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.
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