It’s the US’s fault – China and North Korea’s militarization is simply a response to the US’s militarized approach.

Biden’s approach brings antagonistic military forces into closer proximity, heightening the risk of preventable accidents that could spiral into conflict. It also threatens the leadership and nuclear arsenals of China and North Korea, incentivizing both to invest in improved military hardware that can hold U.S. forces at a greater distance. Predictably, Beijing and Pyongyang have embraced an arms-race logic, responding to U.S. posturing by expanding their own military forces, coercing U.S. allies and partners to halt cooperation with Washington, and attempting to project power farther from their borders.

China’s recent nuclear expansion is clearly a response to the gratuitous, unrestrained nuclear policies of the Trump administration. Even before the planned modernization and expansion of U.S. nuclear forces, the United States had 3,750 nuclear warheads compared with China’s 350 (at most). Given this enormous advantage, China’s nuclear advancements should be understood as an effort to catch up to and counter the United States—not to overtake it or launch a bolt-from-the-blue surprise attack. Massively outgunned, China is acting rationally and predictably. Less rational is Washington sitting in a position of advantage, observing China’s clear track record of seeking to counter U.S. nuclear modernization, and then proceeding as if Beijing won’t do so in this case. By modernizing its nuclear force, the United States is giving China every reason to expand its own.

Washington’s conventional arms competition with Beijing is similarly risky and self-defeating. Beijing may perceive a U.S.-supported Australian submarine fleet as a threat to its shipping lanes, just as it might come to see Japanese long-range cruise missiles and South Korean ballistic missiles as tools for striking China’s leadership or its nuclear arsenal. Moreover, Chinese officials have long argued that U.S. ballistic missile defense systems are intended to neutralize China’s much smaller second-strike capability. Their fears are likely heightened by the Pentagon’s recent boasts about converting ship-based anti-air missiles from defensive to offensive weapons and by Washington’s refusal to publicly admit that neither it nor Beijing has the ability to disarm enough of the other’s nuclear arsenal to prevent a retaliatory strike—a mutual vulnerability that it acknowledges with Moscow.

The United States’ military excesses are also reshaping the Korean Peninsula in dangerous ways. The dramatic imbalance between U.S. forces and the North Korean military incentivizes Pyongyang not only to continue to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal but to consider using it first in a crisis. Worse, the two Koreas—with help from the United States—have begun an unconventional asymmetric arms race: both are increasing the range and payload potentials of their missiles and both are developing sea-launched ballistic missiles (though neither really needs them). All of this adds up to a uniquely volatile form of one-upmanship with no clear exit.