How to Stop the Scary Slide in U.S.-China Ties

How to Stop the Scary Slide in U.S.-China Ties

07/14/14

Robert A. Manning, Barry Pavel

Politics, Foreign Policy, Security, United States, China

The administration would be wise to prioritize issues, and place those defining the strategic relationship with China at the top of the list.

The upbeat tone at the biannual bureaucratic gathering last week on U.S.-Chinese ties known as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (SED) did not mask the troubling reality: the U.S.-Chinese relationship is more at risk than any other time since 1989, as Beijing’s assertive actions on disputed territories in the South China incrementally changes the status quo. And about the only certainty is that this elaborate bureaucratic exercise checked all the boxes on issues from climate change to currency manipulation, yet the relationship will continue its downward spiral. The core issue of whether the world’s two largest powers can find a modus vivendi remains unanswered.

The trajectory of U.S.-Chinese relations—whether they become predominantly cooperative, predominantly competitive, or remain a mix of both indefinitely—will likely remain a key question around which much of the global order of the twenty-first century will revolve. And to a considerable degree, the answer to that question turns on whether a framework for strategic stability is possible.

As was learned in August 1914, economic interdependence does not necessarily prevent nations from going to war. In part, an effort to avoid 1914 analogies, Beijing has recently been promoting the idea that the United States and China should forge a “new type of great-power relations,” an aspiration that President Obama embraced at the 2013 Sunnylands Summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though it lacks any mutually agreed definition.http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-stop-the-scary-slide-us-china-ties-10865

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