Leo Blanken, Jason Lepore and Christopher Boss
Should we confine ourselves to the zero-sum context, where the answers are comparatively easy, evading the more interesting contexts where the answers may be harder?
Consider gangs coexisting within a prison. These rival organizations will fight over some issues but are driven to collaborate on others. Peace is maintained and mutually beneficial business (drug dealing, for example) is conducted—both inside and outside the prison—within a delicately balanced equilibrium. One side eradicating the other is highly improbable and unnecessary violence to that end serves to only degrade outcomes for both sides. Instead, threats, violence, alliances, deconfliction, and even cooperation are all used deftly for the purpose of maintaining balance and accruing gains to each side. At the end of the day, these gangs are stuck with each other and need to learn how to coexist.
Though some may balk at the analogy, strategic competition between the United States and China shares many attributes with these prison gangs. And given the substantial intellectual shift required in the US national security enterprise to best manage the dynamics—and risks—of that competition, the jarring tone of this comparison may, in fact, be useful here.
The United States is still struggling cognitively to come to terms with the rise of China. More specifically, the US national security community is not well prepared to contend with a peer rival who seeks to contest American hegemony, but with whom our economy is critically interdependent. What is required, therefore, is significant cognitive reorientation for competition: from our foundational models of how we understand the functioning of the international system, to policy analysis, to the formation of strategy, to that strategy’s execution. In other words, there must be a shift in mindset—the structure of shared assumptions, causal reasoning, language, and framing that allows a group of actors to fruitfully proceed with collective problem-solving, planning, and execution. The rise of China is creating an implicit zero-sum mindset among planners and practitioners; we see this as ill-fitting and, frankly, dangerous. We offer an alternative—a mixed-motives mindset—that would serve as an appropriate framing for strategic competition with China.
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