How should we understand the transformation of U.S.-China relations from the Cold War era to today’s technological rivalry? Was the Carter administration’s China policy driven more by geopolitical realism or ideological idealism? And can the framework of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan still survive in an age of AI competition and global supply chains? In this interview, Peng Sheng, a scholar affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School, discusses his new research on the Carter era, technological competition, and the global transformation of the Cold War. Drawing on archival materials from China, the United States, Europe, Russia, and Taiwan, Peng offers a fresh perspective on how the late 1970s shaped many of the tensions and dilemmas still defining U.S.-China relations today. Sheng is the author of Jimmy Carter and China: Multilateral Competition in the Global Cold War, published by Columbia University Press.
Juan Zhang (JZ): Historically, scholars have often explained U.S.-China relations during the Carter era through the framework of the “U.S.-China-Soviet strategic triangle.” Your new book introduces the perspective of “multilateral competition in the global Cold War.” What is the fundamental difference between this framework and the traditional interpretation? What do you see as the biggest misunderstanding in previous scholarship, and why has it persisted for so long?
Peng Sheng(PS): My main wish in writing this book is to provide a new global framework for examining the Cold War and current-day US-China relations by integrating the crucial role of US allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and by placing technological competition at the center of this relationship. This framing helps us move beyond two shortcomings of the traditional framework of a simple “U.S.-China-Soviet strategic triangle.” The trilateral framework was enormously useful, especially during the Cold War itself, because it emphasized the geopolitical balancing among Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. But it also falsely equated China with the superpowers in terms of power and influence, and risked reducing the late 1970s to a narrow story of high diplomacy and China trying to maneuver itself between two great powers.
So the first misunderstanding in earlier scholarships, in my view, was the tendency to treat normalization primarily as a geopolitical maneuver against the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet factor mattered enormously. But if we focus only on the triangle, we miss why the multipolar system emerged after the Cold War – because it was already emerging during the Cold War itself, driven by “mid-sized” powers like China and France, as well as resource-rich Middle Eastern monarchies. My work puts multilateral competition at the center, and doing so helps us see some dynamics that got lost in the traditional high-diplomacy story. Namely, that a lot of the competition hinged on rising technological interdependence, expanding financial and trade networks, emerging regional powers in the Middle East and Asia, energy crises, transnational narcotic trafficking and terrorism, the arrival of the computer age, and global production chains were transforming international politics into something much more interconnected yet also much more unstable. The Cold War was no longer simply about nuclear missiles or alliance blocs. It was increasingly about who could dominate and set the standard for the emerging systems of technology, modernization, global markets, and knowledge production. In many ways, I see U.S.-China rapprochement as part of that larger global transformation. China’s opening was tied not only to security concerns about the Soviet Union, but also to access to technology, industrial modernization, scientific exchange, and participation in global systems of production and trade.
The second-biggest misunderstanding, I would say, was that previous scholars missed the dynamic discussions in the world’s capitals at the time, in which even the Chinese and Soviet leaders themselves and their top advisors had doubts about their current Cold War policies and the triangular view of the international system. Those nuanced discussions, which I showed in my last chapter, offered a sense of ideological flexibility and policy creativity that helped explain why we saw such profound transformation later on during the Reagan-Gorbachev years, which really can’t be explained in simple triangular strategic terms. The deeper story was that the United States, China, the Soviet Union, Japan, Western Europe, as well as Taiwan, then still a military autocracy under Chiang Ching-Kuo, were all responding to a rapidly changing global environment defined by technological revolution, economic interdependence, energy insecurity, and intensified global competition. Those smaller countries all had dynamic discussions within and aggressively pursued their interests while shaping the international system in the late Cold War.
JZ: The Carter administration emphasized human rights diplomacy, yet it also demonstrated strong realism in its China policy. How do you evaluate this tension between “idealism” and “realism”? Is it a contradiction, or a form of strategic balance?
PS: I would argue that the tension between “idealism” and “realism” in the Carter administration’s China policy was a mixed outcome of an uneasy, often unstable attempt to balance the urgent security concerns of the Cold War and long-term humanitarian visions of what American policy makers would like China to become. The documents showed that Carter initially moved quite cautiously on China precisely because of human rights concerns, democratic values, and the domestic political implications of normalization – Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, was particularly concerned about human rights and Taiwan. Unlike some of his predecessors, Carter was personally uncomfortable with treating diplomacy as purely transactional. Carter, during his 1976 campaign trials, criticized Nixon and Kissinger for being overly secretive about China policy and made fun of them during his campaigns, where, when it came to China policy, the US had “two presidents”. This hesitation, in retrospect, was very intuitive because the change he made later on in 1978 carried real domestic political costs, especially given strong congressional and public support for Taiwan in the United States.
For much of 1977 and early 1978, the administration therefore tried to slow the pace of normalization and explore whether broader improvements in U.S.-China relations could occur without an immediate and dramatic rupture with Taiwan. In that sense, Carter’s emphasis on human rights and moral diplomacy was not merely rhetorical; it genuinely shaped the timing and caution of his first-year China policy.
At the same time, however, Carter and many of his advisers also overestimated how much China’s human rights situation had actually improved after the end of the Cultural Revolution. There was a widespread tendency in Washington to interpret the post-Mao reforms, the rehabilitation of intellectuals, and the opening to the outside world as signs that China was gradually moving toward a more liberal and humane political order. Compared to the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution, China certainly appeared more stable and pragmatic. But this often created an illusion of deeper political transformation than was really taking place.
Another factor I would like to point out is that the Taiwanese leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, had very bad personal relations with Jimmy Carter. Taiwan’s secret nuclear program was run under Chiang’s personal protection and led to a series of crackdowns from the Carter Administration. Chiang also loudly criticized Carter and worked with his Republican rivals, and Taiwanese intermediaries and intelligence channels explored secret contacts with Soviet representatives, trying to outmaneuver the Americans. None of which, of course, helped his relationship with Jimmy Carter – or Ronald Reagan later in the 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, however, was much more diplomatic and charming, yet very aggressive in pursuing his policies, including, of course, asking Carter to crack down on Taiwan. Here, I would recommend that students and future scholars look into Taiwanese archives; they offer a wealth of resources and insights. Also, Hsiao-ting Lin’s recent biographies of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo.
By 1978, China increasingly appeared not simply as a bilateral diplomatic issue, but as part of a much larger global contest over power, technology, influence, and the future balance of the Cold War system. This created a sense of urgency that pushed Carter toward decisions he had earlier approached more cautiously. In other words, normalization was not only about China itself; it became entangled with crises in the Horn of Africa, which is now mostly forgotten, superpower arms control, Soviet expansion, and the instability of the old Détente system created by Nixon and Kissinger. When I looked through records from the Carter Administration, they had barely any time to discuss human rights in China at all in 1978 and 1979, when the major decisions on China were made, while the war in the Horn of Africa – the war between Somalia and Ethiopia, and SALT II dominated the white house discussions. So I would not describe Carter’s policy as a simple abandonment of idealism in favor of realism. Rather, it reflected the difficult reality that leaders often attempt to reconcile moral commitments with geopolitical pressures – they are normal people too and don’t have 48 hours a day. I would also point out that Carter continued to work on human rights in China after his presidential term, including helping with Chinese village elections and being quite vocal about Christian communities in China, though those post-presidential actions achieved only limited results.
JZ: Your research shows that the United States maintained a “dual-track policy” between mainland China and Taiwan. In your view, did the Carter administration truly “choose Beijing,” or was it trying to maintain a form of strategic ambiguity?
PS: I would argue that the Carter administration did “choose Beijing” at the geopolitical level, but the complex political establishment in Washington, D.C., which President Trump today would call the “swamp,” never fully abandoned Taiwan politically, institutionally, or emotionally. In that sense, what emerged after 1979 was less a clean strategic realignment than a complicated dual-track system that combined formal normalization with Beijing and continued substantive ties with Taiwan.
From the perspective of high strategy, Carter clearly concluded that cooperation with the People’s Republic of China was essential in the context of the global Cold War and the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union. Especially after the crises of the late 1970s—the Horn of Africa, Soviet activities in the developing world, and concerns surrounding SALT II—Beijing increasingly appeared to Washington as an indispensable strategic partner in balancing Moscow. In that sense, the administration chose Beijing in terms of diplomatic recognition and anti-Soviet cooperation.
However, the broader political system in Washington never fully switched sides. Congress, the military establishment, big arms makers, and parts of the foreign policy bureaucracy, and large sections of American public opinion, remained deeply sympathetic to Taiwan and suspicious of communism in China despite Mao’s death in 1976. My book, for example, has a copy of a Taiwanese student letter to United States Senator Barry Goldwater asking him not to sell them to “red China,” – one of the tens of thousands of such letters sent to the US politicians at the time. Taiwan’s influence in Washington, D.C., and its popularity among the general US public were immediately visible in the strong backlash against the terms of normalization and the rapid passage of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) in 1979. So while formal diplomacy shifted to Beijing, many of the structures of American political and strategic support remained tied to Taipei.
This is why I describe the post-1979 arrangement less as a complete transfer of loyalty and more as a form of strategic ambiguity before the term itself became widely used. The United States recognized the PRC diplomatically while preserving mechanisms that allowed Taiwan to survive politically, economically, and militarily. Meanwhile, it is also important to point out that the TRA remained ambiguous about whether the US should intervene if China attacks Taiwan, leaving future administrations with more flexible policy options. In practice, President Carter sought to maintain relations with both sides to satisfy their different interests and needs. Carter was not alone. If we looked at President Ronald Reagan, who also went back and forth on a compromise between both sides, cracked down on Chiang Ching-kuo’s nuclear program, and oscillated between arming the PLA in mainland China and selling weapons to Taiwan. Reagan’s policy towards both Chinese regimes, in fact, was very ambiguous and similar to Carter’s. President H.W. Bush, too, worked closely with China during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and yet sold the largest amount of weapons to date to Taiwan during his last months in office, and left the Chinese diplomats to protest against Clinton, who pretended he had nothing to do with it. There are almost comical tendencies: U.S. presidents often pretended they were not helping Taiwan, but they always did in secret or waited at the very end of their presidential terms.
One of the most overlooked aspects of this story is the role of people-to-people diplomacy and Taiwan’s image in American political culture. Here, Taiwan was extraordinarily successful. While Beijing gained formal diplomatic recognition, Taiwan retained enormous reservoirs of goodwill within American society. My book also reminded readers that Madam Chiang Kai-shek, at this time, lived full-time in New York and was very active in lobbying for the Taiwanese cause. The KMT party, both under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, had spent decades cultivating educational, religious, cultural, and personal networks in the United States. Carter might not like Chiang Ching-kuo, but he could not ignore the positive American public opinion on Taiwan. The reason why Chiang Ching-Kuo decided to purchase US-made fighter jets instead of Israeli ones, as I mentioned in Chapter 4, was exactly a way to continue Taiwan’s cooperation with the US arms industry and maintain this kind of influence.
JZ: You argue that technological competition and technology transfer were key dimensions of the Cold War. If these technological collaborations had not taken place, might U.S.-China relations have followed a completely different trajectory?
PS: I think technological cooperation was absolutely one of the key foundations of the U.S.-China relationship after 1979, and I see it as one of the essential inputs to a broader understanding that the normalization of U.S.-China relations was not driven solely by anti-Soviet geopolitics. This is a central argument of the book: For China, access to Western technology was crucial for Deng Xiaoping’s domestic modernization agenda. Deng did not simply want diplomatic recognition; he wanted access to advanced industries, computing, aerospace, telecommunications, education, and managerial expertise, and he also wanted to sell China’s petroleum reserves for it – remember that until 1993, China was a net oil-exporting state. Deng Xiaoping had allegedly said, “whoever is with the Americans gets rich, whoever is not with the Americans ends up poor,” on his way back from Washington DC. And the U.S.–China Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology (STA) signed on January 31, 1979, was one of the most important achievements Deng had made, largely forgotten and ignored by US scholars until recent years, when US-China scientific decoupling became a hot topic.
On the US side, I did not see any strong evidence that the US was eager to cooperate with China for science’s own sake; it was more of a need to arm China to counter the Soviet Union, or a vague sense that the Chinese market would become important for US industry in the future. This very limited capacity building was a standard play for the US to help its allies under the Soviet threat. Though very few policymakers, at least as shown by historical documents, expected that China would one day rise to challenge the US in science and technology. There were, however, analyses produced by US intelligence that China’s science and technology were so backward that it would not be a threat to US security any time soon. This was one of the reasons why the previous administrations under Nixon and Ford stopped worrying about China’s nuclear program as the J.F. Kennedy Administration did – the intelligence reassessment in the Nixon years simply didn’t see China’s tiny program based in Lop Nur, at the time, would be a challenge to US security, not even to US allies in Asia. My 2nd chapter showed that China tested its first ICBM in May 1980; it raised some eyebrows in Washington, and even more so in Moscow, but neither the Carter Administration nor the Reagan people took it seriously. This again shows how historical documents sometimes tell a very different story from the popular imagination.
JZ: Your research draws on archival materials from China, the United States, Europe, and Russia. What are the biggest “narrative conflicts” among these different national archives? Was there any particular document that significantly changed your understanding of the issue?
PS: One of the biggest reasons multi-archival work is essential for my research is that the Cold War meant very different things to different actors, even when they used the same language. Leaders constantly talked about “peace,” “security,” and “cooperation,” but those words often carried completely incompatible policy visions. Brezhnev, for example, understood “peace” largely as maintaining strategic parity with the United States and preserving Soviet influence in Europe and the socialist bloc. Deng Xiaoping also spoke about “world peace,” but through the language of anti-hegemony, with the Soviet Union as the immediate threat and the United States as a longer-term secondary one. For Chiang Ching-kuo, peace was tied to the survival of Taiwan and the KMT after diplomatic isolation. Many Europeans simply wanted to avoid being dragged into a U.S.-Soviet war, something Chinese leaders often interpreted as weakness or appeasement. Even within the United States, Jimmy Carter and Paul Nitze both claimed to defend peace, but Carter emphasized arms control while Nitze believed peace required overwhelming American military superiority.
This is why multi-archival research matters so much: if we only read one side’s documents, we risk assuming everyone shared the same understanding of the international order. In reality, people were often speaking the same diplomatic language while imagining very different worlds. Some of the most important documents I found also show how deeply current tensions were already rooted in the late 1970s. A 1979 document by Li Xiannian on technology imports made clear that China never intended to depend on foreign technology forever. The goal was to import foreign know-how, study it, and gradually build indigenous Chinese versions. In many ways, this already anticipated today’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency and technological independence. I also found Soviet economist Vladimir Lukin’s writings fascinating because he predicted that Taiwan would eventually become a major source of future U.S.-China tensions. These kinds of discoveries are only possible when you place Chinese, Soviet, American, European, and Taiwanese sources into conversation with one another rather than treating the Cold War as a single narrative.
This is the fun part of combining intellectual history with diplomatic history: many of the issues and ideas that shaped the late 1980s Cold War and post-Cold War international relations, in fact, have already been discussed during this period in major world capitals, and often by people you would least expect it.
Aside from illuminating documents, I also came across lots of very funny cartoons – Secretary of States Cyrus Vance, for example, who disagreed with Carter’s many policies on the Soviet Union and China and eventually quit his job, had a large collection of funny cartoons of the President, including one of a big Brezhnev with thick eyebrows cooking a tinny feminized Jimmy Carter in a boiling pot, with Brezhnev saying “pass the SALT.” Those are also gems historians love to discover in the archives. Vance, by the way, burned his bridge with Jimmy Carter in the end and donated his papers to the Yale Law School; thus, those funny cartoons are not at the Carter Library.
JZ: What are the fundamental differences between “competition” during the Carter era and “competition” in today’s U.S.-China relations?
PS: This is actually a question we have been discussing for more than a year at the Applied History Program at Harvard Kennedy School. In an exercise developed by Professor Graham Allison, we draw diagrams comparing the late Cold War world of the Carter era with today’s international system to see both the similarities and the differences.
There are still some important continuities. A small number of major powers continue to dominate global politics, and strategic competition between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing still shapes the international system. But the structure of that competition has changed dramatically. Russia today is much weaker than the Soviet Union and far more regionally focused, while China is much more economically and globally integrated than Maoist China ever was. I might also add that the power asymmetry between China and the US in the game of competition has changed, too. On the AI front, China is no longer a junior partner or only on the receiving side; it is a near-peer competitor to the US, not just in a bilateral sense but also in a multilateral sense through the diffusion of AI tech stacks into the EU and emerging markets. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated last year that now half of the world’s best talent in AI comes from China.
Another major difference is the geography of innovation. During the Carter years, the United States and the Soviet Union dominated much of the strategic technological competition. Today, innovation is much more decentralized. Europe, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and increasingly other Asian actors play major roles in global technological development. While American allies are also more autonomous from Washington in pursuing their own policies, there are also “in-between” states with strong regional influences that choose to do business with both the US and China, such as Singapore, India, and most Latin American and European countries. There is a tendency toward global realignment, where smaller states are forced to choose a side, as at the beginning of the Cold War, but the layers of multilateral competition and interdependency are also much more complex than before.
The nuclear issue is also more complicated. During the late Cold War, nuclear competition was concentrated primarily among a few superpowers. Today, far more countries either possess nuclear weapons or have the technological capacity to develop them relatively quickly. If you look at IAEA records or talk to professionals in the nonproliferation world, I won’t name which ones, but like the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy The Dictator, many states are “three months away from developing weapons-grade uranium… to be used for peaceful purposes.” Not to mention the proliferation of knowledge related to chemical, biological, and increasingly, cyber weapons and weaponized AIs. That creates a much more fragmented and unpredictable strategic environment.
Cold War Ideologies have changed as well. Classical Marxist-Leninist communism has largely disappeared as a genuinely universal revolutionary project. In places where communist systems still exist—China, Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam they have evolved into very different mixtures of nationalism, state capitalism, authoritarian governance, and historical identity. In North Korea in particular, the Kim family basically described themselves as deities; Kim Jong-il was born with a bright star or “shining star” in the sky with all sorts of supernatural capabilities. North Korean TV today shows Kim Jong-Un riding a white horse, descending upon a white mountain, and so on, while the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK)’s main ideology focuses more on Juche, or “self-reliance,” than on communism. China, too, focused increasingly on material incentives and nationalism rather than on orthodox communist ideology. In a volume I edited for the University of Vienna, The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation, one of our contributors, Rafael Pedemonte, noted that in Cuba too, Communism has been largely rewritten as a story of anti-imperialism, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main financial and ideological sponsor. Ironically, orthodox communists who really believed Marx’s writings literally, or at least self-defined communists, are today more often found at elite American or European universities.
But perhaps the biggest difference is that the United States itself has changed. During the Carter era, the White House had much greater control over export and sanction policies, information flows, and major foreign policy and economic decisions. Today, foreign governments, multinational corporations, global finance firms, social media platforms, and even powerful individuals can influence American politics and public opinion much more directly than before. Elon Musk, for example, is more powerful than smaller nation-states; the biggest American investment bank, BlackRock, today has more assets than an average European country, while OPEC is more influential than the UN when it comes to peace and stability in the Middle East. Information and ideas also flow across national borders much faster. American youth can be more influenced by TikTok trends than, say, by a speech from any White House official. If you look at the famous Cold War US companies, IBM, AT&T, or Intel, or even Boeing, they never possessed the geopolitical autonomy that Nvidia, TSMC, OpenAI, BlackRock, SpaceX, or TikTok possess today. Unlike the Cold War nuclear-industrial system, today’s technological order is increasingly shaped by private corporations whose influence often rivals or exceeds that of medium-sized states.
So, in short, old-style geopolitics still exists. Military power, alliances, and great-power rivalry remain very real. But the world today is vastly more interconnected and multi-layered than during the Carter era. Competition now takes place simultaneously across technology, finance, media, supply chains, cyber systems, culture, and global institutions. That is exactly why I argue for a more multilateral and transnational perspective. If we look only at traditional state-to-state diplomacy, we miss many of the most important forces shaping the modern world.
JZ: The “technological cooperation” of the past has now turned into “technological decoupling.” Does this mean we are entering a kind of “reverse Cold War”?
Are past decisions to open technology transfers to China now being reassessed?
PS: I would not say we are entering a simple “reverse Cold War,” because the world today is far more interconnected than during the original Cold War, with multiple global centers of power and technological innovation. And US-China relations are much more multi-layered than before. Some dimensions are souring, while others – agricultural product trade or non-sensitive educational exchanges, for example – are still going strong. During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States sought to bring China into global markets, scientific networks, and technology systems, partly to strengthen China against the Soviet Union and partly because many American leaders, including President Carter, believed that economic integration would gradually make China more cooperative and liberal. Many British policymakers also believed the same. By the way, some witnesses to the 1997 Hong Kong handover once told me that they thought Hong Kong was a gem; when it was returned to China, it would make China more like the West. Today, however, many of those assumptions are being reassessed.
At the same time, the two economies still remain connected through trade, research, manufacturing, and consumer markets, though today much less so in finance. If you talk to bankers who once had assets in China, they are now pulling their assets away from mainland China and Hong Kong to Japan or Singapore, or back to the US. Still, many American companies oppose complete decoupling because the Chinese market remains profitable, particularly during presidential or midterm election years like the one right now. So what we are really seeing is not total separation, but financial decoupling with selective technological decoupling in strategically important industries, not a total trade cutoff or a return to the COCOM-style system of the Cold War.
JZ: The Taiwan issue has always been central to U.S.-China relations. Do you think the U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” can still be sustained today?
PS: I think the original logic of “strategic ambiguity” has become increasingly difficult to sustain under current conditions. During the late Cold War, ambiguity worked partly because all sides still had incentives to avoid pushing the issue to the breaking point. Today, however, the political, military, and economic environment is very different.
The first major change is that China is now far more vocal and assertive about the goal of unification with Taiwan by force. In recent years, Taiwan has become closely connected to questions of nationalism, the CCP’s regime legitimacy, and China’s vision of great-power status. The issue is no longer treated simply as a postponed historical dispute; it is increasingly framed as central to China’s national rejuvenation project. That makes ambiguity much harder to maintain.
At the same time, Taiwan itself has changed profoundly since the end of the Chiang Ching-kuo era, which had no real elections and very little press freedom. The joke back in the days was that Taiwan was more preferable in East Asia because the military dictatorship in South Korea was even worse. In chapter five, I mentioned an anecdote that my George Washington University professor, Robert Sutter, was once invited to Taiwan as a young analyst for the US Congress. KMT General Wang Sheng, the general in charge of the military’s political warfare, or in Sutter’s word, “Taiwan’s Darth Vader,” offered the young American a tour of Taiwan’s prison system and showed that all the political prisoners were apparently well clothed, well fed, and not physically abused. “See, we are not the South Koreans.” Things have changed dramatically over the past four decades. Taiwan today is a democratic society whose political culture and public values are in many ways much closer to those of the United States and Western Europe than during the authoritarian Cold War decades. This creates a much stronger ideological and emotional connection between Taiwan and the West than existed in the 1970s.
There is also the technological dimension. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is now deeply integrated into the global economy and the US innovation sector – that is why the scenario of China taking over Taiwan is unacceptable to many US policymakers; they don’t say it in front of the TV, but that is what they discuss in private. This is why I often tell students to read Chip War by Chris Miller, because it explains very clearly how semiconductors became central to modern geopolitics. Taiwan is no longer just a regional political issue; it is deeply tied to global supply chains, advanced computing, AI development, and technological competition.
Finally, U.S. allies increasingly look at Taiwan—and, in the European context, Ukraine—as tests of American credibility and leadership. Many governments are asking whether the United States is still willing and able to defend the international order it helped create after 1945. So I would say that strategic ambiguity has not entirely disappeared, but the space for maintaining it has narrowed considerably. The problem is that both the US and China now see Taiwan as more important than themselves than they did during the Carter-Deng Xiaoping era, which makes the old formulas much harder to preserve.
JZ: You emphasize the role of Europe and other third parties during the Cold War. In today’s U.S.-China competition, do Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia still have similar strategic space?
PS: Absolutely, and in some ways, they may occupy even more strategic space today, though the situation is also more complicated than during the late Cold War. Even during the Carter era, third parties such as Europe, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia had their own interests, fears, and strategies. What is different today is that Europe has become far more economically and technologically important in its own right, and Chinese politicians and scholars have a new appreciation of Europe than before. The European market is about the same size as the US market, and it still produces some of the world’s best talents and ideas. The European Union is not simply a secondary actor in global politics; it is a major regulatory, industrial, and innovation hub. Though some great comedians would say the EU regulates more than it innovates, which has some truth in it – Europe is entirely stuck between the US and the Chinese frontier of AI models in a technological sense. Yet, Europe today still shapes the rules governing global technological ecosystems through regulation, industrial specialization, and scientific infrastructure. In areas such as green technology, advanced manufacturing, and fundamental scientific research, European countries still have great leverage in competing with China. My book mentioned Quantum communication technology in the conclusion chapter, for example, which are essentially dominated by European-Chinese cooperation projects. Many US policymakers are unhappy that Europe is helping China with this, but this is the reality of multilateral competition today.
During the Cold War, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once said China should “strike at the weakest link, then the next weakest link, one at a time, to break the embargo.” When it comes to getting technology from Europe, it is still very much true today in the face of increased US-China tech decoupling. At the same time, European governments increasingly pursue more independent policies toward China, even as they remain broadly aligned with the United States on security issues, particularly in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2022.
Similarly, Japan has some of the world’s best research universities and innovative companies, and its importance in the global technology supply chain is often underestimated. Chinese policy discussions today are particularly concerned that Japan could cut off essential materials needed for semiconductor production — seemingly “simple” products such as industrial glues, bonding films, resins, and heat-resistant chemical layers used in advanced chip manufacturing and photolithography. Modern AI and high-performance semiconductors cannot be produced reliably without these ultra-precise materials, and Chinese domestic suppliers are still far behind Japanese quality standards. Companies most people have never heard of, such as Resonac, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, and Denka, dominate these niche but critical sectors because of decades of accumulated expertise and highly specialized industrial training. From Beijing’s perspective, this creates a major strategic vulnerability: even if China improves its domestic chip industry, restrictions on these materials could still cripple advanced semiconductor production.
At the same time, Japan today is also far more active and independent in pursuing its interests than during the Cold War. Just this week, on May 1–2, 2026, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Hanoi for talks focused on AI, semiconductors, critical minerals, energy, and supply-chain security. Japan’s increasingly active role is another reason scholars should pay much closer attention to it when studying current international relations: understanding today’s global order requires looking not only at Washington and Beijing, but also at powerful regional actors with their own agendas and influence.
JZ: If you were to draw one key lesson from the Carter era, what would you emphasize to today’s policymakers?
PS: The key lesson I would draw from the Carter era is that policymakers must take technological change seriously before it becomes impossible to control. In the late 1970s, U.S. leaders opened technology transfers to China because they believed cooperation could serve strategic and economic goals, such as bringing China on board the proposed Comprehensive Ban Treaty, which Carter failed to conclude by the time he left white house, and the United States didn’t succeed again until much later, during the Clinton Administration in 1996. This was a tremendous, wasted opportunity to slow down the horizontal spread and vertical advancement of nuclear weapon technologies. Today, there is a similarly urgent challenge: the spread of weaponized AI technologies. Unlike Cold War nuclear weapons, which were largely controlled through centralized command systems with humans in charge, AI is more automated, decentralized, commercially driven, and widely available. That makes it much harder to regulate and potentially more dangerous in a crisis.
The US-Israeli air campaign in Iran, for example, was run on AI, while China is also a leading innovation center for autonomous weapon systems and drone swarms. I’m glad to see that my American colleagues at the Belfer Center have warned that military AI could reshape crisis bargaining, autonomous weapons, defense planning, and national security itself. So my advice to policymakers is: do not wait for a disaster or a missed opportunity to pass. The danger of AI is not simply its destructive potential, but the collapse of centralized control structures that once made US-Soviet nuclear deterrence relatively predictable in the past. I do believe that the United States has great potential – and the capabilities – to become a world leader in setting the safety standard of AI weapons, and the current and future administrations should treat AI governance as seriously as nuclear arms control, build global standards for military and civilian AI, and try to bring China into that framework, however difficult it is.
JZ: Why did you choose to study the Carter era, rather than the more commonly examined Nixon or Reagan periods?
PS: I chose to focus on the Carter era partly because Nixon’s opening to China has already been studied extensively; John Adams even wrote an opera about it. Nixon’s diplomacy was dramatic and historically important, but it is often examined primarily through the lens of high geopolitics and strategic triangular diplomacy. By contrast, the Carter years were the period when U.S.-China relations became much deeper, broader, and more institutionalized.
This was also the moment when technology, scientific exchange, trade, and global interdependence became central to the relationship. During the Nixon years, the technological dimension was still relatively limited, and China remained far more internally focused. Under Carter and Deng Xiaoping, however, cooperation expanded substantially into education, science, industry, and technology transfer. In many ways, this was the real beginning of the modern U.S.-China relationship and the beginning of China’s entry into the modern world.
I was also personally interested in Jimmy Carter himself. Carter was a deeply moral and religious person who genuinely tried to integrate human rights, Christian ethics, and political integrity into foreign policy during a very difficult global moment. I wanted to understand how someone with those convictions managed the compromises and pressures of Cold War geopolitics. In many ways, Carter paid a political price for trying to maintain that balance, particularly during his reelection campaign. I think there are important lessons there for future political leaders.
The Reagan era is equally fascinating to me, especially in terms of global economic competition, technology, and the irreversible crisis of communism. I also studied with Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor, Professor Henry R. Nau, at GWU and interviewed officials from that administration. But as historians, we are ultimately limited by documents and archival access, as our work is built on documented facts. Many important Reagan-era materials remain classified or only partially available, as with European archives from that decade. I would be very interested in researching that period in the future, but the Carter years currently provide a much stronger archival foundation for answering these larger global questions.