Crisis management

XING WEI/FOR CHINA DAILY

After nearly four decades in which the relationship between the United States and China was characterized by strategic engagement, an undisciplined "strategic competition" has now become the norm. No new strategic framework between the two countries has yet been established to guide their relationship through this time of trouble.

Therefore, it is inevitable that the tension between the United States and China will grow, and competition will intensify.

However, as I have written before, war is avoidable.

Indeed, it is important to consider once again the argument of Harvard scholar Graham Allison's Thucydides Trap thesis--that rising and established powers are destined to engage in dangerous rivalry, and even conflict.

It is easy to predict war. But in my view, there is nothing inevitable about war. Although it is much harder to outline a course that could help both countries safeguard peace. To believe that war is inevitable denies the agency of leadership and makes us all captive to some deep, irreversible trends of history.

Certainly, the rest of the world, and not just Asia, would welcome a future where they are not forced to make the ultimate binary choice between Beijing and Washington in what they fear is becoming an increasingly bipolar world.

They would instead prefer a world in which there continues to be a global order in which each country, large and small, can have confidence in its future territorial integrity, political sovereignty and its own pathway to national prosperity--as well as an international system with the capacity to act on the great global challenges of our time, such as climate change, which no individual nation can solve alone. But that, too, depends on what happens next between China and the US.

There is therefore no other realistic alternative: a new strategic framework to manage US-China relations must be found.

If the US and the Soviet Union, following the near-disastrous brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis, could eventually agree on a political and strategic framework to manage their own fraught relationship without triggering mutual annihilation, surely it's possible for the US and China to do the same in the infinitely less trying geopolitical circumstances of today.

This is where the idea of "managed strategic competition" emerges.

The idea is a relatively simple one in concept: to establish a new minimum strategic framework for US-China relations based on three core propositions.

First, to establish a clear understanding of each other's irreducible strategic red lines to help prevent conflict, through miscalculation or design, by creating an environment in which each side concludes that clear strategic predictability advantages both, that strategic deception is futile, and that strategic surprise is just plain dangerous.

Second, to then relocate the primary burden of strategic rivalry to a competitive race, in which each country would strive to its utmost for superiority, but would remain at peace. Such strategic competition would also prioritize each side's political, economic and ideological appeal to the rest of the world.

Third, to create the political space necessary for China and the US to continue to engage in strategic cooperation in a number of defined areas where each side agrees that both their global interests and their national interests would be enhanced by global collaboration--and indeed undermined by the absence of an agreed, collaborative approach, such as on climate change.

The idea of managed strategic competition is anchored in a deeply realist view of the global order. It accepts that states will continue to seek security by building a balance of power in their favor, while recognizing that in doing so they are likely to create security dilemmas for other states whose fundamental interests may be disadvantaged by these actions.

It is important to be realistic, of course, about what can be achieved through any such joint strategic framework. It will not of itself prevent war. But, properly constructed, and based on clarity, transparency and credible deterrence, it may reduce the risk of it.

The challenge in this case is to reduce the risk to both sides as the competition between them unfolds by jointly crafting a limited number of rules of the road that will help prevent war. The rules will still enable each side to compete vigorously across all policy and regional domains.

If both sides could agree on those stipulations, each would have to accept that the other will still try to maximize its advantages while stopping short of breaching the limits--or the commonly agreed strategic guardrails of the relationship.

Meanwhile the great strength of managed strategic competition as an agreed framework is that it also accommodates continued international collaboration between the two countries when it is in their national interests to do so.

There are many, however, who would criticize such an approach as being naive. Why, they ask, should their country tie its hands by accepting any limits in such an important contest?

But there are deeply realist answers to these objections.

From the US perspective, having another decade to rebuild, or in some cases deepen, US economic, military and technological power, with some prospect of improving the balance of power in relation to China in each of these domains, is no small thing.

In this sense, time could be argued to be the US' friend, not its enemy, despite the fact that the Chinese might of course argue the same from their own perspective as they too seek to enhance their strategic, military and economic position in the immediate years ahead.

The truth, as both sides know, is that the uncertainty of the outcome of any conflict is too great. The sheer potential destructive force of such a conflagration is beyond imagining.

Meanwhile, the bottom line is that a mutually agreed framework of managed strategic competition offers some potential to reduce the temperature levels in the most highly volatile theaters of operation--where at present there are very few, if any, rules of the road to prevent even unintentional crises and escalation.

The author is former prime minister of Australia and president of Asia Society Policy Institute. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.