by Zack Beauchamp

Gulliver pushes back against Stephen Glain's worry that "some kind of Sino-American conflict is inevitable":

I am more sanguine than Glain about the prospects for peaceful management of the U.S.-China relationship in the future. It seems certain that this is a result of my greater confidence in the U.S. foreign and security policy establishment to think strategically and behave rationally, a confidence that's inexplicable in light of my tendency to offer near-constant criticism of America's strategic failures. But I'd like to believe that we'll develop a somewhat more sophisticated understanding of our economic and security interests in the future, an understanding that will allow us to perceive and react to the legitimate interests of others in cool-headed and even-handed fashion, one that will help us move past the current fad for primacy everywhere and at all times.

Courtney Messerschmidt, reading the new Defense Department annual report on China (pdf), sees China prepping for a military challenge to the US: