Security imperatives usually overwhelm all else, including economic interdependence
U.S. Navy's Virginia-class nuclear submarine, one of the candidates for Canberra to choose: the dynamic in which security competition dominates great power competition is difficult to stop. © Huntington Ingalls Industries/Reuters
Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The strategic competition between the United States and China is supposed to be a three-dimensional contest over security, economy and ideology.
