U.S.- China competition for global influence

Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills

Source Link

After a little over two decades of simmering geopolitical suspicion between Washington and Beijing, President Donald Trump’s administration finally declared China to be a major strategic competitor of the United States. The December 2017 National Security Strategy plainly described China as a “revisionist” power that “seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.”

The summary of the National Defense Strategy issued subsequently by the U.S. Department of Defense elaborated on this assessment by declaring that “China is a strategic competitor” and further noting: China is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage. As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.2 This transformation of China from an ambiguous partner to a strategic rival was a long time coming. 

The Trump administration only articulated boldly what both the George W. Bush and the Barack Obama administrations feared as a possibility but hoped to avoid through deepened engagement and prudential hedging. Yet this aspiration was unlikely to ever be realized because, irrespective of what the United States tried or did, the steady growth of Chinese power since the reforms began in 1978 would have bestowed on Beijing greater influence and control over the Indo-Pacific space at Washington’s expense—this, in turn, enabling China to seek parity with, if not supplant altogether, the United States globally.3 This chapter analyzes the progression of China as a strategic competitor of the United States and the geopolitical implications of this evolving development. Toward that end, it is divided into four major sections. 

The first section assesses why the U.S. quest for a partnership with China was fated to fail once China’s growth in economic capabilities was gradually matched by its rising military power. The second section explores why the United States took so long to recognize that China was in fact steadily becoming a strategic competitor, even though that was increasingly evident after the end of the Cold War. The third section describes the contours of the Trump administration’s current confrontation with China and elaborates its significance for U.S. interests. The fourth section summarizes the chapters gathered together in this volume—whose theme is the impact of U.S.-China competition on the global system—to underscore the point that most states enjoy significant agency, which enables them to pursue choices that go beyond exclusive solidarity with either the United States or China in the ongoing Sino-U.S. rivalry. The conclusion argues that the Trump administration should consider significant correctives to its current strategy for confronting China if the United States is to secure enduring strategic advantages over the long term.