US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s long-delayed trip to Beijing has come and gone. Despite the predictable optimistic spin on the visit – both sides agreed to strengthen people-to-people exchanges and promised to continue talks – it did little to defuse the increasingly fraught conflict between the United States and China.

The failure to re-establish military-to-military communications is especially worrisome, given the recent spate of near-misses between the superpowers’ warships in the Taiwan Strait and aircraft over the South China Sea. And this is to say nothing of reported Chinese surveillance and military activity in Cuba, which bears an eerie resemblance to the events that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 – one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War. The risks of accidental conflict, as underscored in my recent book, remain high.