Robert Daly & Robert Litwak
At their meeting last November, US President Joe Biden and China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping agreed to resume dialogue to promote peace. But the first real test of their tentative comity, Taiwan’s May presidential election, brought saber-rattling from Beijing. China’s large-scale naval and air exercises around the island that Biden has vowed to defend echoed the Cuban Missile Crisis and underscored that Taiwan is the epicenter of a new Cold War.
In the early phase of this rivalry, neither Biden nor Xi shows any sign of reconsidering his nation’s goals, strategies, assessments of the other, or desire to shape global norms. Both powers want to avoid war, but not at the cost of questioning their interests or values. Each is determined to neither fight nor lose.
The only strategy open to them, therefore, is to build a framework for peaceful rivalry. The first steps will be hard, as each country believes it has the upper hand, and each rejects the other’s key concepts for international order.
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