Editor's note: President and Founder of Eurasia Group Ian Bremmer wrote that if China and the U.S. could partner up to address global health threats, climate change and new technologies's effects, it'd give the world the governance globalization didn't. The benefits are great, What's stopping us from grabbing it? This episode of Reality Check analyzes the impediment on the development of the China-U.S. relationships - the tend to personal political interests by U.S. politicians and the dysfunctions in U.S. politics.

Ian Bremmer, President and Founder of Eurasia Group, wrote in his book The Power of Crisis "the U.S. and China won't be allies anytime soon. But if they can become partners in addressing global threats to human health, climate change, and profoundly disruptive new technologies, then we will finally have the governance that globalization has never given us."

Could China and the U.S. indeed become partners like Bremmer wrote and then can we have this global governance? Let's start with some basics. Together, China and the U.S. account for more than 40 percent of global GDP. They are the two largest trading countries, the top patent applicants, the two largest manufacturers. The two consume more than 40 percent of global energy. They are the largest contributors to UN peacekeeping operations; and the list goes on.

In a recent interview with the Guardian about climate change, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said: "Absent China, are we getting the best hope for where we want to try to go? Not, not in my judgement." So yes, partnership between China and the U.S. is indispensable for global governance. But what's standing in the way of that?

Professor at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs commented that "right now, the United States is raising tensions with China. It is doing so deliberately, dangerously, and provocatively." He said "the U.S. government, I should say, the American people, not so much. But the U.S. government thinks that we are in a grand competition with China, that it's a devastating competition, that we need to contain China" and what we need is dialogue. "We need better understanding. We need the leaders of China and the United States to meet routinely. We need governments to carry out exchanges routinely, so that this is a normal relationship," Sachs stated.

In political science, there's this theory about agency. Broadly speaking, it treats politics as constituted by individual agents and these individual agents could act based on their own interests and affect real change. Over the last several years, we've seen that playing out in the U.S. politics. We've seen a leader who dismantles decades' norms for his own fantasy and pushes the two countries into a trade war; politicians aggressively upsetting the balance in the Taiwan Strait just to secure political gains and a legacy; and a section of the population whipped up by hyper-nationalism. They turn against the innocents – some against their own people.

Bremmer commented in an interview that "In fact, I would argue that the U.S. is more politically dysfunctional right now than all of the other G7 advanced industrial economies. And you see that with the event of January 6th; you see it with the Democrats and the Republicans treating each other as the enemy internally. And that's unfortunately only getting worse. So, it's been coming for decades now. There are some people trying to fix it, but no one believes this is going to be resolved in the next ten years. So, it's a reality, it's a fundamental constraint we have to deal with."

Anti-China becomes easy for politicians, the easy excuse for domestic failures, the easy crowd-rousing platitude in campaigns, the easy "prove" of someone having a grasp on international affairs. But, there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's always a price. The world is paying for it.

Bremmer wrote in the book that "the world needs China closer to center stage. It needs Chinese investment. It needs China to remain stable and predictable - and to grow. And if Washington wants to build a pragmatic partnership with Beijing, it should join the rest of the world in recognizing that reality." That's a big reality check for American politicians by a veteran Washington insider. They really should take note of it.

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