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Uncertainty, Shifting Power and Credible Signals in US-China Relations: Why the “Thucydides Trap” Is Real, but Limited

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Abstract

Is conflict between a rising China and a declining United States inevitable? One of the main purported drivers of the “Thucydides Trap” is that declining states face intractable uncertainty about rising states’ future intentions. Since a declining state cannot be sure how a rising state will use its power in the future, the decliner faces strong incentives to initiate preventive action, possibly war, to forestall the power shift, even if the rising state has behaved cooperatively to date. A common conclusion is therefore that preventive war is often unavoidable under large power shifts, even between states with truly compatible goals. Drawing on recently-published formal work, this paper argues that the uncertainty underpinning the Thucydides Trap is not as pervasive as conventional wisdom holds. Indeed, even under large power shifts, rising states’ cooperative signals should be sufficiently credible that preventive war should not occur when the declining state is initially uncertain of the riser’s intentions. Rather, preventive war should occur only if the declining state has high confidence that the riser’s intentions are truly hostile. The analysis yields two main conclusions. First, China’s cooperation has been sufficiently credible to avert preventive war, but not to avoid a substantial degree of competition with the US, which has rationally hedged against China’s rising power. However, American observers have often misinterpreted the credibility of both cooperative and non-cooperative Chinese signals, and the current US government is far too confident that China harbors hostile intentions. This leaves open the possibility of a US-China war due to psychological misperceptions.

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Notes

  1. In responding to Allison, this paper proceeds from his premise that China is rising dramatically relative to the US. Although this claim has been disputed [2], even a slowing Chinese economy is projected to continue annual growth rates of around 6%, in contrast to the 1-3% growth that is likely the new normal for the post-financial crisis United States, Europe and Japan. This means that even if China does not surpass the US, its power and influence over the shape of the international order will continue to increase relative to that of the US and its allies for the foreseeable future ([3, 8]:13-36).

  2. In responding to Allison, this paper proceeds from his premise that realistic paths to preventive war exist [1]. However, some scholars dispute this premise, given the high degree of economic interdependence and mutual nuclear deterrents between the two countries. Most skeptics accept, however, that even if preventive war is off the table, full-scale, cold war-style competition short of war can be driven by the same preventive incentives that drive the Thucydides trap [66]. The argument in this paper applies equally to both of these high-intensity forms of conflict.

  3. In this paper, a rising state’s actions are defined as “revisionist” to the extent that they impede the declining state’s goals. Thus, revision is a relational concept that is independent of the status quo. This definition allows the argument below to circumvent the thorny debate over whether the US or China is more revisionist [6], in order to focus more productively on the degree to which their interests are compatible in relation to each other.

  4. There are various definitions of “hedging” in the IR literature [35]. It is defined here as a continuum that ranges from complete accommodation of a rising state’s power gains to intense balancing tactics short of war to contain the riser. Hedging includes such tactics as balancing alliances, arms races, economic sanctions, and the construction of institutions that favor the decliner over the riser.

  5. Like any theoretical argument, the one below omits many factors that drive the degree of competition and cooperation between the US and China, including the domestic sources of US and Chinese national interests, psychological biases that affect states’ foreign policies, or how economic interdependence and nuclear weapons make war less likely by raising its costs. However, the deductive logic presented here is quite complementary to these other theories of international conflict in ways that are discussed at length in the empirical application to contemporary US-China relations, below, including the implications of relaxing the rational actor assumption.

  6. The possibility of irrational conflict occurring between the US and a hypothetically-benign China if this assumption is relaxed is discussed extensively in the next section.

  7. On the spiral model, see [21, 27, 36].

  8. Again, this must logically be true, because preventive war would completely eliminate incentives to misrepresent, resulting in fully-informative cooperative signals and no incentive for the declining state to launch preventive war in the first place. Thus, there must be some degree of containment short of war beyond which the declining state prefers not to escalate any further.

  9. Note that the argument here assumes that states’ national preferences are fixed. Relaxing this assumption, such that the compatibility of the rising and declining states’ preferences could change over time, would add an additional source of uncertainty and reduce the decliner’s confidence about the riser’s future intentions. However, the argument presented in this section would remain unaffected: the decliner’s hedging strategy would still increase the credibility of rising states’ signals, which would be sufficiently informative to avert rational preventive conflict. The effects of relaxing this assumption in US-China relations is discussed in concrete terms below.

  10. This is particularly true regarding issues of high importance to the US and during periods where China’s rise appears to be waning.

  11. This strategy is consistent with the definition of hedging given above (note 4), as a degree of balancing that falls somewhere between complete accommodation and full containment. Although US security policy toward China entails a higher degree of balancing than US economic policy (at least until recently), it clearly falls short of cold-war style military containment ([8]:xv).

  12. Among the litany of devastating critiques of offensive realism, see [34] for a discussion specific to US-China relations.

  13. For a recent review of this burgeoning literature, see ([11]:69-78).

  14. The US National Defense Strategy concurs that “China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea… It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions” [65].

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  1. Research Fellow, Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 259772, Singapore

    Brandon K. Yoder

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Yoder, B.K. Uncertainty, Shifting Power and Credible Signals in US-China Relations: Why the “Thucydides Trap” Is Real, but Limited. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 24, 87–104 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-019-09606-1

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