The Most Dangerous Game

At first, many in Washington assumed that China’s rise could be managed. In response to the inexorable logic of modernization and some coaxing, China would become, as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick put it in 2005, a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. For a time, Beijing did seem to be tamed, as it appeared to embrace Western norms and international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Today, however, that hope is dying. On issue after issue, Beijing seems to be rejecting rather than accepting the U.S.-led global order, putting it on a collision course with Washington and prompting endless discussion about how to solve the “China challenge.” But for all the specificity of the debate—how to deter an invasion of Taiwan, what to do about Beijing’s expansionist claims in the South China Sea, and whether the West should economically and technologically decouple from China—at the heart of the matter lies a much bigger and older conundrum in international relations. How does a status quo power handle a rising power, and do moments of transition inexorably lead to war?

The political scientist Graham Allison has called the seemingly inevitable clash between the United States and China “the Thucydides trap.” The phrase refers to the pattern first laid out by the fifth-century Greek historian in his study of the conflict between Sparta, then the dominant power in ancient Greece, and Athens, its rising challenger. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, he famously concluded that “what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” In the modern era, international relations scholars have come up with a name for this dynamic: power transition theory.

Pointing to history, the theory holds that ascendant powers routinely emerge to challenge the dominant power and the international order established by it, eventually leading to conflict. Far from remaining confined to the ivory tower, this conceptual framework has long guided official thinking. After World War II, for example, policymakers in Washington and Moscow worried that the Cold War between the established American power and the rising Soviet one might turn hot.

But power transition theory offers another implicit, and often overlooked, truth: that the way the established power manages the international order can matter as much as, if not more than, the ambitions of the challenger. Precisely because they are still rising, challengers generally have to act within the existing laws, norms, and institutions that govern international relations, even when they disagree with them. By contrast, established powers have the ability to adjust those rules and institutions in ways that sustain or enhance their own position. In other words, for a long-dominant hegemon, the best response to a threatening upstart may not be to confront or try to defeat it but to use the international order to contain it.

HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE

Modern power transition theory originated with the political scientist A. F. K. Organski, who gave a general theoretical foundation to the problem first articulated by Thucydides. In 1958, Organski identified what he called a “recurring pattern” in international relations: in every era of history, he argued, there is a status quo power that eventually faces a challenger. During the Cold War, scholars such as Robert Gilpin, Jacek Kugler, and Ronald Tammen expanded on Organski’s thesis, agreeing that a rising power tends to be “dissatisfied” with the way that the dominant power influences the distribution of goods in the international system, thus preventing the challenger from reaping equal benefits. And so it rises to displace the status quo power, a confrontation that often leads to war. 

In line with this thesis, most policymakers and analysts thinking about China today have been concerned almost exclusively with the direct threat posed by Beijing’s rise. This is not surprising, since power transition theory’s primary implication is that challenges by rising powers can lead to war. For this reason, the first generation of power transition theorists tended to focus on how the distribution of power affected the probability of war and peace: a concentration of power in a single hegemon could, in their view, stabilize the system until a challenger became sufficiently strong to contest that power. Applied to the United States and China today, this framing suggests a dire outcome. Even if a full power transition does not occur—that is, even if China eventually stagnates—Beijing might attain enough economic and military power to push back against Washington, raising the odds of war.

But the emphasis on China’s trajectory ignores the theory’s second implication—the part that attempts to explain why rising powers seek to challenge the great power in the first place. Power transition theorists argue that conflict emerges not simply as a consequence of a challenger’s growing power but because of the challenger’s relationship to the international order. Specifically, a rising power may be dissatisfied with existing international arrangements and may seek to gain sufficient power to eventually change them. Therefore, the way the status quo power manages the international order can determine whether rivalry turns into conflict.

Challengers generally have to act within existing norms, even when they disagree with them.

To understand why, it is necessary to grasp exactly which aspects of the existing order rising powers wish to change and how. Most rising powers are not wholly revisionist. Rather, they tend to dislike some elements of the international order while accepting others. Thucydides himself implicitly made this point: in his view, it was not just Athens’s rising power that led to the Peloponnesian War but also its dissatisfaction with some of the cultural and political norms that Sparta embraced. As Laurie Bagby has observed, Thucydides argued that the clash between the “national character” of Sparta (reticent, inward-looking) and that of Athens (daring and glory seeking) influenced how they approached the distribution of power and the international order. For example, Sparta was slow and hesitant to defend friendly states. This emboldened Athens to invade and annihilate a neutral state—the island of Melos—to demonstrate its strength and power. In his Melian Dialogue, Thucydides’s dramatic narration of the negotiations between Athens and Melos, Athens declares, in a show of the cultural norms that drove it, that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Over the past decade or so, a new generation of power transition scholars has paid more attention to how rising powers, both past and present, interact with the international order. Stacie Goddard has studied the ways that rising powers justify their actions, showing, for example, that the long-dominant United Kingdom chose to accommodate the upstart United States in the 1820s because London recognized that Washington, through the Monroe Doctrine, was upholding existing norms of free trade, international law, and noninterference. Xiaoyu Pu has explored how rising powers strategically frame their views of order to domestic and foreign audiences. China, for example, has engaged in “conspicuous giving” and charity through its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in an effort to convert economic power into diplomatic power. Rohan Mukherjee has looked at the tendency of challengers to sacrifice material interests in order to be accepted as a part of the great-power club. Japan, for instance, agreed to limit the size of its fleet at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, notwithstanding its drive to become a major naval power, and China, despite its efforts to build a larger nuclear arsenal, agreed to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996.

Michelle Murray has shown how rising states seek to be recognized as full equals of established powers, as both the United States and imperial Germany did at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how denial of that recognition can fuel a “forceful contestation.” Joshua Shifrinson has noted that, contrary to what one might expect, rising powers are often careful to avoid antagonizing a declining great power, as the United States did when it supported the United Kingdom at the start of the Cold War. By accommodating the incumbent, a rising power can more quickly expand its own capabilities. And Kristen Hopewell, Emma Mawdsley, and Khalid Nadvi have each sought to identify the ways in which rising powers want to change the international order and why, concluding that they often cooperate with each other to modify the existing structures of global governance.

This growing body of work has added important insights about how rising powers navigate the international order: rather than challenging it outright, they tend to accept many existing norms, cooperate to reject other aspects, and are sensitive to accusations of being overthrowers of existing arrangements. In doing so, they are playing a long game aimed at two objectives: using the arrangements of the current order to bolster their own rise, and weakening the architect of that order until they can attain sufficient power to create a new one. Yet this research also offers insights into how the great power can avoid this outcome. Left untended, the international order may facilitate a challenger that seeks to manipulate existing norms to gain advantage or to draw other countries into its own orbit. But the great power also has the ability to change the order in ways that limit these dangers.

As Sevasti-Eleni Vezirgiannidou has pointed out, it matters not only how the great power manages its relations with the rising power but also whether the great power is prepared to rethink the order it built. She argues that the United States has avoided contemplating changes to the liberal international order that could help slow its decline. Rather than strengthening or even reforming existing international institutions, Washington has often turned to ad hoc informal institutions and diplomacy, making the international order more fragmented and contested than ever. For example, Vezirgiannidou notes that the United States has sanctioned Iran, a fellow member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for its nuclear program yet sought to legitimize India, which is not a member of the treaty, as a nuclear weapons state—an approach that may ultimately weaken international arms control arrangements. Such erosion of international institutions could accelerate China’s rise, making China more likely to challenge the existing order or even to precipitate a direct conflict with the United States.

By instead rethinking the formal institutions and existing practices of the international order, the United States can fortify its own position and diminish China’s influence, thus reducing the chance of conflict. But Washington should act quickly. For now, Beijing is still a hegemon in the making and lacks the clout and capability to impose a new order: even as it seeks to get around some of them, it must generally play by established practices and norms. At some point, however, American leaders could find that it is China, not the United States, that is writing the rules of the game.

PLAYING TO WIN

To put the more recent insights of power transition theory into practice, it is important to identify the aspects of the liberal international order that China and other challengers accept, not only those that they reject. As my own research has shown, rising powers often have to embrace important elements of the international order to gain recognition as a future dominant power. At the end of the nineteenth century, both the United States and Meiji Japan understood that owning and administering colonies signified great-power status, even if, in the case of the United States, there was great debate about the moral, racial, and economic implications of doing so. Both rising powers accepted the need to become a colonizer to achieve status, with Japan acquiring a vast empire and the United States annexing Hawaii and the Philippines.

China’s behavior today is analogous. Consider the Belt and Road Initiative, its vast infrastructure and investment program. Western analysts have criticized the BRI for “debt-trap diplomacy,” arguing that Beijing extends loans to smaller countries in the global South as a way of gaining inordinate influence over their affairs. But it is hard to dispute that the initiative was built on the established multilateral principles underpinning the U.S.-led liberal international order—namely, facilitating global trade and economic growth through interconnectivity. Accusing China and the BRI of wholesale revisionism not only leaves the United States open to charges of hypocrisy but also creates the perception that the United States is simply not able to compete with China in the global economy. A smarter approach would be to offer a better alternative to the BRI. So far, Washington has not done so. The West’s supposed answer to the BRI—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, a $600 billion initiative launched by the G-7—is hampered by its members’ domestic political constraints and their limited ability to control private-sector investments.

Rather than seeking to confront China directly—a strategy that could itself lead to conflict—the United States should determine how to change the order to reinforce its own power. To begin with, this means recognizing that a challenger is far more likely to disrupt than disfigure the order. In Tanzania, for example, China has established an academy where young leaders from various African ruling parties are taught about the subordinate position of courts and the importance of rigid party discipline. But even this project seeks only to offer—rather than impose—China’s authoritarian model of governance and development. And at any rate, Beijing’s broader efforts to spread its ideology on the continent have had mixed success. The United States, by contrast, has the power and authority to press for changes in the order that could strengthen African support or existing institutions.

Yet Washington’s management of the order has been underwhelming. The Biden administration’s 2021 Summit for Democracy, for example, was intended to shore up liberalism. But the meeting included countries such as India and Nigeria that today are hardly considered paragons of democratic practice; it also largely sidelined civil society and had no concrete agenda or outcomes. On economics, the United States has to a significant degree abandoned its long-held belief in trade liberalization, yet it has not even bothered to frame its aggressive use of tariffs and industrial policy as part of a systematic rethinking of the global economic order.

MORE FRIENDS, MORE POWER

If recent power transition theory makes clear that the United States needs to rebuild the liberal order to sustain American power, it leaves open how. One promising approach is to address issues that are not yet governed by international norms. Take cybersecurity. To address the growing threat of Chinese and Russian hackers, the Biden administration has made cybersecurity a national priority, yet it has failed to establish broader international cooperation, including by setting down international regulations and penalties for cyberattacks. Other issues for which international standards are deficient or lacking include social media, cross-border data flows, food security, pandemic preparedness, and artificial intelligence.

To truly restructure the order, however, the United States also needs buy-in from its allies. An international order cannot be built or rebuilt by the hegemon alone; it takes a coalition of the willing. Consider the Cold War, which could be described as a successful case of a power transition that did not end in direct conflict between the hegemons themselves: confronted by the rise of the Soviet Union, the United States was able to use its alliances to build a liberal international order in ways that strengthened the West and helped contain the Soviet challenge. Indeed, the communist threat gave Washington’s allies and partners an unambiguous rationale for supporting such efforts. The new Western-led order was expressed both in military alliances such as NATO and in international institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the WTO.

Today, the rationale for supporting U.S.-led innovations to the order is not as clear. Many countries are glad to do business with both China and the United States and want to preserve that flexibility. Nonetheless, the United States has an advantage. Building on its decades-old alliances and international relationships, it has introduced several new formal arrangements with other countries, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with Australia, India, and Japan, and AUKUS, with Australia and the United Kingdom, which are both underpinned by the desire to contain China. By contrast, China has no special friendships or strategic partners, let alone formal military allies; its emerging partnership with Russia is still fragile. Not surprisingly, the international institutions that Beijing has spearheaded, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of Eurasian countries and the BRICS—the group founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—have limited influence.

Washington’s management of the international order has been underwhelming.

Still, as power transition theory shows, Washington cannot rest on its laurels. For several decades, the center of gravity in world politics has been shifting away from the West. China and India have been vying to lead the developing world, and both have sought to highlight the divide between the global South and the West. The United States needs to show that its interests are not in opposition to those of non-Western countries. At the WTO, for example, Washington has wisely supported changes that aim to be inclusive but are also pragmatic and efficient. These include the increasing use of multilateral negotiations, or negotiations that are in principle open to all parties but are in fact mostly undertaken by only those members that are particularly interested in the issue at hand—an approach that is endorsed by most developing countries but opposed by India. Similarly, the Biden administration’s promotion of “friend shoring,” or bringing supply chains out of China and onto less hostile territory, holds tremendous potential for building more trade links with developing countries. But Washington needs to go further. With friend shoring, it needs to explain what its criteria for friendship are and what exactly its friends will get, beyond merely more bilateral trade.

By taking such steps, the United States can better respond to rising powers that may reject important elements of the international order yet still buy into much of it. India is the chief example here. Although it is one of Washington’s strategic partners, New Delhi holds positions on trade and liberalism that depart significantly from the principles endorsed by the United States.

India has a lax approach to intellectual property rights, for instance, and under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, its government has been accused of dramatically eroding civil liberties. But given both countries’ wariness about China, they need each other. By rebuilding the order to include new areas or issues in which India has a deep interest—technology and cyberspace, for example—the United States can induce more buy-in from India and set the norms for future cooperation or restraint.

For now, however, the main focus should be China. A power transition is coming: China is still rising and could soon have the capability to revise the international order, which could ultimately unseat the status quo great power. That is what challengers do once they have risen. If the United States hopes to avoid that outcome, it cannot simply rely on confronting China or complaining about how China is playing the game. It will need to change the game itself.