The world is now in the midst of a once-in-a-century global health pandemic that threatens the lives and livelihoods of billions. This coronavirus transcends borders and nationalities, and until a vaccine is found, a cluster of cases in any one country will endanger the health and safety of people everywhere. For this reason, there has rarely been a time in which the fates of the world's nations were so clearly linked and where American leadership and purposeful international coordination were so urgently required.

For America to defeat the coronavirus and return to a version of life as it was before this nightmare, should we identify China as an adversary against whom to mobilize? Or alternatively, must we recognize it as a partner whose cooperation is essential for our own victory? While the consensus in Washington has moved sharply toward defining China as part of the problem, the fact is that we cannot succeed in this war against coronavirus without making China part of the solution.

Since publishing his book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, three years ago, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Graham Allison has been searching for ways to escape the dangerous dynamic that could lead Washington and Beijing to stumble into a catastrophic conflict neither side wants. Convinced that there is no monopoly of strategic wisdom on either side of the Pacific, Allison decided to take a classroom assignment on crafting a grand strategy to meet the China challenge and open it to the public as a case competition. His office received dozens of valuable submissions from across the world.

Could China and the US be stumbling down the path Germany and the United Kingdom took at the beginning of the last century? The possibility will strike many readers as inconceivable. But we should remember that when we say something is “inconceivable,” this is a claim not about what is possible in the world, but rather about what our limited minds can imagine.

My answer to the question of whether we are sleepwalking toward war is “yes.” 

Unipolarity is over, and with it the illusion that other nations would simply take their assigned place in a U.S.-led international order. For the United States, that will require accepting the reality that there are spheres of influence in the world today—and that not all of them are American spheres.

Churchill observed that the further back one can look, the farther ahead one can see. To help the Aspen Strategy Group look ahead to prescriptions for the U.S. in the current strategic competition with China, the organizers asked me to look back at previous great power rivalries. Specifically, they assigned me two Applied History questions:

• “What are the lessons from history we should be aware of when two great powers collide?” 
• “What should the U.S. learn from these to shape its policies on China?”

Since his book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, was published, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Graham Allison has been searching for ways to escape the structural stress that could inadvertently lead Washington and Beijing to a violent conflict. Convinced that there is no monopoly of strategic wisdom on either side of the Pacific, Professor Allison decided to take a classroom assignment on crafting a grand strategy to meet the China challenge and open it to the public as a case competition. His office received dozens of submissions from across the world.

OVER THE past year, writes I have been collaborating with a prominent leader in the technology industry to combine his decades of experience advancing frontier technologies, on the one hand, and my decades of experience in national security decisionmaking, on the other. Together, we have been trying to understand the national security implications of China’s great leap forward in artificial intelligence (AI). Our purpose in this essay is to sound an alarm over China’s rapid progress and the current prospect of it overtaking the United States in applying AI in the decade ahead; to explain why AI is for the autocracy led by the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter, the “Party”) an existential priority; to identify key unanswered questions about the dangers of an unconstrained AI arms race between the two digital superpowers; and to point to the reasons why we believe that this is a race the United States can and must win.

In this week’s brouhaha over the leaked cables from Britain’s Ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch, to his government in London describing the Trump Administration as “inept” and “dysfunctional,” Trump’s explosive reaction, and the Ambassador’s resignation, one central question has been assiduously avoided: what does Sir Kim mean by “inept” and “dysfunctional?”

By turning established diplomatic practice on its head and making an unscheduled stop to shake hands with Kim Jong Un in the DMZ, President Trump demonstrated his readiness to go the extra mile and beyond to meet the challenge his predecessor, Barack Obama, told him would define his presidency.