April 2023, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, spoke to a Washington audience about the risks that a similar kind of overdependence on China might eventually pose. His argument was not for decoupling—meaning the total detachment of the U.S. economy from China’s—but for de-risking: ensuring that the United States and the rest of the democratic world do not remain dependent on China for anything that could be weaponized in case of a crisis. He gave some examples, pointing out that the
