The assertion that the relationship between America and China is an increasingly

important determinant of the shape of the international system by now requires little

justification. From an antipodean perspective, the assertion itself is all but redundant, and

any consideration or decision regarding Australia’s and New Zealand’s interactions with other

states, and many of those regarding domestic matters, occur within the overarching context of

this relationship. This context, of course, is not fixed but dynamic, and by almost all

accounts is approaching a point of inflection driven by the continued growth of Chinese

economic and military power in relation to that of an America in relative decline. In The

China Choice, Hugh White provides a clear statement of this accelerating dynamic and of

how the US might best respond to it. He outlines what he sees to be the possible outcomes in

Asia of the shifting balance of power between China and America: maintenance of the status

quo, while desirable to all in the region except China, is no longer possible, and an attempt by

the US to sustain it will of necessity entail escalating strategic rivalry with China. The

remaining possibilities are that the US could simply withdraw from Asia, leaving China to try

and fill the vacuum, or that China and the US could come to some sort of power-sharing

arrangement to their mutual (dis)satisfaction (White, 2013, chapter 1).

American preferences with respect to these choices are reasonably clear. The desire for

continued primacy in Asia, exemplified by the so-called “pivot” of American attention away

from the Middle East and back towards the region bounded by the Western Pacific and Indian

Oceans, is shared by White but is, in his estimation, bound to be disappointed. Chinese

power, while still significantly less than that of the US, is sufficient to deny American

hegemony in Asia even now and is becoming only more capable. Pressing China, in the

expectation that it will acquiesce in submitting to ongoing American dominance, will on the

contrary be met with resistance and a high risk of escalation into armed conflict. Not only

would conflict with China jeopardize the American economy (not to mention China’s and the

world’s along with it), but neither military victory nor the avoidance of nuclear exchange

- 1 -

would be certain. The only potentially worse outcome from the US perspective would be

American capitulation and withdrawal from Asia, leaving it with minimal direct influence,

and exposing Asia to the risk of Chinese hegemony. Were China to achieve this against the

resistance of smaller Asian states, it would not only be likely to devastate the world’s most

economically dynamic region, but might also leave China free to exert itself in the affairs of

other regions, including the western hemisphere (White, 2013, chapter 3; Mearsheimer, 2014,

chapter 10).

Cooperation between China and the US remains for White as the only option with the

potential for avoidance of direct conflict. He does not consider it the most likely outcome for

at least two reasons. First, he deems that each side assumes the other to be more severely

constrained by their economic interdependence and the asymmetries that would characterize

any military conflict, and will therefore expect the other to withdraw as pressure mounts.

Second, White argues that there is a confusion of means with ends, particularly on the

American side, such that primacy in Asia has become an end in itself rather than a means to

prosperity and security that might be achieved otherwise (White, 2013, chapter 6). Further

complicating any cooperation between these powers is the presence of various US allies and

other interested parties; I will return to this below, as it is a matter crucial to White’s proposal

for a solution to the problem of power in Asia, but his formulation is premised on a particular

understanding of the structure of the primary bilateral relationship. As represented here, this

relationship takes the form of that staple of game theory as applied to international relations,

the prisoner’s dilemma.

In its most basic form, the prisoner’s dilemma describes a competitive situation between a

pair of opponents who may each either cooperate with (C) or defect from (D) the other. This

is a non-zero sum “game,” as there are intermediate positions between “winning” and

“losing” which are quantified in a “payoff structure” that designates the ordering of

preferences regarding the outcome of the game. Each of these non-zero sum games is

- 2 -

defined by its payoff structure, which may be analyzed in order to determine the strategy or

strategies best employed to maximize the payoff for each player. For a two-player game in

which each has a single choice between cooperating or defecting, there are four possible

outcomes: both players defect (DD), both cooperate (CC), or one defects and the other

cooperates (DC and CD). In the prisoner’s dilemma, the ordering by preference of payoffs

for each player is DC (or the “temptation” payoff), CC (mutual cooperation), DD (mutual

defection) and CD (the “sucker’s” payoff). From the perspective of American preferences

regarding power in Asia vis-à-vis China, these correspond to maintenance of the status quo

with Chinese acquiescence; some form of mutually agreed upon power-sharing arrangement;

direct conflict with a risk of escalation into war; and American withdrawal from Asia. For

China, hegemony in Asia is ultimately unattainable, even in the unlikely event of American

withdrawal (i.e. DC), as the result of an inevitable “classic ‘balance of power’ struggle” with

its neighbours. Nevertheless, White contends, “we cannot be sure that [China’s leaders] will

settle for as little as an equal share in the leadership of Asia. We can be sure they will not

settle for less.” At stake for China is not merely open markets or sea lines of communication

in its region, but its status as a great power: “In 1972, China tacitly relinquished its claim to

great power status in Asia. Today China is strong enough to claim it back, and nothing is

more important to China than that claim. If necessary, it will fight for it” (White, 2013,

chapter 3; emphasis added). American primacy in Asia (CD) is no longer acceptable to

China, relinquishing its position to China is not, at least for now, conscionable for America

(2013, chapter 6), and each power, on White’s reading, has sufficient capacity to deny the

other’s preference but not enough to ensure its own. It is an open question, however, whether

China values the payoff from mutual cooperation more highly than that from mutual

defection. If it is true that China values nothing more than its great power status, then it is

“deadlocked”1 into defection and open conflict must occur in any scenario short of complete

1. The payoff structure for the game “deadlock” is DC > DD > CC > CD; i.e. the

- 3 -

American withdrawal from Asia.

But even if White’s assertion is somewhat exaggerated, and there are circumstances under

which China might prefer mutual cooperation over open conflict, his structural-realist

approach to the problem of power in Asia, while more subtle than Mearsheimer’s, mandates

pessimism. There is much to be said for this approach. It is clear and concise, and leaves

little doubt regarding the value of each result, supported by a straightforward and seemingly

incontrovertible logic. Its rhetorical strength is heavily underscored by the closing chapter,

which takes the form of an imagined Presidential address, and serves to tighten further the

narrative arc of this vision of the near future in which the outcomes are treated as if they are

the result of a single, sweeping, grand-strategic manoeuvre. However, given the starting

conditions and the stakes as laid out by White, the most likely outcome must be mutual

defection and open conflict with a significant risk of war. In the simple prisoner’s dilemma

that White effectively describes, the least bad option for each player is to defect, for fear of

winning the sucker’s payoff for unrequited cooperation, and in the hope of winning the

temptation. As Robert Axelrod has famously demonstrated, an obvious first step in

correcting this situation is to ensure that the game has multiple rounds, and therefore that the

current move has potential consequences for future rounds. It is inconceivable that a

negotiation of this magnitude could occur in the space of a single sitting, as it were, and

White does not suggest that it could. Nevertheless, the logic implied by his pessimism is

linear: the journey from here to there is, in principle, simply traversing the distance between

them, irrespective of the path we take. With sights fixed firmly on his distant goal of a

Concert of Asia, White’s running leap across the chasm is doomed, and he knows it before he

takes off. The hope, no doubt, is that those watching will be both sufficiently inspired by the

attempt to make White’s goal their own, and sufficiently cautioned that they will pay more

attention to their footing. Policy inch by diplomatic step is the only way to make the trek, but

preferences for mutual cooperation and mutual defection are reversed with respect to the prisoner’s dilemma.

- 4 -

the implication is that each tread must be guided by the final objective.

Axelrod’s first experiment with a series of rounds of prisoner’s dilemma, as reported in

The Evolution of Co-operation, was analogous to this process. Fourteen computer

programmes encoding various strategies for playing the game were pitted one against each of

the others in a round robin tournament, each game lasting a predetermined two hundred

rounds (Axelrod, 1990, pp. 30-31). In principle, for players engaged in a prisoner’s dilemma

who know beforehand how many rounds will be played, the optimum strategy is the same as

for a single round, viz. mutual defection. Any agreement made at the beginning of the game

to reward cooperation with future cooperation and punish defection with future defection will

be null and void in the final round, as each player will then have an incentive to defect in

order to try and maximize the payoff, given that there can be no future reward or punishment.

The same incentive will therefore also pertain in the penultimate round, as both players know

that cooperation now will be met with defection later, and therefore also in the

antepenultimate round, and so on back to the first round. By this logic, White is correct to

despair of his concert of Asia being realized if it is taken to mark the endpoint of a series of

manoeuvres designed to bring the US and China back from the brink of conflict. There need

be nothing about the proposed concert itself that necessitates its failure, but the force of

White’s own argument and the structural-realist terms in which it is cast give him every

reason to doubt its success.

Axelrod’s experiment, however, turned out rather differently. The strategy determined by

the application of backwards induction from an assumed end-game defection might be

considered one of harm minimization: it eliminates any chance of receiving the sucker’s

payoff, but at the cost of maintaining an environment of perpetual mistrust and of foregoing

the chance of benefitting from cooperation. It allows the game to played safely, but not well.

The strategies submitted to Axelrod’s competition aimed, for the most part, to do better than

this. Those that performed best, when considered in aggregate across the entire competition,

- 5 -

were those he terms “nice” strategies – they were never the first to defect, and would do so

only when provoked. They differed in terms of what opponent behaviour would count as

provocation and in how they managed retaliation, but they shared this easily definable feature

that runs against the grain of harm minimization. There were, in this first run of the

experiment, some “end-game” effects, but these tended to be restricted to the final handful of

moves, and clearly did not negate the advantage gained by the nice strategies. The strategy

that performed best overall, both in this experiment and the one that followed (with a

significantly greater number of competitors, all of whom were provided with full details of

the first competition, and an indeterminate number of moves in each round), was the one

dubbed TIT-FOR-TAT. This simple strategy always starts by cooperating, and in all

subsequent moves mimics the behaviour of its opponent in the previous round. Thus, if the

opposing strategy cooperates in this round, TIT-FOR-TAT cooperates in the next; the same

applies to defection. Perhaps the most striking feature of this strategy is that it never “beats”

its opponent; if we assume that payoffs are symmetrical, then the best that TIT-FOR-TAT can

achieve is parity for persistent mutual cooperation. It risks doing worse than its opponent by

offering up the temptation payoff in the first round but is quick to punish such opportunism.

However, it does not bear a grudge and equally quickly rewards cooperative behaviour. In

essence, it does well overall by helping its opponents do well, even a little better than itself,

assuming those opponents are sufficiently responsive to TIT-FOR-TAT’s reciprocating style

(Axelrod, 1990, p. 112). “Mean” (those that will defect first or without provocation) or

capricious strategies (like RANDOM) tend not to do well, but they also tend to take nice,

reciprocating strategies like TIT-FOR-TAT down with them. Nevertheless, TIT-FOR-TAT is

robust, doing well in a wide range of situations. Axelrod distills the results of his

competitions into “four simple suggestions for how to do well in a durable iterated Prisoner’s

Dilemma: 1. Don’t be envious. 2. Don’t be the first to defect. 3. Reciprocate both

cooperation and defection. 4. Don’t be too clever” (1990, p. 110).

- 6 -

The last of these “suggestions” reaches into the heart of strategic thinking – one’s own

actions will affect those of an opponent in a competitive situation. When this situation is

zero-sum, the intentions of each player are clear and fixed with respect to one another, and it

pays to be as sophisticated and farsighted as possible in analyzing a series of moves and

countermoves; the moves one makes will be in direct response to those of the opponent, but

there is never any doubt regarding the aims of each player, and in principle, the further ahead

one can see, the better able one is to limit the opponent’s choices and broaden one’s own. By

contrast, in prisoner’s dilemma, and other “mixed-motive” games (after Schelling),

“winning” does not necessarily imply the opponent’s defeat, and the best outcome is likely to

be contingent upon a degree of coordination. Signalling intentions clearly and unequivocally

is most easily achieved by “announcing” a willingness to cooperate from the start, and by

responding swiftly and consistently to the other’s behaviour. Deviations from this pattern –

whether by trying an occasional unprovoked defection in pursuit of short-term gain, by not

quickly punishing similar such attempts on the opponent’s part, or by sustaining rewards or

punishments for too long in spite of changes in the other’s behaviour – risk adding sufficient

“noise” as to render unintelligible the message one is hoping to convey, and thereby making

coordination of action all but impossible.

Under such formalized conditions, then, strategies for playing iterated two-player mixed-

motive games with the payoff structure of a prisoner’s dilemma, that are not predicated on

defeating the opponent, and that are nice, reciprocating, clear and consistent, tend on the

whole to do well and to allow “opponents” to do well (or better) by encouraging mutual

cooperation. Thus, in addition to the strategy itself, there are three circumstantial parameters

that define the nature of the game and may therefore affect the success of such strategies.

These are the time dimension, the payoff structure, and the number of players involved.

Kenneth Oye (1985) has discussed these parameters in the context of international

cooperation under anarchy, and his analysis provides us with a framework for further

- 7 -

consideration of White’s formulation of the US-China relationship.

As discussed above, in the single-round prisoner’s dilemma, the payoff structure that

defines the game determines that mutual defection is the only sensible strategy. Although

mutual cooperation would appear at first blush to serve the interests of each player better,

because there is no expectation of future interactions that might offer reward for cooperation,

fear of the sucker’s payoff eliminates cooperation as a viable option for either player. For

games with a predetermined end-point known to both players, the logic of backwards

induction produces the same result for the entire series. In each of these cases, we might say

that the future is valued at zero relative to the present. For an infinite series, no round can be

temporally differentiated from any other, and the “future” is therefore valued as highly as the

“present.” For all games of finite but not predetermined length, the value of future payoffs is

some fraction of the present payoffs. A future that is heavily “discounted” with respect to the

present implies a high probability that the number of rounds will be small (and vice versa),

and a lightly discounted future implies that a long game is thought to be likely. Therefore,

the higher the value of the future relative to the present (that is, the longer the game seems

likely to be), the greater the likelihood that cooperation will be an attractive strategy. In the

second of his tournaments, Axelrod effectively set the value of the future by determining the

probability that the game would end on any given round; this was sufficiently high that

cooperative strategies had a good chance of being successful (Axelrod, 1990, pp. 42-43). For

real players, the relative value attributed to future interactions derives from a complex array

of factors both internal and external to the game, and here, perception counts for everything.

For example, the future may be heavily discounted for either player or both if it appears to

them that the circumstances of either (or both) are sufficiently unstable as to cause a re-

evaluation of priorities such that the payoff structure of their interactions changes, making

cooperation significantly more or less likely. Unless both parties become simultaneously

more likely to cooperate (which is to say that their interests become more closely aligned,

- 8 -

resulting ultimately in “harmony”), any such shift is more likely to result in the defection of

at least one player. Oye focusses on ambiguities in the definitions of cooperation and

defection that may reduce the stabilizing effect of strategies of reciprocity, thus shortening the

“shadow of the future.” In the absence of explicit and agreed upon parameters, players may

fail to recognize (or plausibly claim such failure) the nature of the other’s action, or fail to see

it at all if processes are not transparent. Further, the flexibility of action required in order to

respond quickly and clearly to the other’s behaviour may be limited if the players are large,

complex entities like states (Oye, 1985, pp. 15-16).

Much of the foregoing assumes that each party is engaged in playing the same game, i.e.

that their preferences are similarly arranged, and that this arrangement corresponds to the

formal structure of the prisoner’s dilemma. For this to be the case, players need not attach

the same values to the various payoffs, but they must occur in the same order. Once again,

for real players, determining the relative value of different outcomes may not be

straightforward. It may not be so obvious to the non-Realist, for example, that the US would

prefer war with China over voluntary withdrawal from Asia: each option would entail

significant costs, but these are, at least initially, of different kinds and not easily comparable.

Similarly, if China does indeed value its great power status in Asia above all other

considerations, as White suggests, then its defection in any interactions that do not fully

satisfy this demand may be all but inevitable. But values need not be so starkly opposed for

players to muddy or even poison the waters. In spite of the perception that interactions are

likely to be ongoing, and even if the ordinal values of payoffs are consistent and compatible,

changes in the absolute value of various payoffs can be important. If the benefits of mutual

cooperation only marginally outweigh those of mutual defection, and/or if the temptation of

gains from unilateral defection is too great for either player, the shadow of the future may be

shortened by the relative discounting of later cooperation. On the other hand, payoffs can be

altered in such a way as to improve the chances of cooperation. Oye cites Jervis’ account of

- 9 -

unilateral actions that can alter the payoff structure in ways reassuring to opponents: by

favouring procurement of defensive over offensive armaments, placing troops on borders that

serve as de facto hostages, or publicizing agreements, players can reduce, and most

importantly, be seen to reduce the benefits that might accrue from defection; although as he

notes, such unilateral shifts may unfortunately increase vulnerability to the other’s defection

(Jervis, 1978, pp. 178-179). Bilateral strategies include decomposing payoffs into multiple

parts and playing for each, or linking different issues, such that addressing one is contingent

upon a cooperative outcome in another; each of these is designed to increase the chances of

future interactions and therefore the benefits of cooperation now (Oye, 1985, p. 11). In the

Cold War setting, it has been argued (if not entirely convincingly) that military technology,

and nuclear weapons in particular, have so elevated the benefits of cooperation and

diminished the chances for success of unilateral defection to have changed the game structure

altogether, from a prisoner’s dilemma to a “stag hunt,” or even harmony in more optimistic

formulations (Oye, 1985, p. 9).

The importance attributed to future interactions and the payoff structure that defines them

are, then, thoroughly interdependent. Changes affecting one variable (say, in the relative

discount applied to the future) will produce a change in the other (the relative weighting or

even the preference-order of payoffs), and vice versa. However, the relationship between

these changes is not linear, and for two primary reasons. First, as alluded to above, there is

always the operation of what Edward Luttwak (2001) has termed the “paradoxical logic of

strategy”: in any conflictual relationship, including those also involving some degree of

cooperation, the actions of one party come up against the opposition, total or partial, of the

other. As a result, there is a tendency for the effects of those actions to be reversed, to a

greater or lesser degree. The opposing reaction suffers a similar fate, and so on, in a

potentially endless recursion. Such is the foundation of any number of the commonplaces of

strategic thought, from apparently self-contradictory pronouncements like “if peace is

- 10 -

desired, prepare for war,” to the security dilemma, to nuclear deterrence, to the prisoner’s

dilemma itself. Thus, decomposition of payoffs, for example, may well improve the chances

of ongoing cooperation by reducing the cost associated with an instance of unrequited

cooperation, but this simultaneously lowers the risk of derailing an ongoing interaction by

means of an isolated defection, thereby increasing the temptation to try one’s luck. Second,

as we have already seen, the interplay between the future and payoffs for real players is

mediated through that between perceptions and values.

The effects of the relationship between perceptions and values are themselves somewhat

paradoxical. Values, whatever their specific content, tend to be relatively stable, and may

indeed be considered by those holding them to be eternal, regardless of what historical

evidence there may be as to their mutability. Perceptions of behaviour, one’s own or

another’s, are given meaning at least in part by the interpretive framework established by a

system of such values, which is in turn extended and reinforced by having “made sense” of

those perceptions whose meanings are incorporated into the framework. This has a

conservative effect on the revaluations of future discounts and payoff structures that

characterize ongoing competitive interactions, gradually raising the threshold for what would

count as evidence to the contrary of increasingly reified and generalized beliefs. In a

strategic situation, however, such apparent stability is fragile and must finally succumb.

Eventually, the weight of internal contradictions is unsustainable and the entire edifice

collapses; the more extensive and sophisticated the system of beliefs must become in order to

accommodate and reconcile interpretations of perceived behaviour with “immutable” values,

the more potentially devastating its exposure to the inevitable reversal. In highly schematic

terms, this provides one way of understanding the collapse of the Soviet Union. In its

transformations from Marxist revolution to Leninist state to Stalinist empire, the fundamental

contradiction, of a state apparatus founded on the principle of control of the means of

economic and political production by labour but manifested in totalitarian repression by a

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small and powerful elite, could be made sense of only in the context of a project of

continuous expansion, culminating in global revolution and the “return” of the state to the

workers. Failure of continued expansion beyond Eastern Europe and Central Asia (the

occasional allied communist state outside these borders notwithstanding) in the face of the

US-led resistance of “degenerate” capitalism on the one hand, and a rivalry with the

nominally ideologically aligned China on the other, exposed this contradiction to the need for

justification in terms other than those of the moribund revolutionary project. The concession

of piecemeal freedoms to a disgruntled populace, in pale mimicry of those enjoyed as rights

in the West, could only weaken further a structure teetering on such a foundation, and

certainly could not prevent its disintegration.

Despite the almost total opposition between their respective value systems, the US and

the USSR clearly shared at least one common interest: survival of the state. This single

paramount concern, in the developing context of a nuclear weapons doctrine that assured

mutual destruction in the event of direct armed conflict, was arguably sufficient to raise the

probability of cooperation on this issue to near certainty. The deepest suspicions of each

concerning the motivations of the other did not prevent, and indeed likely facilitated

cooperation on this primary issue. Such distrust made it necessary that strategies regarding

the development, testing, deployment and posture of nuclear weapons more or less conform

with Axelrod’s “rules” regarding transparency and reciprocity. The proper functioning of

these strategies was absolutely predicated on distrust – any thawing of relations short of full

harmonization of interests risked reducing the pressure to maintain sufficient clarity of

statement and action to avoid potentially disastrous misunderstanding. Without the fear that

any significant “wrong move” might trigger a fatal response, there would be the temptation to

hedge and dissemble in order to gain the upper hand with a sneaky defection. In virtually

every other aspect of the relationship, secrecy and deception may have been ubiquitous,

defection the norm. It is worth considering that perhaps the distrust engendered by this

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behaviour was in fact necessary to the maintenance of the defining aspect of the Cold War:

the non-use of nuclear weapons.

The US-Soviet example provides us with a sort of limiting case of the paradoxical

interactions between future and payoffs, perceptions and values, highlighting the potentially

positive role of distrust in establishing cooperation between states under conditions of

anarchy. Considerations of “strategic distrust” have been the focus of recently published

exchanges between Chinese and American scholars with interests in policy and often deep

connections with their respective governments. Kenneth Lieberthal and Wang Jisi coined this

phrase in a monograph for the Brookings Institution, and it permeates a collection of

epistolary dialogues collected under the title Debating China (Hachigian, 2014), to which

Lieberthal and Wang also contribute. They define strategic distrust simply as “mutual

distrust of long-term intentions,” and go on to characterize it as “corrosive, producing

attitudes and actions that themselves contribute to greater distrust. Distrust itself makes it

difficult for leaders on each side to be confident they understand the deep thinking among

leaders on the other side regarding the future U.S.-China relationship.” Their purpose in

examining the phenomenon “is to enable each leadership to better fathom how the other

thinks – and therefore to devise more effective ways to build strategic trust” (Lieberthal &

Wang, 2012, pp. vi-vii).

At stake for all these authors is the possibility of cooperation between the US and China,

and the collected exchanges cover the gamut of contexts for their relationship, including

economics, political systems and values, global responsibilities, climate change, military

development, and regional security, among others. Common to each of them is the

underlying assumption that competition and cooperation are in some sense mutually

exclusive; not that each cannot exist alongside the other, but that as one increases, the other

must diminish. Further, it is assumed that the key to increasing cooperation at the expense of

competition is the development of “strategic trust,” and moreover, as Lieberthal and Wang

- 13 -

note, that deep understanding of the other is fundamental to the generation of such trust.

Throughout the dialogues, authors bemoan the distrust that hampers cooperation, and yet

despite this, each also indicates the substantial, if insufficient, level of cooperation that occurs

across each layer of the US-China relationship. Only one author, Yuan Peng, suggests that

“mutual trust can only be established gradually after a period of sustained cooperation”

(Hachigian, 2014, p. 94), thus reversing received wisdom concerning the direction of

causality between trust and cooperation, but just a few pages later reverts to a restatement of

the apparent conundrum in which all these authors remain bogged: “What can we do to

improve our effective and meaningful cooperation? I think mutual trust is the key” (2014, p.

103).

US-Soviet interactions are raised in this collection as a foil against which the US-China

relationship is to be contrasted, both historically and normatively. It is taken for granted that

the former was a zero-sum game and the latter is not (see, for example, Michael Green’s

contribution; Hachigian, 2014, p. 206), but that persistent and deepening distrust risks

pushing US-China interactions towards this abyss (e.g. 2014, p. 4 and p. 107). As the above

analysis of the US-Soviet relationship shows, however, even a single shared interest, no

matter the degree of mutual distrust, may be sufficient to introduce the conditions for

structuring a relationship as an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and that if the stakes are

sufficiently high, distrust may help to ensure that states conduct themselves in a manner that

enhances cooperation.

None of this is to suggest that continued distrust between China and America is of itself a

good thing, merely that the relationship between trust and cooperation is not necessarily one

of simple mutual reinforcement. Assuming it to be so, as the contributors to Debating China

do, risks leaving us paralyzed by the apparent insurmountability of the “trust deficit.” From a

different perspective, the key to cooperation need not be the building of trust, but the

leveraging of distrust. If Lieberthal and Wang are correct in their assertion that the “three

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fundamental sources of strategic distrust between the United States and China” include their

differing “political traditions, value systems, and cultures,” “insufficient comprehension and

appreciation of each other’s policy-making processes and relations between the government

and other entities,” and “the perceived narrowing power gap” between them, then there may

be no real choice (Lieberthal & Wang, 2012, pp. 35-36). As we have seen, perception and

understanding are in large degree functions of the value systems that provide the interpretive

lenses through which behaviour is observed, and for a value system to count as such, it must

be resistant to change, and therefore to the generation of trust between competing value

systems. At the same time, a value system approaching a point of crisis as it begins to crack

under its own weight of contradiction, as some commentators on either side of the US-China

debate appear rather hopefully to predict for the other, would seem at least as likely to reform

in hardened opposition to its old rival as in any sort of congruence with it, assuming that the

intervening chaos did not result in irreversibly destructive conflict. If, ultimately, the source

of strategic distrust is reducible to the contest between rival value systems, then making the

best of the distrust we have is the only viable option.

For White, the possibility of US-Chinese cooperation entails the sharing of power in Asia,

but any arrangement to which the pair might agree is immediately complicated by the

presence of other Asian powers, particularly Japan. The problem posed by Japan is both

structural and empirical: as a “strategic client” of America, it tips the balance of power in

Asia sufficiently towards the US as to make maintenance of the status quo appear natural and

viable in American eyes, and therefore more likely to trigger Chinese defection from what it

sees as an unsustainable order. In order to move from this deadlock towards a situation in

which China might value cooperation over conflict, some sense of parity between the powers

must be established, necessitating the severance of the US-Japan alliance. Japan would in

this case be obliged to restore to itself sufficient power (including the acquisition of nuclear

weapons) to resist being swept into the Chinese orbit, which would tip the balance too far in

- 15 -

the other direction, with a similar risk of deadlock. An action on Japan’s part designed to

extricate itself from “the untenable position of relying for its security on an adversarial

relationship between its two most important international partners” would have the effect of

shifting the payoff structure for China and America so as to improve the odds of cooperation,

but at the cost of significantly complicating the game by introducing a third player (White,

2013, chapter 5). From White’s broadly realist perspective, a system of three or more states

in a balance of power will be unstable and exist always on the brink of war. He looks to the

Concert of Europe for a model offering a chance for greater stability, noting that it kept the

peace in Europe for a hundred years until 1914, and casts about for Asian powers suitable for

inclusion, adding India primarily on the basis of its potential for future influence. White

draws from his model seven “fundamental understandings that must be sustained if the

concert is to endure,” a “formidable list” that explains both the rarity and occasional success

of such concerts, not least because “it shows they do not survive merely on trust.” Indeed,

given the circumstances White describes, a concert of Asia may require systemic distrust to

survive. As he acknowledges, “concerts have usually been erected in the aftermath of major

wars” (White, 2013, chapter 8). Jervis has argued that all three of the concerts that have

occurred in modern history have followed major wars, and that only one of these could be

regarded as successful.2 War against a potential hegemon is a function of the balance of

power that normally prevails, but at the same time, war undermines the primary assumptions

that maintain the balance – the freedom of states to form alliances with any other(s) in the

system in pursuit of short-term interests, and the use or threat of war as a tool of statecraft.

So far, only major war has been a cause sufficient to undermine these assumptions to the

extent that a concert may emerge from the disrupted balance (Jervis, 1985, pp. 60-61). White

hopes that it is not necessary, and it can be argued that in the setting of sustained systemic

2. Jervis is rather less sanguine than White regarding the success of the concert of Europe, holding that it ended with the Crimean War in 1854, but functioned fully only until 1822 (Jervis, 1985, p. 58).

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distrust, major war may be avoided, and there is greater hope for a functioning concert.

Maintaining the sustained cooperation between more than two states that characterizes a

concert requires overcoming the increased number of transactions and rising information

costs, problems of recognition, diversity in payoff structures, and difficulty in clearly

implementing reciprocity that accompany enlarging the number of players in an iterated

prisoner’s dilemma (Oye, 1985, pp. 19-20). Systemic distrust arising from competing value

systems may have the effect of allaying certain of these difficulties by narrowing the range of

interests that are at stake in the game to those that are of the highest, even existential, import,

and by helping to ensure that communication by word and deed regarding these interests is

clear. Given also, as a precondition, that none of the powers included in a concert would be

sufficiently powerful on its own to dominate all the others, endemic distrust would mitigate

against the formation of alliances within the group, having the effect of undermining the

assumptions both of freedom of alliance and use of war that would promote the collapse of a

concert into a balance of power. Additionally, where the memory of war appears to fade and

allow the balance of power to reassert itself as the governing principle of interstate relations

(Jervis, 1985, pp. 61-62), systemic distrust is likely to be reinforced by ongoing interactions

between competing value systems; the greater danger may in fact lie in the values of some

concert members becoming too closely aligned. Little enough work should be necessary to

prevent this unfortunate event.

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