With Xi Jinping expected in Washington soon, now seems as good a time as any to unpack one of the more consequential phrases to emerge from the latest round of China–U.S. diplomacy: “a constructive relationship of strategic stability.” （The White House’s official characterization adds “based on fairness and reciprocity.”)
In May, Xi offered four dimensions of such a relationship: “a positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, a sound stability with moderate competition, a constant stability with manageable differences, and an enduring stability with promises of peace.” Since then, Chinese academics have been busy trying to work out what exactly all of that means.
International Review 国际观察, a journal published by Shanghai International Studies University, devoted a section of its latest August issue to reflections by leading Chinese international relations scholars on “a constructive relationship of strategic stability” between China and the United States.
Among the contributors is Zhu Feng, Professor and Dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, whose article examines the core meaning of this new framework and the pathways towards putting it into practice.
What follows is an English translation of Zhu’s article, which Zhu himself has kindly reviewed.
朱锋:中美建设性战略稳定关系的核心要义与建设路径
Zhu Feng: The Core Meaning of and Pathways Towards a Constructive China-U.S. Relationship of Strategic Stability
During his visit to China in May 2026, Donald Trump held in-depth, candid, and strategic discussions with Xi Jinping on the stability and development of bilateral relations. This marked the 14th state visit to China by a U.S. president since President Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972.
The two leaders agreed on the need to build “a constructive relationship of strategic stability.” This represents not only a new definition of China–U.S. relations, but also a new test of how the relationship should be understood and advanced. The future stability, manageability, and sustained mutually beneficial development of bilateral relations will depend to a considerable extent on how the two countries make “a constructive relationship of strategic stability” a regular, concrete, and institutionalised feature of their ties.
I. “Strategic Stability” Was a Central Concept for Managing Strategic Competition Between Great Powers During the Cold War
“Strategic stability” emerged as an important concept in international security during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the late 1950s, in response to the intensifying U.S.–Soviet nuclear arms race, the RAND Corporation, a major U.S. think tank, were the first to develop the concept of strategic stability. It argued strongly that the two superpowers needed to ease their nuclear arms race, keep their adversarial relationship under control, and guard against the risk of military conflict escalating into all-out nuclear war.
By the 1970s, a strategic-stability policy framework had largely taken shape amid the U.S.–Soviet Cold War confrontation. Its central premise was that, given the enormous land-, air- and sea-based nuclear strike capabilities developed by the two superpowers by that time, the prospect of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) could serve to manage conflict, restrain either side from seeking to destroy the other militarily, and prevent both all-out war and the catastrophic escalation of military conflict from conventional warfare to limited nuclear war and ultimately full-scale nuclear war.
In December 1987, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in Washington, D.C., bringing an end to their competition over missile deployments in Europe. The treaty was regarded as an important agreement for advancing strategic stability after U.S.–Soviet relations moved into a period of détente. Limiting the number of offensive nuclear warheads and delivery systems, while continuing to advance nuclear disarmament and nuclear arms control, became important elements in giving concrete form to the concept of strategic stability.
The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, bringing the Cold War to an end. In April 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). Under the treaty, each side agreed to limits of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers, and 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers and heavy bombers. The treaty was to remain in force for ten years. In 2021, the United States and Russia agreed to extend New START for another five years.
The outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, however, once again caused U.S.–Russian relations to deteriorate. Against the backdrop of continuing Western sanctions on Russia, Moscow subsequently suspended its participation in the New START and revised its principles governing the use of nuclear weapons.
However, the concept of “strategic stability” that developed during the U.S.–Soviet Cold War and continued to shape U.S.–Russian relations in the post-Cold War era does not apply to China–U.S. relations.
First, China has consistently followed the principle of maintaining a “minimum nuclear deterrent” and has refrained from a nuclear arms race. Even today, the scale of China’s nuclear forces and delivery systems remains far smaller than those of the United States and Russia.
Second, China continues to uphold its no-first-use policy. China maintains nuclear weapons solely to preserve an effective nuclear deterrent and to provide a strategic means of nuclear retaliation after suffering a nuclear strike. The narrow conception of strategic stability developed by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War — built on MAD and centred on enormous nuclear destructive capabilities — is not appropriate for China.
Finally, China has consistently been an important participant in and contributor to nuclear arms control and disarmament.
In 2018, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the INF Treaty. Following the U.S. withdrawal, Washington began a renewed push to develop offensive intermediate-range and nuclear missiles. At the same time, the U.S. has mobilised numerous military allies and security partners in Europe and Asia in an effort to contain China. It has continued to expand the deployment of advanced U.S. missile systems such as Typhon and Tomahawk in the Asia-Pacific region, while advancing the Australia–United Kingdom–United States security partnership, or AUKUS, under which Australia is to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. The United States’ post-Cold War strategy of military expansion in the Indo-Pacific constitutes a major threat to China’s national security.
In sum, the concept of strategic stability derived from the U.S.–Soviet Cold War experience cannot simply be replicated and applied to China–U.S. relations today.
II. A Constructive Relationship of Strategic Stability Redefines the Framework for China–U.S. Relations
China–U.S. relations today could still, to some extent, slide into a “new Cold War”, and the logic of the “Thucydides Trap”, familiar from both international relations theory and history, continues to pose a serious challenge to the course of bilateral relations. If the United States continues to let the advantages of its position as a unipolar hegemon, an extremely self-interested foreign policy, and an ideologically prejudiced framework shape its strategic thinking and policy towards China, it will inevitably force China to push back in defence of its core interests, including sovereignty, security, and development.
Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed to U.S. leaders that China has no desire to compete with the United States to be “No.1”. China–U.S. relations should always be guided by mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit, and win-win cooperation. In response to the trade and tariff wars pursued during Trump’s second term, as well as U.S. military strikes against Venezuela and Iran, China has consistently stood for international justice and international rules. It has remained committed to acting as a stabilising force in international affairs, a builder of the international order, and a leader in global development.
Against the current backdrop of turbulence and transformation in the international strategic landscape, stable, manageable and constructive China–U.S. relations are especially important to world peace and development.
The “constructive relationship of strategic stability” is an important “Beijing consensus” reached at the China–U.S. summit. At its core, it is not about simply replicating the U.S.–Soviet Cold War experience. Rather, in the twenty-first century, it is about grounding China–U.S. relations in the reality of their interdependence and in a firm rejection of bloc confrontation, and working steadily to stabilise and improve the relationship.
The primary objective of strategic stability is not simply nuclear arms control, still less the launch of trilateral nuclear arms-control negotiations among China, the United States, and Russia on U.S. terms. Rather, the objective is to ensure that, while China responds effectively to structural U.S. strategic pressure and containment, the two countries preserve their interdependence and mutual openness and keep disputes and potential flashpoints under effective control. Only by maintaining constructive channels of communication, cooperation, and exchange can the two countries achieve genuinely sustainable strategic stability in the twenty-first century.
Since President Nixon visited China in 1972, China–U.S. relations have passed through three historic stages: strategic reconciliation from 1972 to 1978, strategic partnership from 1979 to 1991, and strategic engagement from 1992 to 2017. Despite ups and downs, the relationship has consistently served as a strategic cornerstone of world peace and development and as a major force underpinning mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit, cooperation, and development between the two countries. Although the balance of power between China and the United States has shifted significantly over the past 14 years, and the global geostrategic landscape is undergoing changes unseen in a century, with “the East rising and the West declining”, the balance of global power in the short to medium term remains one of “a strong West and a weak East”.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has remained wedded to the strategic ideas of the “superiority of unipolar hegemony” and “American exceptionalism”, while seeking to impose a “new Cold War” on China. In December 2017, the National Security Strategy released during Trump’s first term essentially defined China for the first time as the United States’ greatest strategic competitor. Containing China geopolitically and pursuing “de-Chinaisation” in economic and trade relations became central elements of U.S. strategy towards China.
The Biden administration’s adjustment of its China policy after taking office in 2021 was to cast U.S.-China strategic competition as a worldwide confrontation between a rules-based “democratic camp” composed of the United States and its Western partners, on the one hand, and a power-seeking “authoritarian camp” comprising China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other countries, on the other.
China has consistently rejected a “new Cold War” and China–U.S. “decoupling”. Yet from Trump’s first term to the present, the United States has continued to regard the consolidation of its unipolar hegemonic position and the sustained expansion of its strategic competitive advantage as paramount security interests. It has high-handedly suppressed China’s development and worked to assemble and organise various “minilateral” mechanisms within the Asia-Pacific geostrategic environment, making the containment and restriction of China’s rise a central objective of U.S. national security strategy.
The “Thucydides Trap” described in the history and theory of international relations is not an inevitable result of shifts in the relative power of states. Rather, it arises when the dominant state in the international system adopts a narrowly self-interested and self-centred strategy. Enabling China and the United States to escape the “Thucydides Trap” and develop a major-country solution acceptable to both sides — one that can prevent the continued escalation of international conflict and the fragmentation of the world order — is a strong shared expectation of the peoples of both countries and the international community.
III. Putting a Constructive China–U.S. Relationship of Strategic Stability into Practice Requires Concrete Measures, Clear Rules and a Long-Term Approach
Advancing “constructive strategic stability” cannot mean simply replicating the Cold War experience of the United States and the Soviet Union built around MAD. Nor can it mean returning to crisis management alone against a backdrop of deep strategic confrontation between major powers. Ultimately, the path towards constructive strategic stability must be grounded in a commitment to building a community with a shared future for humanity in the twenty-first century. Guided by the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, the two countries should keep the relationship manageable, make it more stable, and place it on a positive trajectory.
At his meeting with Trump on 14 May 2026, Xi offered a timely and perceptive formulation of four mutually reinforcing and indispensable dimensions of a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability: a positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, a sound stability with moderate competition, a constant stability with manageable differences, and an enduring stability with promises of peace.
These four dimensions of stability — and whether the two countries can take joint action and meet each other halfway in advancing and realising them — are critical to achieving sustained mutual benefit, inclusiveness, and mutual success in China–U.S. relations. They are also essential to putting a constructive relationship of strategic stability into practice.
A major test for China–U.S. relations will be whether the two countries can genuinely incorporate these four dimensions of stability into their policy interactions and the process of improving bilateral relations. Guided by head-of-state diplomacy, they should turn this vision into reality and inject the greatest possible certainty and stability into a turbulent world.
The latest round of China–U.S. head-of-state diplomacy has shown considerable strategic foresight and once again charted a new course for bilateral relations. Although China–U.S. relations are undoubtedly fraught and complex, a rising China that continues to place its people’s well-being and economic development at the centre of its national agenda will remain, for a long time to come, a partner the United States will find difficult to turn away from. Under the guidance of head-of-state diplomacy, there remains considerable scope for China and the United States to make their constructive relationship of strategic stability more concrete, more institutionalised, and more enduring, and to advance mutual respect, stable and manageable relations, and mutually beneficial cooperation.
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