• One thing you can personally do is try to cultivate friendships on both sides, and make an effort to share and appreciate the culture, history, and daily challenges of each. If we have populations that really don’t want to fight, maybe that will help de-escalate things a bit.

    China is my neighbor now (I immigrated to Asia). Some of their literature and history is really quite interesting! I’m not an expert, but I could make a suggestion or two if you like.

      • Yeah I’ve ended up with some sort of syncretic mixed culture. It’s quite good. You get to pick and choose what works best in your situation from both cultures. There are a lot of people from Asia who have done this, but not many from the West – I think mostly because not many people immigrate from the West to Asia. I’ve managed to really push my business forward drawing on ideas from both cultures.

        I’ve already started packing up and exporting concepts back to family in the West. The way Asian families handle family-level economics and real estate inheritance is something that I think early adopters would benefit from in the current ridiculous housing situation in many parts of Canada. Meanwhile, the Western tolerance of lawyers in family matters gives me a big edge here – avoiding the family feuds that so much is lost to. Just the first two random examples that come to mind :)

  • Superpower wars are expensive and extremely unrewarding. Neither wants them. Sometimes they may talk the talk but when it comes to dedicating the next 10 or 20 years to a constant resource drain with no chance of recovering any of that, they’ll find any excuse to get out of it.

  • They know the answer already, and are probably both trying it.

    In US terminology, since that’s the language I know, they try for “competition” rather than “conflict”. The difference being whether they respect each other’s sovereignty for the most part while trying to bury the other, and don’t take straight-up military actions.

    To achieve this, you provide a long series of “offramps” - opportunities to pause and de-escalate - on the path between peace and MAD, and ensure there is no benefit to either party to do any specific escalation. Mistakes will happen, both deliberate and accidental, but they’re very unlikely to all happen at the same time, so even if things get tense there’s offramps left, and game-theoretically they will take one because nobody wants a full-scale nuclear conflict.