Containment’s deceit: why the United States needs to review its China strategy

Abstract

Together with many other scholars of US containment, Brooks/Wohlforth share widely held assumptions on the future US–China relationship. Indeed, their arguments tempt American strategists into foregoing evaluations as the enduring US structural superiority, reflected in the strategy of “standing on the defensive”, reassures them that Beijing will be socialised to structural realities favouring the USA. However, China is not the Soviet Union and the twenty-first century’s second decade not the 1980s. Confusing the latter with today’s China and its highly adaptive governance system misrepresents a drastically changed politico-material context, as China has emerged as the leading economic power since 2014 (measured in PPP). Precisely because Brooks/Wohlforth adopt an exclusively material view, they overlook the notion of US cultural superiority which has invariably underpinned material accounts of containment. Thus, their material defence of America as “Number One” becomes a cognitive barrier, possibly self-defeating, to more comprehensive reviews of US technological superiority.