Great as the opportunity costs are in a deepening U.S.-Russia cold war, the evolution of U.S.-Chinese relations will be the single factor producing or preventing a dystopian bipolar world driven by two destructive cold wars. Xi’s apparent belief that the United States and the West are in irreversible decline and Biden’s conviction that the struggle between Chinese authoritarianism and American democracy is existential make finding common ground more difficult. Both perspectives, however, also create an imperative that the challenge each sees remain short of conflagration. Rudd’s concept of “managed strategic competition” and the steps that he urges would seem an obvious place to begin. (And in his most recent analysis, he sees signs that leadership in both countries, plagued by a swelling set of unresolved problems, may be ready for a temporary respite from their jousting.) However, now that China is a peer nuclear competitor, and should be acknowledged as such, the two countries need to go further. They need to launch an active, ongoing strategic dialogue to explore how each imagines the paths to a nuclear war, the weapons systems and strategies that risk producing such, and potential measures that would reduce this risk.

Both countries should also recalibrate the way they are altering the context for conventional war in East Asia. China should relax its moves toward claiming the Taiwan Strait as territorial waters, and the United States should reemphasize its “one-China” policy and reciprocate any restraint in Chinese military actions with limitations on its own military operations. In general, both nations need to rebalance the elements in the United States’ overt and China’s implicit strategy of competing, confronting, and cooperating. The space where competition invites confrontation should be narrowed, and where it permits cooperation, should be broadened.

A year or two ago, none of us, including leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, could have imagined what the Russo-Ukrainian War has wrought. One hopes their ability to imagine what worse could yet go wrong will not fail them.

Robert Legvold is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, where he specialized in the international relations of the post-Soviet states.

Image: Reuters.