1. Destiny as Political Technology
Debates about whether the United States and China are ‘destined for war’ are usually cast in realist terms, with inevitability flowing from systemic anarchy and power transition. This essay argues instead that the language of destiny is not a structural fact but a political technology, through which each nation secures ontological survival. The American trope of a ‘pacing challenge’ and China’s invocation of ‘great rejuvenation’ function less as neutral diagnoses than as identity scripts, mobilising resources and legitimising extraordinary measures by presuming the other as antagonist. Rivalry is enacted through discursive performance, a struggle to sustain national being by scripting an enemy whose existence makes one coherent. The task is not to weigh whether realism predicts war, but to show how the vocabulary of destiny accelerates confrontation by producing the peril it claims merely to describe.
The analysis traces these dynamics: in Washington, the ‘pacing challenge’ from its 2023 Senate debut into the 2024 NDAA and FY 2025 budget; in Beijing, the ‘great rejuvenation’ from Xi’s early speeches into the 20th Party Congress and strategic industrial mobilisation. These discursive trajectories show how fatalistic language generates material outcomes, undermining the realist claim that rivalry is foreordained by structure alone.
2. The Realist Script
The ‘inevitability’ claim stems from neorealism, which holds that in an anarchic system, the security dilemma makes great power competition endemic. Despite realist debates over power-maximisation versus security-seeking, Mearsheimer’s ‘tragedy’ thesis has become the dominant framework for understanding US-China competition as structurally determined.[1]
Power-transition logic predicts that when a rising challenger closes on an established hegemon, war becomes more probable.[2] In today’s constellation China is the ascendant power, the United States the reigning one. From a realist vantage point, their collision flows from structure, not miscalculation or malice.[3]
This analytical framework is elegant and influential, yet its concepts become politically performative when adopted by policymakers. In shaping the reality they purport to describe, realists confirm the constructivist critique of its supposed neutrality. As early as 1983, Ullman warned that equating security with military power ‘conveys a profoundly false image of reality’ and militarises U.S. policymaking.[4]
3. Narrative as Political Technology
The realist script explains structural conditions for rivalry but says little about how states translate them into policy. As Buzan observed, structural theories risk treating states as interchangeable units, overlooking the domestic cohesion that shapes how external pressures are processed.[5] Rather than abandoning realism, this essay interrogates its performative dimension: how its concepts function once mobilised by political elites. To that end, it employs two constructivist tools – ‘securitisation’ and the ‘illocutionary speech act’ – to show how the language of destiny operates as political technology.
Securitisation theory describes how a ‘securitising actor’ frames an issue as an existential threat to a ‘referent object’.[6] This is achieved via an illocutionary speech act,[7] which distinguishes a statement that merely describes the world (a locutionary act) and one that performs an action by being uttered (an illocutionary act).[8] For a securitising move to be successful, it must be accepted by a relevant audience, such as the legislature or the public.[9] This focus on existential threat and emergency action lifts an issue ‘above politics’.[10]
These theoretical tools show how realism’s vocabulary of threat and competition can be instrumentalised as political technology. As Ole Wæver observes, securitising actors draw on established discourses to lend scientific legitimacy and urgency to political projects, making budgetary priorities appear matters of survival rather than discretion.[11] Such framing maps onto what Duncan Bell terms the ‘mythscape’, that of collectively rehearsed national destinies that render compromise suspect.[12] In this instance, Washington’s narrative of a ‘pacing challenge’ and Beijing’s of a ‘great rejuvenation’ function as mythscapes, each defining a national project that presumes the other as an obstacle.
4. Micro-Process Traces
This claim can be demonstrated by tracing key securitising phrases from high-level rhetoric through policy documents to material outcomes for both China and the US.[13]
4.1. The U.S. Trace
On 16 May 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the Senate Appropriations Committee that ‘the PRC is our pacing challenge’ and cast the US$842 billion request as strategy-driven rather than discretionary.[14] The cue framed the budget as structured by great-power competition and invited institutional uptake.
Seven months later, Congress authorises the frame’s operational centre of gravity in the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The Joint Explanatory Statement creates an Indo-Pacific Campaigning Initiative, notes a request of US$786.2 million for USINDOPACOM campaigning, and adds a further US$508 million across the services.[15] The same statement extends and endorses the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and provides a budgetary display keyed to that rubric.[16] While the statute does not use the precise phrase ‘pacing challenge’, the conferees state that PDI will ‘prioritize Department of Defense efforts… enhancing U.S. deterrence and defense posture… and increasing readiness and capability in the Indo-Pacific region, primarily west of the International Date Line.’[17]
Material conversion follows in appropriations in March 2024, when Division A of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act enacts the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024.[18] DoD’s FY2025 Pacific Deterrence Initiative book then repeats Austin’s formula, opening with ‘The Department is prioritizing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as its pacing challenge’, and records a PDI display of roughly US$9.06 billion in FY2024 (request) and US$9.86 billion in FY2025.[19] On DoD’s own display, PDI rose from US$6.19 bn (FY2023) to US$9.06 bn (FY2024) and US$9.86 bn (FY2025), representing a 46% jump, then a further 9% after ‘pacing challenge’ entered executive rhetoric.
The sequence of speech → legislation → outlays, shows how pacing challenge discourse directly precipitates, rather than merely predicts, a more muscular U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific.
4.2. The China Trace
The Chinese narrative begins with Xi Jinping’s report to the 20th Party Congress (16 Oct 2022; People’s Daily ed. 4 Jan 2023), which named as its ‘central task’ as ‘以中国式现代化全面推进中华民族伟大复兴’ (advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation).[20] The declaration is illocutionary: by stating the goal, Xi performs the act of binding national modernisation to the Party’s political authority, framing it as a collective leap toward an historic destiny.
Twelve months later, on 24 October 2023, the Patriotic Education Law made the slogan official, obliging schools, media and museums to ‘carry forward the spirit of rejuvenation’.[21] Its Support-and-Guarantee chapter created a legal basis for future appropriations without specifying amounts. In January 2025 the Ministry of Education announced a central special fund for patriotic-education projects.[22]
In July 2024 the narrative moved from law to mobilisation. Han Zheng’s keynote to the 12th World Peace Forum (4 July) warned of ‘外部遏制’ (external containment) and urged a ‘shared-destiny community’,[23] while a Central Military Commission directive (10 July) ordered the PLA to ‘敢打必胜，以实现中华民族伟大复兴’ (dare to fight and win to realise national rejuvenation).[24] Both were illocutionary, instructing audiences to act to realise the rejuvenation they proclaim.
By mid-2025 the Support-and-Guarantee provisions had moved to practice, extending beyond cultural projects into large-scale industrial mobilisation. Xi Jinping’s calls for ‘independent and controllable’ core technologies as a pillar of the ‘great rejuvenation’ were codified in the 14th Five-Year Plan’s directive to accelerate semiconductor self-sufficiency.[25] In May 2024 Beijing launched the third phase of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund with registered capital of ¥344 billion (US $47.5 billion).[26] Official discourse cast it as both for ‘external containment’ and for technological rejuvenation, funnelling resources into chip fabrication, research and design. Like the PDI, it converts a securitising slogan into multi-billion-dollar mobilisation.
5. Spiral Dynamics
Viewed through this lens, the traces reveal a clear escalatory spiral. In classic security studies, such dynamics are often explained through the lens of misperception. Robert Jervis’s spiral model, for example, posits that a state’s defensive actions can be incorrectly seen by a rival as offensive threats, sparking a cycle of mutual fear and hostility.[27] This cognitive trap is reinforced by the structural realities of anarchy, what Barry Buzan terms the ‘defence dilemma’, where any increase in one state’s security can decrease the security of others.[28]
Yet the evidence here suggests something more deliberate than simple misperception. Escalation is not just a cognitive error but a political process, actively manufactured by securitising actors on both sides. The narratives in the traces act as political technologies, converting structural anxiety into material commitments.[29] This is how rivalry is discursively accelerated, where each side’s defensive posturing, justified by its ‘mythscape’,[30] is framed by the other as proof of malign intent, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.[31] This discursive process is not deterministic. In principle it contains a counter-logic, what Etzioni terms ‘mutually assured restraint’, where rivals may forgo certain deployments to signal moderation. Discourse, then, can serve as a political technology of restraint as well as acceleration.[32]
6. Counterargument & Limits
A structural realist might argue that the discourses traced above are mere epiphenomena. Austin invokes ‘pacing challenge’ and Xi proclaims ‘great rejuvenation’ because material competition already exists – Beijing’s defence spending reached $314 billion in 2024, while Washington spent $997 billion and restricted China’s semiconductor access.[33] From this view, the documentary traces merely show rhetoric following structure, rather than creating it.
This materialist account has considerable force. As Mearsheimer argues, capability aggregation creates fear regardless of stated intentions and states must assume the worst about rivals’ motives given the high stakes of survival.[34] The budget increases and industrial mobilisation could simply reflect rational responses to objective threats rather than discursive construction.
Yet this misses how discourse determines which capabilities become politically salient. China’s military spending represents 1.7% of GDP versus America’s 3.4%, showing that the threat requires discursive activation to justify emergency measures.[35] More tellingly, if structure determined discourse, we would expect consistent rhetoric across time. Instead, the ‘pacing challenge’ frame represents a specific choice to militarise competition beyond what capabilities alone would predict. As Krebs and Jackson demonstrate, such rhetorical moves can trap opponents ‘without the rhetorical materials to craft a socially sustainable rebuttal,’ creating policy lock-in that transcends material constraints.[36]
The traces themselves have limitations, as public documents may simply reflect post-hoc justifications. Correlation between rhetoric and budgets doesn’t prove causation and both may respond to classified assessments unavailable to researchers. Nevertheless, the pattern suggests discourse doesn’t replace material reality but shapes how ambiguous capabilities become actionable threats. War becomes not structurally inevitable but discursively accelerated.
7. Conclusions
The concept that the United States and China are destined for war is not an objective finding but a political construction. The securitising narratives of a ‘pacing challenge’ in Washington and a ‘great rejuvenation’ in Beijing are identity scripts, political technologies that mobilise domestic populations, legitimise extraordinary measures, and channel resources. Rather than operating in isolation, they are symbiotic, feeding a spiral dynamic where each side’s defensive posturing is read as proof of aggression and sustaining a prophesy of conflict.
This reveals realism’s blind spot. Once its concepts migrate into politics, they cease to describe and begin to perform. Rivalry is discursively accelerated through a struggle for ontological survival enacted through the vocabulary of destiny. Yet discourse can also contain its own counter-logic. The idea of mutually assured restraint shows that doctrines and slogans can be deployed not only to hasten confrontation but to slow it, acting as instruments of moderation. The choice between escalation and restraint thus lies less in structure than the narrative tools employed by each nation.
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[1] John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Updated Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 265.
[2] John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Structural Realism,’ in International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, ed. Timothy Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 61.
[3] Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 284.
[4] Richard H. Ullman, ‘Redefining Security,’ International Security 8, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 129–30.
[5] Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2007), 93.
[6] Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization,’ in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 54-55.
[7] J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 98-103.
[8] Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,’ International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2003): 514.
[9] Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 25.
[10] Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies,’ 515.
[11] Wæver. ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’. 54-55
[12] Duncan Bell, ‘Mythscapes: memory, mythology, and national identity’. British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (March 2003): 74.
[13] These traces rely on publicly available documents and visible policy instruments. While this approach cannot capture all causal mechanisms or behind-closed-doors negotiations, the focus on high-profile securitising language and budgetary outcomes provides illustrative evidence of discursive materialisation. Fuller analysis would require elite interviews and comprehensive corpus analysis across classified materials.
[14] Lloyd J. Austin III, ‘Opening Testimony Before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense,’ 16 May 2023, 8.
[15] U.S. Congress, Joint Explanatory Statement to Accompany the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, 317, 325.
[16] Ibid. PDI display/table.
[17] Ibid. §1302.
[18] Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, Pub. L. 118-47 (23 March 2024), Div. A.
[19] U.S. Department of Defense, Pacific Deterrence Initiative: FY 2025 Budget Justification, March 2024, 3.
[20] Xi Jinping, ‘全面建设社会主义现代化国家…,’ People’s Daily, 4 Jan 2023, 1.
[21] Standing Committee of the NPC, Patriotic Education Law of the PRC (24 Oct 2023), art. 8.
[22] Ministry of Education, ‘Reply to NPC Proposal #4957,’ 13 Jan 2025; Ministry of Education et al., ‘意见—高校思想政治工作体系,’ 15 May 2020, sec. III.4.
[23] Han Zheng, keynote, 12th World Peace Forum, 4 Jul 2024; Central Military Commission, Decision on Deeply Advancing Political Training (10 Jul 2024), art. 2.
[24] Central Military Commission, Decision on Deeply Advancing Political Training, 10 July 2024, art. 2.
[25] State Council of the People’s Republic of China, Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) and Long-Range Objectives Through 2035, Part V, Chap. 15, Sec. 2.
[26] Reuters, ‘China Establishes Third Phase of National Integrated Circuit Investment Fund with $47.5 Billion,’ 27 May 2024.
[27] Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, New Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 62–76.
[28] Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,’ World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978): 169.
[29] Wæver. ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’. 55
[30] Bell, ‘Mythscapes’. 75.
[31] Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 69.
[32] Amitai Etzioni, ‘Mutually Assured Restraint: A New Approach for United States–China Relations,’ The Brown Journal of World Affairs 20, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2014): 40–41.
[33] SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2024 (Apr 2025), 2; Sujai Shivakumar and Charles Wessner, The Limits of Chip Export Controls (CSIS, 2025).
[34] Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 271-272.
[35] SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2024, 2.
[36] Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick T. Jackson, ‘Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric,’ European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007): 36.