The Diminishing Prospects for U.S.-China Détente

I recently attended a small private conference that addressed the strategy the United States and its allies should pursue in the Indo-Pacific to deal with the challenge from China. I found myself isolated in advocating sustained diplomacy with Beijing aimed at some form of mutual accommodation that could facilitate peaceful coexistence. Although there was a range of views at the conference, the prevailing sense was that engagement with China has become highly problematic, if not futile, largely because Beijing’s strategic ambitions leave little room for either accommodation or peaceful coexistence. Even China’s minimalist goals were deemed by many conference participants to be both immutable and irreconcilable with U.S. and allied interests. Accordingly, the discussion focused primarily on how to forge and operationalize the coalition to deter and push back against China’s inexorable ambitions—in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to “invest, align, and compete”—with little attention to engagement or cooperation with Beijing.

I argued (without much effect) that this approach is based, first and foremost, on an inaccurate and exaggerated assessment of China’s strategic intentions. The prevailing view is that Beijing seeks to establish exclusive hegemony in East Asia, supplant the United States as the leading global power, and export its ideology and illiberal values to the rest of the world. Beijing, of course, consistently denies all of this, but these denials are just as consistently dismissed in the West as disingenuous or dishonest. 

Accordingly, I have scored few points over the years offering evidence and logic pointing out that China is focused on maximizing its wealth, power, and influence in a multipolar world rather than on making a bid for global supremacy and legitimizing its governance and development model rather than expecting other countries to adopt it. Chinese leaders almost certainly recognize that pursuing exclusive global hegemony would be destabilizing and potentially counterproductive to Chinese interests and security. It would risk alienating many other countries whose hearts and minds China is seeking to cultivate. Even if hegemony were achievable, it would be unsustainable.

Yet the prevailing—or at least dominant—view at the conference was that China is not seriously interested in peaceful coexistence with the United States. Instead, it wants to impose its prerogatives on other countries, set the rules of international behavior, and dictate the terms of the U.S.-China relationship. Why is it difficult to acknowledge the probability that Beijing knows that it could not successfully or sustainably do any of these things? Chinese leaders recognize that there are limits to China’s global power and leverage. They cannot realistically hope to subordinate the United States and the rest of the world to their will within a Sino-centric global order. That vision is a chimera in Beijing and a bogeyman in Washington.

However, the notion that Beijing has excluded the possibility (or the viability) of peaceful coexistence raises the question of how receptive Washington itself is to the idea. Chinese leaders no doubt believe that it is the United States that seeks to govern the world, impose its prerogatives on other countries, set the rules, and dictate the terms of the U.S.-China relationship—and think it has the power to do all these things. For both sides, it is easier to claim that the other side has made it a winner-take-all contest than to consider the compromises that would make peaceful coexistence possible. 

And that’s the central challenge of peaceful coexistence: it ultimately would require some form and level of reciprocal compromise and acknowledgment that this is necessary due to the circumstances of economic interdependence, limits on both sides’ leverage, and the imperative for cooperation on many vital transnational issues. But both Washington and Beijing are resistant to compromise and to admitting the need for it. Moreover, at present, it does not appear politically popular or smart in either Washington or Beijing to suggest concessions to the other side. Hence the stalemate and the apparent zero-sum nature of the competition.

China shares ample responsibility for this. Its arrogant, mercenary, coercive, and often belligerent international behavior and rhetoric—not to mention the appalling aspects of its domestic governance—fuel the aversion in the United States to accommodating any of Beijing’s preferences. And it is clear that China seeks to reinforce its global position relative to, and often at the expense of, the United States. That competition is inevitable, even if it need not be zero-sum.

At the same time, if Washington deems even Beijing’s minimal strategic goals to be both unacceptable and unchangeable, this would leave little room for accommodation. It would also blame Beijing exclusively for resisting compromise—a sentiment that Washington itself shares. The fact is that Beijing is genuinely interested in peaceful coexistence. Yet, like Washington, it is skeptical that the other side is similarly inclined or has already concluded that it is not. Both sides need to stop using this premature judgment as an excuse for rejecting the idea in advance or for avoiding the domestic political challenge of promoting and pursuing it.

Apropos of this stalemate, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recently published a report entitled “Defining Success: Does the United States Need an ‘End State’ for Its China Policy?,” featuring essays by prominent scholars and strategic thinkers on U.S.-China relations. Several of the contributors highlight the need for Washington to undertake the challenge of diplomacy aimed at negotiating peaceful—albeit competitive—coexistence with China. Former White House official Evan Medeiros asserts that the task for Washington is that of finding “the optimum mix of engaging, binding, and balancing policies” because all three “are needed to compete effectively” and “engagement policies enhance competition rather than undermine it.” 

China scholar and former U.S. diplomat Susan Shirk writes that the United States needs to test “the potential for intensified diplomacy” and “the possibility of mutually beneficial compromises” with China. This may not always succeed, she notes, but “it will provide a foundation for a more stable relationship in the future.” Moreover, Washington must not reject the effort before trying it: “Only if a series of strategically-designed diplomatic interactions attempted over an extended period of time fail to moderate Chinese conduct should Americans conclude that the only option is to pull the grim trigger to deny and degrade China.” The default for many strategists today is to pull that trigger.

Other contributors emphasize the strategic necessity for Washington to pursue this approach. Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan observes that the United States and China “are both uncomfortable because their interdependence exposes their mutual vulnerabilities” and that “composing oneself for the long-term management of an issue with little prospect of any clear resolution is not an attitude that sits naturally with most Americans.” However, he concludes that the United States needs to find a way to overcome that discomfort because “the relativities of power have irrevocably changed,” and the United States “will have to share the Asia-Pacific space” with China. China scholar Yun Sun states succinctly that “China will always remain a geopolitical challenge for the United States, regardless of its regime type.” Still, since it “will not, of course, go away…some type of coexistence with China is almost a given.”

Not surprisingly, there are many skeptics of this approach. In the same report, scholar Zack Cooper suggests that “a policy of accommodation” with China is “unlikely to succeed given that [previous] engagement efforts largely came to naught.” Similarly, scholar Hal Brands characterizes the belief that U.S.-China rivalry is “severe but not immutable” as probably “illusory” because the Chinese Communist Party is “governed by a fundamentally zero-sum mindset which bodes ill for long-term strategic accommodation.” This outlook, however, is based in part on debatable premises about both China’s intentions (as outlined above) and the historical record of U.S.-China engagement. And by prematurely dismissing the potential for accommodation, it negates any reason for Washington to explore it.

In addition to accepting the need for compromise, the pursuit of peaceful coexistence will also require acknowledging that China has legitimate interests and ambitions. This, too, will be a hard sell, given the prevalence of the view that Beijing’s strategic objectives are fundamentally inimical to and irreconcilable with American values and interests. At the conference I attended, most participants appeared reluctant to concede openl—or at least specify—any legitimate Chinese security or economic interests in the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, one of the discussants said emphatically that they would “concede nothing” to China. Such an outlook would appear to offer no path toward mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence, perhaps due to skepticism that they are possible. It is almost certainly based on inaccurate assessments of both China’s ambitions and the United States’ relative leverage in constraining them.

This is important because U.S. receptivity to legitimate Chinese interests will be a key variable in determining the extent and limits of China’s objectives. Beijing currently judges that Washington is resisting both multipolarity and the idea that U.S.-China coexistence could be peaceful. If strategic trends continue to reinforce the Chinese perception that the United States seeks to contain China, hinder its development, or deny the legitimacy of its ambitions, this will increase the chances that Beijing will feel compelled to adopt a more confrontational and aggressive posture.

The pursuit of peaceful coexistence will also require accepting that U.S. global primacy is a thing of the past. In the CSIS report, Brands presumes that Washington’s goal is “a world order in which the United States, its allies and partners, and its democratic values remain predominant.” But Shirk says that the idea of “complete primacy is an outdated holdover from an exceptional period of U.S. unipolarity” at the end of the Cold War and that emphasizing it now “smacks of a playground fight, not a principled aspiration for peace and order.” And scholar Melanie Sisson asserts that a U.S. “strategy that tries to recapture the primacy of the past century, rather than to position the United States to succeed as a great power in the next one, will most likely fail to do either.”

The bottom line, as noted above, is that peaceful coexistence between the United States and China is imperative, and the inconvenient truth is that it will require a combination of mutual accommodation, strategic empathy, and intense bilateral diplomacy. The alternative is an escalating cold war based on false premises and faulty assumptions on both sides. The United States and China must be prepared for the process of working out the terms of coexistence within a multipolar world rather than using inaccurate characterizations or assessments of each other’s strategic intentions as an excuse for avoiding that process. Neither side can pretend or afford to believe that it has the leverage to get everything it wants. Both need to explore where U.S. and Chinese interests really are mutually exclusive or irreconcilable. It is worth noting that most of the rest of the world wants Washington and Beijing to do this.

This would be a prolonged and difficult process. However, another recent Washington think tank report suggests ways to approach it: “U.S.-China Relations for the 2030s: Toward a Realistic Scenario for Coexistence,” from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In this report, Medeiros (who also contributed to the CSIS report) highlights the need to forge “a relationship in which competition and confrontation do not prevail at every moment and in every context.” Former senior intelligence officer John Culver suggests that Washington and Beijing need to “create complementary narratives that emphasize they have more to gain than lose” by constraining their competition and recognizing that “a less confrontational approach is possible…” 

Scholar Stephen Wertheim invokes other strategists who have proposed a “competitive coexistence” in which the U.S.-China relationship “had achieved or was at least moving toward détente, marked by stable, predictable patterns of interaction and mutual respect for [each other’s] vital interests.” He adds that Washington “would have to accept that it harbored unrealistic expectations [about Chinese liberalization and acquiescence to U.S. primacy] that exceeded the requirements of U.S. national security” and that doing so would “create the political space to accept coexistence with Beijing on terms that support U.S. interests [even if they] are less favorable than in prior decades.” In short, competitive coexistence would require the United States to “meet China halfway.”

Many observers will reject all of this as unnecessary and dangerous concessions to China. Indeed, the editor of the Carnegie report, Christopher Chivvis, acknowledges that the policy shifts this scenario would require from both Washington and Beijing “might never materialize” because of the lack of bilateral trust and because—for example—“China might be unwilling to make credible commitments to global restraint.” At the same time, “the United States might be unwilling to accept any global role for China whatsoever.”

Other major obstacles will hinder any pursuit of a competitive, peaceful coexistence. Many strategists will continue to reject the judgments that Chinese ambitions are limited, that compromise with Beijing is necessary or possible, and that U.S. primacy is no longer sustainable. In particular, the belief that China poses a zero-sum existential threat to the United States that excludes the potential for accommodation appears impervious to empirical argument. This may be due in part to inflated U.S. threat perceptions based on self-inflicted political and economic vulnerabilities. Perhaps most importantly, given this mindset and the domestic political equation, advocating an accommodative or cooperative approach to China does not appear to be politically viable for the foreseeable future. 

As a result, promoting diplomatic engagement aimed at peaceful coexistence with China will probably remain an isolated view that generates little support or credibility. Instead, Washington and Beijing, driven by false assumptions, will probably continue the cycle of interactive steps that risk escalating bilateral tensions. As summarized by the editor of the CSIS report, Jude Blanchette, this “mutual mistrust and strategic rivalry” is preventing the two sides from dealing with the “shared responsibility to steward a livable future for all, leaving the world worse off.” That appears to be the path we are on.

Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).

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