At the beginning of the Biden presidencymango win, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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