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Opinion | When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping both want to make their countries great again, how can the US and China get along?
- Cary Huang says the US and China have become incompatible in the Trump years. But the relationship is more complicated than that, and the two countries do not have to be on a collision course
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Amid the intensifying competition and escalating confrontation between the United States and China, the Brookings Institution and Yale University recently hosted a seminar titled “Are US and Chinese long-term interests fundamentally incompatible?”
It was one more event in a long debate about Washington’s China policy that began with Richard Nixon’s China trip in 1972. And it came after heated discussions between diplomats and scholars earlier this year, when two impactful articles – “The China Reckoning” by Barack Obama’s top diplomat for China, Kurt Campbell, in Foreign Affairs magazine and “How the West got China wrong” in The Economist – argued that Washington’s engagement with Beijing had failed to bring political and economic openness to China.
Undoubtedly, signs of incompatibility between the US and China have increased in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Tensions are rising and cooperation is waning in almost every facet of the relationship: from trade, technology and investment to Taiwan, the South and East China Seas, regional security and global governance.
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One theory about US-China incompatibility is what Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has called the “Thucydides trap”. He has examined the history of how a reigning power and a rising one often, but not always, end up going to war. Putting current US-China relations into perspective, he suggests that the two are on a collision course unless US policymakers stop assuming China is like the US.
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But there are also positive examples of the relatively smooth handover of global power, such as the one from Britain to the US around the turn of the last century. The two nations have since become close allies enjoying a “special relationship”.
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