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Can the United States find ways to cooperate with China or Russia in the Indo-Pacific, either to temper geopolitical rivalry or as a strategy to use cooperation with one of the two countries as an advantage against the other? Using official U.S., Chinese, and Russian policy documents, leadership statements, and other sources, the authors of this report assess the prospects for great power cooperation on seven issues: securing a free and open Indo-Pacific, ensuring the defense of key allies and partners, expanding cooperation with new partners in Southeast Asia, ensuring peace in the Taiwan Strait, achieving the denuclearization of North Korea, countering terrorism, and deepening U.S. geostrategic ties with India. The authors find that, because of the divergence in the three countries' strategic views and policy goals, there is little room for U.S. cooperation with China or Russia in the Indo-Pacific. This implies that cooperation in order to tamp down competitive pressures or to drive wedges between Beijing and Moscow is an unpromising approach to managing ties or competition with these great powers. Instead, the United States will be better off focusing on preparations for long-term competition than striving to turn Beijing and Moscow against each other. This research was completed in September 2020, before the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and before the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. It has not been subsequently revised.

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Key U.S. allies, security partners, and diplomatic interlocutors in the Indo-Pacific have been establishing or deepening their defense ties by branching out, engaging with each other on high-level security consultations, selling or transferring defense articles, engaging in joint defense industrial development, carrying out bilateral training and exercises, and signing defense-related agreements. Today, these nations — Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea — are also cooperating with such non–U.S.-treaty countries as India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, which have aligned themselves more closely with the United States as China has grown both more powerful and more assertive in recent years. As a consequence, a set of important new linkages and security commitments among regional actors is forming, with substantial consequences for the United States, China, and the Indo-Pacific region. This report highlights the extent to which regional actors' security initiatives are a response to the perceived threat posed by a rising, assertive China. This report also calls attention to the strong support that the United States continues to enjoy across the region, with numerous actors expanding their security partnerships out of a desire to reinforce the existing regional order centered on a set of U.S. alliances so as to help share the burdens of security maintenance. The analysis points out the importance of understanding the diverse motivations that regional actors have for expanding and deepening their regional security partnerships, and it highlights key areas for building partner capacity. Finally, the authors clarify which aspects of deepening security relationships derive from concerns about China and which stem from considerations other than balancing.

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The People's Republic of China's (PRC's) and the People's Liberation Army's (PLA's) understanding of the military balance is fundamentally based on systems warfare concepts. Systems concepts drive China's perceptions of the successes of its three-decade-old modernization and its identification of enduring or emerging weaknesses. China's leaders recognize the qualitative and quantitative improvements in PLA weapons and technology; however, in key areas essential to conducting systems confrontation and systems destruction warfare, there remain significant gaps that have received the attention of Xi Jinping himself. During Xi's tenure, the PLA has been forced to confront a range of problems that go well beyond technological modernization, force structure, and organizational relationships. Still, both the United States and the PRC, through different evaluation processes, have concluded that war with the other has the potential to be extremely risky from an escalation standpoint, protracted and costly, and fatally harmful to long-term credibility and/or strategic goals. This analysis is one of the first to detail how the PLA understands and assesses military balance. The PLA sees itself as the weaker side in the overall military balance, largely because it has made only limited progress in those key areas that will define future warfare, most importantly informatization and system-of-systems–based operations. Necessary improvements have not materialized quickly and will likely take time because of the PLA's organizational culture and the improvements' systemic complexity. A refined understanding of Beijing's view of the PLA also has significant implications for U.S. policymakers, military commanders, and planners.

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Although a non-Arctic state, China has become a significant player in the Arctic region, engaging in economic, scientific, cultural, diplomatic, and military activities in and around various Arctic countries. This report assesses the potential implications of Chinese investments and activities in the Arctic for the regional rules-based order and for regional and transatlantic security. In this research, which was conducted as a collaborative effort between the RAND Corporation and the Swedish Defence Research Agency (Totalförsvarets Forskningsinstitut, or FOI), the authors evaluate China's strategy and diplomacy in the region and inventory existing activities in the North American Arctic (United States, Canada, and Greenland). The complementary FOI report, China's Economic Influence in the Arctic Region: The Nordic and Russian Cases, is available from FOI's website. Through such approaches as a scenario-based tabletop exercise, this study also takes a broader look beyond the Arctic region to better understand the types and characteristics of Chinese activities that have been problematic and potentially destabilizing in other parts of the world. The authors assess how some of these activities could also arise in the Arctic-a region whose physical, political, economic, and social characteristics set it apart, in many ways, from the rest of the world. They advance five recommendations that the U.S. government-particularly the U.S. Department of Defense-in collaboration with international partners and indigenous populations could take to maintain and reinforce current factors of Arctic resilience and mitigate undesirable Chinese involvement in the region.

Security, International --- Geopolitics --- Arctic regions --- China --- Strategic aspects. --- Foreign economic relations --- Foreign relations