US vs. China

By Jeremy Brecher, Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

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In barely a decade the US and China have moved from tacit alignment to existential rivalry. Impacted by and impacting the other dynamics of the convergence of crises that compose the “polycrisis,” the US and China are openly preparing for war – a war that could all too easily escalate into World War III. This is the sixth of a series of Strike! commentaries on “The Polycrisis and the Global Green New Deal.”

Earlier commentaries in this series have described the innumerable wars, conflicts, and geostrategic ploys among great and lesser powers that mark the period of polycrisis. These are superimposed on a polarizing global conflict between the US and China. This conflict illustrates the familiar historical situation in which an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as regional or international hegemon – a situation which has frequently led to war. (This is sometimes referred to as “the Thucydides trap,” echoing the ancient Greek historian’s attribution of the Peloponnesian wars to the Spartans’ fear of the growth of Athenian power.) The US-China conflict cannot be reduced to a political, military, economic, or ideological essence; by definition, the polycrisis cuts across the boundaries of such categories.

With the end of the Cold War, the US became the sole global superpower. It worked to establish global institutions and patterns to realize the potential of its global hegemony. These included institutions like the World Trade Organization and international patterns like tacit US interdependence with China — what has been described as the “coupling” of the US and Chinese economies. Building on Nixon’s “opening to China” and the admission of China to the WTO, the US accepted a huge stream of imports from China while China accepted American IOUs and massive and very profitable investment by non-Chinese corporations. US business enthusiastically supported the accommodation between China and the US and coined riches out of it. Both countries dialed down potentials for military conflict.

The Great Recession that started in 2008 was followed by the collapse of this accommodation. As a brilliant analysis of US-China rivalry called “The Second Cold War” recounts, both the US and China “responded to the financial crash and the era of secular stagnation that it ushered in by embarking on ‘restorative’ political projects, which put them on a collision course. Ultimately, Xi’s “national rejuvenation” and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” both harkened back to “imagined pasts.” They are “inextricably linked to historical missions whose achievement is supposedly destiny.” (The same could be said of Putin’s efforts to restore the Russian empire.) Joe Biden “expanded the contest by framing the US-China rivalry as an epic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.”[1] Each aimed to restore what it considered its rightful place in the world.

As mainstream international relations analysts Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs, it is “no longer debatable that the United States and China, tacit allies during the last half of the last Cold War, are entering their own new cold war.”[2] As “The Second Cold War” puts it, “Their relations are on track to remain simultaneously confrontational and interdependent in many ways, as both countries are racing to extend their overseas influence.”

But as “The Second Cold War”[3] makes clear, the emerging conflict between the US and China, following the era of globalization and unipolar dominance, has very different characteristics than the US-Soviet conflict of the original Cold War.[4] The current US-China conflict comes after a 40-year era in which economic globalization established a networked global economy. As that global economy is increasingly fractured in the era of polycrisis, the result is not a return to the pattern of the Cold War, in which “great powers engaged in a zero-sum competition to establish alliances and create territorial blocs of allied and client states.” Today, “the US and China engage in network-based competition.” Increasingly, “the US and China compete for centrality in four interrelated transnational networks: infrastructure, digital, production, and finance.” Controlling nodes in these networks can “anchor people, resources, and places into an American or Chinese sphere of orientation.” The goal, in short, is to hegemonize transnational networks within a fragmenting but still transnational political economy.

An article in Financial Times on “China’s plan to reshape world trade on its own terms,” describes how

China is accelerating efforts to construct an alternative trade architecture that is insulated from US influence and centered upon the developing world. In this, Beijing’s main strategy is to capitalize on ties with the “global south” fostered through its $1trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an investment program launched in 2013 that counts more than 140 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere as its participants. The architecture under construction revolves around a China-centric network of bilateral and regional “free trade agreements” (FTAs), which allow for trade at low tariffs while also promoting direct investment flows, Chinese officials and trade experts say.

This network of trade agreements currently includes 28 countries and territories that take close to 40 per cent of China’s exports.[5]

From Chip War to Ship War

President Joe Biden signs H.R. 4346, “The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022”, Tuesday, August 9, 2022, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Erin Scott). Photo credit: The White House, Wikipedia Commons

Economic and geopolitical rivalry fully converged around the production of high-tech semiconductor chips, essential for military as well as a high proportion of consumer products. In August 2022, Congress enacted Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized more than $50 billion to subsidize research and manufacture of semiconductor chips in the US.[6] Then on October 7, 2022, in a stunning reversal of free trade principles, Biden promulgated stringent export controls openly intended to disrupt China’s “ability to obtain advanced computing chips, develop and maintain supercomputers, and manufacture advanced semiconductors.”[7] Shortly thereafter the US initiated the building of new military bases in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, increasing Chinese fears that the US aimed for military encirclement. Meanwhile, geopolitical and military tensions erupted around Taiwan, which happens to be the major source of advanced semiconductor chips.[8]

The banning of high-tech chip sales to China was rapidly followed by a series of militarized confrontations that illustrate the classic dynamics of escalation. In early 2023 a Chinese balloon observed floating over the US led to a diplomatic crisis and the postponement of a long-awaited visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. This was followed by intensified naval and air incidents. A chronology summarized such “Provocative Military Maneuvers in Areas Near China, Japan, and Taiwan” in 2023:

Nearly every day, China and/or the United States deploy combat ships and planes in the South China Sea and in areas near Japan and Taiwan to demonstrate resolve and intimidate their rivals. These actions include large-scale U.S. naval exercises in the South China Sea as well as recurring Chinese air and sea maneuvers in areas near Taiwan. While officials on both sides typically claim their forces are merely conducting normal training exercises, these mock combat drills — often conducted in the vicinity of opposing forces — send an unmistakable signal of hostile intent.

As it did in the days following then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2, 2022, visit to Taiwan, China has continued in 2023 to conduct near-daily deployments of combat ships and planes in the areas surrounding Taiwan. On many occasions, some of these aircraft enter Taiwan’s self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) or cross the median line in between China and Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait, prompting the Taiwanese military to dispatch its fighter planes to ward off the Chinese aircraft.

The U.S. has also continued a steady pace of naval maneuvers and “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPs) in the South China Sea and in waters near Taiwan. Both countries have also conducted elaborate naval maneuvers in the East and South China Seas and in waters near Taiwan, often involving their aircraft carrier strike groups.[9]

After one such incident New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that “the smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.”[10]

This escalating conflict is also drawing in other nations from around the region and even around the globe. For example, Russian president Vladimir Putin recently visited North Korea and signed a mutual defense agreement with Kim Jong-Un. In response, South Korea said it would review the possibility of supplying arms directly to Ukraine. Shortly thereafter South Korea, Japan, and the US launched large-scale joint military drills called “Freedom Edge,” involving navy destroyers, fighter jets, and the nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, aimed at “boosting defenses against missiles, submarines and air attacks.” North Korea charged such drills show the relationship among the three countries has developed into “the Asian version of Nato.”[11] Similar escalatory dynamics have involved the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga. As the US, South Korea, and Japan held a tripartite summit, Mike Mochizuki of George Washington University said that their growing network of alliances would cause “not so much a stable peace, but a deepening geopolitical divide between the U.S.-allied network on the one hand, and China, North Korea and Russia on the other hand.”[12]

As Michael Klare has written, the thrust toward US-Chinese conflict is driven both by the “escalatory dynamics built into those disputes” and by “bellicose domestic pressures from powerful political and industrial factions that view intense military competition with the other side (if not necessarily war) as attractive and necessary.” In both the U.S. and China, “vast military-industrial operations have blossomed, fed by mammoth government disbursements intended to bolster their ability to defeat the other’s military in all-out, high-tech combat.” In this “hothouse environment,” military bureaucracies and arms-makers on each side have come to assume that “perpetuating an environment of mutual suspicion and hostility could prove advantageous,” leaving key politicians “ever more obliged to shower them with money and power.”[13]

The U.S. Senate and House approved a record defense policy bill that authorized $886 billion in military spending in 2024, $28 billion more than in 2023, with most of the increase designated for ships, planes, and missiles intended primarily for a possible future war with China.[14] A similar dynamic, according to Klare, “fuels the funding efforts of top Chinese military-industrial officials,” who no doubt are “citing evidence of Washington’s drive to overpower China” to demand a “reciprocal buildup,” including nuclear weapons.[15] And in both countries “various political and media figures” continue to benefit by harping on the “China threat” or the “America threat,” adding to the pressure on top officials to take strong action in response to any perceived provocation by the other side.[16] In June, 2024 the US House of Representatives approved $500 million in foreign military financing for Taiwan along with $2 billion in loans and loan guarantees “to strengthen military deterrence against China.” The US also approved $300 million in spare and repair parts for Taiwan’s F-16 fighter jets. In response to US arms sales to Taiwan, in July China suspended talks with the US over arms control and nuclear proliferation.[17]

Geopolitical struggles for hegemony are nothing new; historically they have always been part and parcel of the nation state system. In the era of the polycrisis, they interact with other dynamics in ways that aggravate many other intersecting crises. Indeed, today’s US-China rivalry looks like one more aspect of choosing up sides for World War III.

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[1] Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, Jessica DeCarlo, Nicholas Jepson, Steve Rolf, Mustafa Kemal Bayirbag, Louis Cyuzuzo, Meredith DeBoom, Alireza F Farahani, Imogen T. Liu, Hannah McNicol, Julie T. Miao, Philip Nock, Gilead Teri, Maximiliano Facundo Vila Seoane, Kevin Ward, Tim Zajontz,& Yawei Zhao,  “The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production and Finance Networks,” Geopolitics Vol. 29, 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432?src=

[2]  Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, ‘The New Cold War: America, China, and the Echoes of History,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021, October 19, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-10-19/new-cold-war

[3] Seth Schindler et, al., “The Second Cold War,” Ibid. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432?src=

[4] Some of these themes will be expanded upon in later Commentaries in this series on economic deglobalization.

[5]  “FT China’s plan to reshape world trade on its own terms.” https://www.ft.com/content/c51622e1-35c6-4ff8-9559-2350bfd2a5c1

[6] Tim Sahay, “A Year in Crises,” Phenomenal World, December 21, 2023.  https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/a-year-in-crises/

[7] US Bureau of Industry and Security, cited in “The Second Cold War.” A subsequent Commentary will address the emergence of fragmented globalization and the US-China trade war over electric vehicles and other climate-protecting products.

[8] For background on the crucial role of microchips see Ashley Smith, “Biden’s Chip War with China is an Imperial Struggle for High-Tech Supremacy, Truthout, February 28, 2023. https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-chip-war-with-china-is-an-imperial-struggle-for-high-tech-supremacy/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=b8136138-3739-4340-98df-2fe56169438b .For a deeper dive, see Chris Miller, “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” Simon & Schuster, 2022. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Chip-War/Chris-Miller/9781982172008

[9] “Provocative Military Actions,” Committee for a SANE U.S.-China Policy.  https://www.saneuschinapolicy.org/provocative-actions

[10] “North Korea says drills by South Korea, US and Japan show nations have developed ‘Asian Nato’ “ New York Times, June 29, 2024.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/opinion/china-america-relationship.html

[11] “North Korea says drills by South Korea, US and Japan show nations have developed ‘Asian Nato’ ” The Guardian, June 29, 2024  https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/29/north-korea-condemns-joint-military-exercise-by-south-korea-us-and-japan

[12] Maya Krainc, “The Trilateral Summit is All About China,” Responsible Statecraft, April 10, 2024.  https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-china-tensions/

[13] Michael Klare, “The U.S. and China at Year’s End,” Portside, December 29, 2023.   https://portside.org/2023-12-29/us-and-china-years-end?utm_medium=email&utm_source=portside-snapshot

[14] Brad Dress, “House sends annual Defense Policy bill to Biden’s Desk,” The Hill, December 14, 2023.  https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4359994-ndaa-defense-policy-bill-house-passes/

[15] David E. Sanger, William J. Broad and Chris Buckley, “3 Nuclear Superpowers, Rather than 2, Usher In a New Strategic Era, New York Tjmes, April 19, 2023.    country’s nuclear forces. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/us/politics/china-nuclear-weapons-russia-arms-treaties.html.

[16] Michael Klare, Ibid.  https://portside.org/2023-12-29/us-and-china-years-end?utm_medium=email&utm_source=portside-snapshot

[17] Andrew Roth, “China suspends nuclear talks with US over arms sales to Taiwan,” Guardian, July 17, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/china-suspends-arms-talks-over-us-weapons-sales-to-taiwan