A parade of senior American policy makers is traveling to Beijing on diplomatic missions to mend tattered relations between the United States and China. The U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is expected in Beijing on Sunday, a week after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was in town. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited a month ago. After nearly a year of strained communication, the flurry of diplomacy is good news: If the two governments are speaking with each other, perhaps they won’t shoot at each other.

Or at least that’s the idea. The improved dialogue is President Joe Biden’s attempt to demonstrate the possibility of a middle path between conflict and appeasement in contending with China. He believes that the U.S. can and should compete with China while setting in place guardrails that will prevent competition from veering  into confrontation. The two countries might even find opportunities to cooperate on pressing global concerns, such as climate change.

China’s leader Xi Jinping appears amenable, at least for the moment. In fact, Xi’s government was so eager to paint Yellen’s visit in a positive light that it laid things on a bit thick. Referring to a rainbow that appeared over Beijing upon Yellen’s arrival, Premier Li Qiang told Yellen that the U.S. and China can see “more rainbows” after a period of “wind and rain.” With the Chinese economy staggering badly, and the U.S. and its allies moving to “de-risk,” or reduce their reliance on China, Xi and his team seem to be in the mood to chat, charm, and change minds.

But these efforts should not be taken to mean that Xi accepts Biden’s two-track template for their relationship. Rather, Xi seems to believe the very opposite: that gentlemanly competition is not viable, and that Washington must either capitulate to Beijing’s wishes or prepare to slug things out. How Xi ultimately responds to Biden could make the difference between a Cold War–style era of great power competition—which would be bad enough—and a hot shooting war that would be catastrophic for everybody.

Read: China and the West are coming apart. Can China’s economy continue to rise?

American foreign-policy makers too often assume that they are in the driver’s seat in U.S. relations with other nations, and that the policies of other governments are, to a great degree, a reaction to Washington’s. Obviously, any country’s foreign policy does in part respond to others—China’s included. But national leaders also have their own agendas and goals that have little or nothing to do with specific decisions made and actions taken in Washington.

Xi Jinping most certainly has an agenda of his own, and he has made no secret of it. Since taking power more than a decade ago, he has stated his goal of achieving the “Chinese Dream” of “national rejuvenation,” which means the resurrection of China’s greatness on the world stage. Getting there entails “reunification,” as the Communists call it, with Taiwan to make the nation whole, based on Beijing’s definition of its rightful borders. Xi has pledged to build China a “world-class” military to give heft to his foreign-policy aims. His government has also declared its plans to leverage state support to dominate emerging technologies, including electric vehicles and artificial intelligence. More recently, Xi has outlined his vision for a new world order that would strip international affairs of liberal values and elevate the legitimacy of authoritarian governments instead.

Throughout his tenure, Xi has pursued these goals with determination and scant regard for Washington’s opinion. He has routinely ignored Washington’s objections, voiced since the Obama administration, to his effort to lay claim to nearly all of the South China Sea, including by building military installations on man-made islands. Washington has further made clear that it views Xi’s industrial policies, which funnel large amounts of state financial support to high-tech sectors, unfair and threatening to American companies. But Xi just keeps spending. More recently, Xi has brushed off U.S. concerns about his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and has continued to deepen ties with Moscow.

Xi has signaled that he has no intention of changing his policies in order to improve relations with the United States. Rather, Beijing’s consistent position has been that Washington is entirely to blame for rising tensions, and so repairing them is entirely America’s responsibility. “If the United States does not hit the brake but continues to speed down the wrong path,” Qin Gang, China’s foreign minister, said in March, “there will surely be conflict and confrontation.”

Read: The world according to Xi Jinping

After Blinken’s visit last month, Xinhua, China’s official news agency, published an editorial that suggested “three R words that Washington should remember: rationality, responsibility and results.” It went on to claim that “the root cause for the downward spiral of China-U.S. relations is Washington’s misperceptions toward China, which have led to misguided China policies.” Even under the rainbow of Yellen’s meetings, Beijing continues to press Washington for concessions while offering none in return. After Yellen’s departure, China’s finance ministry issued a statement saying that Beijing “requires” the United States to “cease the suppression of Chinese enterprises” and “take concrete steps to respond to China’s major concerns in economic relations” in order to improve ties. Only three days before Yellen arrived, Xi’s government announced its own export controls on two key metals used in electronics manufacturing—hardly an olive branch.

What Xi really wants is freedom of action, unfettered by American power, rules, or criticism. Many of his policies are designed to eliminate China’s vulnerabilities to American punitive action. His military buildup has been designed specifically to counter the way that American armed forces project power. Xi’s drive for economic “self-sufficiency,” especially in crucial technologies such as semiconductors, is meant to protect China from Washington’s sanctions. When Xi told Blinken that “major-country competition does not represent the trend of the times” in their June meeting, according to the Chinese summary of the talk, he might have meant that he desires peaceful relations with the United States, but he could just as easily have been saying he doesn’t think he should have to contend with the United States as an impediment to his volition.

Beijing and Washington simply do not perceive “competition” the same way. Washington has repeatedly attempted to portray measures such as curbs on the export of certain chip technology to China, imposed last year, as targeted efforts to defend American national security that are not meant to derail Chinese development. But in Beijing, these steps are seen as no more than a global superpower exploiting its economic leverage to sustain its dominance. Qin Gang once said that Biden’s “so-called competition means to contain and suppress China in all respects.”

Xi could possibly show greater flexibility in closed-door negotiations than he has in public. Much of China’s rhetoric is aimed at a domestic audience to make Xi look like a determined defender of China’s national interests. Yet Xi has called China’s rise an “inevitability,” and he could assume that the United States (and everybody else) will eventually have to concede to China, whether they like it or not.

Beijing’s attitude raises doubts about how much can actually be achieved through dialogue, or even a softer China policy of the sort many American commentators have urged. Writing recently about tensions over Taiwan, Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, rightfully worried about the “‘tit-for-tat’ dynamic that has come to define U.S and Chinese interactions, whereby each side doubles down on what it sees as deterrence signals that in fact only serve to provoke further such signals.” He recommended that both countries take steps to defuse a possible crisis, including Washington showing its sincerity by reducing its naval transits in the sensitive Taiwan Strait. The former AIG chair Maurice Greenberg, representing a group of concerned American business leaders and policy makers, argued last year that the U.S. should build on the positive benefits of the two countries’ economic relationship to create a more constructive dialogue: “It is in our national interest, now more than ever, to do all we can to improve U.S.-China relations,” he wrote.

But whether such approaches would actually benefit bilateral relations ultimately depends on Xi’s willingness to respond in kind. So far, the Chinese leader has displayed little interest in changing his policies to accommodate Washington. There is a good chance that his current engagement with the Biden administration is little more than a fishing expedition to see what favors he might be able to extract with a few smiles and handshakes but without altering his agenda. The more consistent signals from Xi suggest that the only way to get along with China is to give in to China.

That doesn’t mean dialogue is pointless. If (or, more probably, when) a crisis erupts, an open channel of communication could help avert disaster. But more than likely, no pot of gold awaits at the end of the rainbow.

Not so long ago, alcohol was good for you. In a 1991 segment on 60 Minutes, a French researcher claimed that red-wine consumption was responsible for good health in France. This argument proved popular with the wine-consuming public, and prompted academic papers positing an inverse relationship between red-wine consumption and cardiovascular disease. Scientists even put forward a mechanistic theory for why red wine was healthy, involving a compound called resveratrol.  

But others soon cast doubt on the possibility that red wine could really have any causal relationship with longevity. The “alcohol is good for you” narrative eroded and, in the past year, seems to have fully collapsed. A number of researchers are now arguing that basically any amount of alcohol is bad for you; a New York Times article from January was titled “Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health.” Some—including the Canadian government—are now suggesting that, as a result, the safest choice is not to drink at all.

Excessive alcohol consumption clearly leads to significant problems, physical and emotional. That is not up for debate. However: Recent rhetoric, veering in the direction of abstinence, goes well beyond the sound advice to avoid heavy drinking and ignores the value of pleasure.

[Read: A daily drink is almost certainly not going to hurt you]

In fact, a pleasure-agnostic approach to health advice is now in vogue even outside the domain of alcohol, and is filtering down to the general public with sometimes absurd results. Recently, a reader asked me: Is there any data on health benefits to orgasms? I am not aware of reliable data from randomized experiments suggesting that having more orgasms improves health. That isn’t the point of orgasms, anyway. The point of orgasms is that they are fun. We do not need to prove health benefits to want to have them.

Public-health advice is sometimes based on a “lexicographic” standard—putting the effects on health first, second, and third, and ignoring other considerations, including enjoyment. A lexicographic standard applied to, say, meat consumption would hold that we must always eat burgers well done, because that is the best way to avoid any risk of E. coli, even though well-done burgers are tasteless. More generally, some in public health avoid discussing the negative unintended consequences of absolutism. During the coronavirus pandemic, some officials advocated strongly for long-lasting school closures, arguing that keeping kids at home was the only way to prevent in-school spread among students and teachers. That was, in a technical sense, true, but this recommendation failed to consider the enormous costs to children of those closures, which should have been weighed against any benefits.

Coming back to alcohol, pleasure-agnosticism could make sense if the best available evidence indicated substantial harm from even moderate drinking. It does not. I should also stress that the data are fundamentally flawed because the largest, most commonly cited studies we have are observational, not randomized. And the characteristics of people who consume alcohol in moderation are different from those who do not.  

In 2018, The Lancet published a comprehensive study on the link between alcohol consumption and cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. It is an extraordinary work of scholarship, combining hundreds of previous papers. And the results indicate an upward trend in cancer, in particular, as alcohol consumption increases. But the effects at moderate levels of drinking—say, one to two drinks a day—are very small. For heart disease, we see the typical decrease in risk at moderate drinking levels, and increases with higher amounts.  

[From the July/August 2021 issue: America has a drinking problem]

None of these results are convincingly causal. It seems very likely that all associations—positive and negative—are overstated relative to the truth. Generally, when researchers are able to adjust for some demographic differences, the relationship between alcohol and health gets smaller. This, in turns, suggests that if they could adjust for more differences, it would get smaller still. Whether these relationships would be smaller but still positive, or really zero, is something we cannot know from the data we have.

We cannot conclusively prove that moderate alcohol consumption is totally benign, much less beneficial. Based on the data we have, it also seems extremely unlikely that moderate alcohol consumption is fully “bad” for your health.

If you do not enjoy, or actively dislike, alcohol, then the abstinence standard might be the right one for you. But many people do enjoy a drink from time to time: a beer with friends, a cold glass of rosé in the summer, a hot toddy in front of the fire, even just a glass of white wine while cooking at the end of a long day. If we accept that pleasure has value, and that the data are muddy, then the moderation standard makes more sense.

The pendulum on alcohol has swung too far from the 1980s. Alcohol is probably not the key to longevity. But it’s not arsenic, either. In the immortal words of Cookie Monster, it’s a sometime food.