Is United States inching toward conflict with China 2023 ?

China 2023 ? Tensions between the United States and China have been on the rise in recent years, particularly over issues such as trade, technology, and geopolitical influence. However, whether this will ultimately lead to a full-blown military conflict between the two countries is difficult to predict.

It’s worth noting that the United States and China are both major powers with extensive global reach, and conflict between them would have significant consequences for the entire world. As a result, both countries have strong incentives to avoid direct military confrontation and to seek diplomatic solutions to their differences.

That being said, it is also true that both countries have engaged in military posturing and provocative actions in recent years, particularly in the South China Sea, where China has been building and militarizing islands that are also claimed by other countries in the region. The U.S. has conducted freedom of navigation operations in the area, which China sees as a violation of its sovereignty. There have also been ongoing concerns about cyber-espionage and intellectual property theft.

Overall, while the situation between the United States and China is certainly tense, it’s important to keep in mind that both countries have a lot to lose if they were to go to war. As such, it’s in the interest of both sides to continue to engage in dialogue and seek peaceful solutions to their disputes.

What happens next?

Everyone should brace for this to be the new Chinese party line, Kennedy says. “Nothing Xi Jinping or the Chinese leadership in general says about foreign policy or the U.S. in particular is by accident,” and his new aim at the U.S. “sets a tone that other officials within China will have to follow.”

That will certainly not help restart efforts to improve U.S.-China trade, scientific and cultural exchanges, or political relations, the Journal says. And Europe and Asia will “pine for more stable U.S.-China relations that might reduce the political risk of trading with each of the world’s two largest economies or trying to choose between them.”

“In the near term, given Xi’s increasingly assertive policies — including foolish acts such as the ill-timed balloon — we will probably have to spend more time on the rivalry side” of “the Sino-American strategic competition,” Harvard’s Joseph Nye writes at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute. What we need to prevent is this crucial relationship developing into another Cold War or worse, and more aptly, another “1914, when all the great powers expected a short Third Balkan War, only to end up with World War I, which lasted four years and destroyed four empires,”

In the 1910s, political leaders “didn’t pay enough attention to the growing strength of nationalism,” now on the rise in China and the U.S., Nye adds. “If the Sino-American relationship was a card game, one could say that we have been dealt a good hand. But even a good hand can lose if it’s badly played. Seen against the historical context of 1914, the recent balloon incident should remind us why we need guardrails.”