No one knows what the future holds for U.S.-China ties, maybe not even Donald Trump himself. The president-elect’s views on China are myriad and contradictory.

As the United States and the ROK prepare to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of their security and defense alliance in 2025, forging a durable technology alliance is going to become an increasingly critical element of their cooperation.

Thirty years ago, the idea that China could challenge the United States economically, globally, and militarily seemed unfathomable. Yet today, China is considered a great power. How did China manage to build power in an international system that was largely dominated by the United States? What factors determined the strategies Beijing pursued to achieve this feat?

China wants to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant power, and although partnering with Iran, North Korea, and Russia helps Beijing in that effort, the trio can also undermine its aims.

Türkiye is an important transatlantic actor in Sino-Western competition. It can add value to Western efforts aimed at synchronizing policies toward a rising China. And yet, at present, Ankara’s policies on China are not harmonized with those of its partners in the West.

It has become difficult to imagine how Washington and Beijing might turn their relationship, which is so crucial to the future of world order, toward calmer waters. If there is to be any hope of doing so, however, policy experts need some realistic vision of what those calmer waters might look like.