CSIS BRIEFS | WWW.CSIS.ORG | 1THE ISSUE:EDITORS’ NOTEEdited by Jude Blanchette of CSIS and Hal Brands of SAIS, the Marshall Papers is a series of essays that probes and challenges the assessments underpinning the U.S. approach to great power rivalry. The Papers will be rigorous yet provocative, continually pushing the boundaries of intellectual and policy debates. In this Marshall Paper, Michael J. Mazarr argues that amid escalating U.S.-China tensions, American policymakers are gravely underprepared to manage the episodic crises that form an inevitable part of great power rivalry. Effective crisis response can not only prevent escalation, but also strengthen U.S. strategic advantage within the larger rivalry. Drawing lessons from the Cold War, Mazarr distills six principles to guide crisis management among U.S. policymakers navigating an increasingly crisis-prone U.S.-China relationship. NOVEMBER 2022By Michael J. Mazarrith U.S.-China relations already headed toward a more belligerent rivalry, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022 was bound to cause heartburn in Beijing. China responded with an elaborate show of force around the island: shooting missiles over Taiwan and into Japanese exclusive economic zone (EEZ) waters, firing rocket artillery into the Taiwan Strait, declaring a ring of maritime exclusion zones around Taiwan, and surging over 200 military aircraft and 50 ships into Taiwanese airspace and waters.1 Many now refer to the event as the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis.2Yet compared to previous confrontations around Taiwan, the United States this time failed to play much of its appointed part. The Biden administration mostly stayed aloof, condemning China’s actions but not dispatching U.S. forces to confront China directly.3 If there was a crisis, it was largely one-sided, with China posturing and slinging missiles and the United States watching from the sidelines. The resulting U.S. coolness left China thrashing in a performative display that produced condemnations from Japan, Australia, and Europe.4This U.S. strategy might have been quietly brilliant, inviting China to stamp and roar and drive many countries further into a balancing coalition. The administration may have decided that a belligerent response would have been inappropriate given that it had been the action of a U.S. official that had sparked the crisis. But it remains to be seen if restraint was the right choice. The crisis arguably furnished China with an ability to set a new threshold for military intimidation in the strait and beyond.5 Some observers worried that U.S. moderation would encourage China to escalate its coercion in the future, a concern fueled in part by commentary in China that seemed to brag about the absence of a more forceful U.S. response.6One thing seems clear: an era of persistent confrontations in U.S.-China relations has arrived.7 The escalating rivalry U.S.-China Relations in the TankA Handbook for an Era of Persistent ConfrontationCSIS BRIEFSW CSIS BRIEFS | WWW.CSIS.ORG | 2is, unavoidably, a long-term campaign for predominance in which each side makes investments, builds forces, and develops technologies to gain competitive advantage—as symbolized by the set of potent sanctions Washington recently imposed on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry.8 But it will also take a more perilous form as a series of discrete collisions that demand careful statecraft. Not all these events will be on the scale of the Taiwan Strait Crisis. Some could involve sudden disclosures of Chinese troops at foreign bases, large-scale cyber intrusions of U.S. systems, or proxy conflicts that emerge out of disputes over third parties.9 But some of the confrontations could be even violent and dangerous, such as outright Chinese military action against islands in the Taiwan Strait, an all-out blockade of Taiwan itself, or even seeming preparations for an invasion.10In dealing with the Taiwan issue and larger U.S.-China relations, the United States should keep firmly in mind that these are primarily political issues, which demand diplomatic solutions. Attending to the statecraft of the larger relationship is the essential route to avoiding and mitigating crises. But in intense rivalries, crises are likely to emerge despite such efforts. In such an era of persistent clashes, the United States will need criteria to guide its responses—a handbook for managing a series of skirmishes within the larger rivalry.11 This essay offers an initial down payment on such thinking by drawing lessons from the most recent U.S. experience with managing crises within a larger rivalry: the Cold War. It uses those lessons to suggest six principles for managing confrontations with China. The resulting approach is to get the fundamentals of a systemic competition right and then strike a difficult but necessary balance: respond rapidly and decisively in support of a few vital commitments while resisting the urge to