A Restraint Approach to U.S.–China Relations: Reversing the Slide Toward Crisis and Conflict

Currently, the United States and China are locked into an increasingly dangerous, interactive spiral, driven by worst-case assumptions and beliefs regarding each other’s motives and intentions. Unless reversed or significantly moderated, this spiral threatens to produce a disastrous crisis or conflict in the years ahead, particularly over Taiwan. Neither the existing bounded competition (i.e., “soft” containment) approach of the Biden administration nor the more aggressive, hard containment approach advocated by many others in Washington offer much hope for stabilizing the situation.

Michael Swaine and Andrew Bacevich of the Quincy Institute argue in their recent paper “A Restraint Approach to U.S.–China Relations: Reversing the Slide Toward Crisis and Conflict” that a variant of the Restraint approach – centered on a more credible balance between military deterrence and diplomatic reassurance, the reprioritizing of U.S. national security threats, and more cooperative and inclusive economic and technological initiatives – offers a better chance of stabilizing the U.S.-China relationship and protecting U.S. interests.
June 2023

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11:00 AM EDT
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Join us for a timely and important discussion with:

Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine, Senior Research Fellow at QI’s East Asia program, is one of the most prominent American scholars of Chinese security studies. He comes to QI from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he worked for nearly 20 years as a senior fellow specializing in Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations.

Michael Mazarr

Michael J. Mazarr is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Previously he worked at the U.S. National War College, where he was professor and associate dean of academics. His primary interests are U.S. defense policy and force structure, disinformation and information manipulation, East Asian security, nuclear weapons and deterrence, and judgment and decisionmaking under uncertainty.

Kristen Gunness

Kristen Gunness is a senior policy researcher in the RAND Corporation's Washington Office. Her background includes military, security, and foreign policy issues in the Indo Pacific region with a focus on China. Before joining RAND, Gunness served as the Director of the Navy Asia Pacific Advisory Group at the Pentagon. 

Sarang Shidore (Moderator)

Sarang Shidore is QI’s Director of Studies, where he focuses on geopolitical risk and energy/climate security, with an emphasis on Asia and the Global South. He was previously a senior research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and senior global analyst at the geopolitical risk firm Stratfor Inc.
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