ARTICLE: U.S.-China Meeting Renews the Dialogue, By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, July 28, 2009

Big event to be tracked.

I know Obama freaks out the realists when he says, "The pursuit of power among nations must no longer be seen as a zero-sum game," because they either think in terms of hard assets or soft influence and clearly there must be someone ahead or behind on these subjects, right? Clearly, if China has more, the U.S. has less?

The way to move beyond this view is to understand the critical mass component of the U.S. and China working together. It is the equivalent of the U.S. and USSR on nukes in the Cold War: it sets such a high bar to the rest of the planet that many key decisions will take on a G-2 air, like it or not.

But yes, there is a lot of stability created by such pervasive certainty.

You've got the biggest Old Core and the biggest New Core saying, there will be no fight, but frenemy-based collaboration, and that rules out a ton of bad scenarios.

And in doing so, both see their power and influence expanded/preserved.