Both the United States and China are adding yet more pressure to their already strained bilateral relationship. This week, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled details of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, Britain, and the United States, designed to push back against China in the Indo-Pacific by supplying nuclear submarines to Australia. A few days earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping consolidated his grip on power at China’s annual parliamentary meetings. During the meetings, he unveiled a range of new appointments, including a new defense minister, and delivered a tough-worded speech accusing the United States of attempting to contain China’s development.
These latest moves come at a newly dangerous moment in the U.S.-Chinese standoff. After a brief, false thaw following a friendly Biden-Xi meeting in November, neither Beijing nor Washington seems capable of taking meaningful and sustained steps to increase trust, let alone induce cooperation. Both are also readying further measures to compete with one another in the economic, military, and technological domains—which raises the risk that competition could all too easily spill over inadvertently, or even deliberately, into conflict. The Biden administration hopes for a relationship characterized by competition with “guardrails.” But it risks a new period of tit-for-tat competition with no guardrails at all.
