Editor’s note for Friday, February 5, 2021

My thoughts today: 

Short of War: How to keep U.S.-Chinese confrontation from ending in calamity is the title of a new Kevin Rudd essay in Foreign Policy, which begins thusly: 

Officials in Washington and Beijing don’t agree on much these days, but there is one thing on which they see eye to eye: the contest between their two countries will enter a decisive phase in the 2020s. This will be the decade of living dangerously. No matter what strategies the two sides pursue or what events unfold, the tension between the United States and China will grow, and competition will intensify; it is inevitable. War, however, is not. It remains possible for the two countries to put in place guardrails that would prevent a catastrophe: a joint framework for what I call “managed strategic competition” would reduce the risk of competition escalating into open conflict.

Our word of the day is Kuaishou (快手 kuài shǒu). 

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief