Pursuing primacy vis-à-vis China causes counterbalancing and miscalc.

It Is Difficult to Stop China’s Continued Rise¶ Second, neo-primacy’s logic rests on shaky foundations, as the United States’ opportunity to reclaim preeminence is extremely small, and the effort will likely prove both counterproductive and dangerous. Baldly, if the United States was unable to keep China from becoming a near-peer competitor in the first place via classic primacy, it is even less likely that the United States has the wherewithal to put the Chinese genie back in the bottle and now push China from the great power ranks via neo-primacy.¶ States generally balance when confronted with a direct external threat. This tendency is significant in the US-China context because, under neo-primacy, the United States would effectively declare itself a direct threat to China at a time when US analysts acknowledge China has a growing capacity to oppose American plans and ambitions.53 Though China is not poised to dominate East Asia, it can thus be expected to devote its own considerable resources toward keeping pace with US efforts to arrest China’s rise and/or shift the relative distribution of power in the US favor. The odds of major crises would then increase as Washington and Beijing maneuver for position, in turn raising the odds of escalatory spirals, miscalculation, and war.54¶ Trends in military spending and recent economic developments suggest China’s capacity to oppose neo-primacy and a US drive to reclaim untrammeled preeminence. On one level, China currently devotes a smaller share of its economic wealth to military purposes than the United States, yet it has still managed to reduce American military advantages. This implies that Beijing could do quite a bit to frustrate American policy simply by allocating more to international purposes; if the United States feels pressured by a China that spends 2 percent of its GDP on defense, a China that spends 3 or 4 percent of GDP on defense—roughly what the United States has spent since the Cold War—would present a still larger problem and place the United States in an even worse position.55¶ Nor is it just military spending that underlines neo-primacy’s limitations. After all, ongoing efforts to decouple the US and Chinese economies—designed partly to limit Chinese growth—has pushed Beijing toward fostering a self-sustaining domestic economy able to withstand “sustained acrimony with the United States.” Given this, it is reasonable to infer that additional economic efforts to outpace Beijing will generate countervailing Chinese responses.56 Considering, too, that China’s economy has grown at a faster rate than the United States’ (even during COVID-19) and that the country has worked to narrow the USChina technological gap,57 the PRC’s ability to keep pace with the United States cannot be discounted.58 Shifts in the distribution of power since the Cold War make neo-primacy self-defeating by enabling China to match US efforts while risking US national security along the way. In this sense, neoprimacy risks exacerbating the very problem it seeks to address.