Preventive or Revisionist Challenge During Power Transition? The Case of China–USA Strategic Competition

Introduction

History has clearly not ended, and its tectonic plates are again on the move as the rise of China has brought the discussion of great power politics and competition back to the centre stage in the academic field of international relations and the world of policymaking (Bolton, 2020; Clinton, 2011; Haass, 2020a; Haass & Kupchan, 2021; Schuman, 2020; Westad, 2019). While the relationship from the early 1990s and up until the 2000s was characterised by relatively low tensions (Goldstein, 2020; Ross & Tunsjø, 2016), the past several years, particularly from 2010 onwards, have increasingly been portrayed as one of a new Cold War (Mearsheimer, 2020; Walt, 2020).

Structural shifts in the balance of world power have historically been major sources of instability in international politics due to strategic uncertainties, changes in patterns of cooperation and competition, among the great powers (Gilpin, 1981; Organski, 1968; Walt, 2018; Wu, 2020). According to Allison (2017), 12 of the past 16 shifts in the distribution of power among the great powers have unleashed the so-called Thucydides’ Traps ¹ and hegemonic wars. Hegemonic wars are quite different from other inter-state wars as they involve the great powers and because the very structure of the international political system and the ordering principles of relations between states are at issue (Gilpin, 1988; Can & Chan, 2020; Ikenberry, 2001, 2020).

China–USA relations have become the most recent case of power transition in the international political system, and according to some observers, it should be expected that as China approaches power parity, or overtakes the USA in terms of material capabilities, it will initiate a challenge for the position of hegemony and seek to revise the existing US-led liberal international order (McMaster, 2020; Pillsbury, 2015; Walt, 2018). The fundamental logic underpinning this assumption is simply that states in an anarchic self-help environment are first and foremost concerned about their security, and that the best way for a state to guarantee its security in such an environment is to become the dominant power in the system (Waltz, 1979; Mearsheimer, 2014). Furthermore, because the arrangements of international order are shaped and controlled by a dominant power, a newly established power will seek to revise these arrangements to better reflect and reinforce its own particular values, interests and influence, rather than those of the previous hegemon (Gilpin, 1981; Organski, 1968).

The best way for China to guarantee its security is thus to outrank the USA as the most powerful state in the world and use the overwhelming influence such a position brings to shape and control an international order more conducive to its own interests and values rather than those of the USA. China, the argument goes, is a dissatisfied and revisionist rising great power, while the USA is a satisfied established great power that will seek to protect the status quo from the malign purposes of China (Yilmaz & Xiangyu, 2019). China and the USA are ‘on a collision course fueled by the dynamics of power transition’ (Layne, 2020, p. 42).

We challenge the above-mentioned assumptions and expectations held by scholars and policy makers who argue that rising great powers historically tend to be the instigators of hegemonic challenges against established great powers and its application to China–USA relations in the twenty-first century. By adapting assumptions from the preventive war model and theory of strategic competition, and through the application of these for a re-examination of China–USA relations, we argue that (a) the USA, as the established great power, is dissatisfied with the ongoing transition process and (b) that the USA has initiated a preventive strategic competition to weaken China’s rising strategic influence in the world with the aim to halt and reverse the ongoing power transition process.

The remainder of this article is organised as following. The next section outlines the theoretical foundations the above-mentioned assumptions on rising great powers as revisionist challengers are grounded upon, and the outlooks they have generated in relation to contemporary China–USA relations in the worlds of academia and policymaking. Second, we challenge the logic and expectations of these assumptions by constructing an argument based on assumptions derived from the preventive war model and strategic competition theory. Third, we apply this argument for a re-examination of China–USA relations in the twenty-first century. In the fourth section, we discuss our findings in light of the expectation from our argument. Finally, a conclusion is provided.

Before we move on to next section, we do find it necessary to clarify that the following article in no way seeks to provide a final argument on the ongoing scholarly debate on China–USA relations. We further acknowledge that we here provide a crude and abstract analysis as this has been necessary for the purpose of our argument and due to limitation on space. That said, we hope this article will be a fruitful and humble contribution to the academic discussions relating to revisionist versus preventive hegemonic confrontations during power transition processes in general, and China–USA relations in particular.

Power Transitions and the Revisionist Challenge Argument

Throughout history, the law of uneven rates of growth among nations, particularly among the great powers, have led to struggles for supremacy and hegemony (Jianren, 2019). Going as far back as to the writings of Thucydides on the history of ancient Greece, we have been told that it was the uneven growth of Athens which Sparta feared would mean the loss of its supremacy that led to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Allison, 2017), while scholars such as Organski (1968), Gilpin (1981) and Kennedy (1987) applied the same law to explain the struggles and wars among the great powers of Europe and North America from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries in their respective attempts to dominate the world. Out of these explanations, an argument has emerged in which rising great powers purportedly tend to be the instigators of great power wars as they approach parity (in terms of aggregate power) with an established great power in their quest to dominate the international system. ²

While the theoretical assumption that the increasing power and efforts of a rising great power inevitably will lead to a confrontation with an established great power in the international political system was first developed within the ‘power transition theory’ by Organski (1968), it was Gilpin (1981) who most famously outlined the argument in his seminal War and Change in World Politics and later coined as the ‘hegemonic war theory’ (Gilpin, 1988). This confrontation, as the argument goes, will be not only about the position of supremacy in the hierarchy of distribution of material capabilities but also about the rules and institutions that govern the international system (Gilpin, 1988; Ikenberry, 2001). While the established great power will go to great lengths to preserve its position and the pre-existing international order, the rising and dissatisfied power will attempt to challenge the position of the former and seek to revise the existing order (Jianren, 2019; Organski, 1968; Yilmaz & Xiangyu, 2019). The simple reason for this is that the existing international order is shaped and controlled by the established great power and, therefore, reflect and reinforce its interests and influence while leaving the rising great power dissatisfied (Organski, 1968; Gilpin, 1988; Lai, 2011).

These arguments have led many to assume that while the established great powers (and its allies) will act as satisfied status quo seekers, rising great powers will behave as dissatisfied revisionists during power transition processes (Layne, 2020; Yilmaz & Xiangyu, 2019). While the former will use its might to preserve its hegemony and the governing institutions of the international political system that it once created and now controls, the latter will seek to overtake the established great power’s position as a hegemon and establish new institutions that regulate the order of things in the international system more conducive to its own interests (Layne, 2018).

Following these assumptions, a wide range of scholars also claim rising great powers to be the instigator of the challenge for hegemony (Copeland, 2000; Organski & Kugler, 1980; Shifrinson, 2018a). ³ Power transitions are dangerous, it is argued ‘not because leading powers will fight to defend their positions, but because rising powers will embark on destabilizing bids for hegemony’ (MacDonald & Parent, 2018, p. 14). In his seminal World Politics in which he looks at power transitions and hegemonic wars from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, Organski (1968) argued that: ‘Peace is threatened whenever a powerful nation is dissatisfied with the status quo and is powerful enough to attempt to change things …the challenger all too often turns to war’ (p. 364, 371). ⁴ That emerging great powers are revisionist challengers is ‘nothing new and are commonly destabilizing’, Kirshner (2021) argued, ‘as they invariable step on the toes of the contended guardians of the status quo’. Similarly, Gilpin (1981) argued that rising great powers are more likely to launch a hegemonic challenge against established great powers once the former catches up with the latter in terms of material capabilities (pp. 33, 187).

This line of thinking is invoked by a variety of scholars in their assessments on the implications the rise of China will have on the relations between the great powers and the future trajectory of international order (Can & Chan, 2020). ‘China’, as one scholar has stressed, ‘is the only country on the planet with the potential to challenge U.S. power’ (Mearsheimer, 2018, p. 233), and we should expect China to initiate that challenge, such as through territorial expansion, direct military confrontation, and by undermining the existing institutions of the international order in its bid to replace Pax Americana with a Pax Sinica, once it reaches parity or overtakes the USA (Friedberg, 2020; Pillsbury, 2015). Others again have even drawn resemblance with that of pre-World War I Anglo-German rivalry in which the latter is commonly perceived as a revisionist challenger (Kagan, 2018), arguing that ‘like Britain and Germany before 1914, the USA and China are on a collision course’ (Layne, 2018, p. 312). China, therefore, ‘cannot rise peacefully’ (Mearsheimer, 2010, p. 382).

This belief is not restricted to the academic community alone but is also increasingly getting a foothold in the world of policymaking, and, not surprisingly, particularly within the USA. The US national security strategy from 2017 clearly defined China as a great power competitor that seeks to ‘displace the United States’ (White House, 2017, p. 25), while the national defence strategy from 2018 likewise argued that China will seek the ‘displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future’ (DoD, 2018, p. 2). Both documents portray China as a revisionist challenger that is bent on upsetting the world balance of power and overthrowing the existing international order. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named China as the ‘central threat of our times’ (Santora, 2020), while ex-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster argued that ‘China has become a threat’ that will seek to ‘revise the international order’ (McMaster, 2020, p. 68). This belief is also strongly held in the US intelligence community, as once expressed by Adam Schiff, former Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that ‘Beijing seeks to build a world in which its ambitions are unchallenged’ and that the US ‘must rise to meet this challenge’ (Schiff, 2020).

All things being equal, China is portrayed as a revisionist threat to the USA and the existing international order (Layne, 2020), it is a new ‘communist rival’ that ‘seek global influence’ and will inevitably seek to challenge the position of the USA and revise the existing international order (Westad, 2019, p. 87). China will, furthermore, most likely ‘present a stronger ideological challenge than the Soviet Union did’ (Campbell & Sullivan, 2019).

The Case for Preventive Strategic Competition

In Thucydides’ famous historical account of the Peloponnesian War, we are told that it was the rise of Athens and the fear this fuelled in Sparta that led to the outbreak of the conflict. What many scholars leave out, however, is that it was Sparta, and not Athens, that initiated the war by giving the latter an ultimatum to roll back from Potidaea, restore independence to Aegina, and repeal the Megarian decree, or face confrontation. Athens simply refused to submit (Thucydides, 2009). What Sparta did was to initiate a war against Athens before the latter would surpass the former in terms of material capabilities and geopolitical influence. If the Spartans had waited for Athens to overtake their city-state, it was assumed that a Spartan triumph would have been less probable as relative strength increases the likelihood of victory, that is, it would be more likely for Sparta to win a war against Athens while the former still had the upper hand (Jianren, 2019). In international relations parlance, this is today referred to as a preventive war (Levy, 1987; Organski, 1968).

There are in fact many historical analogies where a dominant great power has been dissatisfied with the shifting balance of power in favour of a rising great power, and, consequently, has sought to initiate a preventive war to halt, or reverse, an ongoing power transition process in order to maintain its relative power and influence. As one scholar argues, ‘the single greatest constraint on the emergence of any new power is the possibility that its actions will trigger counterbalancing behavior or perhaps a preventive attack’ by an established great power (Montgomery, 2016, p. 6). ⁵ This logic is based on an expected-utility framework in which a declining great power will desire to fight a war at a point in time when it is still stronger than a rising challenger, as the probability of victory would be higher at such a moment, compared to a situation in which war is delayed to a point in time where the rising power has overtaken the hegemon (Jianren, 2019).

In addition to the case of Sparta, the idea of preventive war was also dominant in German military thinking and war preparations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries against a rising Russia in the East (and towards France in the West). German officials argued that a preventive war should be launched before Russia could manage to overtake Germany in terms of relative power as this would make victory more likely and reduce the costs of war (Snyder, 1984). Similarly, policy makers in the USA did also push for a preventive war against the Soviet Union and China in the early years of the Cold War ‘on the theory that it would be easier to defeat them now than later when their industrial and military strength has increased further’ (Organski, 1968, p. 348). ⁶ According to the famous historian A.J.P. Taylor, ‘every war between the Great Powers [in the 1848–1918 period] started as a preventive war, not a war of conquest’ (Levy, 1987, p. 84).

While established great powers have tended to launch preventive wars, rising great powers, such as Athens, were left with the choice to submit to the will of the strong or respond in kind to avoid any losses to their newly acquired power and influence. ‘So make up your minds here and now,’ Pericles argued at an assembly in Athens to debate the Spartan ultimatum, ‘either to submit before any harm is done, or, if it is to be war (and in my view that is the best course), to make no concessions for reasons either great or small, and to refuse to live in constant fear for our own possessions’ (Thucydides, 2009, Ch. 141).

Although there are many historical cases that illustrate how established great powers have initiated preventive wars against rising great powers during power transition processes, there are no such cases to be found from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. The reason for this is mainly attributed to the existence of nuclear capabilities by the great powers and that this mutual deterrent capability has made hegemonic wars between them less likely. This is due to the fact that nuclear weapons significantly have reduced the probability of victory and increased the costs of an all-out military confrontation through ‘mutually assured destruction/MAD’ between the great powers (Betts, 1985; Keohane, 1984; Monteiro, 2014; Can & Chan, 2020). ⁷ As such, it was the existence of MAD, the argument goes, that prevented the USA from launching a preventive war against the Soviet Union in the 1950s and early 1960s to halt the latter’s emergence into a peer competitor (Layne, 2020).

According to strategic competition theory, it is, therefore, more probable, in the age of MAD, that great powers, during periods of power transition, will limit their competition and rivalry to the diplomatic domain where they will seek to increase their relative strategic advantage in the world while weakening their competitors’ without engaging in direct military confrontation with each other, that is, for diplomatic paradigm shifts to occur in the bilateral relationship as the rising great power approaches parity with the hegemonic power (Jianren 2019). A diplomatic paradigm shift can furthermore simply be understood as ‘changes in a state’s guiding principles, policy goals, and policy priority, of its foreign policy focus’ (Jianren, 2019, p. 20). For the purpose of our argument, we here focus on diplomatic paradigm shifts in the foreign policy posture of a declining versus a rising great power towards each other during a power transition process.

In line with the preventive war model, we argue that a diplomatic paradigm shift should be expected to first occur in the existing hegemonic power towards the rising great power, the purpose of which is to halt, or reverse, the power transition process which is working in favour of the latter. The policy focus of the existing hegemonic power will very much be concentrated around the attempt to weaken the increasing strategic influence of the rising great power, be it political, economic or military. This paradigm shift in the existing hegemon’s foreign policy goals towards the rising power will consequently lead to a ‘response’ by the rising great power whereby it will seek to transform its own foreign policy posture to minimise and/or avoid damage or losses that it might incur on the continuation of its development and expansion of its strategic influence, in opposition to the hegemon’s attempt to reverse the transition process (Jianren, 2019).

Rather than locating the question of systemic dissatisfaction and initiation of a great power strategic challenge in the agency of the rising power during a power transition, we instead argue that dissatisfaction and initiation of great power strategic competition should be identified in the agency of the existing hegemonic power (Yilmaz & Xiangyu, 2019). The next section of this article provides a case study to test the explanatory power of our argument.

China–USA Relations in the 2010s and 2020s

Empirical observations reinforce the argument outlined in previous section, as can be witnessed by the changing focus in US foreign policy towards China in the early 2010s, when the power transition process between China and the USA accelerated following the global financial crisis of 2008 and after China overtook Japan to become the 2nd largest economy in the world. The first indication of this paradigm shift in the USA was the so-called ‘Pivot to Asia’ strategy, famously announced by then Secretary of State Clinton (2011) ⁸ and laid the groundwork for a shift in US foreign policy priority from fighting terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia to great power competition in East Asia (Shambaugh, 2018). This strategy, later defined as the ‘Rebalance to Asia’, aimed to increase US military, economic and political influence in the region while weakening the influence, and contain the rise, of China (Jianren, 2019; Takahashi, 2021). The motivation for this rebalance was primarily taken to be China’s increasing weight in the Asia-Pacific region, its assertiveness relating to its territorial claims in the East and South China Seas from 2009 onwards, and its alleged reluctance to abide by the norms and values of the liberal international order (Friedberg, 2015; Shifrinson, 2018b; Strangio, 2020).

More specifically, the USA sought to strengthen its own influence and weaken China’s by increasing its political, military and economic presence in the Asia-Pacific. In the military and political dimensions, the USA reinforced its forward deployment and commitments to existing allies, began ‘freedom of navigation operations’, and tried to forge new security partnerships with countries such as India and Vietnam, while a more active participation in regional multilateral organisations, such as the forging of partnership with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asian Summit (EAS), were strengthened to promote the image of USA as a ‘resident power’ (Takahashi, 2021; White House, 2011). The economic dimension of the strategy was aimed to underpin the desired political and military involvement of the USA in the region and was manifested through the proposal to form a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for trade and investment (Kirshner, 2021). With the TPP, the USA essentially sought to forge a trade alliance whose entry requirements were designed to exclude China. Increasingly, it became clear that Washington desired to push China out from the evolving regional politico-economic architecture and isolate it, unless Beijing accepted continued US regional dominance and abide by the norms and values of the liberal international order (Jianren, 2019; Can & Chan, 2020).

China’s response to this paradigm shift in the USA came in 2013, after Xi Jinping’s proposal to Barack Obama that both countries should forge a ‘new type of great power relationship’ to mitigate a clash of interests, that is, the Thucydides’ Trap, was turned down by the USA (Nakazawa, 2021). The first indication of China’s diplomatic paradigm shift was the transformation of the policy of ‘keeping a low profile’ from the Deng Xiaoping era to ‘striving for achievement’ as announced by Xi Jinping in late 2013. With this paradigm shift, priority was given to create a more favourable environment for the continuation of China’s national rejuvenation by establishing friendly relations with countries from Asia to Africa and Europe, aimed to win over political support from them as a reaction to the USA balancing attempt: the so-called ‘go-west’ strategy (Nakazawa, 2021; Yan, 2014). According to some observers, ‘keeping a low profile’ of the Deng era had not prevented the USA from seeking to contain China, and Xi Jinping had, therefore, to adapt a new and more pro-active foreign policy paradigm to assure the international community of China’s benign intentions and willingness for cooperation and integration with the world to offset the US containment strategy (Yan, 2014).

The new orientation in Chinese foreign policy was paralleled with acceleration of China’s military modernisation process that had begun in the 1990s and the advancement of the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD) strategy which aimed to reduce the viability of any US and allied military intervention close to China’s shores and keep them at bay (Beckley, 2017; Campbell & Doshi, 2021). This was accompanied by the announcement of the Silk Road Economic Belt, the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road and the formation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). All these ambitious endeavours aimed to improve China’s defensive capabilities, and dialogue and cooperation between China and the international community, and thus to minimise any losses from the challenge posed by a dissatisfied US ‘Rebalance to Asia’ strategy (Jianren, 2019).

The Silk Road Economic Belt, the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road and the AIIB further laid the groundwork for the development of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched in 2015. Through the BRI, China ultimately seeks to establish alternative political and economic networks and to attract international participants into these networks in order to avoid the entangling effects the US strategy might cause to Beijing’s economic development and strategic influence. Together, these new initiatives and Beijing’s desire to also increase its influence within the existing arrangements of the international order, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank (WB), made it clear that China had begun to engage in ‘order-reforming activities’ (Chen, 2016). The BRI in particular had a significant impact on US foreign policy, as it started to worry about the challenge the initiative posed to the existing Bretton Woods institutions and for being isolated, as America’s allies and partners alike decided to join despite pressures not to do so by Washington (Nakazawa, 2021). China’s order-reforming activities also increasingly led the USA to perceive Beijing not only as a threat to its national security but also as a more general threat towards the entire liberal international order. China would use its growing influence within these institutions, it was believed, to delegitimise and overturn pre-existing standards and norms ‘perceived as hostile to China’s interests and values’ (Anonymous, 2021, p. 52). That China was a ‘revisionist power’ was being confirmed in the eyes of policy makers in Washington DC (Bolton, 2020; McMaster, 2020).

The diplomatic paradigm shift in the USA further accelerated during the Trump administration in 2017 (Chen & Zhang, 2020). At the same time as the USA underlined its adherence to ‘the return of great power competition’ as the tone of international politics in the national security and defence strategies from 2017 and 2018, respectively, and China to be a threat to its national security and prosperity, the Trump administration also increasingly sought to portray China as a revisionist power and threat to the Indo-Pacific, and the liberal international order, arguing that China would seek to coerce its neighbours to accommodate a Beijing-centred regional sphere of influence and that Beijing was allegedly attempting to export its totalitarian model to other countries (Schiff, 2020). The Trump administration also launched an offensive against the existing arrangements of the international order as they supposedly restrained the USA and favoured China (Wu, 2020), leading to what some scholars define as a ‘new world disorder’ (Chen & Zhang, 2020; Haass, 2020b; Rhodes, 2020; Waever, 2017).

While the name of the containment policy was changed from ‘Rebalance to Asia’ to the ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) strategy, its essence very much remained the same. Its objective remained to try to halt and reverse the transition process by containing the rise of China and increasing US strategic influence in the region (Can & Chan, 2020). The FOIP strategy, similar to the rebalance strategy, aimed to strengthen US military, diplomatic and economic commitments to ‘established alliances and partnerships, while also expanding and deepening relations with new partners’ (such as India and Vietnam) to counter China’s attempt to ‘reorder the region to its own advantage’, according to a report from the Department of Defense (DoD, 2019, pp. 4–5). One of the most significant US initiatives within the FOIP so far has been to push for an alliance with India, Japan and Australia named the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) to directly balance against China (Babones, 2020; Tsutsui, 2020; Zhang, 2020), a policy that is very likely to further accelerate under the Biden administration according to the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who, in late January 2021, argued that the USA would form a ‘chorus of voices’ with its allies to push back against China in the region (Moriyasu, 2021).

In addition to the FOIP strategy, the USA also initiated a trade war against China, which has aimed to, according to then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ‘protect the American economy’ (Pompeo, 2020), and, as argued by former Vice President Mike Pence, to roll back China’s attempt to ‘win the commanding heights of the 21st century economy’ (Pence, 2018), specifically targeting the latter’s technology and export sectors (Mearsheimer, 2020). The primary motivation of this trade war, as argued by some observers, has been to ‘disentangle’ or ‘decouple’ the US economy from China and to create an ‘economic iron curtain’ around the latter so as to weaken and isolate Beijing (Hirsh, 2019; Johnson & Gramer, 2020; Palmer, 2020). According to former President Trump himself, the USA would even consider to ‘cut off the whole relationship’ with China if necessary (Farrell & Newman, 2020).

These policies towards China were also coupled with an offensive against existing arrangements of the international order, characterised by a dismissive attitude towards these as the Trump administration perceived them to favour Beijing (Rhodes, 2020; Yilmaz & Xiangyu, 2019). The former US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brian, for example, argued that the USA would pull out from the World Health Organization (WHO) because its response to COVID-19 ‘showed that it is beholden to China’ (Lee, 2020). The Trump administration’s ‘isolationist’, ‘anti-globalist’ and ‘America First’ agenda, rhetoric and policies, were pushing the country into an ‘age of unreason’ (Kirshner, 2021), increasingly ‘tearing apart’ the existing international order, as one prominent scholar argued (Haass, 2020a), and led a former high-ranking official in the Obama administration to claim that the USA had ‘abdicated from its leadership role in in the world and lost its claim to moral authority’ (Rhodes, 2020, p. 46). Trump’s disregard for international order and institutions were clear signs of US dissatisfaction with the increasing influence of China within these (Rhodes, 2020).

China’s response to this ongoing US challenge was to create policies aimed at reducing its strategic and economic vulnerability vis-à-vis Washington through accelerated military modernisation and security cooperation, particularly with Russia (to an extent in which some might call an ‘informal alliance’ to have emerged between Beijing and Moscow), strengthening its capacity for being economically and technologically self-sufficient (Buckley, 2020; Pei, 2021), and diversifying its trade and investment relations in the face of US threats to roll back China’s economy through trade wars and potential ‘decoupling’ (Medeiros, 2019; Wu, 2020). China also accelerated its ‘charm offensive’ towards neighbouring countries, and the wider international society, pushing for a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) between the Asia-Pacific countries, a Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with the European Union (EU), and organising major international gatherings and projects under the BRI umbrella. By 2019, China was able to attract 123 countries and 29 international organisations as signatories to the BRI (Hillman, 2020; Nakazawa, 2021; Shambaugh, 2020).

Beijing also sought to push back on US rhetoric by underlining that it was against any form of hegemony and declaring that it had no desire to revise the international order (Wu, 2020), that it would respects the rights of all nations to choose their own development model (Ministry of National Defense, People’s Republic of China, 2019), and its adherence to a free and open international economic order (Yan, 2019). Beijing has particularly emphasised that it rejects a so-called ‘Cold-War mentality’ (Tan, 2021). This line of thinking was particularly underlined by Xi Jinping during his speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in 2017 and 2021, which aimed to counter the Trump administration’s attempts to portray China as a revisionist and threatening rising great power (Tan, 2021).

The diplomatic paradigm shift in China culminated with the conception of a ₹community of common destiny for humankind’ ⁹ (State Council Information Office, 2019). This conception in Chinese foreign policy aimed to portray China as being committed to work for a more multipolar world rather than to replace the hegemonic position of the USA, aspire to reform the existing arrangements of the international order to better reflect the interests of developing countries, establish new international institutions and networks, such as the BRI, to complement and augment those that already exists, and display China’s desire to step up its provision of global public goods (Chen, 2016; Ministry of National Defense, 2019). China has thus sought to respond to the US strategic competition by continuously seeking to increase its own influence vis-à-vis the USA in the region, and the world in general, to portray itself as a benign rising great power and to maintain a stable environment through the establishment of multilateral networks and institutions favourable to the continuation of its rise as a great power.

Bringing Preventive Strategic Competition Back In

The above analysis bolsters the argument we have outlined at the beginning of this article. Although the assumptions that (a) established great powers are more likely to be dissatisfied with a power transition process as it challenges their supremacy and hegemony, and (b) that they, therefore, are more likely to be the instigators of an hegemonic war against rising competitors to halt and reverse the transition process, are both in line with the historical record, as we have illustrated, China is more often portrayed as a dissatisfied revisionist rising power bent on initiating a challenge to replace the USA and overturn the existing liberal international order, while the USA is depicted as the satisfied existing hegemon that will seek to protect the status quo from the ‘China challenge’.

Major works on power transition processes during the past 500 years have shown that these structural forces more often than not, due to the instabilities in great power relations caused by strategic uncertainties, unleashed the so-called Thucydides’ Trap and led to hegemonic wars that ended with the crystallisation of a new international order shaped and led by the new hegemonic power (Allison, 2017; Gilpin, 1981; Ikenberry, 2001; Kennedy, 1987). The difference between China–USA relations in the twenty-first century and previous historical analogies, except for the US-Soviet rivalry, is the existence of nuclear capabilities, and that great power competition and rivalry in the post-Cold War era, due to MAD, are very much restricted to the diplomatic domain where the established and rising great power will compete over strategic influence in the world, rather than engaging in an outright hegemonic war with each other (Allison, 2017; Jianren, 2019; Keohane, 1984).

As an established great power dissatisfied with the ongoing power transition process, it has been the USA that has initiated the great power strategic competition for influence against China in the twenty-first century. This challenge was initiated with the announcement of the ‘Pivot’ strategy by the Obama administration in 2011 and aimed to increase Washington’s relative military, political and economic influence vis-à-vis China in the Asia-Pacific region (Yilmaz & Xiangyu, 2019). It was only after the announcement of this strategy to contain the rise of China that Beijing also engaged in strategic competition with the USA as a ‘response’ to offset Washington’s attempt to halt and reverse the power transition process (Jianren, 2019).

China’s diplomatic paradigm shift from ‘keeping a low profile’ to ‘striving for achievement’ in 2013 and the announcement of the BRI initiative in 2015 were aimed to counter the US challenge to contain its rise by developing policies aimed to maintain a stable and favourable regional and international environment for the continuation of its development, and by winning over other countries to join in its endeavour of China’s ‘Great Rejuvenation’ (Yan, 2014). China’s response further aggravated US threat perceptions as the diplomatic shift and initiatives led by Beijing, such as the attempt to gain greater influence within existing arrangements of the international order and the creation of alternative networks and institutions, began to attract followers and pose a challenge to the US-led international order (Ikenberry 2020; Nakazawa, 2021).

The strategic competition accelerated under the Trump administration with the official naming of China as a revisionist great power that desires to challenge the position of the USA and reshape the arrangements of the existing international order in accordance with its own interests (DoD, 2018; White House, 2017). While the name of the balancing strategy was shifted to the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’, the primary aim of containing China militarily, economically and politically was held intact (DoD, 2019). China’s response to the accelerated competition was through the announcement of the conception of ‘a community of common destiny for humankind’ as a policy guideline. As elucidated above, the similarities between China’s first and second responses to the US strategic challenge has been to cultivate and strengthen ties with the international community in order to portray itself as a benign power rising peacefully (Can & Chan, 2020).

The second Chinese response to the US strategic challenge has further increased fears in the USA of China’s bid for mastery. The conception of ‘common destiny’ is believed by Washington to be China’s own Marshall Plan to export its governance model to the world through Beijing-centred institutions under the BRI umbrella (Browne, 2018), and that it allegedly verifies China’s desire to shape and control a new world order (Anonymous, 2021; Friedberg, 2020). The strategy to cultivate ties with the international community to increase its strategic influence vis-à-vis the USA has been bolstered with China’s push for the RCEP in the Asia-Pacific and the CAI with the EU. While the CAI led one observer to argue that ‘Europe has handed China a strategic victory’ (Rachman, 2021), the RCEP led another to claim that China ‘delivered a blow to U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration has sought to isolate China from the international community’ (Takita, 2020).

Conclusion

In this article, we briefly outlined the competing arguments within the academic field of international relations related to whether established great powers tend to launch preventive challenges or rising great power tend to initiate revisionist bids for hegemony during power transition processes, and how the proponents of the latter argument assess the rise of China and its implications on the future trajectory of international politics. We furthermore constructed an argument by adapting assumption derived from the preventive war model and strategic competition theory in support of the former argument.

First, we illustrated that the assumption of established great powers as being satisfied, and rising great powers as dissatisfied, can be misleading both historically and in relation to contemporary China–USA relations. Second, we provided an examination of how the assumption that rising great power are more likely to initiate a hegemonic challenge against an established great power and the exiting international order is also far from providing an accurate picture of power transition processes. On the contrary, and by building upon the existing literature, we have argued that the established great powers are more likely to launch a preventive hegemonic challenge against rising great powers, and that the latter will seek to adapt policies aimed to offset the challenge and the losses that may be inflicted upon them by this challenge. Finally, we argued that, in the age of MAD, great power competition is more likely to be played out in the diplomatic domain where an established and rising great power will compete over strategic influence in the world, rather than engaging in an outright hegemonic war with each other.

Our findings have very much been in line with the expectations of our argument. With the ‘Pivot’ strategy announced under the Obama administration, the USA initiated a strategic competition with China to increase its relative military, political and economic influence in the Asia-Pacific vis-à-vis China. China responded to this challenge with its own paradigm shift from ‘keeping a low profile’ to ‘striving for achievement’ and the announcement of the BRI initiative. Chinese initiatives are aimed to attract international support and partners while minimising opposition and losses that could potentially be inflicted on China by the US strategy. The strategic competition increased during the Trump administration with its Indo-Pacific strategy and China’s adaption of the conception of a ‘community of common destiny for mankind’ as its overall policy guideline in 2018.

The China–USA strategic competition has largely been one of challenging each other’s influence in the Asia-Pacific in particular, and in the world in general, to an extent in which alternative US- and China-centred networks and arrangements are increasingly competing, but sometimes complementing, each other within the existing international order. As one prominent international relations scholar recently has argued, it very much seems like the ongoing strategic competition between China and the USA has become ‘hardwired into the emerging structure of the international system’ (Walt, 2021).