Thinking about U.S.-China Relations

By Robert S. Ross

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Thinking about U.S.-China Relations

By Robert S. Ross

Boston College

Observers have long expected that the rise of China would challenge U.S.-China cooperation and regional stability. The typical assertion is that “power transitions” cause war. This is an overly-simplistic casual statement. The cause of war cannot be reduced to a single mechanical variable. But equally important, the rise of Chinese capabilities and the associated U.S.-China power transition is still far from approaching the nexus at which power transition theory predicts great power hostilities. Despite China’s improving ability to impose costs on U.S. military operations, the United States retains significant military supremacy in the western Pacific and the South China Sea. Even should China continue to close the gap with the United States, the dangerous U.S.-China power transition nexus is many decades away.

Nonetheless, at intermediary stages in the power transition, a rising power’s improved capabilities will challenge the ability of the great powers to sustain cooperation and minimize tension. Such is the case in contemporary U.S.-China relations.

On the one hand, China’s navy cannot challenge U.S. maritime supremacy; its navy lacks the long-range air support necessary for power projection and war fighting. But China has developed limited naval capabilities that enable China to protect better its maritime interests and to realize -new foreign policy objectives. Its development of a better trained and more capable maritime surveillance force and destroyer capability enable it to challenge the policies of U.S. allies and develop a more proactive regional security policy that can contribute to regional tension.

China limited capabilities and a more proactive Chinese security policy will not challenge the regional balance of power or vital U.S. security interests; there is no cold war in the offing. But China’s military modernization does impose new policy making challenges for both China and the United States.

During the era of “peaceful rise,” China’s primary strategic objective was to maintain a stable regional environment and U.S.-China cooperation to enable the leadership to focus on economic development. Today, however, China aims to balance two competing objectives. First, its improved capabilities create expectations for a more productive foreign policy. But China’s increasingly severe domestic challenges still requires Chinese leaders to balance this first objective with its prior objective of maintaining U.S.-China cooperation and regional stability. This is a difficult balance.

China’s improved capabilities and the development of a more proactive foreign policy also create new challenges of U.S. foreign policy making. Whereas China’s emerging objective is to advance its interests and maintain U.S.-China cooperation, the U.S. objective is to sustain the regional status quo by reassuring U.S. allies of its resistance to a rising China while continuing to develop U.S.-China cooperation and avoiding unnecessary conflict. This too is a difficult balance.

Over the past year, neither China nor the United States has managed well their respective policy dilemmas.

Chinese foreign policy made significant advances in 2013. It used its new maritime capabilities to compel the United States to reconsider its forward-leaning support for Japan and the Philippines in their maritime territorial disputes with China. By mid 2013, China had made significant advances in these disputes while advancing U.S.-China cooperation, culminating in the U.S.-China “Sunnylands” summit in June 2013. In 2013, despite its determined diplomacy in the South China Sea, it had also improved relations with Vietnam and all of the other ASEAN states, with the exception of the Philippines. And despite its forceful resistance to Japanese territorial claims, it developed improved relations with South Korea.

But by the end of 2013 and early 2014 China had overplayed its hand. Its abrupt and clumsy November 2013 announcement of an air-defense identification zone (ADIZ) for the East China Sea alarmed the region that a rising China had developed an overly ambitious agenda for regional influence. This was followed by the near-incident between the USS Cowpens and a Chinese naval vessel in the South China Sea and then region-wide speculation that China planned an ADIZ for the South China Sea.

China’s policy had sought too much too soon with inept diplomacy. It thus inevitably elicited a U.S. effort to reestablish its commitment to the status quo. But the U.S. response reflected a similar difficulty in managing competing U.S. objectives.

To reassure its allies of U.S. resolve, the United States adopted a high-profile posture opposing Chinese foreign policies. The U.S. national security advisor for Asia warned China that a Chinese ADIZ for the South China Sea would alter the U.S. defense posture in Asia. The United States also raised its challenge to China’s policy toward its territorial dispute with the Philippines. And for the first time the United States publically challenged China’s “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea. During President Obama’s April 2014 tour through East Asia, he visited three countries with territorial disputes with China. In Tokyo he became the first president to declare that the U.S.-Japan alliance covers Japanese territorial claims in the East China Sea. Obama then participated in the conclusion of a U.S.-Philippine agreement that will enable the U.S. to expand its military presence in the Philippines.

By exaggerating the Chinese challenge and by allowing its allies’ concern for U.S. resolve to shape its policy, the United States overreacted to Chinese policy. It injected itself into East Asia’s disputes over meaningless maritime rocks and reefs and had placed itself in opposition to Chinese sovereignty interests. In so doing, Washington has inevitably elicited heightened Chinese concern for U.S. intentions to “contain” China and to encourage U.S. allies to challenge Chinese maritime interests. Not surprisingly, China has responded with greater maritime pressure on Japanese maritime claims.

Observers have long recognized that the rise of China would challenge great power stability.

The contemporary difficulty in U.S.-China relations the cycles of escalation should thus not be surprising; U.S. and Chinese policy dilemmas reflect the policy challenges to both countries of managing China’s rise with balanced policies. In late 2013-early 2014 each country erred in unnecessarily sacrificing great power cooperation in support of exaggerated national security concerns.

The growing difficulty of great power policy making does not mitigate the costs of policy mistakes. With each Chinese and U.S. policy mismanagement, suspicion deepen in each country of the other’s intentions, making it more difficult for China and the United States to restore the prior level of cooperation and to sustain cooperation as the policy making challenges continue to deepen with China’s continued rise.