Thread by @GrahamTAllison

Having returned from a whirlwind tour of 9 intense days of meetings in Beijing, reflecting on my discussion with Xi Jinping:

While Xi’s primary objective in meeting with US business leaders (I was included as a ‘representative of the academic and strategic community’) was to emphasize that China is “open for business,” he was also interested in engaging about the broader geopolitical relationship.

I was invited to offer a 5-minute comment on the relationship between the US and China.

In addition to commending him for what he and President Biden achieved in San Francisco in establishing a solid foundation for a stable, constructive relationship going forward, I raised a question about the metaphor he had used in his discussion with Chuck Schumer last October.

There, he said: “The Thucydides Trap is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the US.”

He went on to use an interesting metaphor to describe the US-China relationship: “I am in you, and you are in me” (你中有我，我中有你)

I asked him what he meant by that. For a clip of his answer to the question, see the recording below:

His response captures the essence of the conditions in which the greatest Thucydidean rivalry of all times is playing out.

Across nearly every dimension—tech, trade, industry, military, and global influence—the US and China are destined to be the fiercest competitors history has ever seen.

But if war means suicide for both nations, then the central truth Reagan captured about nations with robust nuclear arsenals remains as true today as it was during the height of the Cold War: “A nuclear war cannot be won and therefore must never be fought.”

The US and China exist in 21st-century conditions in which each nation’s survival depends on cooperation from the other to address shared, existential challenges (nuclear MAD, climate change, global pandemics, etc.)

That requires leaders in both countries to identify what Kissinger called a new “strategic concept” that satisfies the contradictory imperatives to simultaneously compete and cooperate.