Most cultures—especially, perhaps, those in Asia—regard cycles as one of the basic rhythms of life, including international life. Great Britain was recognised as the leading world power for more than a century from 1815. The United States roared into prominence over the few decades leading up to World War I and, after leading coalitions to victory in Europe and Asia in World War II, resolved to design and manage a thoroughly refurbished international system. By that time, it had long been clear that the UK wouldn’t contest being displaced in that role.

Over the past 2,500 years, China’s fortunes reached glittering heights on three occasions, usually separated by chaos, civil war or foreign conquest and occupation. Now China sees itself as on the cusp of a fourth age ranked among the world’s leading states and possibly—because it is for the first time intimately linked to the rest of the world—the first among equals. The remaining obstacle is the US, which is now itself deeply ambivalent about continuing to take on any kind of leadership responsibilities but which has also signalled its determination to resist China (and Russia), shifting the tone of the international system away from liberal democratic values in favour of more authoritarian guidelines and constraints.

In the months before his death in 1945, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his key advisers designed their system to address the root causes of the devastating turbulence in the first half of the 20th century—specifically, ultranationalism and protectionism. Roosevelt also determined that China, with its immense population (if little else in 1945), had to be part of an inner clique of large powers tasked with holding the system together.

The advent of the Cold War between the US and USSR around 1947, and China joining the socialist bloc in 1949, meant that the existential cleavage turned out to be ideology and associated philosophies of governance. The two systems had their first conflict just a year later, in Korea, with the US and China as the core adversaries. The US-led international order therefore got off to a somewhat confused start.

The Sino-Soviet alliance imploded in 1960, and in 1972 the US and China engineered a historic accommodation. Later, after Mao Zedong’s death, the Chinese Communist Party capitalised on the de facto American security blanket to abandon socialist thinking on resource allocation and switch progressively to a market system linked to the international trading community. China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, made much of the proposition that the constellation of forces driving the international system provided China with a ‘strategic window of opportunity’ to attempt this hazardous transformation in comparative safety: the US stalemated the USSR in security terms and was prepared to support China’s ‘reform and opening up’ by leaving the huge US market open to Chinese products.

A decade later came the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union and a peaceful end to the Cold War. China’s economy was beginning to flourish, but the CCP also engaged in the stunningly brutal suppression of protesters seeking greater freedom. The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 led to strained relations with Washington for several years, but the White House’s core stance of protecting the accommodation with China survived.

One strand of logic in the American position was the broad contention that a free-market economy was likely to also have a liberalising influence politically and socially. Keeping the US economy open to countries utilising the market system therefore supported US interests. If Tiananmen Square tested this contention, so too did Japan’s emergence in the same timeframe as a state that could compete with the US even in high-technology products. Miraculously, however, although China was an order of magnitude larger than Japan and its adoption of liberal principles to guide the conduct of its affairs a much more problematic contention, the general wisdom of America’s posture towards China wasn’t really contested through the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.

George W. Bush’s administration came to office in January 2001 with a (neo-conservative) mindset to reposition China as a strategic rival and proclaimed a sweeping pivot to Asia centred on this assessment. These policy settings were swept aside by the events of 11 September and Washington’s disastrous determination to put Iraq at the centre of America’s response to mass-casualty terrorism.

Not long after Iraq was confirmed as a historic blunder, China was again detecting a strategic window of opportunity to continue with its export-led growth model. The global financial crisis in 2008 confirmed that this window remained open. It may well have been the case that the GFC drove a shift in the relative stature of the US and China. Key pointers included Beijing’s preparedness to simply deflect US President Barack Obama’s repeated attempts to discourage state-sponsored theft of technology and other intellectual property and its decision in 2014 to implement well-prepared plans to construct seven artificial islands in the South China Sea to try to make its extensive claims there a fait accompli.

The broad posture of engaging with and accommodating China, which emerged in 1972, wasn’t formally terminated until 2017–18 when President Donald Trump’s administration recommitted the US to strategic competition with major powers that wanted ‘to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests’, specifically, China and Russia.

For 50 years, a disciplined and focused China feasted on the fruits of Western success to accelerate its reacquisition of major-power capacities. It secured relief from the Soviet threat, access to immense markets, enduring privileges as a ‘developing economy’ and a relaxed attitude to the theft of technology. This looked like another textbook example of how the US-designed ‘rules-based order’ was supposed to work in respect of states ‘not of the West’. No one saw merit in wondering whether the American-led order could embrace a China that could readily match the US in raw economic muscle and, in the fullness of time, dwarf it.

A little interrogation would have confirmed that the CCP regarded every basic principle of democratic governance as deeply threatening and would, early in the new century, label advocacy of them as treasonous.

China’s hard power continues to converge on that of the US and will exceed it in due course. At some point, a surfeit of hard power will compensate for shortcomings on the soft power front, but until then soft power means that global leadership cannot simply be seized, it must also be bestowed.

Soft power has contributed heavily to America’s standing and influence and, although China certainly recognises this, its own progress on this front has been stunted by its government’s deep aversion to transparency in any shape or form. Transparency is inescapably associated with spontaneity, which in turn threatens the control that the CCP clearly regards as crucial to its survival. This imperative, however, makes the CCP a poor communicator, presenting China as introverted, secretive, evasive and calculating—qualities that crush those associated with soft power: confidence, integrity, legitimacy, frankness and intimacy.

Despite the spectacular economic gains of the recent past, the CCP is not doing justice to China, an extraordinary country by any measure and one that has enriched and continues to enrich our world in so many ways. Tragically, it is likely to prove simply incapable of doing so.

Australia is still searching for a posture of engagement towards the government of China that endures—not least because it involves recognising that the CCP is very unlikely to change its outlook and expectations and the means it feels entitled to employ to achieve them.

Similarly, the Covid-19 experience has propelled the US–China relationship beyond ‘distant’ to overtly hostile. If the fallout from the pandemic includes the threat of a game-changing divergence in the economic trajectory of the two states—as it well might—the relationship could degenerate to instability and outright danger. Perhaps more likely is that the power struggle between these two giants will persist and that this struggle will be both prolonged and fraught with danger. Either way, those with the capacity to make a positive difference, whether alone or in coalitions, need to get to work.

Having already claimed more than 227,000 lives and sent the global economy towards its deepest slump since the Great Depression, the Covid-19 crisis is bound to reshape geopolitics. While the contours of the post-pandemic order remain to be seen, one thing seems certain: far from normalising their relationship, the United States and China are likely to become increasingly estranged—and increasingly hostile towards each other.

Even before the current crisis erupted, the Sino-American relationship was on life support. The outbreak may have sounded its death knell. In particular, evidence that local Chinese authorities initially suppressed information about the new coronavirus, together with the severe disruption of global supply chains caused by China’s sudden nationwide lockdown, highlighted for most Americans two sources of severe vulnerability stemming from the bilateral relationship.

The first is China’s repressive political system. While Americans have long been aware of the ideological chasm between their country’s system of government and China’s, to most it was largely an abstraction. Stories about the forcible detainment of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, the repression and abuse of Tibetans and the persecution of political dissidents were harrowing, but distant. For many, they were merely evidence of the US system’s superiority.

The Covid-19 outbreak – which has caused the deaths of more than 60,000 Americans, partial economic shutdowns and mass unemployment—turned the abstract into reality. For the first time, ordinary Americans going about their lives in their own country fear for their economic and physical survival, because of political repression in a distant land.

And Americans do, by and large, blame Chinese political repression for the crisis. According to a recent Harris poll, more than 70% of Americans believe that China reported inaccurately on the outbreak’s effects, and over 75% hold the Chinese government responsible for the virus’s spread. In fact, 55–60% believe that China’s government deserves more blame than its American counterpart for Covid-19’s spread in the US.

The second source of vulnerability lies in economic interdependence, especially US reliance on Chinese supply chains. Before the outbreak, Americans viewed this issue mainly through the lens of trade imbalances and job losses. They now largely see China’s outsize role in producing the world’s personal protective equipment and pharmaceutical ingredients as a dangerous national-security weakness that must be mitigated.

But while the Covid-19 crisis has highlighted for Americans the true extent of the danger of engaging with China’s one-party regime, a large and immediate surge in mutual hostility was not inevitable. That outcome reflects both governments’ decisions to leverage the crisis to boost their domestic standing.

After news of its botched initial response in Wuhan got out, the Chinese Communist Party went into damage-control mode. As soon as new infections began to decline, the government launched an aggressive diplomatic effort and propaganda blitz to repair its image. It has sent medical supplies and personnel to hard-hit countries like Iran, Italy and the Philippines. At home, it has trumpeted its own resolute action, whipping up nationalism and criticising Western democracies’ weak responses.

The West, meanwhile, gave China plenty of ammunition. US President Donald Trump, in particular, has overseen a truly inept crisis response, characterised by finger-pointing, constant contradictions and outright lies.

With Trump’s failed response, and the associated meltdown of the US economy, now threatening his re-election prospects, the Republican Party is eager to pin the blame on China. And many Americans seem convinced: according to the Harris poll, more than 50% agree with Trump’s characterisation of the new coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus’.

This toxic brew of ideological hostility, a prolonged trade war, geopolitical rivalry and domestic politicking will most likely fuel further escalation in bilateral tensions. In the US, Congress is likely to pass legislation mandating the reshoring of China-based production of goods deemed relevant to national security. And the Trump administration will probably impose new sanctions, including tighter restrictions on technology transfers.

Because such punitive measures enjoy wide public support—71% of Americans want to pull manufacturing back from China—the only real question is how harsh they will be. Given the political stakes, Trump is unlikely to show much restraint. After all, the US relationship with China is set to be the most important foreign-policy issue in the November election. Already, Trump has begun attacking his presumptive Democratic challenger, former vice president Joseph Biden, for being ‘soft’ on China, while Biden has responded by accusing Trump of being softer.

As for Chinese President Xi Jinping, he is unlikely to back down. Earlier this month, at a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee (the CCP’s top decision-making body), he declared that ‘we must maintain “bottom-line thinking” and make mental and material preparations for changes in the external environment that will last a relatively long period of time’”. It’s not yet clear exactly what Xi’s ‘bottom-line thinking’ is, but it’s a safe bet it implies that China will respond to intensifying US pressure not with concessions but with retaliation.

At a time when the world is facing an imminent shared threat, a worsening cold war between its two largest economies is the last thing anyone needs. But with neither leader likely to change his approach, that outcome will be hard to avoid. In fact, far from catalysing global cooperation, the pandemic may well lock the US and China into a vicious cycle of escalation, leading directly to full-blown conflict.

Towards the end of 2017, America’s official rhetoric on China changed so abruptly that the sensation was one of a dam bursting. The national security strategy issued in December 2017 and the national defence strategy of January 2018 spoke of a loosely coordinated but comprehensive challenge from Russia and China to overwhelm and suppress US power and influence.

These landmark documents had an undertone of anger and frustration that this challenge hadn’t been detected earlier and now required the US to undertake an urgent retuning of its external policy settings.

A part of the intellectual assessment of this policy lurch has been the contention that, since the end of the Cold War, the US had broadly rested its approach to China on the assumption that reinforcing Beijing’s decision to use the free-market system to guide the allocation of resources, not least through keeping the US and other democratic markets open to Chinese exports, would lead in due course to more liberal political and social practices inside China.

At the heart of America’s anger and frustration was not only the belated realisation that this assumption was seriously misguided and that China now had potentially enough momentum to contest the supremacy of the US-led liberal order, but also the sense that China had consciously duped the US into entertaining this assumption for so long.

That is not how I remember it. I have been a keen student of US foreign and security policy for a long time and I think I would have noticed if a key driver of the US approach towards China was the expectation that it would deliver a more liberal Chinese approach towards governance.

This expectation was not a significant theme in US policy statements or academic debates from the time of China’s adoption of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening up’. Nor can I recall any serious exploration of how communist China could insinuate liberal practices into its ethos of domestic governance.

The view that was widely held from the 1980s onwards was that a China that was enmeshed in the international commercial and financial system (in stark contrast to the Soviet Union) was likely to be a more collegiate actor across the spectrum of international issues. That is a very different expectation to one based on China developing some hybrid socialist–liberal system of governance.

I would agree that China has consistently and very skillfully disguised its aspirations and intentions—especially the points in time when they underwent significant change—but I don’t share the contention that Beijing has overtly indulged in fuelling expectations that the governance of China would, over time, hew more closely to the tenets of a liberal democracy.

We now have a clearer view of the challenge ahead. The US leads a strong majority of states that accept that governance should be transparent, that prioritise the rights of citizens through an authoritative parliament of elected representatives, and that maintain an independent judiciary, a free press and a democratic (in the sense of not monopolistic) business community competing for resources and markets under a common set of rules.

The Chinese Communist Party insists that there are legitimate alternative ways of defining and measuring national development, including the rights of its citizens, that support its view that national progress is most reliably assured when the authority of the state is not qualified and that notions of transparency and other deliberate checks and balances on that authority should be viewed as calamitous, even treasonous.

China’s national statistics in recent decades offer strong support for the CCP’s contention, except, of course, for the simple fact that the Chinese public has never been offered a choice. Can the US and China devise a workable interface between their respective approaches to governance or should they concede that the instincts and options available to their governments, businesses and civil society are so fundamentally different as to preclude constructive engagement, leaving deliberate disengagement, or parallelism, as the more sensible path to stability and peace over the long term?

The challenge for third countries like Australia is to develop a package of policy settings that offers sensible guidance as this elemental clash of perspectives plays itself out. The package should recognise that Australia is not indifferent to the outcome but is aware of the incalculable benefits of avoiding or minimising any cleavage of the international community into separate groups headed by the US and China.

The package must be responsive to our enduring affinity with the values and principles that shape the way the US goes about its business, both domestically and internationally, but not preclude either an earnest Australia–China dialogue on governance or Australia’s capacity to advocate internationally for particular outcomes or for mechanisms to develop new outcomes.

These policy aspirations must rest on a declared and demonstrated determination to expose any hidden dimensions of activities by other states deemed injurious to Australian interests, especially any such activities conducted within our borders. This requirement, in turn, demands a sustained commitment to the necessary intelligence-gathering effort as well as the resolve to periodically make clear where Australia’s red lines lie.