Assessing China’s Strategic Relationships: A Conceptual Overview
Abstract: Divergent assessments about the nature of China’s strategic relationships and how much military and security cooperation a given relationship will support are largely due to conceptual confusion about how to think about alliances and strategic alignment. China’s strategic relationships are inherently ambiguous due to the lack of explicit security commitments. The paper argues that the first step in assessing the strength of a strategic relationship is to look at the breadth, depth, and strategic importance of current cooperation to assess the relative value for each partner. Current cooperation should be discounted by considering how much is due to non-strategic factors and how relative power influences each side’s bargaining power. Analysis based on current cooperation can be extended into the future by considering the mix of common and conflicting interests between the partners, which define potential areas of future cooperation and suggest limits on how far the partners are willing to go. Deeper strategic cooperation requires more strategic trust because the specialization and dependence that create synergies make the partners vulnerable if the partnership ends. The willingness of one partner to bear costs, run risks, and make commitments on behalf of the other partner’s interests or for the sake of the relationship is a good measure of that partner’s commitment and whether the relationship has moved beyond transactional cooperation, suggesting the likely limits on deeper strategic cooperation in extreme situations.
Dr. Phillip C. Saunders is Director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and an Adjunct Instructor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Saunders has a Ph.D. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Dr. Saunders is co-author with Joel Wuthnow of China’s Quest for Military Supremacy and with David Gompert of The Paradox of Power: Sino-American Strategic Restraint in an Era of Vulnerability (2011). He has published widely in leading security and China journals and co-edited nine books, including Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan(2022) and The PLA Beyond Borders: Chinese Military Operations in Regional and Global Context (2021).
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