This article was developed in part through the author’s participation in a project organized by the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies. The views in this piece are the author’s alone.
Members of the policy communities in Washington and Beijing are increasingly reaching a common conclusion on the diminishing value of U.S.-China negotiations. President Donald Trump is an important outlier from this emerging consensus.
His views will carry the day in setting American policy. Thus, the central question facing American policymakers is not whether to engage in negotiations, but rather how to deliver better results from negotiations than previous administrations. To support such planning,
this paper examines the purposes of direct negotiations. It then reviews the negotiating records of the three previous U.S. administrations to draw lessons from those periods for the way forward. From there, the paper focuses on three issues that could serve as the basis of future negotiations and a strategy for organizing the process. The three issues are trade and economics, military and risk reduction,
and law enforcement cooperation. A path remains open for Trump and Xi Jinping to drive the relationship forward, but only if they take control of the moment rather than succumb to fatalism about the inevitability of estrangement or conflict.
While there are vanishingly few areas of agreement between the United States and China, there is one broadly shared sentiment between policymakers in both countries: cynicism. As the costs and consequences of the trade war become more visible, the national mood in both countries about the U.S.-China relationship is hardening. Leaders and leading thinkers seem to be becoming more fatalistic about the trajectory of relations. And there appears to be growing pessimism that problems in the relationship are fixable.
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