"Far from mitigating Beijing's brashness, all of these diplomatic overtures that we've seen over the last year have emboldened Xi further."

"Far from mitigating Beijing's brashness, all of these diplomatic overtures that we've seen over the last year have emboldened Xi further. And I really do think that appeasing this sort of aggression today really does risk miscalculation and potentially even catastrophe tomorrow.
    "I think APEC revealed that policymakers here in Washington are interested in pursuing a path towards détente. A lot of the language that we heard from Xi Jinping himself about 'the world is big enough for the two of us' is eerily reminiscent of what we even heard from Khrushchev during the Cold War about peaceful coexistence, right? Even the Biden administration's China policy is rooted in an idea of competing while coexisting. It assumes a policy of détente. And so I think, as much as I've sort of had concerns or reservations about comparisons to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, I do think it's important that we recognise that détente as a policy failed.
    "We did fool ourselves a little bit into thinking that the US and Soviet systems could co-exist. And so we pursued policies that were aimed, I think, at stability, but counterintuitively extended the Soviet system's survival [which was always headed for collapse]. And so I think today, because of all of the headwinds that Tom outlines in his paper, Xi Jinping really welcomes détente. It provides the necessary breathing room that he needs both to address the structural, not cyclical, structural problems in China's economy, problems that he has talked about since his first day atop of the Chinese Communist Party, but also to build out this alternate global architecture, one that reflects China's values and, I think, China's interests."

~ Craig Singleton, from his Hudson Institute co-presentation 'How the US Should Respond to China’s Challenge to US Geoeconomic Leadership' [transcript here]. Hat tip Bill Brown, who reminds us "The CCP, like the Soviets, is nothing without the West."