The United States has been unsuccessful in its attempts to rally Southeast Asia against China. In recent months, it has mounted a transparent effort to curry favor in the region. But nobody wants to choose between major trading powers. They’d rather keep their options open.

The U.S. has seemingly pulled out all the stops to advance its agenda in Southeast Asia, hoping to entice countries away from China. Yet, as members of China’s neighborhood, ASEAN members will find it hard to create distance between themselves and China, literally and figuratively.

China-U.S. relations are the main stress point in the present-day world, and the U.S. has yet to accept China’s bottom lines. While chilly political relations and warm economic ones are the new normal, it is still possible for the two to meet halfway.

China and United States should distinguish between strategic competition and a struggle for supremacy, as doing so would help avoid stepping over a boundary line beyond which competition turns into a drive for hegemony and world domination.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the United States had a grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union. Yet by the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, America had been deprived of that pole star. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, US President George W. Bush’s administration tried to fill the void with a strategy that it called a “global war on terror.” But that approach provided nebulous guidance and led to long US-led wars in marginal places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2017, the US has returned to “great-power competition,” this time with China.

Recent events in Sino-American relations indicate that China may no longer be willing to work with the United States on managing contentious issues or buffering the rivalry between the two powers. Beijing’s recent interactions with American officials indicate a new uncompromising and “maximalist” approach, based on the belief that America is in terminal decline and its need to compromise or show deference is over.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is clearly mapping out its ambitions for global influence challenging the primacy of the U.S. Now, Western allies have presented a B3W Partnership to challenge China with additional global infrastructure investment.

The Group of Seven’s (G7) fixation on China and Russia is problematic because member countries still have serious internal problems related to their domestic economies and income inequality.

They won’t resolve the significant issue of how China and the U.S. should go forward. But at least the talks established a strategic consensus on managing competition. More talks are likely — even amid quarrels.

U.S. Deputy of State Wendy Sherman recently talked with Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng and Foreign Minister and State Councilor Wang Yi on her visit to China. As relations remain contentious, it’s important that both China and the U.S. keep communication channels plural, open, and as bilaterally reciprocated as possible.