The geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China embodies risks of outright military conflict, economic warfare, and political subversion, as well as the danger that tensions between the world’s two leading powers will destroy the potential for achieving a global consensus on such issues as climate and artificial intelligence. Moderating this rivalry therefore emerges as a critical goal, both for the United States and China and for the wider world.
The authors of a new RAND report propose that, even in the context of intense competition, it might be possible to find limited mechanisms of stabilization across several specific issue areas. They offer specific recommendations both for general stabilization of the rivalry and for three issue areas: Taiwan, the South China Sea, and competition in science and technology.
Key Findings
Several broad principles can guide efforts to stabilize intense rivalries
- Each side accepts that some degree of modus vivendi must necessarily be part of the relationship.
- Each side accepts the essential political legitimacy of the other.
- In specific issue areas, especially those disputed by the two sides, each side works to develop sets of shared rules, norms, institutions, and other tools that create lasting conditions of a stable modus vivendi within that domain over a specific period (such as three to five years).
- Each side practices restraint in the development of capabilities explicitly designed to undermine the deterrent and defensive capabilities of the other in ways that would create an existential risk to its homeland.
- Each side accepts some essential list of characteristics of a shared vision of organizing principles for world politics that can provide at least a baseline for an agreed status quo.
- There are mechanisms and institutions in place — from long-term personal ties to physical communication links to agreed norms and rules of engagement for crises and risky situations — that help provide a moderating or return-to-stable-equilibrium function.
Recommendations
Six broad-based initiatives can help moderate the intensity of the U.S.-China rivalry
- Clarify U.S. objectives in the rivalry with language that explicitly rejects absolute versions of victory and accepts the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
- Reestablish several trusted lines of communication between senior officials.
- Improve crisis-management practices, links, and agreements between the two sides.
- Seek specific new agreements — a combination of formal public accords and private understandings — to limit the U.S.-China cyber competition.
- Declare mutual acceptance of strategic nuclear deterrence and a willingness to forswear technologies and doctrines that would place the other side’s nuclear deterrent at risk.
- Seek modest cooperative ventures on issues of shared interest or humanitarian concern.
More-specific strategies should guide efforts to stabilize the issues of Taiwan, the South China Sea, and competition in science and technology
- Stabilizing the Taiwan issue should focus on creating the maximum incentive for Beijing to pursue gradual approaches toward unification.
- For the South China Sea, combine deterrence of military escalation with intensified multilateral and bilateral diplomacy to create a medium-term route to a peaceful solution as the default international process and expectation.
- In the U.S.-China science and technology rivalry, manage the worst aspects of emerging technologies for mutual security and the condition of the rivalry, and step back from the most extreme versions of efforts to undermine the other side’s progress.
– Michael J. Mazarr, Amanda Kerrigan, Benjamin Lenain. Published courtesy of RAND.
