USA — China: Strategic balance

Abstract

This article examines the current state of the US-China strategic balance — both military and economic aspects of the latter. This balance, however, is not changing in favor of the United States. Currently, China is the largest economy in the world, and economic ties with China are too important for US partners and allies to break off trade and economic ties with China to please Washington. More importantly, the rapid growth of China’s military-technical potential in recent years has led to radical changes in the balance of power in the western Pacific. Washington has lost its former absolute military superiority in the coastal areas of the PRC, and in the event of a large-scale armed US-Chinese conflict in the Taiwan area or in the South China Sea, American losses will be enormous, and the United States will not be able to achieve a decisive victory during this conflict. Under these conditions, the American ruling elite is united in the fact that without a system of anti-Chinese alliances, which should unite both the countries of the Indo-Pacific region and countries outside the ITR, China’s containment is impossible. The Biden administration continued Trump’s policy of building a “sanitary cordon” around China with the involvement of extra-regional actors in this construction. We are talking about the creation of a military-political alliance AUKUS, which includes Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The purpose of this alliance is to counter China in the disputed areas of the South China Sea. It is concluded that the formation of such a system of alliances is difficult to achieve — and it’s not just that the partners and allies of the United States are too interested in maintaining trade and economic ties with China to participate in the creation of an anti-Chinese “sanitary cordon”. China’s strategic isolation is impossible if Russia cannot be brought into the anti-Chinese system of alliances. At present, however, China has a solid rear in the form of a growing Russian-Chinese partnership and cooperation. The actions of the United States and its allies, which Moscow and Beijing view as threatening and provocative (NATO expansion to the East; American block-building in the ITR) could not but lead to a serious revision by the Russian and Chinese leadership of military cooperation between the two powers.