William Hurst and Peter Trubowitz
Hope springs eternal in the world of great-power diplomacy. Even today, in the throes of a norm-busting trade war with China, there is talk of some kind of leader-to-leader grand bargain between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Trump says he “would love to get a deal with China.” Xi, who has responded to Trump’s tariff broadside in a measured and targeted way, has left the door open for a negotiated settlement. Such a breakthrough in U.S.-Chinese relations might sound alluring at this particularly fraught moment, but the history of the strategic rivalry between China and the United States and each country’s internal politics make the likelihood of reaching one remote.
Since 1950, China and the United States have pivoted from cooperation to confrontation and back again, several times. They have done so for geopolitical and domestic political reasons. As a rule, they have been able to cooperate on security only when facing a clear and present danger from a common enemy. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, for example, led to a series of agreements aimed at containing the Soviet Union. And the two countries have managed economic cooperation only when both were governed by domestic coalitions that supported the expansion of international trade, as during the 1990s and early 2000s. Cooperation across both security and economic affairs, meanwhile, has always been elusive.
Today, there is nothing—internationally or domestically—that would suggest this is a propitious moment for China and the United States to transcend their differences in either the security or economic realm. Both countries are currently governed by strident nationalist coalitions, with an antiglobalization backlash dominating domestic politics. There is also no common security threat drawing the two countries together. Indeed, they are more likely to find themselves on opposite sides (or at least at orthogonal purposes) regarding international conflicts, such as those between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Iran. Only once in the past hundred years, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, did China and the United States find themselves completely at loggerheads on both dimensions of statecraft. With today’s environment becoming more like that one, it is hard to imagine either leader meaningfully resetting relations or addressing any of the major issues dividing them.
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