Making sense of the U.S.-China trade war is difficult in itself. Making sense of how it may provoke a wider economic "decoupling," and impact the long-term strategic relationship between Beijing and Washington, is more difficult again.
I wrote earlier this year in a report entitled "The Avoidable War" that in 2018, a major new inflection point was passed in the postwar relationship between the U.S. and China. Phase one covered the quarter century of strategic hostility from the founding of the People's Republic until rapprochement under Nixon and Kissinger.
