Is Washington Prepared to Negotiate Peaceful Coexistence with China?

Recurring claims that a new “cold war” is emerging obviously evoke the U.S.-Soviet precedent. And although there are many differences between that historical example and the current U.S.-China relationship, there nonetheless are lessons to be learned from making the comparison. Several such lessons can be derived from scholar Frank Costigliola’s new biography of George F. Kennan, the intellectual author of the U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union. One of the key themes of the book—Kennan: A Life Between Worlds—is Kennan’s failure over the latter half of his life to convince his policymaking successors in Washington that containment was not intended as a military strategy, and was instead meant as a prerequisite for negotiating the terms of peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union…