As someone who has experienced the most frigid extremes of the cold war between the US and Soviet Union, Admiral Bill Owens has made it his life's mission to try to prevent a similar chill freezing the emerging relationship between Beijing and Washington.
Talking to the veteran nuclear submarine commander and former vice-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in his Hong Kong office, it is clear he is far from sure whether he will succeed. He speaks repeatedly of mutual suspicions haunting both capitals as well as the march of time that threatens the 'enormous leadership' required to turn things around.
Already his fledgling Sanya Initiative - a private effort to foster trust and communication between retired military leaders from both countries - must struggle against those suspicions. He is not afraid, he says, to be branded a 'panda hugger' back in Washington - a phrase long used as a pejorative in pockets of America's military-industrial complex.
If not exactly a precise return to cold war paranoia, Owens fears China and the US becoming locked in a military, political and economic competition from which only the rivalry of great nations, not the partnership, will be allowed to thrive.
'I think time tends to run out on these things as the attitudes on both sides harden ... as the Chinese military grows, the US will react to it in a competitive way,' he explains. 'We have only a limited amount of time remaining to find ways to ... become more like friends than competitors and genuinely engage in addressing the issues that the world faces.
'When you look back 30 years from now, what we should have done back in 2010, I think there will be a number of things that we will have said we have done. At that time it may be too late. We may be locked in some kind of competition ... not only a trade competition, not only a business competition but a competition of great nations.'
A lean and upright 70, Owens talks of the responsibility of his generation of cold warriors to avoid the conflicts of the past. Explaining his 'passion', he reflects on a decade spent deep in the Pacific and Arctic at the helm of submarines bristling with nuclear arms aimed at the Soviet Union.