I’ve been noticing a greater desire for detente with China within intellectual circles. Recently, Scott Galloway published an article called “The Case for Making-Up with China.” Fareed Zakaria noted that China appears much more stable than the US, and that in his recent visits to Shenzhen, Chinese policymakers and business leaders he spoke to paid much more attention to how Greenland crisis affected Europe’s, Canada’s, and even Japan’s & South Korea’s decision to hedge towards China. In an interview with The Economist’s Chief Editor Zanny Minton-Beddoes, Tucker Carlson flatly stated that the US should not interfere with Taiwan and respect China as a great power.
But there have been numerous other cases too: Alysa Liu publicly defended Eileen Gu’s decision to compete for China’s national team in the 2026 Winter Olympics, after JD Vance made public statements on Gu's decision. And even one of the people the New Liberal Podcast interviewed years ago (notable Taiwanese journalist and energy policy wonk Angelica Oung in May 2021) has done a 180 from being an advocate for realist pro-separatism to being an enthusiastic advocate for reunification with the mainland, even making appearances on Chinese state TV network CGTN, as well as making a visit to Kashgar, Xinjiang.
I feel that a lot of things have happened to contribute to this, particularly around Taiwan:
The US Intelligence Community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment report now states that China has not committed to invade Taiwan by 2027.
The New York Times reported on March 11 that China’s air force, the PLAAF, has quietly cut sorties and flights over Taiwan.
The leader of the KMT, Chung Li-wun, made a landmark visit to meet with Xi Jinping, and was treated with great decorum, even riding the bus that EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen rode in (contrasting with Trump’s decision to deny Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te a visa to land in the US, on top of a whole host of mistreatment and strain in the US-Taiwan relationship under Trump 2.0).
President Lai’s approval rating has plummeted to 32%, a historic low in Taiwan’s history. In an interview with Wired Magazine, Obama’s NSC Chair Ben Rhodes advised to pay attention to who wins Taiwan’s 2028 Presidential Election.
Even though Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi’s tough posturing on China & Taiwan helped reassure Japanese voters on security to win a national parliamentary supermajority in the February 2026 General Election, Trump’s decision to start the War in Iran without consulting her, as well as the ensuing economic and energy crisis, has deeply humiliated her. In the span of two months, she now faces rare massive nationwide protests calling for her resignation.
As Derek Thompson noted in his Plain English podcast, Taiwan now faces an energy triage decision in the summer, where they’ll have to face a choice between powering household air conditioning or powering chip fabs.
Weapons shipments keep getting delayed year over year. A shipment of 66 F-16V fighter jets, agreed in 2020, was delayed again from last year to this year. There is a sense in Taipei that the Pentagon is stringing Taiwan along for money without actually delivering on arms. This really creates the worst of both worlds, because it escalates a security dilemma trap with China, without actually providing any deterrence capabilities for Taiwan. On top of that, Taiwan’s military has faced a significant manpower crisis for some time now, even with a conscription policy in place.
The War in Iran has also exposed a dire cost & supply asymmetry in US munitions, to where Ukraine is a more valuable partner on drone interception than the US (which is why Zelenskyy has been on a major tour of the Gulf Cooperation Council recently).
It’s no surprise, then, that we are seeing all this desire by intellectual circles in the US for detente with China. Additionally, part of what seems to be driving this shift is a growing lack of confidence in America's specific system of democracy - particularly around how much power has concentrated in the executive branch since FDR's time, culminating in the abuse of said power under Trump.
And personally, it's a stance that I support. A war between the US and China would have catastrophic consequences for the global economy, and could easily escalate to nuclear war. Even though the American and Chinese political systems have opposing values, ideologies, and interests, there is still a lot of potential for cooperation on greater issues facing humanity like climate change, nuclear arms control, space exploration, drug trafficking, AI safety, scientific research (out of the top 10 universities that publish highly-cited research, 9 of them are in China. Zhejiang University beats Harvard in terms of research paper output), etc.
As someone who is Chinese-American, I'm also worried about what would happen to my community if a war between the US and China broke out - the Asian community remembers the Japanese-American experience in WW2 as well as the rise of anti-Asian hate during COVID. Selfishly, too, I also oppose war and confrontation with China because I don't want to sever my personal connection with China in the way that the Iranians and Russians I know living in the US have had to endure (they don't openly admit it, but it's an experience that is sometimes upsetting to them, particularly around cultural holidays like Nowruz and Orthodox Easter).
But as someone who also believes in liberalism, and as someone who is aware of the many dark things that the Chinese government is doing, it's difficult to reconcile. I struggle with whether supporting detente means implicitly accepting or sidelining those values in practice. So I find myself agreeing with the strategic case for detente, but unsure whether that’s necessary realism, or a form of moral compromise.
How should we think about that trade-off? Is this best understood as clear-eyed realism, or as a quiet concession on liberal values?