"The Missing Pillar" - by CWP alum Eyck Freymann
In December 2023, the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party released its first full report on the USChina economic relationship. Its most alarming finding came from a tabletop exercise simulating a Taiwan crisis.1 The exercise showed that a sudden break in US-China economic ties would impose huge costs on the US economy.2 The report’s conclusion was blunt: “The United States lacks a contingency plan for the economic and financial impacts of conflict with the PRC.” Worse, “no office in the U.S. Government bears primary responsibility for assessing the costs to the U.S. and global economy of a conflict with the PRC nor for doing contingency planning for how the United States and its allies would respond economically.” This oversight threatens the entire US strategy in the Indo-Pacific. American policymakers have always known that the PRC harbored ambitions to overturn the regional order established after the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. The policy of engagement was premised on the idea that economic interdependence could moderate PRC ambitions and even turn China into a responsible actor. But there is now broad agreement that this strategy failed. The new US strategy is to outcompete China in trade, tech, and defense, and to “decouple,” “de-risk,” or “strategically decouple” in key sectors. Indeed, China is pursuing its own strategy of
The Missing Pillar: Economic Contingency Planning in an Era of US-China Competition - Hugo Bromley and Eyck Freymann
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, China Maritime Studies Institute.
He works on strategies to preserve peace and protect U.S. interests and values in an era of systemic competition with China. He is the author of several books, including The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices, with Harry Halem, and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World. His scholarly work has appeared in The China Quarterly and is forthcoming in International Security.
Dr. Freymann advises policymakers in the United States and allied countries. He comments on national security issues of bipartisan concern in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, The Wire China, and The Atlantic, among other venues.
Before Hoover, Dr. Freymann held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Columbia. He holds a doctorate from Oxford, masters degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and a bachelors from Harvard, all in history and China studies.
Photo Credit: Brands, H. (Ed.). (2025). Lessons from the new Cold War America confronts the China challenge. Johns Hopkins University Press. httpsdoi.org10.560219781421453446
