At the beginning of the Biden presidency, many of us serving in the National Security Council gathered to read the intelligence and reached a key conclusion: The 2020s would be what we called the “decisive decade” in U.S. competition with China.

拜登就任总统之初，我们国家安全委员会的许多人聚在一起阅读情报，得出了一个关键结论：本世纪20年代将是我们所说的美国与中国竞争的“决定性十年”。

Beijing seeks to displace the United States from its global leadership position and is a formidable challenger. It is America’s first geopolitical rival to surpass 70 percent of U.S. G.D.P., exceed American industrial capacity and pull ahead in multiple technology sectors, such as electric vehicles, hypersonic weapons and nuclear energy technology. Absent corrective action, the United States risks falling behind China technologically, growing dependent on it economically and perhaps even suffering defeat by China’s military in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. How the next U.S. president navigates the remaining years of this decisive decade will have far-reaching consequences for America and the rest of the world.

北京试图取代美国的全球领导地位，是一个强大的挑战者。中国的GDP已经超过美国的70%、工业产能超过美国、在电动汽车、高超音速武器和核能技术等多个技术领域处于领先地位，美国还是第一次面对这样的地缘政治对手。如果不作出调整，美国就有可能在技术上落后于中国，在经济上越来越依赖中国，甚至可能在台湾海峡或南海被中国军队击败。下一任美国总统如何度过这个决定性十年的剩余时间，将对美国和世界其他地区产生深远的影响。

The good news is that despite deep divisions in American politics, Democrats and Republicans now broadly agree on the need to outcompete China. They have enacted legislation intended to boost American technological leadership, revive domestic manufacturing, promote human rights around the world, strengthen American deterrence in the Taiwan Strait and bolster Asia-Pacific alliances.

好消息是，尽管美国的政治存在深刻分歧，眼下民主党和共和党在战胜中国的必要性方面达成了广泛共识。他们制定了立法，旨在提升美国技术领导地位、重振国内制造业、促进世界各地人权、加强美国在台湾海峡的威慑力量以及巩固亚太地区的联盟。

That united front will be undermined if Donald Trump is elected again. Ironically, although he helped catalyze the current bipartisan approach as president by upending the long-term U.S. policy toward China that emphasized engagement over competition, he has never fully embraced the new consensus and now stands outside it. On China, he is often at odds with his former staff members, current advisers, the nationalist wing of his party and even his own vice-presidential pick — all of whom see the challenge posed by Beijing more clearly than he does. Left to his own unpredictable impulses, Mr. Trump could very well lose this decisive decade for America.

如果特朗普再次当选，这种统一的战线将受到破坏。讽刺的是，尽管在担任总统期间，他通过颠覆美国长期以来强调接触而不是竞争的对华政策帮助催化了目前两党合作的方式，但他从未完全接受新的共识，至今仍站在新共识之外。在中国问题上，他经常与他的前任幕僚、现任顾问、本党的民族主义派，甚至他自己挑选的副总统意见相左——他们都比他更清楚地认识到北京所构成的挑战。如果任由特朗普随心所欲，他很可能会输掉这个对美国来说具有决定性意义的十年。

Nobody grasps this better than China’s leaders. They saw his term as an accelerant of what they believe to be American decline, and not without reason. Mr. Trump focused on U.S. commodity exports instead of long-term manufacturing strength. He alienated allies and partners, mishandled the pandemic response and repeatedly showed disregard for democratic norms. On China policy, he routinely put personal gain over America’s interests and undermined important steps his staff members took to compete with Beijing. As a result, Mr. Trump was widely mocked by Chinese citizens, who nicknamed him “Chuan Jianguo” (“Build-the-Nation Trump” — the “nation” being China). His administration led President Xi Jinping of China to declare that the world was undergoing “great changes unseen in a century” as America fell from pre-eminence.

没有人比中国领导人更清楚这一点。他们认为特朗普的任期加速了美国的衰落，这并非没有道理。特朗普关注的是美国的大宗商品出口，而不是长期的制造业实力。他疏远了盟友和伙伴，对大流行应对不当，并且一再表现出无视民主规范的行为。在对华政策上，他经常将个人利益置于美国利益之上，并破坏他的幕僚采取的与北京竞争的重要举措。结果，特朗普受到了中国人的广泛嘲笑，他们给他起了个绰号“川建国”——这里的“国”是指中国。他的执政促使中国国家主席习近平宣称，随着美国从霸主地位上衰落下去，世界正在经历“百年未有之大变局”。

There is no reason to believe that in a second term Mr. Trump would deviate from the approach that weakened America’s position during his presidency.

没有理由相信，特朗普在第二个任期内会改变在他上次任职期间削弱美国地位的做法。

Take technology policy. When Mr. Trump was in office, his administration rightly levied export controls on Huawei and ZTE, Chinese telecommunications companies that the intelligence community had warned could be vectors for espionage and cyberattacks. But he put self-interest first. He reportedly promised Mr. Xi he would lift the controls (and eventually did so for ZTE, despite bipartisan opposition) in exchange for purchases of U.S. agriculture and energy commodities that he felt would help his re-election prospects.

以技术政策为例。特朗普在任时，他的政府正确地对华为和中兴通讯实施了出口管制，情报界曾警告这两家中国电信公司可能成为间谍和网络攻击的载体。但特朗普将自身利益放在首位。据报道，他向习近平承诺将取消管制（最终他不顾两党反对，取消了对中兴通讯的管制），以换取中国购买美国农业和能源商品，他认为这将有助于他的连任前景。

Today Mr. Trump opposes overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok unless the app’s China-based owners sell it. The goal is to prevent Beijing from being able to shape U.S. public opinion by manipulating the news feeds of TikTok’s 170 million American users or from having access to sensitive user data. He previously supported this approach but appears to have reversed himself after meeting with a top donor who has a roughly $30 billion stake in the app.

今天，特朗普反对一项得到两党广泛支持的立法，该法要求TikTok的中国所有者出售该应用，否则将予以封禁。其目的是防止北京通过操纵1.7亿TikTok美国用户的新闻推送来影响美国的公众舆论，或获得敏感的用户数据。他之前支持该立法，但在与一位持有约300亿美元Facebook股份的顶级捐赠者会面后，他似乎改变了立场。

President Biden has taken important steps to deny China the advanced semiconductors it needs to take the lead in artificial intelligence and improve its military weapons, and he has moved to shore up America’s defenses against Beijing’s publicly documented campaign to compromise critical U.S. infrastructure, such as water, gas, telecommunications and transportation, in the run-up to a possible conflict. If, in a second term, Mr. Trump again elevates his personal interests above the country’s approach to technology competition, it would put these vital efforts at risk.

拜登总统采取了重要措施，不让中国获得在人工智能领域取得领先地位和改进军事武器所需的先进半导体，他还采取行动，加强美国的防御能力，以应对中国政府在可能发生冲突之前对美国关键基础设施（如水、天然气、电信和交通）进行破坏，中国公开表达了发起此类行动的企图。如果在第二个任期内，特朗普再次将个人利益置于国家技术竞争方针之上，那么这些至关重要的努力将面临风险。

The story is similar in manufacturing. As a recent report by Senator Marco Rubio made clear, China already “leads in many of the industries that will determine geopolitical supremacy.” Members of both parties recognize that urgent action is needed to reindustrialize America as a new flood of Chinese exports threatens key U.S. industries.

制造业的情况也类似。正如参议员马可·卢比奥最近的一份报告所明确指出的，中国已经“在许多将决定地缘政治优势的行业中处于领先地位”。两党成员都认识到，由于中国出口的又一股浪潮威胁到美国的关键产业，需要采取紧急行动来实现美国的再工业化。

Mr. Trump does not seem to share this view. As president, he squandered any leverage he gained from raising tariffs on China by accepting a bad trade deal that he hoped would help his re-election prospects. The deal allowed Beijing to keep its unfair practices and sell Americans manufactured goods if China promised to buy American commodities. More bad deals like that in a second term could cost millions of U.S. jobs, displace America in high-tech industry and accelerate decline by turning the United States into a commodity supplier dependent on Chinese manufactured goods.

特朗普似乎并不认同这种观点。担任总统期间，他接受了一项糟糕的贸易协议，浪费了他通过提高对中国关税获得的影响力，他希望这项协议有助于他的连任前景。该协议允许中国政府保留其不公平做法，只要中国承诺购买美国商品，就可以向美国出售制成品。在第二个任期内，更多类似的糟糕交易可能会使美国失去数以百万计的工作岗位，使美国在高科技产业中的地位被取代，将美国变成依赖中国制成品的大宗商品供应国，加速美国的衰退。

With democracy and human rights under pressure around the world, American leadership in defending those values is imperative. Yet Mr. Trump retains an affinity for authoritarian leaders like Mr. Xi and President Vladimir Putin of Russia that is far outside the bipartisan consensus. Mr. Trump once praised China’s response to the Tiananmen Square massacre and threatened to veto nearly unanimous legislation condemning China’s crackdown on Hong Kong by declaring, “We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi.” According to Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, Mr. Trump privately encouraged Mr. Xi to build the re-education prisons in which China interned an estimated one million ethnic Uyghurs. A second Trump term could further greenlight China’s repression and its drive to weaken democratic values and American leadership around the world.

随着民主和人权在世界各地受到压力，美国必须在捍卫这些价值观方面发挥领导作用。然而，特朗普对习近平和俄罗斯总统普京这样的专制领导人仍保持着一种亲近感，这与两党共识相去甚远。特朗普曾赞扬中国对天安门广场大屠杀的反应，并威胁要否决几乎获得一致支持的谴责中国镇压香港的立法，宣称“我们必须与香港站在一起，但我也与习主席站在一起”。据特朗普先生的前国家安全顾问约翰·博尔顿称，特朗普私下鼓励习近平修建再教育监狱，中国在其中关押了约100万维吾尔人。特朗普的第二个任期可能会进一步助长中国的镇压，及其削弱民主价值观和美国在全球领导力的势头。

Mr. Trump’s ideas on Taiwan are a blueprint for calamity. For decades, Washington has deterred China from invading Taiwan with a bipartisan policy of strategic ambiguity about whether the United States would defend the island. Mr. Trump threatens to weaken that deterrence. He said recently that Taiwan should pay the United States to defend the island, which is democratically ruled, while cavalierly casting doubt on America’s ability to do just that.

特朗普关于台湾的想法是一幅灾难的蓝图。几十年来，华盛顿在美国是否会保卫台湾的问题上一直采取战略模糊的两党政策，以此威慑中国入侵台湾。特朗普威胁要削弱这种威慑。他最近说，台湾应该付钱给美国来保卫这个民主统治的岛屿，同时又漫不经心地对美国是否有能力做到这一点表现出怀疑。

This is extremely dangerous. Telegraphing a lack of U.S. resolve could one day embolden China to seize the island, which could spark a conflict that devastates the global economy. And Beijing has already taken notice: It is increasingly well known in Western diplomatic and scholarly circles that Chinese officials and think tank experts are quietly asking whether Mr. Trump might acquiesce to Chinese military action against Taiwan if he is re-elected.

这是非常危险的。传达出美国缺乏决心的信号，可能会助长中国有朝一日夺取台湾的决心，这可能引发一场破坏全球经济的冲突。北京已经注意到了这一点：西方外交界和学术界越来越清楚，中国官员和智库专家正在悄悄讨论，如果特朗普再次当选，他是否会默许中国对台湾采取军事行动。

Democrats and Republicans alike believe that strengthening America’s global alliances is one of the best ways to counter China. But Mr. Trump has shown that he still does not value America’s international friendships. He is threatening once again to raise tariffs on allies, make them pay more for collective defense and renege on U.S. defense commitments. Without its allies, America would stand alone against Beijing.

民主党人和共和党人都认为，加强美国的全球联盟是对抗中国的最佳途径之一。但特朗普已经表明，他仍然不重视美国的国际友谊。他再次威胁要提高对盟友的关税，让他们为集体防务支付更多费用，并违背美国的防务承诺。没有盟友，美国将独自对抗北京。

China is America’s most formidable geopolitical rival in a century, and thanks to Mr. Trump’s term in office, leaders in Beijing are acutely aware of what he is about and how to manipulate him. They believe China is rising and America is declining. Electing Mr. Trump next month risks proving them right.

中国是美国一个世纪以来最强大的地缘政治对手，在特朗普的上个任期，北京的领导人已经非常清楚他是什么样的人，以及如何操纵他。他们认为中国正在崛起，美国正在衰落。下个月，特朗普一旦当选，可能会证明他们是对的。