Considering a Sino-American ‘beautiful deal’: Could China and the US divide the world?

IN THE aftermath of the Cold War, following the integration of China into the global system and the growing diplomatic engagement between the world’s two largest economic superpowers, there was some discussion promoted by realpolitik-types such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski about the likelihood of creating power-sharing agreements between Beijing and Washington.

Indeed, the notion of a G2 (or Group of Two) of these two superpowers, proposed by Brzezinski and Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as members of the UN Security Council, and as the most prominent rising power and the strongest status-quo power, working together to address the big challenges facing the international system and providing the global public goods that the world required, became quite popular, until it wasn’t.

As some suggested, under the conditions of rapid international power transition, when the rising power would inevitably challenge the status quo and the position of the state or states that were securing the established order, rivalry between Washington and Beijing was more likely.