Détente Requires Accommodation

If one seeks to ease and improve relations with another state, one cannot at the same time be intensely committed to resisting them at every turn.

Evan Osnos warns about the pitfalls of a Cold War-style rivalry with China, but then he says this:

Washington should fiercely oppose Beijing’s abuse of human rights, its militarizing of the South China Sea, and its threats to Taiwan. But, if we are to limit the worst risks of a cold war, the U.S. should also prepare for what the Nixon Administration called détente—the policy, adopted in the late nineteen-sixties, with regard to the Soviets, that Henry Kissinger later summarized as “both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.”

The best way to limit the worst risks of a cold war is not to pursue policies that create cold war conditions. That may sound flippant, but it’s true. If you can foresee how policies of containment and rivalry can easily lead to disaster, it makes much more sense to adopt different policies at the outset rather than try to limit the damage that the others cause. Preparing for détente is an admission that policies of containment and rivalry don’t actually work very well. Why not skip ahead to pursuing détente from the start?