A look at a more open past is sobering, but we can only move forward.
Many societal conflicts can best be understood as negotiations over the terms of coexistence: Israelis and Palestinians, Ukrainians and Russians, Sunnis and Shiites, migrants and citizens, young and old, red and blue. |
Those negotiations can easily break down when one party unilaterally adjusts those terms — quickly through the use of force, for instance, or more slowly, through economic or demographic changes. The trick always is to keep the peace as much as possible. |
One of the most consequential negotiations over the terms of coexistence is well underway between the world's most powerful nations: the United States and China. Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping will meet in San Francisco today, on the sides of an Asian economic summit, to discuss ways in which the two nations can live with each other. |
One glimmer of good news for the talks is that relations are at such a low point that any progress is notable progress. |
In her latest essay for Times Opinion, Farah Stockman takes a look back at a period of time considered a golden age of U.S.-China relations through the eyes of people who were there — diplomats, entrepreneurs and others. There is a sense from them, she writes, that the China they knew has changed beyond recognition. "A melancholy camaraderie filled the room," she writes. "It felt like the end of an era." |
But Biden and Xi come to San Francisco not to bury the relationship in a flurry of new tariffs, saber rattling and threats. All of that has been tried in the past few years, and few people are better off for it. A new era is upon us and it begins with mutual acceptance. |
Politicians can talk about "decoupling" all they want, but the reality is that the United States and China are inextricably bound together, and the success of one relies, in ways that many people refuse to admit, on the success of the other. |
The moment calls for sober and practical negotiations around issues of mutual concern: fentanyl, nuclear weapons and renewables, for starters. With far bigger concerns weighing on their minds (the Middle East and Ukraine for Biden; economic stability for Xi), it is in the interests of both nations to postpone more contentious topics for another day. |
It behooves readers to temper their own expectations around the future of the China-U.S. relationship. Unreasonableness is rocket fuel for demagogues who promise that China can be beaten or brought to heel or isolated, or that the United States is hopelessly mismanaged, overextended or in terminal decline (fist-fighting congressmen on the verge of shutting down the government notwithstanding). |
Americans should be pulling for an improvement in relations between Beijing and Washington, if for no other reason than the alternatives are far more frightening. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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