This approach focuses less on building a position of unassailable strength in the Western Pacific than on outflanking the U.S.

The second road is very different because it seems to defy the historical laws of strategy and geopolitics. It focuses on building regional primacy as a springboard to global power, and it looks quite familiar to the road the United States itself once traveled. This road runs through China’s home region, specifically the Western Pacific. The first is the one American strategists have until now emphasized (to the extent they acknowledged China’s global ambitions). If true superpower status is China’s desired destination, there are two roads it might take to try to get there. The architects of America’s China strategy, no matter how instinctively accommodating or confrontational they might be, must face this issue squarely. But it requires a degree of willful ignorance not to ask whether China is in fact seeking (or will inevitably seek) to establish itself as the world’s leading power and how it might go about achieving that goal.

The two of us have different priors about whether stable, constructive U.S.-China relations are still possible. And there is danger in definitive declarations of hostile intent because they can lead to fatalism and self-fulfilling prophecies.

The precise intentions of opaque, authoritarian regimes are difficult to discern. Jake Sullivan was a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Geoeconomics and Strategy Program and also Magro Family Distinguished Fellow at Dartmouth College. Even strategic shocks that originated within China have become showcases for Beijing’s geopolitical aspirations: Witness how Xi’s government has sought to turn a coronavirus crisis made worse by its own authoritarianism into an opportunity to project Chinese influence and market China’s model overseas. China has entered a “new era,” Xi announced in 2017, and must “take center stage in the world.” Two years later, Xi used the idea of a “new Long March” to describe China’s worsening relationship with Washington. Not least, there is the fact that a country that formerly disguised its ambitions now asserts them openly. There are the systematic efforts to refine methods of converting economic influence into economic coercion throughout the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

There is the campaign to control the crucial waterways off China’s coast, as well as reported plans to create a chain of bases and logistical facilities farther afield. There is Beijing’s bid to dominate high-tech industries that will determine the future distribution of economic and military power. There is the naval shipbuilding program, which put more vessels to sea between 20 than the total number of ships in the German, Indian, Spanish, and British navies combined. Now, however, the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous. role-but would defer to the distant future any global ambitions. The conventional wisdom was that China would seek an expanded regional role-and a reduced U.S. Only a few years ago, many American observers still hoped that China would reconcile itself to a supporting role in the liberal international order or would pose-at most-a challenge to U.S. Xi Jinping’s China is displaying a superpower’s ambition.

Edge of space game area dominated