Diplomacy is essential and there will of course be announcements from Xi Jinping's visit to Washington. But It is a bit silly to talk about "constructive strategic stability" when all of the things that have made the U.S.-China relationship unstable in the first place are not only still with us but are very much front and center. These include but are not limited to: (1) clashing security concepts. (2) competing views of economic self-interest. (3) obvious differences of political system and ideology. (4) domestic politics that make almost nobody on either side willing to take a risk for the relationship. (5) the shattering of past coalitions for productive relations. (6) little diplomatic substructure or institutionalized basis for productive relations. (7) lack of cooperation on global issues that might leaven the differences on bilateral and regional ones. (8) over-dependence on the personalities of the two leaders—and especially on an American president who is bucking the almost universally hostile view toward China in his own party while collapsing in the polls. Almost seven years ago, I wrote this essay for @CarnegieEndow on "Why the United States and China Forgot How to Cooperate." In many areas, prospective coordination between Washington and Beijing is a political problem, not an intellectual one. But the reality is, while people used to think that economic integration would mitigate security competition, security dynamics have instead bled back into flows of goods, capital, people, technology, and data. So many things that were supposed to integrate the two countries have actually divided, not united, them. And on the Venn diagram between what Beijing wants and what Washington wants out of the relationship, the overlapping middle has shrunk quite a lot from when I got into this business decades ago.