Darwin's Lock: America, China and the Shared Future of Nations

Can America and China avoid catastrophe—or are they locked on a path toward mutual destruction?

In Darwin's Lock, Joshua Cooper Ramo—former vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates and one of the world's foremost experts on US-China relations—offers a brilliantly original framework for understanding the most consequential geopolitical relationship of our time.

Beginning with Charles Darwin's concept of evolution—widely considered the most powerful idea in the history of science—Ramo argues that America and China are not merely connected by trade or technology. They are locked together in a shared evolutionary logic. Separation is not just costly. At this stage of interdependence, it could be fatal for both.

Drawing on more than two decades at the forefront of US-China relations, Ramo takes readers inside:

• The logic of Chinese urban design—and what it reveals about how Beijing sees the world
• The hidden risks in America's artificial intelligence strategy
• The lunch-table conversations of atomic-bomb builders in 1950s Los Alamos
• The ways climate change, machine intelligence, and biological risk create a web of shared danger neither nation can escape alone

Out of this wide-ranging survey of history, science, and geopolitics comes something rare: a genuinely new framework. Ramo proposes a series of science-based approaches to move the US and China away from the trap of nationalist competition and toward what evolutionary biologists call coevolution—a path in which both nations become more fit, more secure, and better equipped to help the world confront the defining dangers of our age.

The essential choice, he shows, is not between winning and losing. It is between coevolution and coextinction.

Darwin's Lock is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where the world is headed—and what it will take to get there safely.