Avoiding War with China

If the U.S. and China are going to avoid war, we need to stop preparing for it as if it is inevitable.

Nick Kristof wants to advise the U.S. on how to avoid a war with China, but this is the closest he gets to explaining how to do that:

From an American vantage point, another cold war may not seem so terrible, since we and the Russians managed to avoid incinerating each other in the last one. But millions died in the last cold war in proxy war zones from Vietnam to Angola. And Russia and the United States avoided nuclear war in part because leaders on each side had memories of World War II that made them cautious; I worry that today, as in 1914, overconfidence and myopic political pressures on each side might drive continuing escalation.

As solutions for avoiding war go, saying “don’t be overconfident and myopic” isn’t the worst answer, but there is very little specific or actionable in Kristof’s column that would allow policymakers to avoid a future war. When Kristof does talk about specific policies, it is to blame China for making things worse and to praise what the U.S. has been doing. Kristof spends so much of his time establishing that he basically shares the hawkish consensus on China that there is almost nothing left for the part about avoiding the war.