But are they prepared to assume the risks of not doing so, or of refusing to do so? Both Washington and Beijing appear to calculate that they are approaching their competition from a position of strength, if not with the upper hand. Each side, however, almost certainly is both overestimating its own leverage and underestimating the leverage of the other side. Washington in particular is at risk of overlooking a key difference between China today and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the earlier episode, Washington could temporize and generally disregard Kennan’s proposals for US-Soviet military disengagement from Europe because the Soviet Union’s relative global power and influence—outside the nuclear realm—was so far behind that of the United States. There usually was no perceived imperative for the United States to consider mutual accommodation, beyond nuclear arms control.

China, however, is a genuine peer competitor of the United States, with global economic power and diplomatic influence that far exceed what the Soviet Union was ever able to exercise. Beijing and Washington are thus destined to have overlapping spheres of influence, and to possess the capability and leverage to resist each other’s will. Under these new historical circumstances, some version of mutual accommodation almost certainly is the only alternative to inevitable conflict. Both sides need to recognize this, and not dismiss the other side’s readiness to acknowledge it. For these reasons, Kennan’s idea of “serious diplomacy” in pursuit of peaceful coexistence merits even greater consideration and urgency now than it did fifty years ago.

Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).

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