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This week's inaugural Strategic and Economic Dialogue with top economic and foreign-policy officials from China was by all accounts a success. That is to say, discussion ranged widely over the many topics on which the two countries fail to see eye to eye, and neither side fell out with the other. Nothing was really achieved, of course.

Little if anything, it seems, is going to change. But both delegations were delighted, and probably right to be. Things not getting worse -- that was about the best outcome you could have envisaged.

In the future, the two sides will hold more talks like these, and more talks of other kinds as well, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in her concluding remarks. "For our part, the United States was proud to reaffirm our participation in the Shanghai World Expo next year," she added. "And later this evening, we and our Chinese colleagues will participate in a dinner of American business leaders and citizens supporting that effort."

Well, please don't say that this meeting was not a big deal. Participants discussed human rights -- "candidly and respectfully." They worked on a memorandum of understanding on climate change, reaffirming their existing firm commitment to do something about it one day. They talked about the world economy, and they agreed to talk about that some more later. "These are just a few of the concrete discussions and achievements of this first Strategic and Economic Dialogue," Clinton declared. "It represents 30 years of progress, because in many ways, we are building on the work that has gone before and taking it to a new level."

I'm impressed. Another 30 years of progress like this, and we might really be talking about getting somewhere.

Seriously, it was a good meeting, because the key to U.S.-China relations for the time being is to avoid mutually destructive quarrels. Meetings such as this are not going to produce a breakthrough on human rights, or the overvalued renminbi, or trade policy, or any of the other issues that, in some other world, diplomacy might help to resolve. So that was never the right measure of success. If the U.S.-China relationship slides back into acrimonious rivalry, on the other hand, all those goals and many more besides will be jeopardized. So give the delegations some credit for their "concrete discussions and achievements," however gaseous. The alternative was worse.

It is always worth remembering that, so long as a diplomatic breakdown does not gum up the works, the key issues that separate the two countries -- with one notable exception, which I will return to in a moment -- can be perfectly well resolved through self-interested calculation.

China wants the United States to get a grip on its long-term public borrowing. Otherwise international investors might start worrying about U.S. solvency and grow reluctant to finance the country's public debt. That in turn could cause a precipitous fall in the dollar at some point, collapsing the value of China's vast, and mostly dollar-denominated, foreign-exchange reserves.

True. But the point is that the United States should not need China to lean on it before acting to restore sound long-term public finances. Never mind the implications for China; a lenders' strike against U.S. government debt would be a calamity first and foremost for this country. A collapsing currency and a spike in interest rates would be the likely consequences: a stagflationary combination that is extremely difficult to fix. In what kind of world is China more concerned than the United States about America's solvency? A very confused one, evidently.

In exactly the same way, the United States wants China to speed up the halting appreciation of its currency and to switch some of its domestic spending from investment to consumption. Those moves would help the U.S. economy by reducing the trade deficit between the two countries. But just as with the United States and its public borrowing, China should not need any encouragement from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who also attended the meetings, to do those things. An appreciated renminbi and a boost to consumption would raise China's living standards, which the government's exchange rate policy -- and the distorted economic structure it causes -- is suppressing.

The United States has its reasons for failing to act on public borrowing, just as China's government has its reasons for failing to rebalance its economy. In both cases, the reasons boil down to politics.

Washington's current path of growth in public debt is explosive -- not just for the next year or two, when heavy borrowing is justified by the recession and the need for a powerful fiscal stimulus, but over the subsequent 10 years and beyond, when the economy is back at full capacity. It reflects a chronic political incapacity to bring ends and means into alignment. Democrats are really no worse than Republicans in this respect. The two sides have a disagreement over how much to spend and tax, but they have apparently reached a consensus on keeping the gap between those two numbers recklessly large in all circumstances.

Beijing's resistance to moves that would rebalance China's economy away from exports and toward higher domestic living standards is driven by the fear that the transition would see a period of slower growth and higher unemployment -- with unpleasant political consequences for the rulers. What's good for the country in the longer term takes second place to what's good for the political leadership in the meantime -- just like in the United States.

When pondering the utility of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the right question to ask is therefore a bit subtler than you might think. It is whether diplomatic initiatives can alter those political calculations and push either government in the direction of acting in its citizens' best interests, something they are unwilling to do on their own initiative.

It does sometimes happen, in fact. The classic example is the golden age of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade after 1945.

The underlying logic is similar to the present case. Free trade was in the unilateral best interests of each member state, but politically difficult to do. The GATT provided cover. Governments cut tariffs in a reciprocal way. The supposed sacrifice of one country lowering its tariffs was balanced by the benefit of improved access to another country's markets. The economics was bogus, as governments knew at the time: You are better off lowering your tariffs even if nobody reciprocates. But politically it was useful to talk of exchanging "concessions." For years it got the job done.

Unfortunately, that model now appears to be defunct. The Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations is stalled because governments have forgotten that the reciprocity model was the solution to a political problem -- gaining popular consent for trade liberalization -- rather than a statement of underlying economic reality. In any case, simply ask yourself whether Chinese demands for lower public borrowing in the U.S. advance that purpose or set it back. The same goes for American demands of China on exchange-rate policy, or human rights, or almost anything else.

Americans are a proud people who do not care to be bossed around. So are the Chinese. Hence, the greater the diplomatic pressure, the less the progress. Restraint and respect will likely be more conducive to good policy than attempts to muscle the other side -- and this runs both ways.

The important exception to this is climate change. In the cases I just discussed, the mutuality of interests is exaggerated. The key to sensible policy is for the national interest to guide it. Climate change is different. There, forgive the expression, we really do sink or swim together. Whatever Al Gore may say, U.S. action on carbon emissions is going to bring little benefit to the United States unless India and China act too. Cooperation on this between the two countries is going to be vital -- the difference between success and failure.

The good news is that the prospects for this necessary cooperation are better than you might suppose. In fact, the United States might find that in China it has an ally. China has been reluctant to commit itself to internationally agreed-upon targets for carbon reductions -- but so has the United States. And the reasoning on each side is not that different. Skepticism about the mechanics of agreements like the failed Kyoto accord is exacerbated by an elevated sensitivity to infringements of sovereignty. It seems to me, as a European, t0hat China and the United States understand each other pretty well on that topic.

Together, the United States and China could conceivably push for an international emissions-control system that is more flexible than Kyoto, putting greater emphasis on investments in new clean technologies and less on punitive sanctions against existing industries. If they chose to get together on this, the game would be up for other approaches. It is, at least, an interesting possibility.

Definitely worth talking and talking about.