Glenn Tifford argues that breakdown in trust between the U.S. and China is the root cause of erosion in openness, and that the level of trust has substantially declined from a higher baseline, making openness with untrusted actors unsustainable.

Tifford observes that the U.S. and China have incentives to keep lines of communication open on critical issues (global warming, Ukraine, Taiwan), suggesting that complete decoupling is not optimal for either side.

Xi Jinping's writings show that he viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communist Party as a warning, and much of what has followed can be explained through a lens of Xi's determination that this will not happen to China's party.

Glenn Tifford raises a fundamental incompatibility: liberal democracies are premised on openness (the operating system of open societies), while Leninist systems are premised on information control, and this creates cognitive dissonance when trying to maintain openness with a system that weaponizes information.