China and the United States are playing a perilous game of chicken in Asia-Pacific
- Washington and its allies are increasingly challenging Beijing’s militarisation of the South China Sea, but Richard Heydarian considers where it will all end
“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable,” the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote more than two millennia ago.
In many ways, we are witnessing a similar dynamic in China’s adjacent waters, as the United States and its allies seek to prevent a new “Peking order” in the Indo-Pacific. China is just too big and too important for cold war-style containment to be effective.
We are beginning to witness what the political scientist Gerald Segal termed as “constrainment”, namely a strategy that “is intended to tell China that the outside world has interests that will be defended by means of incentives for good behaviour, deterrence of bad behaviour, and punishment when deterrence fails”.
But the approach worked, he said, if and only if the US and its allies “act in a concerted fashion both to punish and to reward China”.
Beijing’s expanding military and paramilitary deployments to the so-called first island chain, which encompasses islands in the East and South China seas and the Taiwan Strait, has raised concerns over the coercive establishment of a new maritime sphere of influence.
