The U.S. and China Have a Common Foe. Hint: It’s Not the U.S.S.R.

The summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week could be the most significant encounter between American and Chinese leaders since Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972.

That summit eased decades of Sino-American animosity and forged a tacit alliance between the United States and China against the Soviet Union. This summit comes at a similar transformational moment in world affairs, when there is a new shared threat to both China and America. It is a metastasizing disorder that could destabilize the world and harm both countries unless they figure out a way to simultaneously compete and collaborate against a growing list of challenges. These challenges can be successfully confronted only by their collective action — starting with the United States and China together creating guardrails against the malign uses of A.I., now that the latest models have demonstrated staggeringly powerful cyberattack capabilities.

Two paradigm shifts have changed the world since the Nixon-Mao summit. The first — still not widely appreciated, although the alarm bells are now ringing off the wall — is the emergence of these new, asymmetric artificial intelligence tools that could superempower small, malign actors, be they terrorists, anarchists, criminals, political groups or small nation-states.

Two guys in a cave with a laptop, access to the latest A.I. models and a Starlink terminal could attack the critical infrastructure of any society.

The second has to do with globalization. The Nixon-Mao summit began the process of taking the world from disconnected to much more connected and then interconnected. When Nixon and Mao began easing China out of its isolation from the global economy — which Deng Xiaoping then vastly accelerated by shifting China to state-led capitalism — they unleashed a cascade of economic and technological forces.

By the time the early 21st century rolled around, the combination of China joining the World Trade Organization and the world being wired with the internet meant that more people in more places could compete, connect and collaborate in more ways for less money on more things than at any other time in human history. It is why I wrote a book in 2005 titled “The World Is Flat.”