By James R. Holmes
Last Friday, I had the privilege of discussing India and China with University of Southern Mississippi studentsin Fort Walton Beach, Florida, near my hometown of Pensacola. The conference room overlooked the Gulf of Mexico on a dazzling autumn day. The site was fitting. An emerging strain in Western commentary on Asia holds that the United States, China, and other seafaring states should strike up a ‘modus vivendi,’ or diplomatic arrangement, governing maritime endeavours in the Western Pacific and the China seas.
Veteran China analyst Michael Swaine sees direct US-China talks as the best avenue to a modus vivendi in the Taiwan Strait. University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall, whose many works include a rollicking history of the North Pacific, says he hopes a robust US naval build-up will ‘push the status quo powers and rising power (China), not toward confrontation, but toward accommodation’ of a kind last seen during the interwar years, a heyday of naval arms control.
Read the full story at The Diplomat