A top priority for the incoming US administration of president-elect Joe Biden will be deciding how to handle the conflict with China. What started as a trade fight morphed into a tech war and is now at an impasse. A new approach is urgently needed. It should have three major elements.
First, dialogue. The Twitter-driven policy bluster of the past four years of Donald Trump’s administration has no place in problem-solving between the world’s two largest economies. At the same time, it is fair to say that the periodic summits favoured by his predecessors — whether biannual (George W Bush) or annual (Barack Obama) — were not exactly successful either.
A better approach would be to establish a permanent secretariat that has full-time responsibility for all aspects of the US-China relationship — from trade and technology, to cyber security and people (including educational exchanges, visas and human rights).