While difficult to assess, tensions among groups within the PRC create opportunities for imaginative US policies that could attenuate CPC aggressiveness.

Ambitions of Communist Party of China leading, but younger, members, desires among youth for privileges they enjoyed before Xi Jinping’s rising restrictions, hopes of entrepreneurs to fulfill dreams, freedom within LGBTQ communities to express themselves and, generally, liberties among the people in the PRC add to up to a lot of volatile pressure that the CPC hopes to contain.

That building pressure produces opportunities for creative diplomacy.

With opportunistic zeal, analytic rigor to define achievable goals, followed up with disciplined planning, creative US diplomacy can and should, to use a CPC term, “make correct choices” that achieve US objectives.