The mood music around China and the United States has grown ominous. Government white papers, op-eds, and IR scholarship now treat a great-power collision as a question of timing rather than possibility. We think the alarm has crowded out something more useful: historical perspective on how Beijing and Washington have, more than once, balanced powerful countervailing forces without falling off the edge.

The wartime relationship between China and the United States from 1940 to 1945 offers a case where calculations of security, economy, and identity pulled both governments in opposite directions at once, and yet a workable balance held until Japan’s surrender. The eight decades since have transformed both states beyond recognition, but the core pattern of intense connection paired with deep friction is back. Reading the present with one eye on that earlier period yields what Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler call “security dilemma sensitivity,” an awareness of how one actor’s behaviour gets read by another.

What the wartime relationship actually looked like

A simple version of the story runs from the exhilaration of new allies fighting Japanese aggression to a victory soured by mutual frustration. But reality was rockier from the beginning. 

Roosevelt’s administration extended Lend-Lease aid, ended American extraterritoriality, repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, designated China one of the “Four Policemen” at the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in October 1943, and the president himself met Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo a month later with promises about returned territories and postwar........

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