America’s Growing Agreement on Countering Russia-China Challenges

Abstract

Against the background of previous U.S. government approaches after the Cold War, this chapter focuses on domestic U.S. determinants of the remarkable shift in American policy toward China, along with the concurrent U.S. policy toward Russia. The argument employs Robert Putnam’s framework of “two-level games” to explain how the impact of domestic contestation and public opinion on elite-driven policy causes deviations from a standard realist approach to U.S.-China-Russia relations, and explains the development of a more unified and coherent U.S. approach toward China and Russia by the end of the Trump government’s first term. This chapter also highlights the endogeneity of the U.S.-China-Russia strategic triangle that is absent from most work on the subject. Not only does U.S. policy toward China and Russia affect bilateral China-Russia relations, but the causal arrow also runs in the other direction, with improvements in the China-Russia bilateral relationship affecting U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy incentives.