Jonathan Kirshner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
RELATIONS BETWEEN the United States and China have taken a dark and perilous turn. For much of this century, there was reason to hope that China could be welcomed into the liberal international order, and that its thriving there might mitigate the unavoidable tensions of great power politics. Recently, however, positions have hardened in both East and West. China has taken a discouraging, repressive turn towards personalist authoritarianism; in the United States, increasingly illiberal and politically dysfunctional, a more hawkish posture towards the People’s Republic is one of the vanishingly rare postures that garners bipartisan support in Washington.*
Indeed, inside the Beltway, virtually anyone with influence on policy now professes to be a “realist” with regard to American foreign policy towards China. Unfortunately, casually throwing around the word “realism”—often as little more than a euphemism for being “tough”—falls far short of providing a productive guide to policy. Worse, and harrowingly, the two most influential “realist” theories commonly gestured at in this context are flat wrong in their analyses and appalling in their policy prescriptions, proffering misguided and dangerous advice.
More here.