Balancing on the Edge of a Volcano: What World War II China and America Can Teach Us about Today
Sino-American relations in the 1940s look little like the 2020s on the surface, yet the underlying dynamics of countervailing forces are remarkably familiar.
The mood music around China and the United States has grown ominous. Government white papers, op-eds, and IR scholarship now treat a great-power collision as a question of timing rather than possibility. We think the alarm has crowded out something more useful: historical perspective on how Beijing and Washington have, more than once, balanced powerful countervailing forces without falling off the edge.
The wartime relationship between China and the United States from 1940 to 1945 offers a case where calculations of security, economy, and identity pulled both governments in opposite directions at once, and yet a workable balance held until Japan’s surrender. The eight decades since have transformed both states beyond recognition, but the core pattern of intense connection paired with deep friction is back. Reading the present with one eye on that earlier period yields what Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler call “security dilemma sensitivity,” an awareness of how one actor’s behaviour gets read by another.
What the Wartime Relationship Actually Looked Like
A simple version of the story runs from the exhilaration of new allies fighting Japanese aggression to a victory soured by mutual frustration. But reality was rockier from the beginning.
Roosevelt’s administration extended Lend-Lease aid, ended American extraterritoriality, repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, designated China one of the “Four Policemen” at the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in October 1943, and the president himself met Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo a month later with promises about returned territories and postwar partnership. The same Roosevelt then went on to Tehran without Chiang, conducted military planning over the Generalissimo’s head, and at Yalta in February 1945 traded Manchurian privileges to Stalin while keeping the details from Chungking. Chinese scholars have read Yalta as a violation of Chinese sovereignty, with Wang Zhen arguing that the American policy of “making China a great power” amounted to a nominal status under American direction.
The friction ran in both directions. The Roosevelt administration grew disgusted with the corruption surrounding Chiang and the Kuomintang’s reluctance to fight Japan. Chiang prioritized his future struggle against the Chinese Communist Party, hoarding American aid for that confrontation. General Joseph Stilwell pushed for radical changes, even floated the option of arming the Communists, and was eventually recalled at Chiang’s insistence. Yet through all of this, neither side looked for the exit ramp. Roosevelt accepted working with the problematic Chiang as the cost of keeping a large continental ally in the war and involved in postwar multilateral collaboration; Chiang accepted American condescension as the cost of American largesse. Each kept a rough cost-benefit ledger and kept making payments.
That balance collapsed quickly after 1945. The Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the Vietnam conflicts followed. The wartime success therefore offers no reassurance on its own. What it offers is a concrete example of how two governments held a precarious position under real pressure, and a record of the leadership flaws and systemic weaknesses that eventually let the position fail.
What Rhymes in the 2020s
Today’s China has economic and military power that the China of 1944 sorely lacked. Yet the earlier relationship’s structural feature, intense interconnection braided with serious conflict, is back. Trade and investment flows run in the hundreds of billions in each direction. Diplomatic management still happens at the top, such as the Biden-Xi summit at Woodside in November 2023 and the Sunnylands Statement on climate cooperation.
At the same time, Washington applies what one Chinese commentator described as a “small-yard and a high-fence” approach to advanced technologies, the United States and the G7 launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment as a counter to the Belt and Road, and friction over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and cyber capabilities is persistent.
US strategy documents frame this in systemic terms. The 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance identified China as the only competitor potentially capable of mounting a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system. Secretary Blinken’s 2022 speech doubled down on that framing. Chinese leaders speak in equally civilizational terms, with President Xi repeatedly invoking “profound changes unseen in a century.”
Yet neither side has walked away. The mutual restraint over Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling and the continued, if grudging, cooperation on North Korea and climate suggest that the cost-benefit ledger is still being kept.
Where the Wartime Parallel Actually Bites
The danger is not that the 2020s look exactly like the 1940s. The danger is that they look enough like the 1940s to share the failure modes. Two stand out.
The first concerns leadership flaws. Chiang’s appetite and arrogance and Roosevelt’s overreach were not unique to those men or those decades; they demonstrate the predictable hubris of leaders of redoubtable states. The instability implicit in Donald Trump’s return to the White House sits uneasily on that historical pattern, as does the volatility of major-power decision-making more broadly.
The second is systemic immaturity. The UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, and G7 are stronger today than the half-built institutions of 1945, but they are visibly straining under the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and they continue to be reshaped by China’s and India’s rise, by climate change, and by artificial intelligence. The infrastructure for cooling great-power tension is clearly not as sturdy as it needs to be.
The wartime record shows that balance is possible even under severe strain. It also shows that balance is not the same as stability, and that the same leaders who achieve balance can also eventually lose it. Today’s red lines around Taiwan, cybersecurity, and trade rules will be respected only if Beijing and Washington can anchor their definitions of national interest somewhere between a pragmatic “good” and a hypothetical “perfect.” Historians of any nationality can usefully offer illuminating examples of both promising and troubling experiences
Their recent article, “Then—and now: Sino–American Relations in World War II and the 2020s,” is published in International Journal and available here.
