The competing rivals are vulnerable to extraneous actions unrelated to the rivalry, by some third party, unintended by either of the principal rivals, which nonetheless one or the other feels obliged to respond to, setting up a spiral that often ends in a conflict, even a catastrophic conflict.

Many factors make today’s world more stable.

While the 90 day “truce of Bueno Aires” buys time for negotiations during the US-China trade war, it does little to address the real problems of the China-US relationship. Instead of succumbing to unnecessary hysteria, the US-China relationship should move towards a “cooperative rivalry.”

He Yafei argues that it is still true that China and the U.S. have more common grounds than differences. China continues to desire for a secure and stable world order.

Professor Graham Allison of Harvard has suggested that the US/China relationship might fall into the ‘Thucydides trap’, referring to conflict between an established power and a newly rising one. This is a possibility but not a certainty: both countries will have to take care to avoid exacerbating difficulties in the relationship and to make the right choices among the different scenarios for the way forward, and as things stand, China appears better placed to manage this change.

Cold War benefits no one.

The Trump administration gives no credit to China.

The US has to come to grips with the changed balance of power and accept the coming of a “new era” in international relations and global governance.

Jared McKinney uses three historical analogies to illustrate his point that it is a reductionist proposition that the U.S., as the ‘champion’ of democracy, and China, as a rising ‘revisionist’ state, are locked into an existential struggle in which one will lose and one win.

Zainab Zaheer argues that with the Belt and Road’s development, the next few years may be slightly reminiscent of the Cold War, where two rival nations both well equipped with resources and manpower fought for influence and dominance, while smaller nations were left playing a game of strategy, trying to maximize the benefits of fraternizing with giants.