Eric Rosenbach and Chris Li
Mr. Rosenbach served as an assistant secretary of defense and as chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Defense. Mr. Li is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
On May 26, 2023, a U.S. Air Force plane was on a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea when a Chinese fighter jet banked dangerously close to it. Several months earlier over the same waters, a U.S. military plane was forced to take evasive action when a Chinese fighter came within 20 feet.
Risky intercepts and unsafe encounters like these between air and naval forces of China and the United States and its allies have spiked in recent years, and there appears to be no letup. In August, China released footage of what it claimed was a near miss between Chinese and U.S. helicopters in the Taiwan Strait. Territorial confrontations between Chinese and Philippine vessels have become routine in the South China Sea, and this week Australia said a Chinese fighter jet had released flares dangerously close to an Australian Air Force plane.
The danger of one of these incidents tipping into an actual conflict has never been higher. Yet in sharp contrast to the era of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, there are virtually no reliable systems of real-time communication between American and Chinese military forces to defuse an inadvertent crisis.
President Trump, who plans to meet President Xi Jinping of China next week on the sidelines of a regional summit in South Korea, has made clear that his priority with China is a trade deal.
But trade depends on peace and stability. By working to lay the foundation for durable crisis management systems with China, Mr. Trump can secure his legacy as the president who pulled the two powers back from the brink of World War III.
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History has shown how superpower confrontation can quickly spiral toward nuclear Armageddon. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is perhaps the most chilling example.
The United States and China have also come dangerously close to blows.
In 2001, a U.S. Navy spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet in the South China Sea. The Chinese pilot was killed, and the American aircraft made an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island, where the crew was captured. The ensuing 10-day standoff was resolved only after delicate diplomacy that reached the highest levels of the Chinese and U.S. governments.
Whether that kind of crisis resolution can be replicated today is uncertain. China is far more assertive and militarily powerful than it was in 2001, and tensions with the United States are more combustible, amplified by nationalistic pressures on both sides.
The situation between the United States and the Soviet Union was different. Although sworn ideological adversaries, they had the wisdom to put reliable checks and balances in place. They notified each other before missile launches, agreed to a range of transparency requirements so that each side could tell that the other’s activities were exercises, not attacks, and followed safety protocols designed to reduce the chance of run-ins. These safeguards remained functional even when tensions spiked.
The importance of open lines of contact cannot be overestimated.
In 2015 Russia dramatically increased its military presence in Syria. One of the writers of this essay assisted Ash Carter, then the U.S. secretary of defense, and Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in reopening military communication channels with the Russians that had been severed a year earlier after Russia invaded Crimea. We took measures to avoid accidental clashes in Syria, and no such run-ins occurred.
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