Читать книгу After Engagement - Группа авторов - Страница 10

This movement toward a more adversarial US-China relationship has taken place as the distribution of power in the international system has been shifting. China’s rapid rise, and the absence of any other state following a similar trajectory, brought a transition from the post–Cold War condition of unipolarity, marked by the United States’ position as a peerless superpower, to what seems likely to become a bipolar world sometime in the first half of the twenty-first century.³² By the end of the twentieth century, China’s military capabilities already had begun to reflect the impact of long-pursued modernization, underwritten by decades of economic growth and aided by selective purchases of advanced equipment from Russia. Equally important, China’s expanding capabilities were being harnessed to an increasingly active foreign policy that fed apprehensions in a more attentive United States.³³ While anticipation that China might one day emerge as a rival superpower had motivated the Bush administration’s initial intention to treat China as a strategic competitor at the dawn of the century, the significance of China’s economic and military rise was unmistakable by the time the US refocused on Asia under President Obama a decade later, and became a central concern in the Trump administration’s security policy.

China and the United States began to engage one another on terms characteristic of the behavior of two great powers in a bipolar international system.³⁴ Each was quickly becoming the other’s most significant strategic competitor. For both countries, efforts to develop means to counter the other dwarfed what either could gain by recruiting allies.³⁵ The US remained, by a large margin, the post–Cold War world’s preeminent military power. China’s expanded capabilities clearly separated it from the next tier of powerful states (including Japan, Germany, India, Russia, France, and Britain).³⁶ Consequently, whether China succeeded in forging closer ties with Russia, and whether the US managed to keep its Pacific partners firmly on its side in addressing potential challenges from China, thus seemed unlikely to alter significantly the emerging balance of power between the US and China.

Even if the era of American primacy had not yet ended, shared expectations about a future bipolar order gave the US and China incentives to monitor one another more closely, to compete more widely, and to see the other’s gain as its own loss. This perspective helps explain the notable increase during the 2010s in what otherwise appear to be the US’s outsized concerns about China’s growing role—but still limited military presence—from Africa to the Arctic and China’s hypersensitivity to American measures that had begun to respond to those concerns.

As the US and China increasingly focused on the risks each might pose to the other, their attention turned to the geographic area where the two countries’ interests most significantly intersect: maritime East Asia. China saw the American military presence in the region and US policies as an increasingly serious challenge to China’s interest in minimizing threats along its periphery, securing economically and militarily vital sea lines of communications (SLOC), and defending (sometimes assertively) its contested claims to sovereignty over landforms and associated maritime rights in the South and East China Seas.³⁷ The United States saw China as a growing threat to its interests in maintaining the credibility of its international commitments (especially security treaties with its allies along China’s periphery, several of which have territorial and other serious disputes with China) and upholding principles of international relations and a rule-based international order (including norms concerning the peaceful settlement of international disputes and rules governing freedom of navigation that are embodied in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—a treaty to which, ironically, China, but not the United States, is a party).

Moves on both sides reflected and fostered a more fraught security relationship. Washington ramped up the frequency of and publicity about US Navy operations challenging Beijing’s maritime claims in the South China Sea and its expanding presence on outposts created by its island-building; China criticized these activities as provocations that threatened its interests and complicated its efforts to work with ASEAN states to reduce tensions by negotiating a code of conduct for the South China Sea.³⁸ Several indications that the US would strengthen its support for Taiwan (including increased arms sales) deepened China’s concern that Taiwanese political leaders would feel emboldened in rejecting the consensus on “one-China” that Beijing insisted had been forged in Singapore in 1992 (and a version of which the Taiwanese government had accepted before 2016). China’s increased economic, military, and diplomatic pressure on Taiwan prompted responses from Congress (including several pieces of legislation urging stronger military cooperation, higher-level official exchanges with Taipei, and stronger US support for Taiwan’s international status) and the Trump administration (echoing, in part, earlier statements from then president-elect Trump) that called into question Washington’s commitment to abide by its own long-standing “one-China policy” and related support for preserving the status quo in cross-Strait relations.³⁹

The geographic locus of these points of conflict encouraged both sides to take steps that contributed to an especially challenging security environment. With China growing militarily stronger and more assertive and the US becoming more attentive to the Chinese challenge, each side moved to deploy new forces and to plan for increasingly plausible contingencies in which they might engage each other as adversaries, primarily in a maritime domain. Unlike the fixed positions of rival land-based militaries (which characterized the central front in Europe during the Cold War), naval forces, even when not directly challenging one another, operate on patrols, maneuvers, and exercises in areas where units from both sides are present, conducting surveillance, tracking, trailing, warnings, and other actions that increase tensions and the risks of triggering incidents that can lead to inadvertent conflict.

The international system’s chronic condition of anarchy also has contributed to more troubled bilateral relations. The absence of an authority that can reliably resolve disputes among states constrains each state to try to provide for its own security. In this context, economic dependence on other states that might pose a serious security threat looks like a dangerous source of vulnerability. Thus, as the US-China relationship moved from a mix of cooperation and limited competition toward rivalry, the focus on absolute gains from their relationship of extensive interdependence (the benefits of “win-win outcomes”) shifted toward concern about relative gains (anxiety about “who wins more”) and the way unequal economic gains might affect each side’s security.