Summary
In Washington and Beijing, as a natural response to the deterioration of relations between the United States and China, “decoupling” and “disconnection” have become watchwords of the day. Interdependencies created during better times have come to be viewed as vulnerabilities, and both sides are jockeying to control the technologies that bind them. This introduction provides strategic context to the “decoupling” impulses within which the papers in this series are situated. It begins by assessing the changing premises of the US–China relationship that animate the current desire to decouple. It finds that this impulse is shaped by both countries’ historical experiences vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. It notes, however, that unlike the US approach against the Soviet Union, the US view of China lacks the strategic clarity that would make broad disconnection desirable. This is but one critical difference among many that make the lessons of the Cold War a poor fit for the present moment. The authors question how current decoupling initiatives mesh with the interdependence that continues to characterize the US–China relationship and whether decoupling can be effectively pursued with the limited tools that both countries have at their disposal for comprehensively reducing existing interdependencies. Like conjoined twins whose circulatory systems cannot be separated, the United States and China are tied together. For this reason, the authors argue in favor of an incremental approach rooted in the indeterminacy of the current moment and recognition of the fact that interdependence is likely to continue.
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