The following is adopted from a recent speech at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China. The United States is committed to maintaining strategic stability in U.S.China relations and supports initiation of a dialogue on strategic stability and nuclear affairs aimed at fostering a more stable, resilient and transparent security relationship with China. That idea - "strategic stability" - is a term we use a lot, but one that is difficult to define, particularly when talking about China and the Asia-Pacific region. During the Cold War, many associated strategic stability with what we called "mutual assured destruction," the notion that the incentive to initiate nuclear use would be discouraged by the fear of suffering unacceptable retaliatory damage. This notion, of course, is ill-suited and too narrow to fully capture the U.S.-China relationship given our multifaceted, shared interests. In today's world, strategic stability encompasses much more than just nuclear relations, and reflects the fact that the U.S.-China relationship, while competitive, is not adversarial.
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