In the wake of President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last month, there has been much talk of “putting a floor” under U.S.-China relations. The phrase is soothing, implying stability, progress, and time — time enough to work out differences, sweep away historical baggage, and come to the realization that the U.S.-China rivalry is just a big misunderstanding. If the two nations simply get together and talk more often, so the theory goes, they can replace disagreements with what the Chinese call “win-win” cooperation.
In reality, however, there is no misunderstanding — and nothing but the flimsiest of floors to build on. The United States and China view each other clearly and dislike what they see for good reasons. Most of the core issues in the relationship are win-lose in nature.
Consider that Taiwan can be ruled from Taipei or Beijing but not both. The South China Sea can be an international waterway or a Chinese lake. Russia can be crippled with sanctions or propped up with oil and gas deals. The internet can be open and free or state-controlled and heavily censored. Even transnational issues are infused with elements of zero-sum competition. Where did COVID-19 come from? How should climate change be addressed? Ask around Washington and Beijing, and you’ll likely get opposing answers.
More fundamentally, the two countries espouse divergent visions of international order. China has positioned itself as the world’s defender of hierarchy and stability against a decadent and disorderly West; the U.S. is belatedly summoning alliances to make the world safe for democracy. The U.S.-China rivalry, therefore, is more than a collection of diplomatic disagreements or a naked struggle for power — it is also a competition to promote different ways of life.
This clash of systems can be partially contained — the U.S. and China, for example, could forswear direct attempts to undermine each other’s regimes — but it can’t be negotiated away because ideology is inextricably linked to both countries’ vital interests. Chinese leaders naturally want there to be more authoritarian governments in the world because fellow autocrats won’t sanction China for its human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party also wants democracies to look dysfunctional, lest the Chinese people start admiring those systems and demanding greater political rights. The U.S., on the other hand, is determined to forge an international environment conducive to maintaining its own democratic system, especially now that the stability of its institutions can no longer be taken for granted.
The Bali G-20 summit last month allowed both sides to restate their “red lines.” But taming the U.S.-China rivalry would require both sides to abandon many of those red lines altogether. China wants the U.S. to, among other things, stop selling arms to Taiwan, draw down the U.S. military presence in East Asia, share U.S. technology with Chinese companies, open up the American market to a glut of Chinese exports, and stop promoting democracy. The U.S. wants China to dial back its military modernization, hostility in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, use of economic coercion, and support for autocratic regimes. None of that seems likely, even with ample summitry. Power-sharing arrangements, in which the two countries form a de facto G-2 to lead the rest of the world, are unlikely to prove tenable.
So where does that leave us? An alternative approach would be for the two countries to settle into a cold war, in which they decouple vital sectors of their economies from one another, maintain military forces capable of deterring one another from aggression in East Asia, and compete to offer solutions to global problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and arms control.
Cold wars are terrible — nobody wants a return to the tensions that characterized the Cold War — but a cold competition is better than a hot war and looks to be the best outcome possible at present. Many of the connections that knit the two countries together are driving them apart, giving them things to fight about and weapons to inflict pain on one another. So instead of calling for the two countries to come closer together and to share power and authority, a more realistic and productive route may be to find avenues to create distance and separation between the two sides and to manage competition between them.
As President Joe Biden remarked in Bali, competition doesn’t have to lead to conflict. A competition in which the U.S. and China engage in a tech race that pushes the frontiers of human innovation to new heights, in which the two build stable and internally peaceful blocs of like-minded states, and in which they use means short of war (including the provision of public goods such as aid, vaccines, and international stability) to try to win hearts and minds and enlarge their respective blocs at the margins would not be so bad for the world and certainly would be better than the vicious hegemonic wars that have characterized so much of modern history.
The “one world” dream of a single jointly-managed global order may be impossible for now, but that doesn’t preclude peaceful relations between two competing orders. Managing that competition won’t be easy, but it is the best way to avoid an even more destructive conflict.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S CONFRONTING CHINA SERIES
Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the co-author of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China.
