Why America Needs a More Restrained Strategic Approach to China

To earnestly prepare for war with China, the United States would likely need to triple or quadruple its current defense budget — a scale of mobilization that Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, describes in a Stand Together analysis as both unrealistic and unnecessary. That arithmetic anchors a broader argument: a more restrained U.S. posture toward Beijing, rooted in realism rather than military escalation, could yield more durable stability than the current great-power competition framework.

The framework problem

Goldstein's central claim is that the great-power competition lens — a framework defined by rivalry for global leadership, economic dominance, and technological supremacy — has fused a constellation of military, economic, and diplomatic crises into a single destabilizing system. The Covid-19 pandemic, rising ideological antagonism, and trade tensions have reinforced one another, producing a relationship where direct dialogue stalled and conflict appeared inevitable. According to the Stand Together interview, both Washington and Beijing have begun recognizing that military conflict would be catastrophic for both sides, and have started moving toward what Goldstein describes as a more pragmatic relationship built on managed competition. The recent summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping — the first trip by an American leader to China since 2017 — is presented as a promising signal not because any major policy breakthrough was achieved, but because the extended face-to-face engagement happened at all and serves as a foundation for building trust over time.

Diverging from the Cold War template

Goldstein pushes back against the reflexive comparison with the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Strategic rivalry and military competition are present, but the structural conditions differ: China is described as much less militaristic than the Soviet Union, and as having actively avoided military intervention in places like Afghanistan and Myanmar despite opportunities to do so. Beijing has also refrained from attempting to dominate neighboring countries and shown less willingness to use force beyond its core interests. The implication is that the Cold War is a template to avoid rather than a model to replicate. Diplomacy and legitimate competition, in this framing, function as load-bearing elements of long-term security rather than tactical concessions to a rival.

What to watch

The practical question is whether U.S. policy can internalize this asymmetry. The summit and renewed dialogue are early-stage feedback loops that, if sustained, reduce misunderstandings over time and stabilize expectations on both sides. Readers tracking the file should monitor whether Washington sustains high-level engagement with Beijing beyond symbolic gestures, whether defense budget trajectories bend toward or away from the triple-to-quadruple mobilization scenario, and how middle powers — including ASEAN states now navigating the U.S.-China artificial intelligence contest, as flagged in a recent South China Morning Post opinion piece on strategic autonomy — position themselves between the two poles.