If one had any lingering doubts about how bad the Sino-US relationship could get, the diplomatic collision in Anchorage, Alaska, in March should have dispelled them. When State Councillor Yang Jiechi refuted allegations that China posed a threat to a rules-based international order and that US concerns over China’s misconduct in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang ought to be heeded for better bilateral relations, he said “the US is not qualified to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength … The Chinese people won’t put up with it”. His words gained instant popularity at home in China amid accusations in the mainstream Western media that China was becoming more intransigent and pugnacious. Indeed, Beijing has chosen to stare back at America’s icy glare. After the recklessly anti-Chinese Trump administration, Beijing had looked forward to a reboot in bilateral relations with the Biden administration. It was bitterly disappointed when it saw US President Joe Biden and his team not changing much from their predecessor’s course and instead orchestrating a series of international moves aimed at stiff-arming Beijing in the run-up to the Anchorage meeting. US perceptions about the seriousness of challenges posed by a rising China are palpable. However, as Richard Haass, a distinguished American diplomat and head of the influential Council on Foreign Relations think tank since 2003, said in his March 23 Foreign Affairs article “The New Concert of Powers”, “the desirable but impossible” cannot be pursued as “the workable and the attainable”. The Trump administration exerted extreme pressure on China while dreading going to war. One wonders what its successor is aiming to achieve with an approach not fundamentally dissimilar, given Biden’s conviction that America and China are in “ extreme competition ” but need not be in conflict. For one thing, Biden’s team seems to be relying on the international alliance network it is rebuilding and taking comfort from the fact that US allies are all responding positively to their call to stand up against China. But it would be naive to think the cooperative posturing by Japan and the European Union will translate into anything beyond that. Otherwise, why did they bother signing up to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and China-EU investment agreement with Beijing, and did so at a time when the US administration was in transition? On March 26, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke approvingly of the transatlantic community of values, she stressed that this did not mean the US and EU agreed on everything. The EU would share “no identity” with Washington on China, she said, and “that is absolutely clear”. Her comments came after the EU and China had traded sanctions over alleged human rights issues in Xinjiang, thus sparking speculation that the EU-China investment deal could be in jeopardy. That was followed up by Merkel’s phone call to President Xi Jinping on April 7, in which she reiterated the EU’s independence in foreign affairs. This shows Washington would be ill-advised to take it for granted that the EU would sacrifice its economic relations with China for the sake of America’s rivalry with Beijing. At this writing, US Navy destroyers and an aircraft carrier strike group are in the East China Sea, Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. A Chinese aircraft carrier group is conducting exercises east of Taiwan as a warning to the Americans. Given China’s land-based anti-ship missile capabilities, any US warships within 2,000km (1,242 miles) of striking range are little more than pinpointed targets in a time of war in spite of an overall mismatch of the two sides’ arsenals in America’s heavy favour. What is the point of so much military posturing by the US if, for instance, the status quo of Taiwan is changed in favour of China should war break out over the island? Would that signal America’s equivalent of the 1956 Suez crisis and the beginning of the collapse of Pax Americana, as historian Niall Ferguson wrote recently? Isn’t this just what America’s military-industrial complex wants, using warmongering to keep benefiting from big budgets and fat contracts? This is why I am impressed with the article by Haass and co-author Charles Kupchan. In it, they write that the US and its Western allies “will not forestall the arrival of a world that is both multipolar and ideologically diverse” that “requires soberly acknowledging that the Western-led liberal order that emerged after World War II cannot anchor global stability in the twenty-first century”. They advocate an application of the historically successful 19th-century “Concert of Europe”, adapted to today’s world. In it, a global group of six nations – China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia and the US – having both common and competing interests, would form a concert offering “a private venue that combines consensus building with cajoling and jockeying”. In this new concert, “diplomacy would take place behind closed doors and aim to forge consensus”. Although it “reinforces hierarchy and inequality in the international system”, the concert looks to “facilitate cooperation by restricting membership to the most important and influential actors” as “it deliberately sacrifices broad representation in favour of efficacy”. The United Nations and its Security Council should remain, in this scenario, to implement the decisions of the concert. The authors issue a stern warning of “no fallbacks”, claiming that “the alternatives to a global concert all have disqualifying weaknesses”. I agree, but with one qualification. Japan and India should be taken out of the equation so the concert would be an efficiently functioning Quad, agreeable to the remaining core four of the US, EU, China and Russia. It will take time for Washington to come around to this scenario, but eventually it will see in it a sound alternative to the current Quad, for its own good. Terry Su is president of Lulu Derivation Data Ltd, a Hong Kong-based online publishing house and think tank specialising in geopolitics