or STRATIFIED COMPETITION UNDER STRUCTURAL INTERDEPENDENCE

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a renewed understanding, or rather a distinct form of containment, here termed neocontainment, where in a single integrated system governed by a reticular order, competition is structurally stratified, waged across multiple domains at differing intensities, by every instrument short of conventional warfare. Against the prevailing ‘new Cold War’ analogy, this article explains that the strategy the United States now pursues toward China is neo-containment, and that its form is explained by two structural variables: the degree of economic interdependence between hegemon and challenger, and the distribution of network centrality between them. Where the challenger is a central node of a reticular world economy, containment by isolation is structurally foreclosed and the hegemon is driven toward selective constraint across domains. The article traces this strategy to George Kennan’s 1948 doctrine of political warfare rather than to the militarized containment of NSC 68, a lineage that French strategic thought and the Chinese theory of unrestricted warfare have kept more clearly in view than Anglophone scholarship. It then specifies the form of competition that neo-containment produces, Stratified Competition under Structural Interdependence (SCSI), in which rivalry proceeds at different intensities
across functional domains at once and is governed by the Dual Chokepoint Dilemma: when each side controls indispensable but distinct chokepoints, neither can use its weapon in full without prohibitive selfharm, so escalation ends in negotiated suspension rather than rupture. Methodologically, the article combines a structured, focused comparison across time and targets with tests of five hypotheses against the record of 2023-2026, chiefly the semiconductor and rare-earth export-control cycle and its serial suspension, and the Iran war and its extension to the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.

The evidence supports the theory and locates its boundary: the mechanism disciplines, the relationship between the two hubs, not the conduct of states already excluded from the networks it governs, and it operates through the choices of ruling elites. The binding constraint on American primacy lies less in Chinese power than in the domestic sustainability of the containment effort itself.

Updated report