These measures follow former President Donald Trump’s 2018 declaration of a trade war against China, President Joe Biden’s continuation of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, and more tough moves against Beijing. These include U.S. administration agreeing to send nuclear submarines to Australia and ban the export of semiconductor chips to China. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, infuriated Beijing with a trip to Taiwan.

Last month, however, Biden predicted a “thaw” in U.S.-China relations shortly after U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with his Chinese counterpart in Vienna. The two countries’ top commerce officials also met last month. And, it turns out, CIA Director Bill Burns secretly traveled to Beijing in May. What’s going on?

Eyck Freymann is the author of One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World. As Freymann sees it, the U.S. is trying to create guardrails for its relationship with China, as the two countries otherwise fiercely compete for global influence. The Americans are especially anxious to establish a process for averting a crisis over Taiwan.

Washington has chosen to reach out to Beijing, Freymann says, on the belief that the U.S. can now negotiate from a position of strength. American allies worldwide mostly adopted its tough approach to China, while China struggled with an economic slowdown, a shambolic Covid response, and a blow to its international status for standing by Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Still, Freymann says, it’s not clear how Beijing will respond to the U.S. outreach. Competing groups in the Chinese leadership hold opposing views on whether to engage with Washington—and Xi Jinping’s opinion, which will be decisive, remains as yet unknown.

Eyck Freymann: Since 2018, U.S.-China relations have been in an unrestrained free fall. Security analysts have been especially worried about a breakdown in military-to-military crisis communication—but really, cooperation has broken down on nearly every issue, even ones like climate change and arms control, where both sides have common interests.

Meanwhile, perceptions on both sides have been heading toward a dark place. In Washington, there’s by now a bipartisan consensus that China is probably planning a surprise attack on Taiwan by 2027, even though the evidence for the idea is very thin. In Beijing, there are strong suspicions that Washington is trying to “contain” China and infiltrate it from within—which has led to greater repression and an obsession with security in virtually all forms. There’s also a real concern in Beijing that the U.S. might push for Taiwan’s independence, crossing China’s longstanding red line and forcing a war.

The two sides are also engaged in brinkmanship in the South China Sea on a near-daily basis; it could easily lead to an accidental collision of ships or planes that kills someone. At this rate, it’s going to happen.

Biden’s people believe you shouldn’t approach such a negotiation unless you’re coming from a position of strength. Of course, Xi and his people believe the same. But optimists on each side hope that at some point in this decade—if not in this presidential term—the other side might see an interest in establishing some ground rules and creating a floor for the relationship. We’re seeing those optimists about to make first contact.

Bluhm: The U.S. has had some recent diplomatic successes against Beijing: a chip-export ban, a G7 commitment to moving supply chains away from China, and countries in the Indo-Pacific such as Australia and the Philippines aligning more closely with Washington against Beijing. What’s the balance of power between the two countries look like now?

Freymann: The U.S. position in what we might callCold War II is far stronger than it was when Biden took office. Some of that’s Biden’s doing, but not all of it. Two catastrophic developments have strengthened the U.S. position in the past 18 months. The first is Putin’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine; the other is Xi Jinping’s botched handling of Covid.

The war in Ukraine has scared the bejesus out of the Japanese, South Koreans, and other U.S. partners in the Indo-Pacific. It’s driven home the reality that history didn’t end with the Cold War—and that a Chinese attack on Taiwan, with all the cataclysmic consequences that would follow, is actually a plausible scenario.

“There’s not much daylight between the Democrats and Republicans on China policy. Under all plausible scenarios, the U.S. and China are going to remain each other’s most important strategic competitors for decades. They have the world’s two largest economies. They have the two largest militaries. They have different political systems. Their global aspirations conflict with each other’s. I don’t think it’s hard-line to say the two countries are destined for intense, long-term competition; it’s just stating the obvious. The difference between Biden and many Republicans is that Biden thinks it’s both possible and desirable to take measures to minimize the risk that an accident or misperception spins out of control.”

“What’s the Biden administration hoping to get out of trying to ease tensions? The first step is to build, at minimum, crisis-management channels between high-level officials on both sides. Over time, as trust builds, this might lead to arms-control agreements on AI, hypersonic missiles, space warfare, and more. Some would add climate to the list, though I’m skeptical that Washington could offer anything realistic to persuade Beijing to adopt lower emissions targets. Really, no serious person in Washington thinks we can just turn back the clock to 2014 or 2015, when Obama and Xi Jinping met in California to discuss cooperation on climate change, restrictions on cyber espionage, and a bunch of other issues. China has changed. America has changed. But if the two sides restart dialogue now, they might plausibly get to a point by the middle of the decade where the relationship has stabilized.”

“Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party has become utterly paranoid that Western powers are trying to infiltrate China and divide it from within. Its response has been to systematically monitor or shut down every channel of communication with the outside world. Beijing’s zero-Covid policy gave it an excuse to obstruct Western researchers, companies, or tourists from visiting China and engaging with Chinese friends and colleagues. Chinese researchers can’t communicate with foreigners anymore without pre-approval and CCP monitoring. This policy has not meaningfully changed since China ended zero-Covid last year. If the CCP is determined to seal off the population in an information bubble, then I doubt we’ll see tensions ease in the short term. Neither side is going to make concessions to the other on faith; they want to see credible evidence that the other side isn’t trying to screw them by exploiting theatrical diplomacy for geopolitical advantage.”