Chinese companies need access to the enormous American market, and Chinese consumers rely on American products and services. But China also benefits from closing some markets that would otherwise be American-dominated, for instance on smartphone software, which gives Chinese firms space to grow their products.

Maybe hardest to know is whether China’s command economy is better- or worse-suited than the American free market economy to advance the national interest within a system of closed international trade.

We often hear comparisons to the Cold War, which supposedly proved that the American economic system prevailed over the Soviet-style command system. But the Soviet economy collapsed largely because it relied on commodity prices, a vulnerability that remained in place during Russia’s catastrophic free-market 1990s and still today.

And the American economy was more centralized during the Cold War than is widely remembered. Though Americans told themselves that their geopolitical advances sprang naturally from private enterprise, many came from state-led projects, such as those that developed the space program or the internet. The country also poured money into strategic industries such as automobiles and steel during a period, the 1950s and 1960s, when vast international markets were opening up.

Yet now the United States is drifting into a strange place where it really does have the decentralized, unguided economy that it told itself it had during the Cold War, but it is now also closing access to the international trade that such a system requires.

And China, long unwilling to choose between an open or a closed world, is being pushed toward the latter. The country certainly presents itself as economically self-sufficient, something that becomes more true as its middle class grows into a robust domestic market. And its ability to direct vast resources to state-led projects, such as solar power or artificial intelligence, do promise the sort of geopolitical gains once achieved in the United States.