Will US or China win the next war? That’s the wrong question to ask

Who will win the next war? That is the question posed on the cover of the latest Foreign Affairs magazine which explores, among other things, the US-China military and technological rivalry. At its core is a clash of strategic philosophies between the US-led order and China’s world view, which has propelled the latter’s rise to the world’s second great power. The magazine’s contributors reflect a deeply ingrained Western strategic tradition, rooted in liberal realism, that says that the United States must maintain its primacy to underwrite global stability, defend democracy and retain its financial, technological and military power. Any challenger is inherently revisionist. Lead essayist Paul Scharre argues that new technologies in drones, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics challenge not only America’s traditional air and naval power but also allow states such as Iran to conduct asymmetric warfare, which erodes US hard and soft power. Former US Pacific commander Admiral Dennis Blair reinforces this view, arguing that China’s military build-up is not defensive but designed to overturn the status quo in East Asia. He advocates deterrence, using US alliances, forward deployments and technological leadership to guarantee regional stability. Academics Michael Beckley and Hal Brands apply the Anglo-American strategic views of land-based “heartland” (introduced by British geographer Halford Mackinder) and coast-based “rimland” (developed by Dutch-American political scientist Nicholas Spykman) in framing the US-China contest as an age-old struggle between incumbent maritime powers consolidating their positions against land-based revisionists. They correctly argue that the “autocratic axis” is united less by ideology than by a shared resentment of US dominance, while the democratic coalition is fractured by competing interests and sometimes opposite views on how to engage Beijing. On the other hand, Chinese strategic thought, rooted in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and contemporary Chinese statecraft, sees the contest as a reversion to global balance after five centuries of Western dominance. Where the Western alliance hitherto subscribed to the US-led order as the legitimate foundation of global stability, the Chinese and the Global South, particularly former colonies, argue that the existing order is rigged to preserve Western hegemony. The land-based powers of the Asian heartland – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – say they are being encircled by the maritime powers of the rimland (led by the US), which controls chokepoints in not just key trade routes but also in technology, finance and supply chain networks. The most striking divergence lies in how each side defines victory and conflict. Many Western strategic thinkers think in zero-sum terms: either the US sustains its primacy or China imposes an authoritarian model on the region. How to ensure victory comes down to how the US and its allies organise themselves to prevail. Contemporary Chinese statecraft, drawing on more than two millennia of philosophy and coping with hostile neighbours, seeks a more complex systems approach that prizes winning without fighting, shaping perceptions and leverage over brute force, and striking a balance through soft and hard power. Where Americans value fast, massively resourced and decisive moves in technology, finance and hard and soft power, Chinese think and act in dialectical terms. There is continual play with no final outcomes, only a balance between harmony and conflict with multiple actors, taking into consideration natural disasters and other random events. The US, in investing in AI, computing power and technology, is searching for the silver bullet that removes all revisionist rivals. On the other hand, Iranians and Chinese have learned from the Vietnam war that the countryside surrounds the cities and the masses will eventually erode elite impatience. In the fields of AI and robotics, the game is a choice between closed-source models preferred by US tech firms that extract rent or subscriptions from users and open-source Chinese models that deliver almost similar performance at a fraction of the price. In short, the contest is about strategic patience, the best and brightest vs the mass scaler and the cheapest. After the Vietnam war, Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam drew multiple lessons from America’s biggest strategic defeat in his book The Best and the Brightest. He wrote that the loss was not caused by a lack of resources or courage but by the arrogance of elites who believed superior technology, systems, firepower and data could override history, culture and local reality. The elites suffered from groupthink, which filtered out dissent and facts that contradicted their self-referential truths. They valued metrics but ignored a reality politically inconvenient to measure. So who will win the next war? For those who cannot envision a world outside a zero-sum paradigm, it is either the US or China. For complex system practitioners who can, the premise of the question is to be rejected. No one wins in a nuclear war that could obliterate not just rivals but everyone else. The right question is how can we avoid conflict and work towards ending mutual threats, such as climate change, excessive natural resource depletion and human injustices? What makes this contest so dangerous is that both sides might be underestimating the other and overestimating their own advantages. They do not engage in knowing both themselves and the other side, which can breed escalation. AI models hallucinate when asked questions they struggle to answer. Until all sides acknowledge that global stability depends on conversation and mutual understanding, meaning that the future world order must accommodate more than one power’s view, we will sleepwalk into another unending conflict.

Will US or China win the next war? That’s the wrong question to ask

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}We should be asking how we can avoid conflict and work towards ending mutual threats, such as climate change and human injustice

We should be asking how we can avoid conflict and work towards ending mutual threats, such as climate change and human injustice