This article understates our own role in creating the problems we have with China. First and most obviously under Trump we asserted our god-given right to destroy their economy, strengthening hardliners in the ruling party and making truth out of the government propaganda that Western imperialism still stands in the way of any Chinese success.

Second for our own domestic consumption there is the story of the evil Chinese destroying millions of American jobs. Those jobs were in fact lost, but by some strange coincidence nobody notices that 100% of the job loss happened under George W Bush, when the same people who gave us the deregulation-induced 2008 crash were actively encouraging outsourcing abroad. Anything that business wanted was good. The main thing the Chinese did was currency manipulation to avoid appreciation of the renminbi despite the large balance of payments deficit. We could have fought it at the WTO, but we had no interest in doing that!

When you consider that the Republican Party also fought recovery from the crash (remember the balanced budget amendment) to keep things bad for subsequent elections, the Republican Party all by itself produced more misery than the Chinese.

The only way out of the current mess is to establish a decent relationship with the Chinese. That will be much harder now than ten years ago, but there still is a common interest, which is not the case with Russia. Xi is a megalomaniac and an autocrat, but after all so was Trump. That relationship has to be primarily financial; what matters is rules for economic behavior. It matters less whether their society is to our eyes horribly repressive. After all their population is currently a lot more positive about their government than ours is—for the good reason that overall it has made things better for them.

We don’t have to knuckle under to do that. The reason we lost all those jobs was that we chose to.