The United States and China have spent decades building, suspending, restoring, and redesigning channels intended to make a dangerous strategic relationship more manageable. The recurring difficulty has rarely been due to a shortage of mechanisms. Instead, it has been a more basic disagreement over what dialogue is supposed to accomplish.
Washington has generally treated military and strategic dialogue as a tool for managing competition, especially when relations are strained. Beijing has more often treated dialogue as part of the broader political relationship: engagement expands when the relationship improves and contracts when political tensions rise. That difference has shaped military-to-military contacts, crisis communications, strategic stability discussions, and efforts to address nuclear risk.
This article revisits the origins and consequences of that divergence as the U.S. and China explore ways to “build a constructive relationship of strategic stability based on fairness and reciprocity” and embark on a fresh round of military-to-military dialogues to “coordinate, deconflict, and reduce the risk of miscalculation.” The stakes could not be higher. China is undertaking the largest expansion and modernization of its nuclear forces in its history. At the same time, conventional precision strike, cyber operations, space systems, missile defense, artificial intelligence, and autonomous capabilities increasingly intersect with, and complicate, the management of nuclear deterrence. The strategic relationship is therefore becoming more fraught with danger at the same moment the two governments launch a new consultative process while continuing to disagree about the purposes, vocabulary, and political conditions of risk-reduction dialogue.
The implication is straightforward: the United States should continue to pursue substantive strategic engagement with China, but it should define success for itself more realistically. Near-term progress, for example, is unlikely to resemble Cold War arms control negotiations. A more useful objective is to reduce the risk that either side misreads the other’s doctrine, intentions, or actions during a crisis, while building habits and concepts that could support more ambitious measures over time. Dialogue cannot remove the underlying competition, but it can help keep miscalculation from becoming irreversible.
