The United States and China: Anatomy of a Strategic Competition

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Institute for Security and Development Studies (ISDS), Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jices.2026.416004.1114

Abstract

Since the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949, relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, China) have traversed approximately twenty-year cycles of hostility, cooperation, and competition. Since 2017, strategic competition has emerged as the dominant framework in American foreign policy documents, positioning the two states in direct confrontation across the domains of economics, technology, soft power, and geopolitical influence. This paper examines the central question of the nature assumed by the current strategic competition between the two powers and argues that, although the bilateral rivalry is comprehensive and multidimensional in scope, it does not constitute a new Cold War, owing to the profound depth of economic interdependence between them. Moreover, the probability of falling into the Thucydides Trap and of the outbreak of all-out war remains low, given the stabilizing effect of nuclear deterrence and the prohibitive costs of direct military conflict. By contrast, the Churchill Trap—a protracted confrontation defined by persistent enmity short of direct warfare—represents the most plausible and consequential scenario on the horizon. An analysis of bilateral competition across the domains of economics and technology, the Belt and Road Initiative vis-à-vis the Build Back Better World initiative, and soft power reveals that both parties are actively seeking to manage this rivalry. Nevertheless, the absence of robust crisis-prevention mechanisms and the persistence of regional flashpoints—most notably in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea—sustain the very real prospect of inadvertent escalation.

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