How Biden and Xi Can Keep the New Cold War From Turning Hot
Let’s hope it doesn’t take another Cuban Missile Crisis to bring the U.S. and China to detente.
T-shirt diplomacy.
Photographer: Tim Rue/Bloomberg
A little French word that used to play a big role in global politics is poised for a comeback: detente. The word was first used as a diplomatic term in the early 1900s, for example when the French ambassador in Berlin attempted — in vain as it proved — to improve his country’s strained relationship with the German Reich, or when British diplomats attempted the same thing in 1912. But detente became familiar to Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s, when it was used to describe a thawing in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
I have argued since last year that the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China are already embroiled in Cold War II. President Donald Trump did not start that war. Rather, his election represented a belated American reaction to a Chinese challenge — economic, strategic and ideological — that had been growing since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012.