Editor's note: This article is an analytical digest from Jerry Brown's book review "Washington's Crackpot Realism," first published on the New York Review of Books. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

For the U.S. and China to compete or cooperate with each should not be a question in this chaotic world. However, many influential people in Washington have considered China as a foe. Jerry Brown, the chair of the California–China Climate Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that "framing the China threat as irredeemably antagonistic misses the reality that in order to survive, both countries must cooperate as well as compete."

His article's title borrows a phrase coined by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, "crackpot realism," referring to leaders he believed were making wrong decisions while believing themselves to be right.

Brown labels those who view the Sino-U.S. relations as a great power conflict "a vague description encompassing all manner of hostile interactions" in his review of the book written by Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial. Colby, who worked under former defense secretary Jim Mattis and understood U.S. defense policy well, defined the most important challenge facing the U.S. now as neither human rights nor democratic values, not even terrorism, but "inter-state strategic competition." Colby considers Asia the most important region in the world because it produces 40 percent of global GDP, and as China is the biggest power in the region, the U.S. should face the challenge by building a coalition against China.

However, in Brown's point of view, Colby's views are largely outdated. Brown argues that "these are just the latest examples of shocking intelligence failures stretching back to the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Brown warns his fellow Americans that people like Colby are dangerous not only because of the Cold War views that he formulates in his book, but because many advisors in Biden's China policy decision-making team have similar views against China. For example, Rush Doshi, currently Biden's director for China at the National Security Council, also wrote a book about China's current "hostile" strategy by inserting views that this strategy was long rooted in three events that happened at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of 1990s that made China eventually turn against the United States.

Although Brown understands that Colby and Doshi's views are practical for realizing why the competition between the two nations is so dangerous, he goes on by warning that miscalculation may lead to something like World War I. "Few want war, but highly competitive actions are fostering increasingly hostile perceptions based on profoundly different histories and social systems."

He went on by saying how and why a miscalculation may happen, as many Chinese officials and scholars have argued in the past: "First, China, unlike the USSR, has an enormous and growing economy; second, it is a major trading partner with neighboring countries; third, it is tightly integrated with the rest of the world, including the United States."

If the U.S. pursues a goal aimed at breaking ties in all major fields with China, then it would need many partners on the Belt and Road to move away from China, as Melanie Hart and Kelly Magsamen, who both hold senior positions at the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, argued in a new strategic framework for the U.S.–China competition. However, Brown pointed out that it would not be a zero-sum strategic game, as these nations would choose to cooperate with China, at first calling for "partnering on such public goods as disaster relief, ocean protection, climate initiatives, and combating pandemics."

Finally, Brown uses the phrase "planetary realism" to echo Chinese President Xi Jinping's vision of "building a community with a shared future for mankind." 

Just because Chinese and Americans are different races of people on the planet does not mean they are different in all views; it means that all people on the planet can and should solve problems with different cooperative solutions. As Brown notes, these are "unprecedented global dangers caused by carbon emissions, nuclear weapons, viruses, and new disruptive technologies, all of which cannot be addressed by one country alone."

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