The Biden administration is not seeking to replace China’s communist system as it pursues better relations with Beijing, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said Wednesday.

Responding to an article by former Trump administration National Security Council official Matthew Pottinger and former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, until recently chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Campbell said the U.S. has a limited ability to change China’s increasingly troubling international behavior.

Instead, the U.S. should accept China’s system as it is, despite what critics say are growing signs Beijing is seeking to replace the Western democratic system with its authoritarian model.

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Mr. Campbell, until recently the administration’s main point person on China policy, argued that President Biden’s policy of countering Beijing through strengthened relations with Asian allies and partners is working, telling a forum hosted by the Stimson Center, a think tank, that trying to undermine China’s domestic system would be “reckless” and counterproductive.

“I do think we need to accept China as a major player, and doing constructive diplomacy with them is in America’s strategic interest,” he said, citing an uncertain global landscape with wars in Ukraine and Israel, Houthi rebel attacks against shipping in the Red Sea, and famine fears rising in parts of Africa.

“If you add all of those things up, it is a major test for American foreign policy, and I do not believe it is in our interest in the current juncture to add to our list — ‘Let’s try to topple the other leading power on the global state’ — despite our differences,” Mr. Campbell said. Instead, the administration is focused on sending clear signals over “red lines” that should not be crossed by Beijing in an effort to “do what you can to coexist,” he said.

China under President Xi Jinping has demanded that Washington formally accept its communist system as a pre-condition for improved bilateral relations. Pressed whether coexistence with a communist-ruled China is possible, Mr. Campbell noted the U.S. in the past has dealt with adversarial systems such as the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.

Working with allies to sustain the current U.S. order and protecting supply chains from Chinese control are keys to the current policy, he said.

“I will say that U.S.-China relations are going to be challenging under the best of circumstances,” Mr. Campbell said, noting that unlike relations with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the U.S. and China are closely “interdependent.” “Careful coexistence” with China is one of the most difficult challenges in the history of American foreign policy, he said.

Additionally, he argued, America’s regional partners do not favor seeking to overthrow the Chinese communist system, and most U.S. allies and partners in the past did not support what Mr. Campbell called “policies of regime change.” 

The U.S. in recent decades has overestimated its ability to influence Chinese foreign policy, Mr. Campbell said: “I think we have to have a high degree of modesty of what we think is possible with respect to fundamental changes in how China sees the world.”

U.S. officials believe China under Mr. Xi seeks to replace what it calls the “unipolar” U.S.-led liberal international order with its brand of Chinese communism, an authoritarian system dubbed “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Writing recently in the journal Foreign Affairs, Mr. Pottinger and Mr. Gallagher argued that the Biden administration produced multiple failures of deterrence in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Middle East. They criticized the current policy toward China as seeking a “short-term thaw with China’s leaders at the expense of a long-term victory over their malevolent strategy.”

“The United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it,” Mr. Pottinger and Mr. Gallagher wrote. “Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order.”

Mr. Campbell argued instead that the administration’s China strategy seeks to convince like-minded states to defend and preserve the U.S.-led “operating system” of Asia, one that has produced regional peace, stability and prosperity for the past 40 years.