Great Power Rivalry, Status, and Entanglement: Rethinking Sino-American Coexistence

I take the strategic rivalries approach to the U.S.-China rivalry to analyze whether the ongoing transition from the U.S.-led world order to a multiplex world order will occur peacefully. I show that the possibility of a Sino-American war is overstated in the academic literature. I assess the three most prominent pathways to war identified in the literature – an impending power transition, China's quest for regional hegemony, and conflict over Taiwan – and show that the structural drivers of war that these logics posit are either absent or inflated in the Sino-American case. The U.S.-China rivalry is a contest over relative position, and such status rivalries carry a lower propensity for escalation to war than rivalries over other issues, such as territorial disputes that are absent from the Sino-American rivalry. Not only has the world not witnessed a war between two or more great powers since 1945 but the U.S. and China are also not engaged in an ideological contest of democracies versus authoritarianism. Since survival is not at stake in the U.S.-China rivalry, competitive coexistence, rather than an impending great power war (especially one with nuclear undertones), is not only possible but plausible. Nevertheless, their rivalry is likely to be prolonged, since there is no single overarching hierarchy over which either state is set to occupy the apex position indefinitely. I urge caution, however, because world politics will not revolve around the U.S.-China axis alone, for there are multiple great power rivalries in the multiplex order. Although some of these rivalries include territorial disputes, survival is not at stake. However, deliberate, inadvertent, and accidental wars remain possible. The global order can transition peacefully provided multiple entangled rivalries are actively managed.