Introduction

On March 7, 2012, in a speech to mark the fortieth anniversary of President Nixon's historic trip to China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed that "the U.S.-China project of 2012 ... is unprecedented in the history of nations. The United States is attempting to work with a rising power to foster its rise as an active contributor to global security, stability and prosperity while also sustaining and securing American leadership in a changing world. And we are trying to do this without entering into unhealthy competition, rivalry, or conflict."

With these sentences, she encapsulated what may be the most consequential foreign policy challenge of the twenty-first century. While there is a wide range of views in both the United States and China on how to manage bilateral relations, few dispute the assertion of leaders on both sides that the U.S.-China relationship is the most consequential bilateral relationship of our time, as China's spectacular economic growth, its military modernization, and its increasingly active role on the regional and global stages have focused attention on the prospects for cooperation or conflict between the United States and China in the coming decades.

China's leaders have responded to the challenge with a formulation of their own: the call for a "new great power relationship," implicitly endorsing Secretary Clinton's argument that China and the United States must chart a novel approach in order to avoid the dangers of conflict that have characterized relations between established and emerging powers so often in the past.

Both are responding to commonly held views among both policymakers and many academic international relations theorists that China, as a rising power, is bound to challenge America's regional and global hegemony and that America, the dominant power, is destined to resist. Although the outcome of the contest is not foreordained, in this view the inevitability of it is. The immutable structure of the international system is based on states pursuing their national interest by seeking absolute or relative power dominance. For the proponents of this view, the coming contest is largely independent of the character and history of the two countries in question and of the choices made by their leaders.

Their views find inspiration in Thucydides' explanation of the cause of the Peloponnesian War: "What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused Sparta." The United States may not be fearful of China, per se, but its leaders certainly recognize the tectonic implications of the rise of the People's Republic China (PRC) for international relations in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. In any event, the tragic record of conflict over the centuries between rising and established powers has only reinforced Thucydides' argument since then.

For those who embrace this view, the policy implications are clear. On the U.S. side, proponents argue that the core goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to sustain American dominance to ward off the inevitable challenge of emerging powers. It was embodied in the U.S. National Security Strategy of 2002: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States." The concept has been further underscored by leading academic strategists.

Their views are mirrored on the China side by academics and former officials (primarily from the People's Liberation Army [PLA]) who share the view that conflict is inevitable and that China should not shirk from the challenge of taking on American interests.

Others are less deterministic, but not much less pessimistic. Although conflict between China and the United States is not inevitable, they argue, it is highly likely. These analysts draw their pessimistic forecasts from a number of factors. Some point to the difficulty of achieving cooperation and avoiding conflict under uncertainty. Drawing on insights from game theory, they note that rational actors often compete even when they would be better off cooperating because they cannot "trust" the other side to keep any bargain between them rather than defect, as the game theory lexicon would phrase it. Others point to the problems of misperception—what appears to one side as a legitimate strategy of self-defense may look to the other as preparations for offensive actions (the so-called security dilemma). A third group focuses more on the specific traditions and cultures of the two countries themselves, each of which has a strong sense of unique mission and superior values. In the case of the United States and China, this can be depicted as the City on the Hill versus the Middle Kingdom. These self-images give each a legitimate claim, at least in its own eyes, to act as the dominant power—not only for its own narrow self-interest but for the greater good.

Of course, these are not the only views. Practitioners tend to reject deterministic accounts, not least because adopting such a view implies that the choices made by individual leaders are irrelevant to the future course of events. They are supported by historians who look at periods where power shifts have not been accompanied by war. They are further buttressed by theorists who argue that the so-called iron laws of state-to-state relations are really context dependent (with contemporary factors such as nuclear deterrence clearly being relevant) and finally by those who argue that in the globalized world of increasing interdependence, power shifts need not lead to zero-sum competition.

This book proceeds from the premise that the future is not fully determined by factors beyond the control of policymakers in both countries; otherwise there would be little point in considering policy options at all. This is a modest assumption; our analysis does not depend on adherence to a particular school of international relations theory. As a number of academics have noted, even adherents of the so-called realist school have argued in favor of an optimistic view of the future of U.S.-China relations, while some liberal internationalists find a potential cause for pessimism from the application of their theory to the Sino-American case.

Our core contention is that the outcome is contingent. It is contingent on a variety of both external developments and domestic factors in both countries—and in other places, particularly those in the Asia-Pacific region. To a large degree, the...