The world of the early 2000s, in which US-China relations were looked on with hope, now seems hard to imagine. What happened? How did China go from an economic partner to an existential threat to the United States in less than a decade?
The answer is not reducible to partisan politics. While the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party has viewed China as a potential threat since the days of Mao Zedong, they had little influence during the Obama years, the period in which the United States’ current policy toward China has its origins. Although the Trump presidency oversaw a decisive downturn in Sino-US relations, Pentagon leaders were promoting the idea of “great-power competition” in 2015. For some Obama officials, China was the key military challenge of the future as early as 2010, the year before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a “pivot to Asia.”
For some, the United States and China are simply two empires slugging it out on the world stage, a version of a conflict that has been with the world for millennia. But attention to the broader economic picture suggests that something more complicated is going on. Sino-US rivalry has coincided with a crisis of capital accumulation. As the dividends of neoliberal globalization have shrunk and global growth has stagnated since 2008, China and the United States have turned to economic nationalism and military one-upmanship. Both great powers are exploiting the advantages afforded by their favorable positions in the world-system to claim a larger share of a shrinking economic pie.
But this imperialist explanation lacks an account of how US policy toward China operates within the larger history of US foreign policymaking. It neglects how national security elites have responded to internal developments in China and the world by falling back on old frameworks that survived the Cold War.
US strategy toward China is motivated by an untimely pursuit of primacy — global military and economic dominance — under material conditions that don’t allow for it. A US grand strategy premised on primacy has three major features: it requires an extreme imbalance of power in the world-system favoring the United States; it views other great powers as the foremost threat to the state; and it insists on using force to contain or diminish even hypothetical challenges to US supremacy.