David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi
Since the early 2010s, the relationship between Beijing and Washington has steadily shifted from cautious engagement to tense rivalry. Step by step, both sides have adopted national security strategies that treat the other not merely as a competitor but as the principal threat to their core values, political legitimacy, and vital national interests. This evolution has been driven not only by external events but also by domestic political incentives, bureaucratic maneuvering, and deeply rooted anxieties about vulnerability, decline, and status. Each country’s increasingly muscular attempts to deter the other have caused rising friction in the realms of defense, economics, culture, and diplomacy. What began as hedging behavior has hardened into mutually reinforcing strategic postures that assume long-term hostility as the organizing principle of policy.
A world in which the two most powerful countries organize their strategies around mutual enmity is one marked by arms races, institutional paralysis, and the neglect of shared threats such as climate change, pandemic infection, and financial instability. In such a world, conflicts can readily spiral out of control. In the absence of meaningful guardrails, the present trajectory risks locking both societies and the international system into a condition of managed hostility, diminished prosperity, and chronic insecurity—a condition in which competition becomes an end in itself and the costs are borne not by Beijing and Washington alone but by the whole world.
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