He was referring to US’ belief that it could have East Asian countries flocking to its side because they would want its military to help stop China’s rise.

“But we can’t have war with China without it being suicidal,” Roy said. “We didn’t talk about war with the Soviet Union during the Cold War because we recognised it was too dangerous.

“The part of the problem is [that] we are not electing presidents capable of addressing that issue. The state department can’t work out those types of issues. There has to be a higher level of guidance.”

“[The disputes] will continue in some dimension or other ... but [we have] no collaboration with China,” said Robert Blackwill, Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the CFR, at the event. “Diplomacy is missing largely from US-China relationship.

“I’m quite struck by the fact of how little diplomacy there is between the two nations,” Blackwill said. “Never before in human history have you had two major nations capable of either stabilising world order or disrupting it whose every move is a topic of general conversation.

“We need a president who will have the leadership first to understand the point that [US-China relations are] the biggest challenge the United States is going to face in your lifetimes,” said Blackwill, who wrote a recently released report called “Implementing Grand Strategy Toward China: 22 US Policy Prescriptions”.

“In olden days, this was called presidential leadership.”

Collaboration could be expanded in areas such as climate change, economics, health and any other common challenges, both diplomats said.

The US should also engage China more on North Korea, they said.

“It’s bewildering why the administration is not deeply involved with China in trying to reach an interim agreement with North Korea, because we all know that there will be no agreement unless China strongly supports it,” Blackwill said.

US won’t cut more China tariffs until after presidential election

The US warned that the initiative was China’s way of using money to increase its global power.

At the Washington event, Jamie Horsley, visiting fellow of John Thornton China Centre at the Brookings Institution, called the belt and road “a brilliant project” as “everyone needs infrastructure”.

The problems, she said, were that China “was not doing it in accordance with internationally accepted standards. There’s also been the financial sustainability issue, as well as corruption.”

Although, she said, if China recalibrated the initiative, the US should reconsider joining it.

The project “is not going to go away”, Horsley said. “It’s [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative. There’s a lot of reputational costs involved.

“We should rethink joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB],” Horsley said, referring to the US. The AIIB is a multilateral development bank with 76 members that aims to support the building of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region.

The bank “ended up being a respectable multilateral development bank following international standards”, Horsley said.

Wide-ranging collaborations can be difficult because “the present circumstance is that we don’t have the domestic environment at the moment”, Roy said.

“China is an enormous geopolitical challenge for us,” Blackwill said. “If you go back to the last three [US] administrations before this one, the emphasis was primarily on cooperation and love. But [China] didn’t hold up its half of the bargain.”

Blackwill said it was important to realise that “world order cannot be stabilised for the period ahead in a situation of perpetual US-China confrontation”.

“The price of failure is global in character, and would eventually reach even more Americans than it already has through the trade war,” he said.