Is China a Security Threat to the US?

Beckley's article has sparked an interesting debate about whether China is actually catching up to the US.  Drezner provides characteristically insightful comments here.  Erik Voeten over at the Monkey Cage weighs in on a few points here.  Both are relatively receptive to Beckley's claim (though Voeten, like me, takes issue with some of the specific points Beckley lays out).  What really caught my attention though is Voeten's point here:

Yet, this also points me to the biggest problem I have with this article: the intellectual strait-jacket it imposes that forces us to see world politics as a zero-sum game.

So, if we believe that China is catching up, then [according to Beckley], mercantilism is the only answer. This neither reflects the conventional wisdom nor prudent policy advice. China “catching up” does not equal China “taking over the world” nor does it equate a future world where Americans can expect to be catering to their Chinese overlords. This may be the view of some alarmists but mainstream analysts can think of many good reasons to maintain a liberal international economic policy even if China is catching up.

Just yesterday, a former student of mine who is interviewing for a position at the CIA stopped by to ask my thoughts about the future of US relations with China and North Korea.  He's writing an essay as part of his application for the CIA.  He asked me whether I thought the US was likely to go to war with China in the next twenty years.  After a stereotypical amount of hedging, I eventually said something along the lines of, "no, not likely, though it's possible.  What I'd be more worried about is proxy wars."  He then asked, "So, do you think China is even a security threat to the US?  At all?"

I'm not sure why my failure to say "Oh, God, yes, I'm up all night most nights worrying that World War III could start tomorrow" would make him think that I saw no threat at all.  I did say that there was some chance of war, and that I was concerned about the possibility of proxy wars.  But whatever.  Outside the Ivory Tower, there are only two answers to any question: yes and no.  And if the person you're speaking to thinks the answer is yes, and you hedge even a little, you obviously are in the "no" camp.  

But, anyway, this made me step back and think, "What do we even mean when we refer to security threats?"

When I teach War & International Security, and I present models of commitment problems induced by rapid shifts in power, I emphasize that in these models, what prompts the declining state to attack is not a fear of being attacked themselves if they do not strike first, even though we often refer to the wars that occur in such models as "preventive" or "preemptive".  What the declining state is doing is locking in as favorable a distribution of benefits as it can now rather than allowing the rising state to reach a point where it will be able to credibly demand a revised distribution.  In short, the "threat" in these models is merely a threat of the loss of bargaining power.

If you listen to the rhetoric about China, the question seems to be whether China will attack the US (or Taiwan, or South Korea, or Japan).  There is also fear of economic warfare (read: they hold lots of US debt something something took our jobs something something manufacturing base something something collapse of US economy).  The more creative will mention cyber warfare (a threat that is easily overblown).  All of these "threats" have something in common.  They involve China engaging in a deliberate, intentional effort to do harm.

But China's rise could harm the US even if the Chinese did not intend for that to happen.  You don't have to be a Malthusian (and I'm not) to recognized that resources are not infinite.  Influence most certainly is not infinite.  When crises break out, be they military or economic, the range of options available to the US will be more limited if China becomes as powerful as, or more powerful than, the US.  The IMF and other global institutions will be less inclined to choose policies that reflect the interests of the US.  The dollar may cease to be the world's reserve currency (which brings the US what Eichengreen calls "exorbitant privilege").  The list goes on.

Of course, Voeten is also right that the world is not strictly zero-sum.  The US and China have both profited greatly from mutual economic cooperation.  Few non-economists appreciate just how powerful specialization and exchange are for generating wealth.  Resources may be finite, but our ability to make the best use of the resources that are available depends in no small part upon our willingness to embrace this idea.

Agreeing to move closer to the Pareto frontier doesn't eliminate the possibility of conflict over the distribution of benefits once there though.  Frieden, Lake and Schultz make this point beautifully in chapter two of their brilliant intro text.  For too long, IR scholars have seen conflict and cooperation as alternatives to one another.  They are not.  The question of how much stuff there will be to divide up depends largely upon how much cooperation there is.  The question of how that stuff gets divided up has to be answered one way or another though.

There is little doubt in my mind that the world will be richer if the US and China cooperate with one another economically.  There is also little doubt in my mind that a stronger China means a smaller share of the pie for the US.  I don't worry all that much about China being a "threat" in the layman's sense of the word.  But that's not the only kind of "threat" worth worrying about.

The million dollar (or yuan) question then is: if China is currently on a path that would allow it to surpass the United States in the next few decades (and I stress the "if"), would the US be better off getting a smaller share of a larger pie, or should it take actions to contain China and thereby ensure that it receives a larger share of what will be a smaller pie?

I don't know.

And neither does anyone who's being honest.  Because the answer depends on how much smaller a share of how much larger a pie, as well as the costs associated with whatever policies the US enacted in an effort to contain China's rise.  And you ought to be very, very wary of anyone who tells you that they can give you credible estimates of those things.  Odds are, anyone who gives you an answer is selling you their ideology, though they may dress it up pretty first.