America Stepped Back. Beijing Stepped In. This Was Predictable.

The Vacuum Beijing Has Been Waiting For

There's a concept in Chinese strategic thinking called 借力打力 — using the opponent's force against them. It's a judo principle applied to geopolitics. You don't need to outmuscle the United States directly. You wait for America to withdraw, create the vacuum, then position yourself as the responsible actor filling it.

That's what's happening. Has been happening for a decade. But the pace accelerated sharply as U.S. commitment to multilateral institutions wavered and American leadership in international forums grew inconsistent.

The Hill called it a "velvet veto." That's accurate. China doesn't need to formally block American interests at the UN Security Council — though it does that too. It works through softer mechanisms: installing Chinese nationals in leadership positions at the FAO, UNESCO, INTERPOL, and the International Telecommunication Union. Proposing standards through the ITU that build Chinese technical architecture into the global internet. Funding infrastructure through BRI that comes with invisible strings attached and very visible diplomatic debts.

This isn't conspiracy. It's documented. The U.S. State Department's own reporting tracks it. The question is whether anyone is paying attention.

What Withdrawal Actually Costs

When the United States walks away from an international organization, the seat doesn't disappear. Someone else sits in it.

The Trump administration's first term pulled out of UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Council. The Biden administration rejoined both. The Trump second term has renewed skepticism of multilateral bodies — sometimes for legitimate reasons; the Human Rights Council is a genuine embarrassment, seating states like Cuba and China in judgment of human rights while those governments brutalize their own people. The skepticism isn't wrong. The withdrawal strategy is.

Here's why: When you leave, you lose the ability to shape the agenda, block bad appointments, and credibly claim the institution doesn't represent American values. You're right that it doesn't — and then you remove the only actor who might push it to. The UN agencies China now dominates were not designed to serve Beijing's interests. They drifted there while Washington was looking elsewhere.

I spent time in Brussels in 2019 talking to European Union officials about digital standards. The frustration with U.S. engagement — or the lack of it — was palpable. Not because Europeans are anti-American. Because they needed someone to counter Chinese proposals on AI governance, spectrum allocation, and data standards, and the Americans weren't showing up to the meetings where those decisions get made. China was. Every single time.

The Intellectual Failure Behind the Retreat

There's a strain of conservative foreign policy thinking that treats all multilateralism as a trap — a mechanism for entangling American sovereignty in institutions that constrain our action while empowering free riders. This view has a legitimate intellectual foundation. The UN General Assembly does vote against U.S. interests with depressing regularity. International courts do make rulings that American policymakers correctly reject.

But this analysis stops at the cost side of the ledger. It doesn't account for what happens when the alternative to a flawed American-influenced institution is a Chinese-influenced one. The ITU under American-aligned leadership produced internet governance that, whatever its failures, at least started from the premise that the internet should be open. The ITU under Chinese influence is actively developing standards that make internet fragmentation technically easier and governmental censorship architecturally simpler.

That matters. Ask anyone in Central Asia trying to build a free press using Chinese-built telecommunications infrastructure who decides what gets censored.

The choice is not between perfect international institutions and none. It's between international institutions that reflect American values imperfectly and international institutions that reflect Chinese values very effectively. Withdrawal doesn't escape that choice. It makes it for you.

What a Return to Engagement Requires

Engagement isn't unconditional. The United States should use its participation in international bodies as leverage — making clear that funding and cooperation depend on reforms, on fair processes, on leadership that isn't selected through Chinese diplomatic pressure campaigns.

That's a harder posture to sustain than withdrawal. It requires personnel, patience, and a foreign policy establishment willing to play a long game in rooms where the wins are invisible and the process is grinding. It requires showing up to every tedious working group meeting where a Chinese delegate is patiently inserting preferred language into a technical standard that will govern global telecommunications for the next twenty years.

The velvet veto works because it's quiet. The counter to it has to be equally quiet, equally patient, and far more consistent than American foreign policy has managed to be. The alternative is watching Beijing's preferred world order assemble itself one institutional position at a time, while Washington debates whether the institutions are worth fighting for.

They are. That's not even close.