American foreign policy ahistoricism has three distinct manifestations: historical exceptionalism, historical denialism, and historical determinism. In sum, while historical exceptionalism and denialism each privilege America’s own history in ways that give other countries’ history too little weight — their pasts that are never dead — historical determinism’s past is so not dead as to dictate the present. As to China, there is plenty of room to contest Chinese historical claims — like the South China Sea nine-dash line as well as rationales for Uighur concentration camps and the Hong Kong crackdown — without resorting to the clash of civilizations portrayed by a top Trump State Department official, or the new Cold War espoused by an array of Democrats and Republicans.