How China and America Can Move from Competition to Stability
The American team thought it was signaling restraint. The Chinese team saw preparations for combat. In a closed-door Sino-American crisis simulation I helped organize in the 2010s — which the U.S. military funded as part of a long-term project — the Americans repositioned an aircraft carrier away from a maritime dispute between China and the Philippines, expecting the move to reassure Beijing. Instead, the Chinese participants became deeply alarmed. They believed the carrier was now ideally positioned to launch combat operations while remaining less vulnerable to attack. The episode revealed how suspicion could turn an intended reassurance into an apparent threat. This danger becomes more intense when each side views the other primarily through the lens of strategic competition.
For nearly a decade, strategic competition has framed the U.S. approach to China, shaping military planning and operations, alliance diplomacy, trade and technology relations, investment policy, and — increasingly — scientific, educational, and cultural exchanges.
While strengthening deterrence and inspiring improvements in America’s competitive capabilities, strategic competition has become an end in itself, encouraging dangerous policies often based on rigid, worst-case assumptions about Chinese intentions and abilities. And the same dynamic operates on the Chinese side. The framework fails to answer a central question: What kind of stable and beneficial U.S.-Chinese relationship is such competition intended to produce?
Both sides require greater reassurance, positive incentives to exercise restraint and cooperation, and recognition of the need for an enduring, stable balance supported by substantive, lasting agreements. Without these, stress on strategic competition is likely to produce recurring crises, accelerating arms competition, economic and technological fragmentation, and even a full-scale war, potentially involving nuclear weapons and most likely over Taiwan. Even without such a catastrophic outcome, strategic competition will almost certainly diminish cooperation on potentially existential, global threats such as climate change and the disruptive effects of emerging technologies like AI.
