# Kevin Rudd says US-China rivalry will keep escalating, with the rest of the world watching closely

> The former Australian prime minister told Semafor's World Economy Summit that the US-China contest is now playing out across military, economic, trade and ideological lines at once, with little sign the rivalry is heading toward resolution.

- Source: Pacific Post
- Canonical URL: https://pacificpost.co.uk/article/kevin-rudd-us-china-strategic-competition
- Author: Pacific Post Staff
- Section: World
- Published: 2026-10-24T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T00:00:00.000Z
- Tags: US-China relations, Kevin Rudd, diplomacy, geopolitics

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The strategic rivalry between the United States and China is going to keep intensifying rather than settle into a stable rhythm, Kevin Rudd told Semafor's World Economy Summit, arguing that the competition now touches nearly every lever of national power at once.

Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who stepped down as Australia's ambassador to Washington earlier this year and now serves as global president of the Asia Society and head of its Centre for China Analysis, described the rivalry in blunt terms. "There is a full-blown strategic competition under way in every dimension of national political power and influence, militarily, economically, trade and investment and technology, in foreign policy, in ideology," he said. "It's across the world, everything, everywhere, all at once."

His remarks come about a month after Xi Jinping's three-day state visit to Washington in mid-September, a trip during which President Donald Trump emphasized his personal rapport with the Chinese leader while Xi called for unity between the two powers. The warmth on display at that meeting has not, in Rudd's reading, changed the underlying trajectory. He has made a similar point elsewhere, writing that Washington and Beijing "may manage their tensions, but their strategic competition remains entrenched," a distinction between managing a rivalry and resolving it that runs through much of his recent commentary.

That framing matters for governments well outside Washington and Beijing. Rudd's broader argument is that the contest between the two powers is being watched, and increasingly felt, by every other country trying to calculate how close to stand to either side as the competition deepens across trade, technology, military posture and ideology simultaneously, rather than in any one arena where it might be more easily contained or negotiated away.

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Originally published by Pacific Post. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://pacificpost.co.uk/article/kevin-rudd-us-china-strategic-competition.