With the United States in the hands of an unstable president, diplomacy is not the answer for a conflict-prone US-China relationship. The striking contrast between US President Donald Trump’s intrinsic volatility and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s strategic resolve plays to China’s great advantage—and means that effective conflict resolution is a task for the post-Trump era.

It wasn’t always this way. Diplomacy was at the forefront of Sino-American engagement in the early 1970s. Well-practiced in the art of grand strategy, Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai, answering to President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong, masterfully crafted a Cold War triangulation that redefined great-power relations. In the intervening years, leader-to-leader summits became the template for maintaining bilateral ties.

But the rise of politically constrained, egocentric leaders—often deluded into believing that they possessed superior skills of personal persuasion—made disputes between the two superpowers exceedingly difficult to avoid, let alone resolve. Neither side could afford to be seen as weak, and Sino-American conflict resolution became an exercise in saving face.

The emergence of new strains of nationalism in the US and China has also hampered diplomacy, which derives its legitimacy from domestic........

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