A Cold Peace With China

Trump’s foreign policy record during his first term suggests that the taproot of his personal instincts—not those of his senior national security advisors, who rarely shared his preferences and policy positions—is realist restraint. Trump sought to avoid new military entanglements; extricate the U.S. military from its twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan; engage potentially adversarial states like North Korea, China, and Russia in ways that would lessen the possibility of conflict; deter Iran from continuing to destabilize the Middle East without escalating to a major war in the region; and shift the burden of paying for allied defense to wealthy allies rather than American taxpayers.

The first Trump administration’s foreign policy was captured by hawkish advisors—people like Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and John Bolton—who did not share the president’s support for realist restraint. Here, it is important to separate Trump’s rhetoric from the reality of his policies. While Trump talks tough as a means of pressuring other leaders and appeasing his domestic base, as in the case of China during the Covid years, he never acted like a bullying neoconservative primacist. Even with respect to Iran, which appears as a lone exception with the killing of Soleimani and the cancelation of the JCPOA, Trump pulled back several times from the brink of using significant U.S. military force. If Trump wins a second term, the intra-party policy debate between neoconservative primacists, China hawks, and “America First” conservative realists will be decided, provided that this time he hires people who agree with his views. If he loses, the party will remain split until the next Republican president.

During a second Trump administration, there is a real danger that the U.S. foreign policy establishment will be captured once again by neoconservatives and primacists, as it was during the first Trump administration. These individuals, and many more, did not share Trump’s policy preferences and actively worked against his agenda, much to the administration’s detriment. Because there is currently a significant debate on foreign policy within the Republican party, there will be many potential foreign policy officials who, once again, may not share Trump’s foreign policy preferences or be interested in using the next four years to advance his foreign policy rather than their own. Combating this tendency will be a major challenge for the next Trump administration, lest a schizophrenic foreign policy emerge.

A second Trump administration faces one additional potential danger on the foreign policy front: It needs to separate rhetoric from reality. Tough talk can be helpful in holding another state’s feet to the fire, but we should not believe our own tough talk, e.g., sending missiles to bomb drug cartels in Mexico and assassination squads to target their kingpins. It may be rhetorically useful to talk about the many bad acts of countries like China, Russia, or Iran—we do not, after all, share many values with such countries or even many of our erstwhile allies, like Saudi Arabia—but we do not need to talk ourselves into a new cold war with China or a hot war with regional competitors like Iran, which would harm all Americans in countless ways. Of course, the Trump administration must hold other states accountable and extract the very best deals it can for the United States, but actual military conflict or prolonged periods of hostility are in no one’s best interest.

As in the past, the future of world politics will be chiefly defined by competition among the powerful. Asia is the only region where the world’s heaviest hitters come into steady and direct contact with one another. As such, it presents the maximum risk for major-power war. Most critical is the direction of the U.S.-China relationship, and this, in turn, will be significantly affected by China’s power trajectory. What we know is that China, whether it rises or declines, will continue to aspire to regional hegemony. If China’s power grows, so too will its ambitions. If China falters, it will still pursue its regional aims—with one difference. Now a peaking power that sees its relative power position as a wasting asset, China might decide to jump through a closing window of opportunity, adopting reckless policies to achieve its goals. No matter how the future plays out, China will continue using its military buildup to ward off challengers, its economic coercion to bend others to its will, its meddling in others’ domestic politics to get friendlier policies, and its investments in educational and cultural programs to bolster Chinese soft power.

Simply put, great powers will continue, as they always have, to adopt policies that try to weaken their rivals and gain advantages over them (and everyone else, for that matter). That is what great powers do, and it will remain so. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult for either Washington or Beijing to manage the U.S.-Chinese security competition. They are more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries. They both have more to gain by maintaining deep economic ties than by severing them. As Dani Rodrik and Stephen Walt point out, “Given that both are vast countries with large populations, considerable wealth, and sizable nuclear arsenals, neither can entertain any realistic hope of conquering the other or compelling it to change its political system.” Nor does either country intend to conquer or change the political regime of the other. What would be to gain? What would be worth the risk of total annihilation? The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025 (MIC25) may engender competitive anxiety, especially within various power centers in D.C., Detroit, and Silicon Valley, but they do not pose anything resembling an existential threat to the United States. As former ambassador Chas Freeman opined, “There is no military answer to a grand strategy built on a non-violent expansion of commerce and navigation.” Peaceful coexistence is the only sane option, and Trump’s brand of realist restraint is the surest way to secure it.

Starting with the first Trump administration, Washington’s aim has been to suppress China’s rise. The West’s use of export controls on cutting-edge technology has become the new frontline balancing behavior of 21st century power politics. Unlike traditional balancing that amasses power through arms and allies to offset the target’s military power, this new form of balancing seeks to prevent, not counter, the further rise of a peer competitor. Preventive balancing was a Trump innovation that has been carried on with gusto by the Biden administration. The goal is to abort the future threat inherent in the rival’s potential power. Accordingly, both Washington and the Europeans want to ensure that Western businesses do not share sensitive technologies with Beijing and to reduce their reliance on Chinese imports in critical sectors (e.g., telecommunications, infrastructure, and raw materials). Since Covid, the West now talks about “reshoring” and “friend-shoring” production in critical sectors and diversifying supply chains by encouraging companies to produce in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Securing a relationship with China that ensures American prosperity and does not increase the likelihood of war may be the supreme challenge of a second Trump administration. Peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial prosperity must be its watchwords. The vastness and persistent growth of China’s trade and investment with its Indo-Pacific neighbors, Europe, and the United States suggests a future of mutually assured production rather than mutually assured destruction. As such, superpower relations, if managed properly, can remain in a state of Cold Peace—that is, an adversarial peace, wherein rivals avoid the use of military force and focus their relationship, instead, on non-military forms of geopolitical competition.

Taiwan is the likeliest path to a military conflict with China; if such a conflict ever occurred, it would run the risk of going nuclear very quickly, creating an unacceptably great risk for the United States. Taiwan, a non-ally, is not worth risking war with China over. We should maintain strategic ambiguity while helping Taiwan arm and defend itself, thereby deterring a Chinese invasion. Taiwan’s independence can be best maintained by building military capabilities sufficient to halt a Chinese invasion and by not seeking to shift the political status quo. If it can do both, it will avoid provoking a military response from China and deterring any military ambitions China has for the island. Should deterrence fail and China invade Taiwan, the United States should help supply munitions and intelligence to Taiwan but otherwise not risk getting into a potentially existential conflict with China. The fate of Western democracy does not depend on the independence of Taiwan.

A second Trump administration must also avoid a heightened trade war with China. China’s internal weaknesses will eventually be its downfall; we don’t need to engage in Cold War–esque confrontations with China or a severe trade war that will harm American prosperity and risk military conflict with it over Taiwan. To maintain, at worst, a Cold Peace with China, the cornerstone of Trump’s foreign policy should be the embrace of what the political scientist Robert Jervis called a “spiral model” as opposed to a “deterrence model” view of the Sino-American relationship. A spiral model understanding of foreign affairs recognizes that insecurity and fear arise from the very nature of the self-help, anarchic setting of international relations. The actions that a state takes to make itself secure (building arms and forming alliances) tend to make other states less secure. The problem is that neither party in the relationship appreciates how its actions contribute to their mutual fear, which further exacerbates misperceptions of the adversary’s intentions. Spiral model dynamics explain how the structure of international anarchy promotes misplaced fears and suspicions that can trigger wars among pure security seekers as unintended and undesired consequences of actions meant to be defensive.

Consistent with most of Trump’s foreign policy stances, a “spiral model” strategy would directly contradict the hawkish orthodoxy championed by virtually everyone inside the Beltway, including his own administration’s former officials. Spearheading the GOP’s hawkish stance on China, Trump’s former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher recently argued that “Washington should own” the new Cold War with China “and win it”—recognizing that victory will require “greater friction in U.S.-Chinese relations” and the “need to adopt rhetoric and policies that may feel uncomfortably confrontational.” 

Contrary to this “deterrence model” approach, a Trumpian strategy rooted in “spiral model” logic would aim to reduce threat perceptions and eliminate imaginary fears that, if maintained, will surely become self-fulfilling prophecies. To be clear, spiral model logic is not always appropriate. When meaningful conflicts of interests exist and the adversary is truly an aggressor, then “deterrence model” logic applies. But when conflicts of interest are more imagined than real, as is the case with current U.S.-China relations, the path to peace is not to demonstrate resolve and a willingness to fight but to wind down the escalation of mutual distrust by means of empathy for the other’s need for security and reassurance of one’s own benign intentions.

In practice, America should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China and, instead, hedge against the China threat by adopting a “readiness” strategy that emphasizes research and development, professional training, and organizational planning, such that U.S. military capabilities can be quickly expanded later if necessary. If China does start to flex its muscles in a bid to dominate Asia in the same way that the U.S. dominates the Western Hemisphere, America’s over-the-horizon military forces can be mobilized speedily by means of a robust mobilization plan. More generally, it means that, rather than strategic defense through offense, Washington should de-emphasize power projection, while aiming to keep potential attackers away from its allies’ shores. Consistent with defensive defense, the United States can help develop anti-access/area denial capabilities for its allies to keep China at bay.

If China’s intentions prove malign, “spiral model” practices can quickly be replaced by a “deterrence model” strategy—one that does not rely on U.S. military power. China would be contained by a coalition of Indo-Pacific countries, including Japan, India, Australia, Vietnam, and South Korea, whose aggregate power roughly matches that of China. To prevent Beijing from dominating the region, the U.S. simply needs to show that it will reliably back countries that stand up to China (for example, by means of military sales, training, exercises, and other tools to bolster countries confronting Chinese coercion). The core point is that a more secure China is less likely to engage in excessive military buildups that heighten self-fulfilling spirals of fear and hostility. Trump’s second-term strategy should see the U.S. retrench with supreme confidence born of empathy underwritten by unmatched power.

The current structure of the international system does not fit any of the four garden varieties: multipolar, tripolar, bipolar, or unipolar. The world is no longer unambiguously unipolar—the United States is not supremely powerful with no peer contender on the horizon. But it is not bipolar either, if by bipolarity we mean two roughly equal poles as existed during most of the Cold War. It has entered, instead, a condition best described as unbalanced bipolarity. If we define a pole as a state that possesses more than half the resources of the most powerful state in the system, there are two and only two poles, both of which are far stronger than all others. Hence, the system is bipolar. But one of the two poles (the United States) remains considerably stronger than the other (China). We see this imbalance in terms of America’s military command of the global commons (land, sea, air, and space) and the dollar’s status as the international economic system’s premier reserve currency, to name but two important power bases. Hence, the system is structurally unbalanced.

This international structural change explains the political rise of Trump. It explains why he appeals to his nationalist followers, who disdain what they see as corrupt, power-hungry globalists who put the world’s wellbeing above their own countries’ interests—those transnational elites and their postmodern cosmopolitan views of borders, patriotic nationalism, and other traditional loyalties as mere expendable social constructs. It was not Donald Trump’s election that caused the end of the liberal international order. Nor was it the rise of President Xi Jinping. Both men, though of entirely different personalities, pledged to make their nations great again. This should alert us to the fact that great structural forces are at work here; that the driving impersonal forces of history—the rise of China and relative decline of American power and influence—explain the ongoing demise of Pax Americana and the growth of political fragmentation.

Unlike the Cold War, however, the U.S.-China rivalry is a competition of ideas and architectures, not a clash of totalizing ideologies. It is about which capitalist system, authoritarian or democratic, catches more mice—an opportunistic and ad hoc competition over control of the commanding heights in certain technology areas (AI, 5G, quantum computing, etc.) and who will dominate trade networks. No one expects blood to be shed over differences in capitalist domestic structures. This is not a passionate moment in history when a clash of ideas transcends mere “security” to approach something supra-personal, something greater than the individual. It is not a time when individual life is sacrificed without further ado to higher ideas, when individuals unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own lives for such ideas. No, we are not living in those times.

Rather than an ideological dispute, the current Sino-American rivalry revolves around traditional balance-of-power concerns: power, influence, security, and prestige. Surrounded by nineteen countries, many of them hostile or unstable, China reasons that it must carve out a broad sphere of influence that includes most of East China and the South China Seas, parts of India, and Taiwan. Vowing to avenge the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949), the CCP will not tolerate Western bullying about its internal affairs, its autocratic rule and human rights record, and it will not hesitate to use anti-foreign nationalism as a source of domestic legitimacy. A late economic developer, Beijing believes that it must adopt mercantilist industrial policies to catch up and eventually gain primacy in leading sector technologies and to remain a central player in global value chains. China and the United States are both geopolitical rivals and each other’s most important trading partners. Both superpowers fear being cut off from vital goods, markets, and trade routes and will secure their economic lifelines by any means necessary, including bribes, aid, arms sales, and military force. These behaviors and objectives fall squarely within traditional balance-of-power concerns, completely unrelated to any notion of global ideological supremacy. This does not signal a return to 1914 or 1930s militarism and disorder.

American hegemony is over. Trump understands this structural fact and puts America, not its so-called “liberal world order,” first. That said, we should not fear a future of hopeless disorder. After all, hegemonic orders, of the kind that America enjoyed for decades after the Cold War, are not the only possible frameworks for relatively stable and peaceful international politics. A balance-of-power system, especially an unbalanced bipolar one, can provide a robust and durable order. Stability arises from the structural fact that China will not overtake the United States anytime soon, if ever. The United States still holds the world’s only true global blue-water navy, more than fifty allies (many of them rich), strategic partners, and military bases throughout the world, and control over the global economy, with financial weapons that did not exist until the last three decades. 

But this “fact” of U.S. superiority does not mean that it can or should attempt to militarily conquer its weaker rival. We live in a nuclear world. Secure second-strike capabilities make great-power conquest impossible without global annihilation. A second Trump administration should embrace a Cold Peace with China, exercising foreign policy restraint—one guided by a narrow definition of the national interest, economic nationalism, and penchant for viewing world politics in geoeconomic rather than geostrategic terms. If he remains true to his instincts, he will be a leader of his time.