China rise is inevitable, but pursuit of US primacy risks military escalation in Asia.

For the United States, there are many problems with a strategy based around trying to stop China’s rise. One is that on a basic level, it will not work. There is no reason to believe that spending over a trillion dollars modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal or selling submarines to Australia will cause China to do anything but continue arming itself as quickly as possible. China has spent years preparing for a techno-containment strategy from the United States, launching its “Made in China 2025” initiative in 2015 precisely to guarantee that it has a strong domestic technology industry. And the rest of Asia is not willing or able to isolate Beijing under current political conditions.

What maintaining U.S. primacy will instead do is menace the Asian peace. The massive military investments needed to ensure the United States remains the Indo-Pacific’s dominant power require outarming China in areas of its highest capability, close to Chinese shores and far from the U.S. homeland. It is an impossible task. Consider, for instance, the steps Washington must take to fight a war over Taiwan. China has the natural, massive advantage of being close to the island’s coasts, all of which fall within range of Chinese air defenses. To repel a PLA attack against Taiwan, the United States would need absurd levels of modern weaponry—meaning a blank check for the Pentagon. It would have to engage in what the sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “the idiot’s race”: amassing missiles and crafting military positions that stoke jingoism on both sides, heighten instability, and lead each state to adopt the most malign interpretations of the other’s intentions. One must squint quite hard to discern a theory of stability in a strategy that demands a favorable imbalance of military power, the active proliferation of weapons platforms, and muscle flexing in the name of signaling resolve.

Risking military escalation is only one of the ways that primacy has an antagonistic relationship to stability. As I argued in Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace, any U.S. drive for economic dominance will also undermine regional stability because it involves breaking up the economic structures that have played a vital role in preventing war in the Pacific. The East Asian development model based on exports and interdependence was made possible because political leaders decided to prioritize national development over nationalist revanchism. Asian heads of state put dozens of territorial disputes, many of which still endure, on the back burner in order to create a thicket of regional institutions to encourage trade and informal, consensus-based habits of diplomacy. The result was both spectacular economic growth and remarkable stability.