Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan
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o competition or surrender on issues o fundamental importance.
Instead, coexistence means accepting competition as a condition to be
managed rather than a problem to be solved.COLD WAR LESSONS, NOT COLD WAR LOGIC
Given the current hazy discourse on competition, there is an under-
standable temptation to reach back to the only great-power competi-
tion Americans remember to make sense o the present one: the Cold
War. The analogy has intuitive appeal. Like the Soviet Union, China
is a continent-sized competitor with a repressive political system and
big ambitions. The challenge it poses is global and lasting, and meet-
ing that challenge will require the kind o domestic mobilization that
the United States pursued in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the analogy is ill ¿tting. China today is a peer competitor that is
more formidable economically, more sophisticated diplomatically, and
more Çexible ideologically than the Soviet Union ever was. And unlike
the Soviet Union, China is deeply integrated into the world and inter-
twined with the U.S. economy. The Cold War truly was an existential
struggle. The U.S. strategy o containment was built on the prediction
that the Soviet Union would one day crumble under its own weight—
that it contained “the seeds o its own decay,” as George Kennan, the
diplomat who ¿rst laid out the strategy, declared with conviction.
No such prediction holds today; it would be misguided to build a
neo-containment policy on the premise that the current Chinese state
will eventually collapse, or with that as the objective. Despite China’s
many demographic, economic, and environmental challenges, the
Chinese Communist Party has displayed a remarkable ability to adapt
to circumstances, often brutally so. Its fusion o mass surveillance and
arti¿cial intelligence, meanwhile, is enabling a more eective digital
authoritarianism—one that makes the collective action necessary for
reform or revolution hard to contemplate, let alone organize. China
may well encounter serious internal problems, but an expectation o
collapse cannot form the basis o a prudent strategy. Even i the state
does collapse, it is likely to be the result o internal dynamics rather
than U.S. pressure.
The Cold War analogy at once exaggerates the existential threat
posed by China and discounts the strengths Beijing brings to long-
term competition with the United States. Although the risk o conÇict
in Asia’s hot spots is serious, it is by no means as high, nor is the threat