Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan
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cities; its factories are the forge for much o the world’s advanced tech-
nology. This thick web o ties makes it dicult to even start to deter-
mine which countries are aligned with the United States and which are
aligned with China. Ecuador and Ethiopia might look to Beijing for
investment or for surveillance technologies, but they hardly see these
purchases as part o a conscious turn away from the United States.
Even as China emerges as a more formidable competitor than the
Soviet Union, it has also become an essential U.S. partner. Global
problems that are dicult enough to
solve even when the United States and
China work together will be impossi-
ble to solve i they fail to do so—cli-
mate change foremost among them,
given that the United States and
China are the two biggest polluters. A
host o other transnational challenges—
economic crises, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics—also demand
some degree o joint eort. This imperative for cooperation has little
parallel in the Cold War.
While the notion o a new Cold War has brought calls for an up-
dated version o containment, resistance to such thinking has come
from advocates o an accommodative “grand bargain” with China.
Such a bargain would go well beyond the terms o U.S.-Soviet dé-
tente: in this scenario, the United States would eectively concede to
China a sphere o inÇuence in Asia. Proponents defend this conces-
sion as necessary given the United States’ domestic headwinds and
relative decline. This position is sold as realistic, but it is no more
tenable than containment. Ceding the world’s most dynamic region to
China would do long-term harm to American workers and businesses.
It would damage American allies and values by turning sovereign
partners into bargaining chips. A grand bargain would also require
stark and permanent U.S. concessions, such as the abrogation o U.S.
alliances or even o the right to operate in the western Paci¿c, for
speculative promises. Not only are these costs unacceptable; a grand
bargain would also be unenforceable. A rising China would likely vio-
late the agreement when its preferences and power changed.
Advocates o neo-containment tend to see any call for managed
coexistence as an argument for a version o the grand bargain; advo-
cates o a grand bargain tend to see any suggestion o sustained com-Washington should heed the
lessons of the Cold War
while rejecting the idea that
its logic still applies.