Against a backdrop of rising military tensions, intensifying technological rivalry, and shrinking room for accidental escalation, the US-China relationship currently stands at one of its most dangerous turning points in modern history. As US policymakers continue to debate how to respond to China’s growing global influence, leading analyst David Santoro, President and CEO of the Pacific Forum, argues that American strategy must adjust its ambitions to match on-the-ground material realities. While Washington has long pursued enduring global primacy, technological dominance, and full economic sovereignty, Santoro contends that the only sustainable path forward for the bilateral relationship is deliberate, structured managed coexistence.
To frame the ongoing policy debate correctly, Santoro first rejects two extreme, unworkable approaches that have gained traction in Washington. The first, pushing for the subversion of the Chinese Communist Party, is labeled both reckless and foolhardy. Attempting to force the collapse of a nuclear-armed major economy that governs 1.4 billion people carries catastrophic risks: even if successful, the move could trigger uncontrolled military escalation, destabilize critical global strategic assets, spark a total collapse of the global economy, and cause unprecedented humanitarian disaster. The second extreme, ceding control of the Indo-Pacific region to Chinese hegemony, is equally disastrous. Unchecked Chinese dominance in the region would choke off critical global maritime trade routes, weaken core US security alliances and partnerships, and upend the long-standing global balance of power.
The real policy divide in Washington falls between two competing competing visions. On one side are primacists, who argue that the US must enforce full dominance and escalation superiority over China while leading a broad containment strategy. On the other side are realists, who recognize that the era of unchallenged US global primacy has ended, and advocate for building a stable equilibrium with China rooted in military deterrence, targeted economic de-risking, and managed coexistence.
The primacist vision, while ideologically appealing to many, collides directly with hard material constraints that cannot be ignored. Militarily, primacists push for escalation dominance, using overwhelming offensive power to preserve the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, arguing that managed competition prioritizes short-term de-escalation at the cost of long-term victory, and that “there is no substitute for victory.” In technology and trade, primacists frame US-China competition as a zero-sum struggle, calling for aggressive state subsidies, increased federal research and development investment, and strict export controls to preserve US leadership in high-stakes sectors including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and semiconductors. They also push for broad industrial rebalancing, efforts to reverse China’s mercantilist trade practices, reshoring of critical supply chains for goods like critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, full decoupling of major economic sectors, and frame the rivalry as a moral “democracy versus autocracy” crusade aimed at mobilizing US alliances to isolate China and pressure for internal political change.
But this grand ambition runs up against unchangeable realities. Uncontested US military supremacy along China’s coastal perimeter is now out of reach. China’s layered anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks mean the US can no longer project unimpeded military power directly to the Chinese mainland, and any attempt to do so risks triggering a preventive war rather than deterring one. China’s expanding nuclear triad has also eliminated the traditional US strategic immunity that once kept the American homeland largely beyond nuclear threat. As expert Brad Roberts notes, the US will share mutual nuclear vulnerability with China regardless of whether it accepts this reality politically, even as it adapts its nuclear arsenal to counter both Russia and China. Material constraints make achieving nuclear dominance over these two peer adversaries simply impossible.
On the economic and technological fronts, broad blockades on Chinese progress are equally ineffective. China’s deep pool of tech talent and massive capital reserves guarantee that Beijing can innovate around even the strictest Western export controls. Even former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a prominent advocate for aggressive innovation competition with China, has acknowledged that both the US and China will develop next-generation AI capabilities: “We cannot prevent it. We cannot hold it to ourselves for a few years of advantage. We are in a race that will shape the world’s future.” Total economic decoupling is also prohibitively costly, given the deep integration of global supply chains, and aggressive use of trade weapons risks retaliation, including Chinese export restrictions on critical inputs such as rare earth elements that are vital to US manufacturing and tech sectors. Most importantly, key US regional allies and Global South partners refuse to choose between Washington and Beijing, preferring to maintain commercial ties with China alongside security partnerships with the US. China’s deepening strategic alignment with Russia, Iran, and North Korea also creates a counter-bloc that undermines Western efforts to achieve full isolation.
Acknowledging these material limits does not mean American retreat or capitulation, Santoro emphasizes. It simply requires adopting a pragmatic strategy rooted in hard-nosed realism. While some realists (often called offshore balancers) advocate for withdrawing US military forces from the First Island Chain to the Second Island Chain and dissolving mutual defense alliances to reduce the risk of war, a forward-leaning realist camp argues that voluntary retreat would create a dangerous power vacuum that invites the very Chinese aggression deterrence aims to prevent. Instead, these realists argue that the US should maintain a favorable balance of power along the First Island Chain, deter aggression through military denial, manage rivalry through transactional statecraft, and seek equilibrium within the theater rather than retreating to safety behind the horizon. This approach rests on four core pillars:
### Pillar 1: Rebuild domestic solvency, tech leadership, and targeted collective resilience
Sustained global American power begins with strong economic and physical foundations at home. The US should prioritize targeted public investment, next-generation AI infrastructure, green energy supply chains, and expanded domestic manufacturing capacity. Streamlining immigration pathways for top global tech talent and modernizing industrial infrastructure will also create the engines needed to sustain long-term competition. Rather than pushing for full economic decoupling that alienates US allies, Santoro argues domestic revitalization should be paired with collective resilience among partners: Washington should collaborate with allies to build joint critical mineral processing networks, shared strategic reserves, and targeted anti-coercion trade mechanisms. This framework protects both the US and its partners from Chinese economic leverage and export blockades, while preserving open trade channels for non-sensitive goods.
### Pillar 2: Deploy a posture of military denial and allied responsibility-sharing
The US should shift away from vulnerable, concentrated forward military platforms toward a distributed, resilient denial network. Priority should be given to massed autonomous strike systems, long-range mobile anti-ship weaponry, hardened command-and-control nodes, and undersea warfare assets. These capabilities can deter a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan or maritime coercion without relying on escalatory strikes against the Chinese mainland. As strategist Elbridge Colby argues, this approach is the only realistic option to prevent Chinese regional hegemony, since restoring full military dominance over China is unfeasible given China’s size and growing industrial and military capacity. This strategy also requires robust burden-sharing from allies: while reaffirming its extended deterrence commitments, the US should insist that front-line allies take on a larger share of conventional defense. This includes integrating Japan’s new stand-off counterstrike capabilities into joint operational planning, supporting Australia’s expansion of long-range strike capabilities under the AUKUS partnership, and co-developing defense industrial production capacity with regional partners to make the First Island Chain self-sustaining for long-term deterrence.
### Pillar 3: Establish strategic and operational guardrails
As the US strengthens deterrence, it must also acknowledge mutual nuclear vulnerability with China to stabilize the strategic balance and eliminate incentives for worst-case force expansion. Building on this baseline, Washington should pursue targeted risk reduction measures across both strategic and operational domains. Drawing on the precedent of the 1988 US-Soviet Ballistic Missile Launch Agreement, the US should coordinate with allies to push Beijing to adopt formal pre-launch notification agreements for ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles; recent Pacific Forum research suggests China may be open to such an agreement. Beyond missile-related guardrails, the two powers should secure bilateral commitments to maintain permanent human control over nuclear assets, institutionalize 24/7 military-to-military crisis communication channels, standardize maritime and aerial encounter protocols in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, and negotiate binding rules of the road for military AI, space-based targeting systems, and offensive cyber operations. These confidence-building measures are critical prerequisites for future nuclear arms control talks, which remain out of reach today due to the current asymmetry between US and Chinese nuclear force structures.
### Pillar 4: Institutionalize platforms for transactional diplomacy and reciprocal statecraft
Beyond military risk reduction, preventing routine friction from escalating into open conflict requires resilient diplomatic channels that can withstand periods of political volatility. The US and China should establish joint working task forces to resolve trade disputes, update definitions for targeted export controls, and coordinate action on shared non-zero-sum challenges including global macroeconomic stability, climate change mitigation, global public health threats, and the suppression of illicit illicit precursor chemical networks for illegal drugs. Engagement should move beyond empty dialogue to reciprocal statecraft: Washington can offer calibrated market access or relaxed regulatory restrictions in exchange for verifiable Chinese actions, such as stricter controls on fentanyl precursor exports or commitments to fair debt restructuring standards for developing nations. Anchoring these exchanges in multilateral frameworks will also ensure that agreements reflect regional consensus, making it harder for either power to walk away from commitments during periods of heightened political tension.
In conclusion, Santoro argues that prudent statecraft requires aligning strategy with material realities rather than ideological ambitions. Shifting from a pursuit of primacy to a realist framework does not require American retreat or capitulation. Instead, it demands a deliberate balance-of-power strategy: anchoring national power in domestic revitalization, enforcing stability through forward military denial and allied burden-sharing, building critical strategic and operational guardrails to reduce risk, and pairing strong deterrence with sustained crisis diplomacy.