Was U.S.-China Competition Inevitable?
The rise of China has shaken the international system. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a foreign infrastructure investment initiative intended to increase China’s foreign influence; Made in China 2025, a Chinese industrial plan designed to bolster China’s technology sector and compete with Western technology firms; China’s recent aircraft sorties over Taiwan, a sharp escalation in its efforts to coerce the region into a reunification with the Chinese mainland; and much more, are clear evidence of China’s desire to use its newfound might to reshape the world.
Naturally, China’s heightened geopolitical ambitions have alarming implications for the United States, still the world’s most influential country. For instance, the 2018 National Defense Strategy identified strategic competition with China as being a chief foreign policy concern of the U.S., heralding a new era of competition and conflict between the two powers. However, as competition with China has become the guiding force of U.S. foreign policy, many are wondering why it took the U.S. as long as it did to recognize the dangers of China’s rise.
John Mearsheimer, writing this month in Foreign Affairs, observes that the U.S. strategy of engagement with China — referring to U.S. diplomatic and economic cooperation with China from the 1980s onward — purposefully facilitated China’s rise. Further, Mearsheimer argues it was an inevitability that China would employ its increased strength to alter the international order in a manner favorable to itself, spurring competition with the United States. Mearsheimer concludes that “engagement [with China] may have been the worst strategic blunder any country has made in recent history: there is no comparable example of a great power actively fostering the rise of a peer competitor. And it is now too late to do much about it.”
Rather than pursuing a policy of engagement, Mearsheimer argues that the U.S. should have thought about China’s rise in terms of balance of power politics, limiting China’s access to the international trading system, strictly controlling the export of sophisticated U.S. technologies to China, and enlisted allies to further constrain Chinese military and economic influence.
These preventative policies, had the U.S. adopted them, may have slowed China’s rise and dampened contemporary U.S.-China competition. However, U.S. policymakers — going back to the inception of engagement in the 1990s — were aware of the risks that China could pose to the United States. For example, the Pentagon’s 1992 guidance, which encapsulated U.S. foreign policy priorities after the Cold War, had one key objective: to deter countries, such as China and Japan, from arising to challenge it as the U.S.S.R had done. In short, U.S. policymakers, having just emerged from the Cold War, could clearly grasp the dangers posed by potential peer competitors like China. Yet, the U.S. continued to abet China’s rise.
What explains this puzzling outcome? Without an immediate threat after the Cold War, domestic needs — with ideological justifications — dictated U.S. foreign policy and demanded restraint. As a result, the U.S. struggled to translate its formidable military and economic power into tangible efforts to preserve its role in the international system. In other words, domestic political constraints and a lack of severe threats meant that policies such as engagement were the only options available to the U.S. in the decades following the end of the Cold War. The remainder of this piece will explore this argument.
First, when the Cold War ended, the U.S. became the dominant actor in the international system. Generally, dominant powers have the latitude to pursue a variety of foreign policies due to a lack of threats. Given that latitude, however, leaders can chart policy based on other priorities. In the case of the U.S., policymakers often act on domestic political cues.
Importantly, the American public is generally opposed to foreign adventurism — something demonstrated in the 1990s by the uproar over the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident — and can only be roused to action in the face of pressing threats. Without immediate international threats after the Cold War, U.S. leaders could pursue foreign policies which aimed to appease the noninterventionist inclinations of the public. Ideology justified this restraint. Many argued that by integrating competitors into the U.S.-led economic order, they would become more peaceful, democratic, and U.S.-friendly.
With that in mind, the post-Cold War U.S. adopted low-cost, and often passive, strategies to preserve U.S. hegemony. Broadly, this meant that the application of U.S. military and economic capabilities was rare. Indeed, the Clinton and Obama Administrations noticeably limited their foreign interventions. Russia and China — although growing in power — were each so weak in economic and military terms during the 1990s and 2000s that U.S. policymakers would have struggled to garner support for robust, preemptive containment measures against them. Instead, the U.S. maintained a limited troop footprint in Europe and Asia for deterrence and hoped that by offering Russia and China a stake in the U.S.-led order via engagement they would become pliable, democratic partners. In sum, a lack of immediate threats after the Cold War meant that the U.S. could not marshal its capabilities to prevent new threats from emerging.
With immediate threats, of course, the U.S. has easily been able to exert its full influence. For instance, the notable exception to the U.S.’ post-Cold War lethargy is the War on Terror. The attacks of 9/11 created a consensus: terrorism was a severe threat that needed to be addressed. The U.S. leveraged this consensus to pursue the War on Terror, fully utilizing its capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. A similar dynamic was at play during the Cold War. The tangible threat of competition with the Soviet Union meant that the U.S. could rally all available resources to confront the challenge. Ironically, the assertive measures that may have prevented Russia and China from emerging as great power competitors, like those proposed by Mearsheimer, only became viable as these countries became powerful enough to meaningfully compete with the United States. The U.S.-China trade war, which aimed to hinder China’s rise, is one example of such a costly, containment-oriented policy.
As a result, whether Mearsheimer is correct in arguing that harsher U.S. containment measures against China would have forestalled U.S.-China competition is a moot point. During the 1990s and early 2000s, China was so weak relative to the U.S. that, even though China was rapidly amassing power, the U.S. could not have created a political consensus to meaningfully confront it. Unable to effectively exercise its power, declines in U.S. influence became inevitable. As such, today the U.S. is far weaker relative to China than it was during the 1990s and early 2000s. However, these relative declines in U.S. capabilities have created a threat. In turn, the U.S. has begun to marshal its military and economic resources to meet the China challenge, and the tragedy of great power politics continues.
