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How likely is China to start a war? This may be the single-most important question in international affairs today. If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II.
How likely is China to start a war? This may be the single-most important question in international affairs today. If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II.
How worried should we be?
Notwithstanding the recent flurry of high-level diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, the warning signs are certainly there. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades. Notwithstanding some recent efforts to lure back skittish foreign investment, China is stockpiling fuel and food and trying to reduce the vulnerability of its economy to sanctions—steps one might take as conflict nears. Xi has said China must prepare for “worst-case and extreme scenarios” and be ready to withstand “high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” All of this comes as Beijing has become increasingly coercive (and occasionally violent) in dealings with its neighbors, including the Philippines, Japan, and India—and as it periodically advertises its ability to batter, blockade, and perhaps invade Taiwan.
Many U.S. officials believe the risk of war is rising. CIA Director William Burns has said Xi seeks the capability to take Taiwan by 2027. And as China’s economy struggles, some observers—including, reportedly, U.S. intelligence analysts—are looking for signs that a peaking China might turn aggressive in order to distract attention from internal problems or to lock in gains while it still can.
Other analysts think the risk of Chinese aggression is overblown. Some scholars say the danger likely can be managed provided Washington doesn’t provoke Beijing—an echo of a longer-standing argument that China won’t upend a status quo that has served it well. Others point out that China has not started a war since its invasion of Vietnam in 1979. Still others dismiss the prospect that China might fight in response to a slowing economy and other domestic problems, claiming that the country has no history of diversionary war. What links these arguments is a belief in the basic continuity of Chinese conduct: the idea that a country that hasn’t launched a disastrous war in more than four decades is unlikely to do so now.
We believe this confidence is dangerously misplaced. A country’s behavior is profoundly shaped by its circumstances, no less than its strategic tradition, and China’s circumstances are changing in explosive ways. Political scientists and historians have identified a range of factors that make great powers more or less inclined to fight. When one considers four such factors, it becomes clear that many of the conditions that once enabled a peaceful rise may now be encouraging a violent descent.
First, the territorial disputes and other issues China is contesting are becoming less susceptible to compromise or peaceful resolution than they once were, making foreign policy a zero-sum game. Second, the military balance in Asia is shifting in ways that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. Third, as China’s short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening—a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past. Fourth, Xi has turned China into a personalist dictatorship of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars.
This isn’t to say China will invade Taiwan in a particular week, month, or year. It is impossible to predict when, exactly, a conflict might occur because the trigger is often an unforeseen crisis. We now know that Europe was primed for war in 1914, but World War I would likely not have happened then had the driver of the car carrying Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand not taken one of history’s most fateful wrong turns. Wars are more like earthquakes: We can’t know precisely when they will happen, but we can recognize factors that lead to higher or lower degrees of risk. Today, China’s risk indicators are blinking red.
The possibility of a U.S.-China war might seem remote at first glance. Beijing has not fought a major war in 44 years, and its military hasn’t killed large numbers of foreigners since 1988, when Chinese frigates machine-gunned 64 Vietnamese sailors in a skirmish over the Spratly Islands. The so-called Asian peace—the lack of interstate wars in East Asia since 1979—has rested on a Chinese peace.
The absence of war has hardly meant the absence of aggression: Beijing has used military and paramilitary capabilities to enlarge its writ in the South and East China seas. In recent years, China has also engaged in bloody scraps with India. Nonetheless, the fact that Beijing has abstained from major wars—while the United States has fought several of them—has allowed Chinese officials to claim that their country is following a uniquely peaceful path to global power. And it compels those who worry about war to explain why China, which has experienced record-breaking growth enabled by two generations of peace, would change course so dramatically.
It wouldn’t be the first time a seemingly peaceful rising power broke bad. Prior to 1914, Germany hadn’t fought a major war for more than 40 years. In the 1920s, Japan looked to many foreign observers like a responsible stakeholder as it signed treaties pledging to limit its navy, share power in Asia, and respect China’s territorial integrity. In the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin mused about joining NATO and linking Russia closer to the West. That each of these nations nonetheless launched barbaric wars of conquest underscores a basic truth: Things change. The same country can behave differently, perhaps radically so, depending on the circumstances.
