How should the Biden administration handle its inaugural meeting with Chinese officials in Alaska today? Based on his new book, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, it’s easy to guess how Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, would answer the question: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan should confront their Chinese counterparts as aggressively as possible.
Chaos Under Heaven is really two books knit into one. The first, as the subtitle suggests, is a narrative account of the Trump administration’s bizarrely inconsistent and often-baffling approach to China over the past four years. In telling that story, however, Rogin has a larger mission: to describe how he and other Americans first awoke to the China threat—“the most important foreign policy issue in the world”—and to shake the rest of us out of our slumber.
