This article first appeared on Pacific Forum and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here.
The US-China relationship stands at a perilous threshold, defined by military friction, accelerating technological competition, and shrinking margins for miscalculation. As Washington debates how to navigate Beijing’s ascent, American strategy should realign its ambitions with realities.
While the United States may desire enduring primacy, technological dominance, and economic sovereignty, material constraints dictate that the only viable relationship it can sustain with China is one of managed coexistence.
Framing the debate
Let us begin by rejecting two untenable extremes.
First, seeking the subversion of the Chinese Communist Party is as foolish as it is dangerous. Attempting to force the downfall of a nuclear-armed economic powerhouse governing 1.4 billion people risks uncontrolled escalation, unsecured strategic assets, global economic collapse, and unprecedented human disaster, assuming its success.
Second, ceding the Indo-Pacific (or more) to Beijing’s hegemony is equally disastrous. Unchecked Chinese dominance in the region would choke vital maritime trade lanes, undermine critical US security alliances and partnerships, and erode the global balance of power.
The real debate taking place in Washington pits two visions against each other. One is driven by primacists, who demand that the United States enforce dominance and escalation superiority over China while leading a containment strategy.
The other approach is championed by realists, who believe that the era of uncontested US primacy is over and that the United States should seek an equilibrium with China built on military denial, targeted economic de-risking, and managed coexistence.
The primacist ideal and material limits
Ideally, the United States desires enduring primacy.
Militarily, primacists seek escalation dominance, i.e., preserving the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea through overwhelming offensive power. That’s because, as Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher have argued, managing competition “risks prioritizing short-term thaw at the expense of long-term victory” and “there is no substitute for victory.”
Similarly, in technology and trade, primacists treat competition with China as a zero-sum struggle. They advocate using state subsidies, federal investments in research and development, and export controls to maintain the US lead in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and semiconductors.
Primacists also push for industrial rebalancing, reversing Chinese mercantilist trade practices, reshoring vital supply chains (such as critical minerals and pharmaceuticals), and decoupling major economic sectors. Moreover, they frame the competition as a moral crusade of “democracy versus autocracy,” mobilizing US alliances to isolate China and press for internal reforms within China.
This vision, however, collides with unyielding material realities. Uncontested military supremacy along China’s perimeter is now out of reach.
China’s dense anti-access/area-denial networks mean the United States can no longer project unhindered power up to the Chinese mainland. Worse, trying to do so risks triggering a preventive war rather than deterring one. Beijing’s expanding nuclear triad has also rendered US strategic immunity obsolete.
As Brad Roberts has emphasized: “The United States is going to have a relationship of mutual vulnerability with China whether or not it accepts it in a political sense.” Even as it is adapting, as it should, its nuclear arsenal to deal with both Russia and China (two nuclear peers, or a peer and, in China’s case, a quasi-peer) plus North Korea, the United States will face constraints that make seeking nuclear dominance over its adversaries impossible.
Economically and technologically, broad blockades are not foolproof. China’s deep tech talent pool and capital reserves guarantee that Beijing will innovate around such blockades.
While advocating for aggressive competition to out-innovate China, Eric Schmidt has observed the following: “Not only will we invent this AI future, but so will our direct competitor, China. We cannot prevent it. We cannot hold it to ourselves for a few years of advantage. We are in a race that will shape the world’s future.”
Total decoupling is also cost prohibitive. Global supply chains are integrated, and aggressive trade weaponization risks retaliation, including Chinese export controls on critical inputs like rare earth elements.
Crucially, key regional allies and Global South partners reject binaries, preferring commercial ties with Beijing alongside security partnerships with Washington. Meanwhile, China’s deepening alignment with Russia, Iran, and North Korea creates an axis that counters Western efforts at complete isolation.
A realist strategy: The four pillars of managed coexistence
Acknowledging these limits does not mean surrendering. It means adopting a more practicable strategy anchored in hard-nosed realism. To many, opting for realism is synonymous with US retreat and restraint, even capitulation. To be sure, some realists, often labeled “offshore-balancers,” do advocate retrenchment.
In a recent report on US defense policy, for example, Jennifer Kavanagh recommends the withdrawal of American military posture from the First Island Chain to the Second Island Chain and the dissolution of mutual defense alliances, arguing that doing so “would reduce US military requirements and the risk of a war with China while still protecting US interests.”
Other realists, however, contend that voluntary withdrawal creates a dangerous power vacuum, inviting the very aggression deterrence is meant to prevent. So, instead of abandoning alliances or executing a retreat, these “forward-leaning” realists argue that American power is best preserved by maintaining a favorable balance of power directly along the First Island Chain.
They seek to deter aggression through military denial and, more broadly, manage rivalry through transactional statecraft. In short, they believe that the United States should seek equilibrium within the theater, not safety behind the horizon. This approach is the key to success, and it rests on the implementation of four pillars.
Pillar 1: Rebuild domestic solvency, tech leadership, and targeted collective resilience
National power abroad rests on physical and economic solvency at home. That’s why the United States should prioritize targeted investments, next-generation AI infrastructure, green-energy supply chains, and domestic manufacturing capacity. Streamlining immigration pathways for top global tech talent and modernizing industrial infrastructure will also supply the engines needed to sustain long-term competition.
Crucially, domestic revitalization should be paired with collective resilience. Rather than demanding economic decoupling—which alienates partners—the United States should collaborate with its allies to establish joint critical-mineral processing networks, strategic reserves, and targeted anti-coercion trade mechanisms.
Such a collective resilience framework will ensure that neither Washington nor its partners can be singled out by Beijing’s economic leverage or export blockades, all while preserving open channels for non-sensitive trade.
Pillar 2: Deploy a posture of military denial and allied responsibility-sharing
The United States should transition away from vulnerable, concentrated forward platforms toward a distributed, resilient denial network. Priority should go to massed autonomous strike systems, long-range mobile anti-ship weaponry, hardened command-and-control nodes and undersea warfare assets capable of denying an amphibious invasion of Taiwan or maritime coercion without relying on escalatory strikes against the Chinese mainland.
US Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby has argued that such an approach is essential “to prevent China from establishing hegemony” and the only realistic option given that “restoring military dominance over China is unfeasible given its size and capacity.”
Concurrently, this strategy demands robust allied responsibility-sharing. While reaffirming its extended deterrence commitments, the United States should insist that front-line allies shoulder a larger burden of their conventional defense.
This includes integrating Japan’s acquiring stand-off counterstrike capabilities into joint operational planning, encouraging Australia’s long-range strike expansion under AUKUS, and co-developing defense industrial production with regional partners to make the First Island Chain self-sustaining in long-term deterrence.
Pillar 3: Establish strategic and operational guardrails
As it strengthens deterrence, the United States should acknowledge mutual nuclear vulnerability with China to stabilize the strategic balance and eliminate incentives for worst-case force sizing. On this baseline, it should pursue risk reduction measures across both strategic and operational domains.
Drawing on historical precedents such as the 1988 US-Soviet Ballistic Missile Launch Agreement, the United States should coordinate with partners to push China toward formal pre-launch notification agreements for ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles. (A recent Pacific Forum study on this topic finds that Beijing might be receptive to pressure.)
Beyond missile guardrails, the United States should secure bilateral commitments to maintain human control over nuclear assets, institutionalize 24/7 military-to-military crisis communications, standardize maritime and aerial avoidance protocols in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, and establish binding rules governing military AI, space-based targeting systems, and offensive cyber operations.
These measures will serve as prerequisites for the nuclear arms control initiatives currently out of reach given the asymmetry between US and Chinese forces.
Pillar 4: Institutionalize platforms for transactional diplomacy and reciprocal statecraft
Beyond military risk reduction, preventing broader friction from escalating into conflict requires resilient diplomatic channels to withstand political volatility.
The United States and China should establish task forces to process trade disputes, update targeted export control definitions, and coordinate on shared, non-zero-sum challenges, including global macroeconomic stability, climate mitigation, public health threats, and the suppression of illicit precursor chemical networks.
Such engagement should move beyond dialogue toward reciprocal statecraft: Washington should offer calibrated market access or narrowed regulatory restrictions in exchange for verifiable Chinese actions, such as enforcing controls on precursor fentanyl exports or committing to debt-restructuring standards in developing nations.
Anchoring these exchanges in multilateral bodies will further ensure that transactional statecraft remains grounded in regional consensus, making it harder for either power to walk away when political friction flares up.
Conclusion
Prudent statecraft requires aligning strategy with material realities rather than ideological ambitions. In the US-China relationship, shifting from primacy to realism need not mean retreating or capitulating.
Rather, it demands implementing a balance-of-power strategy, one that anchors power in domestic solvency, enforces stability through forward denial and burden-sharing, establishes strategic and operational guardrails, and pairs hard deterrence with crisis diplomacy.
David Santoro (david@pacforum.org) is President and CEO of the Pacific Forum.
