Forever Competition: The Endgame of Sino-U.S. Rivalry

• In Event: Great Power Competition

Abstract

The United States has declared an era of “strategic competition” with China and a contest “to win the twenty-first century.” What does winning mean? In other words, what would need to happen for Washington to announce an end to strategic competition?
If we assume that Sino-U.S. strategic competition concludes on favorable terms for the United States, there are three major potential end states: accommodation (where China changes its foreign policy to satisfy U.S. interests); democratization (where China reforms its political system and introduces contested elections); and collapse (where China’s power is starkly reduced, for example, through secession, civil war, or economic failure). Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations chose not to define a favored termination point for Sino-U.S. strategic competition and contended that a flexible approach to the endgame would keep policy choices open.

However, declining to identify an end state for the rivalry will not keep all options on the table. Instead, structural factors mean that U.S. policy will likely revert to a default setting, with a very high bar for Sino-U.S. strategic competition to conclude. The “negativity bias” in psychology means that people tend to systematically overweight information indicating that another actor is dangerous versus information indicating that another actor has positive intent. Three examples of negativity bias—threat sensitivity, the attribution error, and failure salience—mean that U.S. officials are predicted to respond warily to any of the above scenarios. Beijing’s concessions may be dismissed as tactical, Chinese democratization could be seen as superficial, and even China’s collapse may be viewed as spurring even greater danger. The negativity bias can be overcome through force of numbers, or an overwhelming ratio of positive information versus negative information. Sino-U.S. strategic competition is predicted to end on favored U.S. terms only if two or more of the above scenarios occur, for example, China democratizes and accommodates American interests.

The project builds on my prior article on negativity bias published in International Security in 2019 and combines the literatures on Sino-U.S. competition, psychology, and rivalry termination. The paper tests the argument with a two-part methodology. First, I examine the correlation between the end of America’s past great power rivalries and the occurrence of the above scenarios. Over the last two centuries, there is no example where a U.S. great power rivalry ended with a single positive scenario (e.g., the opponent accommodating U.S. interests). Instead, it often took a brutal war to resolve the contest, for example, the world wars. Second, I show the causal effect of negativity bias in inhibiting an end to strategic competition by exploring U.S. perceptions of Soviet accommodation during the Cold War.

The argument is significant for several reasons. First, in the coming decades, the course and resolution of Sino-U.S. strategic competition will have a major effect on the global system. Second, the barriers to ending Sino-U.S. strategic competition are greater than many observers realize. Scholars and policymakers have debated whether to set the desired end state as China’s accommodation of U.S. interests or Beijing’s democratization, but neither of these outcomes may be sufficient to conclude the rivalry. Third, Washington’s decision not to select an end state for Sino-U.S. strategic competition risks strategic incoherence. One of the most consequential choices in U.S. national security—when to conclude the rivalry with China—ought to result from considered analysis, not from automatic settings that leaders may not fully understand. Fourth, despite its importance, the question of how Sino-U.S. competition will, in practice, end has been largely ignored.

To avoid the default setting for ending Sino-U.S. strategic competition, U.S. leaders must select a conclusion point, for example, identifying a favored scenario of Chinese accommodation. Otherwise, the United States has pivoted from forever war in the Middle East to forever competition in East Asia.

Author

• Dominic Tierney, Swarthmore College