The United States and China "remain deeply interconnected and are competing within a single international system," Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an article recently published by Global Asia, arguing that any effort to revive a "containment strategy" holds little purchase anywhere in the world.
"Even as each side seeks to limit vulnerabilities from dependence on the other, neither side views it as plausible to disentangle entirely from the other at tolerable cost or risk," he wrote, Xinhua news agency reported.
Hass also noted, "For much of the rest of the world, the current moment is more an era of mounting global challenges than one of great power competition."
US-China competition "is occurring against a backdrop of rising global challenges, including climate change, pandemics, mass migration, food and energy insecurity, and widening social inequality," the scholar pointed out.
"As the effects of climate change, pandemics and widening social inequality become more acutely felt, other world leaders and opinion-shapers may become more forceful in urging Washington and Beijing to look beyond each other to contribute their unmatched capabilities to addressing the world's challenges," Hass underlined.
In his view, the path to global leadership may not run through any attempt to "win" the US-China competition, whatever that entails. It may be the result of which country "proves most capable of delivering solutions to challenges at home and abroad."
Katrina vanden Heuvel, a columnist for The Washington Post, has recently urged the United States to avoid a new Cold War and focus on what it really needs.
"What's needed is a security architecture for a world the United States doesn't pretend to police -- limiting, not intensifying, great power conflict," Heuvel wrote in an opinion piece.
"That would include a revival of arms control, new agreements on limits of force, emphasis on areas such as climate change and pandemics where global cooperation -- and particularly cooperation with China -- is essential," she added.