Arthur Kroeber

There's no losing.

There's just managing.

And we need to do a much, much better job of figuring out how to manage it and keep the conflicts and the friction in as contained a zone as we can.

Not easy to do.

Things are complicated.

Yeah, no, that is a really important point.

I want to just dwell on that a little bit.

The attraction that people have towards extreme narratives about China, total domination or total collapse or so forth, very, very strong.

In my view, again, it's a product of ignorance.

The less you know about the realities of place, the more you can construct these fictional stories which take some truth and then –

absolutize it.

The more you know about the reality, it's like, yeah, it's more messy than that, so neither that nor this.

That, I think, is just another argument for why you have to have much more deep engagement so people are engaging with realities rather than fantasies.

You can see this, again, in very mundane ways.

If you just look at the way that the Trump administration has conducted its trade negotiations with China,

it was premised on the notion that Chinese economy was so weak that you hit them with tariffs and they will immediately capitulate.

And that was a ridiculous idea.

And it's taken them a couple of rounds to figure out, oh, maybe that wasn't quite so right and we have to take this more seriously.

So getting away from the extreme narratives is important in general.

And then I think also in the U.S.