If anything, the recent Brookings Institution-Peking University report on the strategic distrust between the United States and China points to a difficult period ahead for the world's two most powerful countries.
The highly regarded report, given prominent coverage in the American media, provides an honest and insightful assessment of the fundamental obstacles to the establishment of enduring trust in each other's long-term intentions. The most important conclusion drawn by the report is that US-China strategic distrust is corrosive and self-reinforcing: distrust drives the adoption of policies that further deepen distrust.
Given the fundamental differences in values, sources and structure of power, decision-making process, and threat perception between China's one-party state and America's liberal democracy, it is virtually impossible to establish strategic trust between these two countries. While the ruling Communist Party of China will always regard the United States as its greatest political threat, in the United States, the Democrats and Republicans alike, see China's Communist Party as an illegitimate regime whose pledge of 'peaceful development' is strategic deception.
Of course, two additional factors - the narrowing gap of power between the two countries and the defence policies adopted by each to hedge against the other - have further inflamed the distrust among each country's elites.
Under normal circumstances, strategic distrust does not necessarily lead to conflict. But that is no longer true for the US and China. For all practical purposes, the two countries have, partly by choice, but mainly because of circumstances not of their own making, become strategic competitors.
In the eyes of some observers, 'strategic competition' is merely a euphemism for another cold war. This is not true. While the ongoing US-China strategic competition does resemble the great power rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union, it notably lacks the intense ideological hostility, the dominant focus on military superiority, the global scale, and absence of deep and extensive economic and social ties that marked the cold war.
Today, the US-China strategic competition is primarily regional, not global, in nature. Its focal point is Asia, where the US attempts to preserve a balance of power and prevent the rise of a dominant power. Although this strategic objective serves American interests, it is seen by China as essentially an attempt to constrain China's legitimate influence in the region. This is the basic logic driving US-China strategic competition.