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The contributors to this volume address a range of security-related aspects of a newly contentious era in US-PRC relations. They agree that the US-China relationship has become significantly more negative and could get worse. They vary, however, in their assessments of how deep and intractable the conflict is, with those focusing on traditional security issues being, overall, more pessimistic than those who primarily analyze, for example, security-related issues in technology and economic relations.

The contributors also differ over how best to characterize the problems in the bilateral relationship. For some, the troubles in US-China relations reflect genuine conflicts of national interest between a rising China and a relatively declining United States. Others see some version of, or variation on, a security dilemma that, in its classic form, arises when a state hedges against uncertainty about the threats other states may pose. Faced with uncertainty about other states’ intentions, a state builds up its own military capability or allies with security partners. Because other states cannot be sure whether such actions reflect prudent defensive measures or aggressive intentions, they, too, have incentives to base their choices on the more ominous possibility. When a state believes other states should understand that its motives are purely defensive, however, it will find such hedging responses alarming and indicative of malign intent, and it will become more likely to respond in kind, triggering a vicious circle and dangerous spiral. Other contributors assess the US-China relationship partly in terms of ideological differences and possible ideational competition. For these authors, and also for their colleagues who see some form of a security dilemma animating US-China relations, concerns about misperceptions intensifying bilateral conflict loom large.

The first chapters in this volume address the overall bilateral relationship. Charles Glaser argues that increasingly competitive US-China relations can be explained by conflicting interests and China’s rising power. In descending order of importance, he identifies Taiwan, US alliance structures in Northeast Asia, regional sea lines of communication, and maritime and territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas. In his account, Taiwan involves incompatible important interests—a core, sovereign territorial security interest for China, and a key international security commitment for the United States. For China, this means a determination to deter Taiwan independence and US intervention, and, ultimately, to unify Taiwan. For the US, it means deterring China from coercing changes to the status quo. Although reflecting conflicting interests, the Taiwan issue also has features akin to a security dilemma in that Beijing sees unification as preserving the status quo of Chinese sovereignty while the US sees unification as altering the status quo of de facto independence.

In Glaser’s account, China may be seeking to end US hegemony in Northeast Asia and disrupt the US’s alliance structure in the region. He sees this as another real, though secondary, conflict of interests, especially if driving the US out is China’s goal. Here, too, there are elements of a security dilemma, because Washington and Beijing hold disparate interpretations of whether various moves would preserve or alter the status quo. SLOC and the South and East China Sea disputes are tertiary issues, amenable to compromise solutions and a focus of ideational conflict more than incompatible security interests. They are important because they can undermine the US’s and China’s ability to manage disputes over major security issues.

Glaser concludes that a possible US misreading of China’s motives needlessly risks escalating US-China competition and conflict. If China’s behavior is primarily driven by limited, arguably defensive security concerns (principally Taiwan) rather than more expansive and ideational goals, then there may be more room for cooperation, and the US may have more to gain by eschewing escalated competition and making concessions on issues important to China’s security (principally Taiwan).

Alastair Iain Johnston addresses security dilemmas in the context of deteriorating US-China relations. He agrees that uncertainty about other states’ intentions is crucial in the origins of security dilemmas, but he argues that it does not adequately explain later stages of an iterative process that he describes as a security dilemma’s life cycle. When a security dilemma takes hold, Johnston argues, declining uncertainty about the other party’s motives leads to spirals of hostility. Each state becomes more certain that it poses no threat to the other, and that the other’s behavior is not justifiable hedging. Security assessments in each country become more homogenous, consensus forms, and doubts about the other state’s intentions are replaced by strong convictions. What began as a classic security dilemma devolves into a zero-sum competition in which each state sees itself as justified in seeking to redress threats it is sure the other state poses.

Johnston evaluates the contemporary US-China case by analyzing “narratives and memes” about US and PRC intentions found in articles discussing security affairs from major CCP media (People’s Daily and PLA Daily). Building on his prior work with Adam Breuer (which looked at analogous issues in US sources), Johnston finds that China’s certainty about the malign intentions of the US has developed more slowly than parallel shifts in US views of China.

Johnston identifies possible warning signs in Chinese discourse that would indicate increased certainty about US hostility, which, in turn, would portend reinforcement of an already-strong consensus in the US that China is a hostile power, fostering the intensely adversarial relations that can characterize later phases in the security dilemma life cycle. Although his chapter provides an account of this possibility in the case of recent US-China relations, Johnston does not conclude that such an outcome is a necessary feature of security dilemmas. He argues that the trajectory can be reversed if intervening events prompt states to reconsider judgments about each other’s intentions, possibly leading them to conclude that the other’s agenda is benign.

Jessica Chen Weiss assesses whether US-China relations are characterized by ideological competition between liberal-democratic and autocratic values. She sees twin developments that point to a “systems” competition: in China, resurgent authoritarianism in politics and economic policy under Xi Jinping and a new willingness to present China’s experience as a model for others; and in the United States (and other democratic polities), an erosion of liberal-democratic values and institutions at home and a declining commitment to supporting them abroad.

Weiss posits several possible agendas for Chinese ideational influence, ranging from an offensive strategy to spread autocracy to a passive bystander role amid global erosion of democracy. She notes that many assessments in the US, including by the Trump administration, perceive an aggressive Chinese ideological agenda, which leads them to favor policies of containment. Weiss argues that China has pursued a more modest goal of making the world safe for the survival of its authoritarian regime, which does give Beijing an interest in not being a lone, isolated autocracy in a democratic world. China, thus, has a limited but growing autocracy-promoting foreign policy consisting of four principal elements: leading by example (with other regimes attracted by the success of China’s model); supporting fellow autocracies in the United Nations and other forums; providing economic and technological assistance—including development aid and tools of digital autocracy—to authoritarian regimes; and shaping opinions overseas, primarily to accept China’s narrative on sensitive political issues (including human rights) and—perhaps in the future—to replicate Russian efforts to undermine democracy in other states.

Weiss concludes that US perception, or misperception, that China poses an expansionist ideological threat may become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it drives US policies of decoupling and containment. She argues that this risk can be ameliorated if the US and other democracies perform better at home (and thus have less need to rely on specters of global ideological conflict to remain engaged internationally), and if China makes greater efforts to defuse crises and alleviate other states’ concerns about its intentions.

Several chapters take a geographic focus, examining aspects of US-China relations that involve relations with other states. M. Taylor Fravel and Kacie Miura argue that US-China security competition in the South China Sea increased in both scope and intensity following the standoff between China and the Philippines at Scarborough Shoal in 2012. Evaluating the work of scholars and policy analysts, government documents, and speeches by key leaders in the US and China, Fravel and Miura conclude that what began as regional conflict among rival claimants to territorial sovereignty and associated maritime rights morphed into another focal point of US-China rivalry. Both the United States and China came to see disputes relating to the South China Sea as contests revealing intentions that bear on larger issues in US-China relations.

The result has been a downward spiral that has hardened each side’s beliefs that the other has hostile intentions. In Fravel’s and Miura’s assessment, China sees US policy and behavior in the South China Sea as indicating Washington’s determination to resist China’s rise through a strategy of containment, thwart its acquisition of a larger international role, and prevent China from challenging the US’s hegemonic position. And the United States interprets China’s policies and actions as proof of a revisionist agenda to dominate the region and to overturn the existing regional order and, perhaps, the larger rules-based international order that developed during the era of American preponderance. Fravel and Miura conclude by emphasizing the growth of broader dangers stemming from the spiral of hostility between the US and China over the South China Sea. They argue that these disputes are exacerbating the risks identified in the literature about the rise and fall of great powers.

The next three chapters turn partly to the roles that third countries play in US-China relations. Michael Green argues that Japan has moved the US to react more strongly to threats posed by China but can also exert a moderating influence on US policies that might increase risks of a US-China military and economic confrontation. Green characterizes Japan’s perspective on relations with the US and China as having shifted away from a long-prevalent post-World War II concern with a Thucydides dilemma, wherein Japan worried both that dependence on the US for security against Chinese threats might entrap Japan in US-China conflicts (even as Japan faced its own Thucydides trap in the form of a possible conflict between itself, as a relatively declining regional power, and a rising China), and that the US might abandon Japan if Washington were to conclude that the benefits of protecting Japan were outweighed by the costs of a resulting conflict with China.

During the 2010s, as China became more assertive in disputed regions of the East China Sea and leveraged economic dependence to coerce Japan and other neighbors, Tokyo’s concerns about threats from China predominated. The emerging US-China strategic competition offered opportunities, which Japan seized. Premier Abe Shinzo pursued strategies of internal balancing (revitalizing the economy, increasing defense spending, and restructuring the apparatus for national security strategy) and external balancing (strengthening the US alliance, loosening constitutional restrictions on the military, and pursuing closer cooperation with regional democracies).

Although Trump’s views on trade and alliances posed challenges, Abe’s Japan cooperated with and influenced the US across several domains of US-China competition: diplomatic (where the Free and Open Indo-Pacific became a central US policy); ideational (where Japan increased support for democratic values and a liberal international order); military (where US-Japan cooperation deepened); and economic (where Japan and the US aligned in seeking to counter China’s BRI and to exclude Huawei from 5G development). Still concerned about Japan’s Thucydides trap, Abe also sought improved relations with China, and still facing a Thucydides dilemma, Japan must worry about mitigating possible US moves—whether toward Japan or China—that could weaken US commitments to Japan’s security.

Victor Cha addresses the implications of changes in US-China relations for North and South Korea, which face constraints as smaller powers in a region where two great powers pursue conflicting interests. Security considerations encourage South Korea to rely on the US for the guarantees an alliance provides against the threat from North Korea and, potentially, from China. At the same time, South Korea’s economic dependence on China encourages it to avoid antagonizing Beijing. Seoul’s approach has been one of hedging to protect its interests in the shadow of US-China rivalry. Although this approach has been viable (if complicated), increased US-China tensions are making Seoul’s policy dilemmas more acute and hedging more difficult. Cha sees South Korea tilting toward China as US-China competition intensifies, putting the ROK-US alliance under stress. As the US more vigorously presses South Korea to choose sides, Seoul may be confronting the limits to its hedging strategy.

North Korea has had more limited options due to its international isolation and dependence on China for both security and economic viability. It must focus on retaining Beijing’s backing. When US-China cooperation increases, Pyongyang seeks to minimize a rising risk of abandonment by Beijing. It complains to China about inadequate support and curries favor by more ardently backing China’s objectives. When US-China competition intensifies, Pyongyang seeks to strengthen its alliance with Beijing by backing China in its great power rivalry with the United States and by exploiting Beijing’s fears that US-DPRK relations might thaw, weakening China’s position in the region.

Cha also considers the implications of intra-Korean relations for US-China relations. Skeptical of the view that reduction in tensions related to denuclearization is a win-win for Beijing and Washington, Cha emphasizes that the great powers’ interests are not much aligned beyond a shared agenda of avoiding war on the peninsula and defusing risks born of Pyongyang’s weapons programs. The US and the PRC continue to disagree about the terms for North Korea’s denuclearization and the terms of—and the path to—possible Korean reunification.

In a chapter assessing the danger of a US-China military conflict or confrontation over Taiwan, Scott Kastner argues that the consequences would be severe, and the likelihood of conflict, although low, is rising. As the cross-Strait balance of military power shifts decisively toward Beijing, China’s confidence that it would prevail in a conflict rises and the costs to China of a conflict fall, increasing the attractiveness of a military option. Although this should give Taiwan reasons to accommodate Chinese demands, a peaceful outcome might be unachievable because of domestic political constraints in Taiwan (reflecting opposition to unification) or information problems that bedevil international bargaining (in this case, that Taipei and Beijing each might misrepresent and overstate its own resolve and misread the other’s redlines) and the difficulty of establishing credible commitments (since a more powerful China cannot ensure that it will honor promises to Taiwan about post-unification arrangements, not least because such a cross-Strait deal would eliminate the prospect of US intervention on Taiwan’s behalf).

According to Kastner, Washington faces an increasingly difficult dilemma in deterring China from coercing Taiwan while maintaining fairly good US-China relations. The deterrence side of this dilemma has always been difficult because the US needs to manage the risks of entrapment inherent in an alliance between highly unequal powers, and because many conventional means for demonstrating commitment—such as security pacts or stationing forces—are unavailable in US-Taiwan relations in the years since US-PRC normalization. China faces its own dilemma, seeking to deter Taiwan independence (which becomes harder amid rising Taiwanese identity) and achieve peaceful unification (which becomes more difficult as China’s growing power and efforts to deter independence undercut its ability to offer Taiwan credible assurances).

Kastner argues that the Taiwan issue is becoming a more serious version of the security dilemma it has long posed in US-China relations. All sides have defensive/pro-status quo objectives (Beijing in deterring Taiwan independence; Washington and Taipei in deterring Beijing from coercing unification) and offensive/revisionist ones (for Beijing, achieving unification; for some in Taipei, independence; and, for some in Washington, greatly enhancing US-Taiwan relations). Especially in the context of a more broadly adversarial US-China relationship, moves such as Beijing’s tougher line toward Taiwan under President Tsai Ing-wen and Washington’s Trump-era moves to upgrade ties with Taiwan can serve—and be seen by the opposing side as serving—offensive goals as well as defensive ones.

A final set of chapters focuses on substantive issue areas. Phillip Saunders considers the implications of China’s ambitious program of military modernization, which has included: massive investments (including in capacity to fight informatized wars and to address contingencies of conflict with the United States); redefined missions (which include maintaining domestic order, traditional military functions of deterring aggression and preserving sovereignty and security, newer roles in protecting economic development and space and cyberspace interests, and nontraditional security tasks such as disaster relief); and institutional reorganization (with changes in the traditional army, navy, air force, and nuclear missile services, creation of new space and cyberspace units, and coordination with the paramilitary People’s Armed Police).

Saunders finds that China’s acquisition of military capacity, which can help achieve foreign policy goals, also entails significant costs. Neighboring countries (many of which have territorial disputes with China) as well as the United States have become increasingly wary of a militarily more powerful China and its use of methods ranging from intimidation backed by its growing military clout to gray zone tactics of coercion to economic and diplomatic carrots and sticks. While a resort to force by China, particularly to resolve territorial disputes, would exact too heavy a diplomatic, economic, and security price, concerns about China’s expanded capacity and increased assertiveness have made Beijing’s softer tools less effective. Saunders also notes the current limits to China’s military capabilities, especially for missions to protect the country’s economic interests and its nationals abroad, which would require projecting force over great distances.

Saunders identifies five factors that will shape the future of PLA modernization and, in turn, the security dimension of US-China relations: the regional security environment, domestic political stability (both of which could require China’s military to focus on local concerns), China’s economic performance (which affects the resources available for military modernization), China’s expanding overseas interests (which might lead to a more robust PLA presence abroad), and, most important, US-China relations. Intensified US-China strategic competition would accelerate Chinese investment in advanced weaponry and force projection capabilities, which would further intensify bilateral rivalry, reduce prospects for cooperation, and increase the importance of developing crisis prevention and management mechanisms.

Elsa Kania and Adam Segal examine issues of science and technology in the context of the emerging rivalry in US-China relations. They depict a striking reversal in attitude from the early decades of China’s economic reforms and opening to the outside world, when blossoming scholarly and commercial exchanges were viewed as mutually beneficial, to the 2000s and 2010s, when China’s growing prowess in science and technology and both countries’ deepening security concerns prompted political leaders in Washington and Beijing to worry that new developments (especially in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G telecommunications networks) would give its principal strategic adversary an advantage.

Kania and Segal describe China’s determination to become more self-reliant in key sectors of science and technology to avoid dependence on an unreliable, potentially hostile United States. Articulated in the context of the Made in China 2025 initiative in industrial policy, this agenda became more urgent when the Trump administration imposed, or contemplated imposing, restrictions that threatened access to critical inputs. Kania and Segal also address the growing American determination to preserve its role as the global leader in science and technology in the face of a perceived challenge from China. This goal has been manifest in growing restrictions on exchanges with China that could help it close the gap, and in incipient efforts that aim to sustain the US lead over China.

Kania and Segal are skeptical that these developments portend full-blown decoupling and the division of the world into distinct science and technology ecospheres. They anticipate a mixed relationship of cooperation and competition, albeit one in which increased mutual suspicion between the US and China constrains scholarly and commercial connections.

James Reilly considers the place in US-China relations of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative—the most prominent international project for China under Xi Jinping. He recounts the US response, beginning almost immediately after the announcement of the “One Belt, One Road” policy in 2013 and escalating under the Trump administration. Washington criticized the BRI as a Chinese global strategy to use “debt trap diplomacy” to advance Beijing’s regional interests and global power while undermining the security and sovereignty of host states and harming American interests. Reilly argues that this US assessment reflects a superficial understanding of the BRI and misplaced credulity toward China’s branding exercise. According to Reilly, Washington’s reaction reflects the CCP’s ability to mobilize resources in the service of regime priorities and to put forth effective propaganda rather than any realistic assessment that the BRI will dramatically alter the geo-economic or geostrategic landscape.

In Reilly’s account, the BRI is less a coherent grand strategy than a label applied to a vast number of uncoordinated Chinese overseas economic activities, some predating the BRI and others the product of parochial initiatives by local-level actors taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the central government’s loudly proclaimed agenda. The sprawling projects grouped under the BRI rubric have encountered serious difficulties, including mismanagement by poorly supervised Chinese participants, insufficient attention to environmental impacts, alienation of local communities in recipient states, and corrupt deals made with insufficient transparency. These troubles have prompted Beijing to undertake major adjustments, including pledges to make BRI projects “open, green, and clean”—promises that will prove difficult to fulfill, Reilly argues, because they will face resistance from Chinese actors who benefited from the initial, freewheeling approach.

Reilly concludes that US overreaction to an inaccurate perception of a formidable and threatening BRI introduces unnecessary conflict in US-China relations. The US stance may also foreclose opportunities for cooperation that could follow from encouraging China to implement its new commitment to a more responsible approach to BRI projects.