FS-C04 — Planetary and Global Futures

Course Overview

FS-C04 — Planetary and Global Futures examines the forces reshaping the international system at planetary scale. This expanded module, based on The Beijing Variable, places the evolving United States–China relationship at the center of inquiry. Learners explore trade, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, Taiwan, military balance, financial competition, global governance, Europe, and the Global South as interconnected dimensions of one structural transformation.

INTRODUCTION: THE VARIABLE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD ORDER The history of great-power competition is, at its core, the history of miscalculation. The First World War began because statesmen on both sides believed that the conflict would be short, decisive, and manageable. The Cold War persisted for four decades not because the United States and the Soviet Union never came close to conflict — they did, most acutely in October 1962 — but because both sides developed, through painful experience, an understanding of the limits beyond which competition would become catastrophic. The question that hangs over the contemporary US-China competition is whether the two superpowers of the twenty-first century will develop a comparable understanding before one of the many potential flashpoints — Taiwan, the South China Sea, a cyberattack, a semiconductor embargo taken one step too far — produces the kind of miscalculation that turns competition into catastrophe. The Trump-Xi summit of May 2026 was, on one reading, a step toward this understanding. The two leaders met in Beijing, discussed the full range of bilateral issues, and produced a joint statement that acknowledged the existence of fundamental disagreements while committing both sides to continued dialogue and the management of risk. On another reading, the summit was a tactical pause in a structural competition that neither side has any intention of abandoning: a diplomatic interlude designed to reduce the temperature without changing the underlying dynamic. The truth, as this book argues, is more complex than either reading suggests. The summit was neither a breakthrough nor a pause. It was an expression of what I call the Beijing Variable: the irreducible ambiguity at the heart of the relationship between the world’s two leading powers, an ambiguity that reflects not diplomatic failure but structural reality. The Beijing Variable is, at its most basic, a relationship that cannot be reduced to simple categories. It is not a Cold War, because the economic interdependence between the United States and China is orders of magnitude greater than the interdependence between the United States and the Soviet Union ever was. It is not a partnership, because the ideological, strategic, and civilizational differences between the two countries are too fundamental for genuine cooperation to be sustained across the range of issues that matter most. It is not a managed rivalry, because the mechanisms of crisis management that the Cold War eventually developed — the hotline, the arms control treaties, the tacit rules of engagement in proxy conflicts — are still rudimentary and institutionally fragile. The US-China relationship is something genuinely new in the history of great-power competition: a relationship of deep interdependence combined with deep incompatibility, in which the costs of escalation and the costs of accommodation are both potentially catastrophic. This introduction situates the analytical framework of the book within the broader literature on great-power competition, identifies the key variables that will be traced across the subsequent chapters, and explains the perspective from which this analysis is conducted. The Structural Drivers of US-China Competition The competition between the United States and China has structural causes that would exist regardless of who held power in Washington or Beijing, and understanding these structural causes is prerequisite to understanding the specific dynamics of the current moment. The most fundamental structural cause is the power transition dynamic identified by the political scientist Graham Allison (2017) in his analysis of what he calls the “Thucydides Trap”: the historical pattern in which the rise of a challenging power creates fear and anxiety in the established hegemon, generating a competitive dynamic that has historically, in the majority of cases, ended in war. Allison’s analysis of sixteen cases of power transition over the past five hundred years found that twelve of them ended in war, and his application of this analysis to the US-China case generated significant policy attention. The power transition framework has been criticized, most importantly by scholars who argue that the economic interdependence between the United States and China creates incentives for avoiding conflict that were absent in most historical cases of power transition (Nye, 2015). The argument from economic interdependence holds that when two economies are as deeply integrated as those of the United States and China (bilateral trade in goods alone exceeded $660 billion in 2022, before the most severe rounds of tariffs), the costs of conflict are so high for both sides that the risk of war is significantly reduced. This argument has been influential in shaping American policy toward China since the Nixon opening of 1972, and its influence persisted, in modified form, through the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and into the first phase of the Trump administration. The Trump administration’s trade war, initiated in 2018, represented a fundamental challenge to the interdependence argument: not a rejection of economic integration as a source of stability, but a claim that the specific form of economic integration between the United States and China had become strategically disadvantageous for the United States, generating dependencies in critical technology sectors that Chinese strategic planners could exploit in a crisis. The Biden administration maintained the core tariff structure inherited from Trump while adding more targeted restrictions on semiconductor exports, reflecting a bipartisan consensus, unusual in American politics, that the relationship with China required more assertive management than the interdependence framework had previously permitted (Doshi, 2021). The Trump second term’s approach to China, combining aggressive tariff escalation with the dramatic gesture of the Beijing summit, represented a distinctive strategic combination that this book examines in detail. The combination reflects a theory of leverage: the idea that maximal economic pressure, combined with personal diplomatic engagement at the highest level, can extract concessions from China that more gradual approaches could not achieve. Whether this theory is correct, whether the Beijing Variable can be managed through the combination of pressure and personal diplomacy that Trump has consistently preferred, is one of the central questions that the chapters that follow address. The Civilizational Dimension The US-China competition is not only a competition between two states. It is a competition between two civilizational projects, two visions of the proper organization of political authority, economic life, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Understanding this civilizational dimension is essential for understanding why the competition is so persistent, why the areas of genuine agreement are so limited, and why the diplomatic gestures that periodically warm the relationship (summit meetings, trade deals, cultural exchanges) rarely translate into durable strategic cooperation. The American civilizational project is grounded in what political philosophers call liberal internationalism: the conviction that the spread of democracy, free markets, and the rule of law constitutes not only American interest but universal human progress, and that American power serves this universal project by defending and extending the liberal international order (Ikenberry, 2011). This conviction is not merely ideological overlay on material interests; it is genuinely constitutive of how American elites understand their country’s role in the world, and it generates a specific set of concerns about China’s rise: concerns not only about Chinese military power and economic competition but about the implications of a Chinese-led international order for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law globally. The Chinese civilizational project is grounded in a different set of convictions, rooted in what Chinese scholars and officials describe as the “Chinese model” of development: a model that combines market mechanisms with state direction, economic modernization with political authoritarianism, and integration with the global economy with the maintenance of strategic autonomy. The Chinese model is not presented by its proponents as a universal template for other societies (officially, China’s approach to governance is presented as appropriate to China’s specific historical and cultural conditions), but the success of the model has generated significant interest in the Global South, where many governments find the Chinese experience of rapid economic development without political liberalization more relevant to their own circumstances than the Western liberal template (Huang, 2011). The civilizational dimension of the US-China competition creates a distinctive strategic problem: it means that the competition is not reducible to a simple clash of material interests that could, in principle, be resolved through negotiation and compromise. The United States cannot accept a Chinese-led international order that institutionalizes authoritarianism as a legitimate form of governance without abandoning the civilizational project that gives American foreign policy its distinctive character and its domestic political legitimacy. China cannot accept an American-led international order that makes political liberalization a condition for full participation without abandoning the Chinese model that its leaders regard as the foundation of the country’s remarkable developmental success. The Structure of This Book This book traces the Beijing Variable through twelve chapters, each addressing a specific dimension of the US-China competition. Chapter One examines the Trump-Xi

Learning Outcomes

• Explain why the US–China relationship functions as a critical variable in the emerging world order.
• Connect trade, technology, security, finance, and diplomacy as parts of a single system.
• Evaluate competing American and Chinese strategic narratives.
• Assess implications for Europe, the Global South, institutions, firms, and citizens.
• Develop evidence-based scenarios for planetary and global futures.

Approach

The module combines close reading, systems thinking, scenario analysis, and reflective questions. Students should compare claims, distinguish structural pressures from contingent political choices, and consider pathways ranging from managed competition to fragmentation or conflict. The material is designed to support discussion, written analysis, and the final Planetary Futures Project.