Although a soft reset arguably is in everyone’s best interests, neither side realistically expects relations to warm considerably overnight. Both realize relations are tense and even fraught on some fronts.
China and the US need to aggressively seek out opportunities where their national interests overlap to work together and step back from the abyss.
Reversing the damage done by the Trump administration will not be easy. It will take time, patience, and persistence. But the opportunity for a new engagement strategy between Europe, China, and the United States is a precious one, which President Biden and his team should nurture and cultivate.
Why does the US play the unwinnable game of which model of government is ‘better’? Why does the US try to block China’s rise and thereby possibly fall into a terminal Thucydides Trap? Why can’t Western leaders, especially in the US, engage in confidence-building cooperative efforts where our national interests overlap?
The claim that U.S.-China prosperity is a zero-sum game of competition where there are winners and losers is misleading.
The world has reached a crucial juncture, and relations among China, the U.S., and the EU have entered an unprecedentedly complicated stage. Opportunities for cooperation and risks of confrontation coexist and carry the same weight.
A new strategy is needed to change the framework of engagement between the United States and China from distrust to trust, from conflict to cooperation.
Some degree of cooperation will be maintained since Washington realizes that total containment measures China will be met with countermeasures.
Despite his promise to deviate from the policies of his predecessor, Biden seems content to only deviate from the method rather than the spirit of Trump’s policy on China.
During the dying days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tore-up four decades of U.S.-Taiwan policy. In doing so, the outgoing Trump administration placed the entire region’s peace and stability in significant danger.
Mutual distrust has been the problem. China and the new Biden Administration could usefully develop some confidence-building measures in tech governance before trust evaporates completely.
Ideological thinking and projection clouds the fact that rule of law, stability and order are as desirable in China as it is in America itself.
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