Conflict & Conflict Resolution

Stephen Walt outlines how Washington and Beijing could stop the war in Ukraine.

Belfer Center experts on the U.S.-China relationship and Middle East issues shared thoughts on the significance of the unexpected Iran-Saudi Arabia agreement brokered by China. 

Stephen Walt analyzes why China's foreign-policy reset will—or won't—work out.

 Stephen Walt decided to look back to see if 2022 had gone according to his expectations. In his last column of 2021, he had described "Biden’s 2022 Foreign-Policy To-Do List." What did he get right, what did he get wrong, and how well did the Biden administration perform?

Stephen Walt provides A realist POV on the war in Ukraine, competition with China, COVID, and more in the second part of an interview with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

Stephen Walt's argument tries to answer the following question: What impact will the decisions taken at the recent Party Congress have on the balance of power and U.S.-China competition? From a U.S. perspective, was what just took place in Beijing good news or not?

The world’s oceans have always provided ships with room to hide. New technology is changing that. Small satellites now collect terabytes of global data daily. Computational analytics can mine that data as humans cannot. Increasingly, this information expands the ability to identify and track ships and their activities, including those affecting national and international security. 

A quarter-century ago, China conducted what it called “missile tests” bracketing the island of Taiwan to deter it from a move toward independence by demonstrating that China could cut Taiwan’s ocean lifelines. In response, in a show of superiority that forced China to back down, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers to Taiwan’s adjacent waters. If China were to repeat the same missile tests today, it is highly unlikely that the United States would respond as it did in 1996. If U.S. carriers moved that close to the Chinese mainland now, they could be sunk by the DF-21 and DF-26 missiles that China has since developed and deployed. This article presents three major theses concerning the military rivalry between China and the United States in this century.

China believes that the U.S.’s longtime One China policy is evolving into a One China, One Taiwan policy. That’s not an accurate reading of the American view on Taiwan, argues Kevin Rudd, but it explains why China is now signaling more clearly than ever its willingness to attack. I have long argued that the geopolitical disaster of a war between the U.S. and China need not be inevitable. That remains my view, Rudd writes—if both sides adopt some basic strategic guardrails. But for the foreseeable future, it’s time for all of us to fasten our seat belts.

In his new book, The Avoidable War?, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd demystifies the actions of the U.S. and China, explaining and translating them for the benefit of the other. Geopolitical disaster is still avoidable, but only if these two giants can find a way to coexist without betraying their core interests through what Rudd calls “managed strategic competition.” Should they fail, down that path lies the possibility of a war that could rewrite the future of both countries, and the world.