Will US or China win the next war? That’s the wrong question to ask

Andrew Sheng is a former central banker and financial regulator, currently distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute, University of Hong Kong.Who will win the next war? That is the question posed on the cover of the latest Foreign Affairs magazine which explores, among other things, the US-China military and technological rivalry. At its core is a clash of strategic philosophies between the US-led order and China’s world view, which has propelled the latter’s rise to the world’s second great power.The magazine’s contributors reflect a deeply ingrained Western strategic tradition, rooted in liberal realism, that says that the United States must maintain its primacy to underwrite global stability, defend democracy and retain its financial, technological and military power. Any challenger is inherently revisionist.Lead essayist Paul Scharre argues that new technologies in drones, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics challenge not only America’s traditional air and naval power but also allow states such as Iran to conduct asymmetric warfare, which erodes US hard and soft power.Former US Pacific commander Admiral Dennis Blair reinforces this view, arguing that China’s military build-up is not defensive but designed to overturn the status quo in East Asia. He advocates deterrence, using US alliances, forward deployments and technological leadership to guarantee regional stability.Academics Michael Beckley and Hal Brands apply the Anglo-American strategic views of land-based “heartland” (introduced by British geographer Halford Mackinder) and coast-based “rimland” (developed by Dutch-American political scientist Nicholas Spykman) in framing the US-China contest as an age-old struggle between incumbent maritime powers consolidating their positions against land-based revisionists.They correctly argue that the “autocratic axis” is united less by ideology than by a shared resentment of US dominance, while the democratic coalition is fractured by competing interests and sometimes opposite views on how to engage Beijing.