Ryan Agee
When Beijing dispatched a relatively unknown rear admiral from its National Defense University to the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, bypassing its own defense minister and forfeiting its plenary address, it did more than snub Asia’s premier security forum. It signaled a regime shifting from dialogue to confrontation. China has traditionally used the Singapore gathering to engage regional counterparts and frame its strategic intentions. By refusing the platform at a moment of rising tensions, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revealed its preference for manufacturing crisis rather than managing competition.
This posture reflects more than diplomatic pique. It is the manifestation of what can be called strategic compression,[1] a condition in which a state’s decision space narrows even as the timeline for action accelerates. For China, compression arises from converging demographic decline, economic stagnation, and political rigidity. These forces produce a closing window in which Beijing perceives a diminishing opportunity to achieve its central project: the “national rejuvenation” with the main marker of absorbing Taiwan.
Washington must recognize both the danger and the opportunity this moment presents. The danger is that compression can drive Beijing toward reckless escalation, gambling that crisis or even conflict will preserve regime legitimacy. The opportunity is that deterrence, strategic friction, and off-ramp architecture can be leveraged to hold China in stasis, denying both a war of choice and a war of necessity.
Strategic Compression: A Closing Window
Compression is the pressure Beijing places upon itself; friction is the pressure others apply upon Beijing. Strategic compression is best understood as the simultaneous narrowing of options and acceleration of timelines that confront states when long-term ambitions collide with structural constraints. The concept is related to the classic “windows of vulnerability” debate in strategic studies. Lebow argued that leaders exploit perceived openings when adversaries are temporarily weak. Later scholars extended the idea: Doeser and Eidenfalk posited that foreign policy change often requires leaders to perceive a fleeting “window of opportunity” as both real and urgent. More recently, Hal Brands has tied these windows directly to great-power competition, warning that compressed states may lunge an advantage before their window of opportunity closes.
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