兰德-耦合竞争-探索美中关系的原型游戏（英）

DAVID A. SHLAPAK, COLIN LEVAUNT, GREGORY SMITHCoupled CompetitionA Prototype Game to Explore the U.S.-China RelationshipThe complicated, interconnected relationship between the United States and China continues to develop, and questions have inevitably emerged about the fundamental nature of the two countries’ relationship. The situation can usefully be modeled as a game. Is this game zero-sum, one side making gains largely at the expense of the other? Or is this game positive-sum, a situation in which each side can enhance its situation without necessarily inflicting costs on the other?The questions that motivate this study as a whole and this game in particular are: How can the United States ensure that its economy meets the nation’s needs under conditions of coupled, strategic competition? Can this be done in a way that does not necessarily hamper the Chinese economy but rather provides benefits to all?1 Orthodox economic theory holds that the global economy is funda-mentally a positive-sum system in which all participants can reap increased benefits from growth. Taking only this into account, the answer to our question would be, “Well, yes, obviously.” However, such a consideration ignores what the competition is about. Certainly, the United States and China have moved into an era of economic competition, with trade and investment as the battlefields. But why has this happened? Have U.S. consumers grown tired of store shelves stocked with inexpensive goods imported from China’s factories? Have China’s leaders decided that they no longer desire double-digit economic growth rates fueled by expanding exports? Of course not.The economic competition is subsidiary and result of a larger geopolitical competition between the two sides. Washington and Beijing have very different views about how the world should be ordered and who should do the ordering, and this geopolitical focus is the driving force behind their competition. Therefore, to understand how these countries’ economies might fare in the future, we must examine the interplay between the geopolitical and economic elements. Whether both sides can succeed—or whether the competitive dynamics mean that inevitably one can prosper, at least to a degree, only at the expense of the other—depends a lot on how one imagines the world works.One perspective is offered by the realist school of international relations theory.2 Although realism is used to describe numerous concepts that differ in many ways, the basic premises of realism are straightforward and rely on three propositions about the nature of the global order.3Research Report2OVERVIEWThis report documents our exploratory effort to develop a game, Coupled Competition, about the strategic competition between the United States and China.a This report is largely descriptive rather than analytic, and the game itself is an incomplete but viable prototype.The game engine—the set of equations that turns player inputs into changes in the game state—is