Partly because China has ramped up its military arsenal and fleet in recent years, as well as built up outposts in the South China Sea, the Trump administration has called it a “strategic competitor,” including in the 2017 National Security Strategy paper and the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Washington has also said that Beijing is a “revisionist power.”

China, in turn, released a defense white paper last summer that described the United States as having “adopted unilateral policies” and “provoked and intensified competition among major countries.”

With the temperature seeming to rise on both sides, how can a conflict, or something like a new cold war, between China and the United States be avoided? Precisely by looking at the actual Cold War.

In the early years of that protracted standoff, American and Soviet aircrafts didn’t hesitate to fire at one another. There were three crises over the status of divided Berlin, in 1948, 1958 and 1961. The Cuban missile crisis brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. And yet outright conflict was averted, thanks to a few modest agreements and well-established hotlines for emergency communication. Even bitter enemies can build trust, and with imperfect tools, when they measure the stakes of a full-on clash.

In 1972, Washington and Moscow signed the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and Over the High Seas — vowing, among other things, to use clear communication signals, avoid “embarrassing or endangering” even ships under their surveillance and exercise “the greatest caution and prudence in approaching” vessels on the high seas. The accord didn’t prevent two Soviet ships from bumping into two American ships in Soviet territorial waters in February 1988, but that was an outlier incident, and the agreement does seem to have drastically reduced the overall risk of dangerous encounters. Within two years of its entry into force, according to a 2012 paper by Raul (Pete) Pedrozo, then a law professor at the United States Naval War College, the number of incidents per year had dropped from 100 to 40.

If the Soviet Union and the United States managed to avoid a major conflict during the Cold War, then some degree of confidence seems in order today about the far less confrontational relations between China and the United States.

Unlike the military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was global, any military competition between the United States and China is confined to the western Pacific. America thinks that China wants to drive it out of the region; China believes America wants to block its legitimate ambition to develop a blue-water navy and hopes instead to confine China’s influence to the eastern coast of continental Asia.