In October 2025, the RAND Corporation released a report titled “Stabilizing the U.S.-China Conflict.” Within weeks, the study disappeared from Rand University’s website. No explanation. There are no revision notices. Please do not re-upload. The retraction of the report is unusual, and the silence even more unusual, for a prominent think tank whose research pipeline is structured to avoid public blunders. The report’s unusual disappearance raises questions about disagreements within U.S. strategy-making circles.
Rand University Headquarters
The timeline itself suggests a struggle. The study was posted on Rand University’s website in mid-October 2025 and was not removed until nearly two weeks later. This is too slow for routine modifications and too fast for regular reviews. Such delays are characteristic of internal contests. The report was scrutinized, approved, published, and allowed to circulate until opponents within the political establishment hardened enough to demand its removal. The RAND report was suppressed not because it was wrong, but because its effects became intolerable once they were recognized. The structural features of the retracted report are as follows:
To understand why this document was retracted, it is useful to examine it alongside another historically significant RAND study, “Russian Expansion: Competing from an Advantage” (2019). The contrast between the two offers a rare, unfiltered glimpse into America’s evolving and contested strategic worldview.
Russia as an object of pressure
“Russian expansion” was clearly about Washington’s ability to impose costs on Russia. The study recommends a strategy to “amplify” Russia’s vulnerability, that is, to stress the country until it faces difficult trade-offs at home. Tools included:
Energy utilization, financial sanctions, information pressure, and peripheral military competition.
The underlying assumption was simple. The US has structural power, Russia does not. As a result, enforcement actions appear to be low risk and high return. This report provides a plan for managing the enemy from a position of strategic trust. Some foreign policy analysts believe the report is a blueprint for America’s tougher stance before the Ukraine war.
China policy as a management of systemic constraints
In contrast, “Stabilizing the U.S.-China Conflict” adopts a cautionary tone that is unusual in the U.S. strategy literature. China’s primary concern is to avoid actions that could weaken the United States itself, rather than identifying Chinese weaknesses to exploit. While the Russian report encourages escalation to impose costs, Chinese research warns that escalation could trigger an asymmetric counterattack that would impact:
Global Supply Chain Industrial Capabilities Technology Platforms Capital Markets
In short, costs cannot be imposed on China without risking significant retaliation against the US economy and defense bases. (This was recently demonstrated when China responded to increased U.S. import tariffs by restricting exports of essential rare earth materials.) The study’s recommendations focus on restraint, crisis management channels, selective “risk avoidance” and rebuilding domestic capabilities. This is in sharp contrast to the confrontational approach outlined in the Russia Enlargement report, and this strategic shift was likely seen as a direct challenge by China hawks in Washington.
Why retracting the RAND report is important
The RAND report does not easily make its way to the public. It undergoes internal peer review before publication. Methodological review. Sponsor communications and approvals. Editorial and classification review. A report cleared through these steps represents a professionally accepted analysis rather than a personal opinion. If such documents are withdrawn after approval, the cause is likely to be political pressure rather than investigative errors.
The structure of the China report challenged the prevailing policy assumptions of China hawks. U.S. defense contractors, naval lobbies, and military planners benefit from a narrative of unlimited U.S. capabilities and endless escalation. Reports suggesting that America’s power is limited, especially relative to peer industrial economies, undermine the logic of increased defense spending and escalation-oriented military planning. In other words, the report’s realism made it politically untimely.
Strategic discussions, not conspiracies
The retraction of the report should not be seen as a mere incident of censorship. It signals something more important, a deepening institutional debate about how to position the United States in a geopolitical environment where coercive measures applied against Russia could backfire against China. The China study represents a school of realism that argues that the United States needs to invest in industrial, technological, and fiscal resilience before pursuing aggressive competition. The warning is not about China’s strength, but about America’s weakness. These include dependence on foreign manufacturing inputs; exposure to retaliatory capital controls; Erosion of technological monopolies. and vulnerable defense supply chains. The report stated the politically inconvenient truth that policy must be fused with economic arithmetic.
Report withdrawal is a setback for the China Hawks
The quiet removal of “stabilizing the US-China conflict” did more than simply protect policy consensus. It exposed its vulnerability. The hawkish approach toward China is based on the premise that coercive influence can be successfully imposed through escalation, and now faces practical constraints that are increasingly difficult to deny. The realism of the Randland Report was not accepted because it was provocative, but because it was evidence-based at a time when the dominant position is ideological.
For China’s hardliners, escalation is a way to restore deterrence through fear. But “stabilizing the rivalry” presented a scenario in which escalation undermines deterrence by exposing U.S. vulnerabilities. In that framework, China’s hawkish position begins to resemble what economists call moral hazard. That is, actors take on greater risks because they expect other parties, here the broader U.S. economy, to absorb the costs.
This tension reveals why the defense strategy is politically unwelcome. This requires recognizing that the United States cannot “manage” China primarily through military signals, sanctions, export controls, and alliance pressure. Although these measures remain important, in the RAND analysis they serve as complements to industrial and technological updates rather than substitutes. The hawkish model reverses this order by treating industrial weakness as an incidental problem rather than a major problem to be solved.
As a practical matter, the retraction of the Landland report signals a deterioration in the political position of China hawks, not because they lack policy influence, but because it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend their strategic legitimacy without suppressing research that contradicts it. The failure to publish vetted and internally approved research by prominent think tanks indicates a growing contradiction between hawkish anti-China sentiment and economic constraints on China policy.
conclusion
If the United States continues to debate China policy without confronting its industrial dependence, disagreements will arise not between hawks and realists, but between narratives and arithmetic. The Rand Corp.’s retracted report was not an ideological provocation but a predictive exercise that reached a forbidden conclusion. That is, the United States cannot pursue hegemonic competition without first rebuilding its economic capacity to compete. Refusing to say so will not reduce the cost of escalation with China. It just postpones the calculation.
