I’ve never fully signed on to the “Thucydides Trap” predictions for the U.S. and China—essentially, the idea that if a rising power and an established power each believe that they are destined for a showdown, then that conflict is very likely to occur. (I haven’t signed on because there are so many buffers working against something like the Thucydides-type German-British collision that led to World War I. Despite their regional rivalries, China and the U.S. are in different parts of the world, with the whole Pacific Ocean between them. They’re not involved in the kind of direct colonial competition that England and Germany were. The gap between the two sides’ military power is much greater, though both are nuclear-armed and thus warier of direct confrontation; and so on.) But I’ve believed in the converse of the Thucydides concept: that the assumption from both governments that they could peacefully manage China’s rise has made conflict less rather than more likely.

So it matters whether the United States approaches China seriously, and vice versa. And right now each country is headed in the wrong direction.

* * *

Just before the 2016 election, I finished a piece about the Chinese side of this predicament, and why handling China would be a bigger problem for whoever became the 45th U.S. president than it had been for U.S. presidents from number 39 through 44, Carter through Obama. The piece was called “China’s Great Leap Backward,” and its premise was that internal changes in China would require a reconsideration of China policy by an administration led by either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

Those changes coincided with the shift in control, beginning five years ago, from the colorless Chinese leader Hu Jintao to the current strongman Xi Jinping. By the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, signs of change were mounting: Xi’s concentration of personal power, his crackdown on dissent in any form, his reversal of the slow but obvious trend toward gradual social and civic liberalization. No reasonable outsider should ever have expected that bringing Communist China into the world economy would convert it into a Western-style liberal democracy. But through the first few decades of this process, economic integration with the world made China undeniably less controlled and repressive, not to mention dramatically richer. Year by year from the late 1970s until about 2015, daily life throughout China became steadily less regimented and totalitarian, more internationalized and diverse. In huge areas of Chinese life, the government can still seem a far-off presence, with free-wheeling chaos more noticeable than tight control.

After these decades of opening up, however, China is by many measures now closing itself back down. After a long trend of increasing the norms of “collective leadership,” which would put limits on the power of any one strongman, the Communist Party has returned to something closer to one-man rule than it has known since the days of Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s and early 1980s, or perhaps since Chairman Mao.