The US and China finally get real with each other
Thomas WrightMonday, March 22, 2021
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Editor's Note:
The exchange in Alaska may have seemed like a debacle, but it was actually
a necessary step to a more stable relationship between the two countries,
argues Thomas Wright. This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic.
Thursday night’s very public dustup
between United States and Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska, during the
Biden administration’s first official meeting with China, may have seemed like
a debacle, but the exchange was actually a necessary step to a more stable
relationship between the two countries.
Director - Center on the United States and
Europe
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Project on International Order
and Strategy
In his brief opening remarks before
the press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he and National Security
Adviser Jake Sullivan would discuss “our deep concerns with actions by China,
including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States,
and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the
rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not
merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues
here today.”
Blinken’s comments seemed to catch the
Chinese off guard. The last Strategic & Economic Dialogue of the Obama
administration, in 2016, began with a conciliatory message from
then–Secretary of State John Kerry and resulted in a declaration identifying 120 different areas of cooperation.
In response to Blinken, China’s top
diplomat, Yang Jiechi, said that
because Blinken had “delivered some quite different opening remarks, mine will
be slightly different as well.” He spoke for 16 minutes, blowing through the
two-minute limit agreed upon in torturous pre-meeting negotiations over
protocol. “Many people within the United States,” he said, “actually have
little confidence in the democracy of the United States.” He went on to say
that “China has made steady progress in human rights, and the fact is that
there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights.” He
also took aim at U.S. foreign policy: “I think the problem is that the United
States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched
the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this
has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has
also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.”
As the press began to leave, assuming
that the opening remarks were over and to make way for the private discussions,
Blinken and Sullivan ushered them back in and challenged Yang, telling him that
“it’s never a good bet to bet against America.” Determined to have the last
word, Yang and China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, responded again. Yang began
by saying, sarcastically, “Well, it was my bad. When I entered this room, I
should have reminded the U.S. side of paying attention to its tone in our
respective opening remarks, but I didn’t.”
The opening exchange did not appear to
materially affect the rest of the meeting. A senior administration official
told me that the moment the cameras left, the Chinese side went back to
business as usual, working through the list of issues on the agenda, including nonproliferation
and Iran. The official told me that the U.S. delegation believed Yang’s opening
gambit had been preplanned and was not an off-the-cuff response. The Chinese
delegation had come, the official said, with the intention of delivering a
public message, which they did in dramatic fashion. China believes that the
balance of power has shifted in its favor over the past 10 years, especially
during the pandemic, and wanted to play to the audience at home.
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For an astonished press, witnessing the
exchange was like being present at the dawn of a new cold war and seemed to sum
up just how bad the U.S.-China relationship had become. Writing in The New
York Times, Ian Johnson warned, “These harsh
exchanges will only contribute to the dangerous decay in relations between the
world’s two most powerful countries. Both sides seem to be trapped by a need to
look and sound tough.”
But this view misunderstands what is
needed in U.S.-China diplomacy right now. The meeting would have been a failure
if it had resulted in general declarations to cooperate while minimizing
competition, a common U.S. strategy when China’s intentions were not as clear.
Organizing the relationship around cooperation is theoretically desirable as an
end goal but will be unattainable for the foreseeable future, given the
unfolding reality of an assertive, repressive China and a defiant America.
Last year, as it anticipated a win for
Joe Biden in the U.S. election and then during the transition, China signaled
that it wanted to effectively reset the relationship regarding cooperation on
climate change and the pandemic. The Biden team saw these overtures for what
they were: a trap to get the U.S. to pull back from competing with China in
exchange for cooperation that would never really materialize. Biden officials
told me that any reset would have been rhetorical only; China would have
continued to push forward on all other fronts, including its quest for
technological supremacy, its economic coercion of Australia, and its pressure on Taiwan.
Had the Biden administration embraced
China’s offer, any agreement would have collapsed beneath the weight of
Beijing’s actual behavior, as well as opposition in Washington. Biden would
have been forced to adjust course and take a more competitive approach anyway,
under less favorable conditions, including nervous allies and an emboldened
China.
By skipping this step in favor of a
strategy of competitive engagement—meeting with China but seeing it through the
lens of competition—the Biden team not only saved time, but it flushed
Beijing’s true intentions out into the open for the world to see. In his
remarks, contrasting “Chinese-style democracy,” as he called it, with
“U.S.-style democracy,” Yang implicitly acknowledged that the U.S.-China
relationship is, and will continue to be, defined by a competition between
different government systems: authoritarianism and liberal democracy.
The Biden administration understands
that a more assertive U.S. approach is jarring to many in the American
foreign-policy establishment, which is accustomed to decades of cautious and
cooperative engagement in high-level meetings. But friction is necessary, given
China’s play for dominance over the past several years. “It is increasingly
difficult to argue that we don’t know what China wants,” said the senior
administration official, who asked for anonymity so as to speak freely about
the meeting. “They are playing for keeps.”
Biden’s priority rightly seems to be
creating a greater common cause with allies against China, especially on
technology and economics. Sullivan refers to this approach as building a
situation of strength, echoing the famous formulation by Truman’s secretary of
state Dean Acheson, who made clear that strengthening the Western alliance was
a necessary precondition for any talks with the Soviet Union. The U.S. has had
considerable success with the Quad, the informal strategic alliance among the
United States, Japan, Australia, and India, although the U.S. needs to be far
more imaginative and ambitious in getting European nations on board with its
efforts to compete with China.
The question after Anchorage is what
role should bilateral diplomacy with Beijing play in America’s overall strategy
to deal with China. Now that the dramatic public exchange has set a more honest
approach for a competitive era, the two sides can progress to a much harder
next phase.
The rules-based international order is
over. Beijing and Moscow concluded long ago that a world in which China and
Russia generally acquiesced to U.S. leadership, as they did in the 1990s and
2000s, was untenable, a Western trap designed, in part, to undermine
authoritarianism. They were not entirely wrong about that—many Americans saw
globalization and multilateralism as having the desirable side effect of encouraging
political liberalization around the world.
The truth is that the United States does
pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s interests (although not
necessarily those of the Chinese people), while the CCP surely poses a threat
to liberal democracy and U.S. interests. Ultimately, Washington and Beijing
will have to acknowledge this to each other. That will be difficult for the
Biden administration, which is accustomed to assuming that American interests
are not a threat to any other government, but broadly benefit all major world
powers. It will be even harder for Beijing, which goes to great lengths to
conceal its revisionism behind a shield of insincere platitudes.
Such an acknowledgment will allow a
truly frank strategic conversation to occur about how these two countries’
systems will relate to each other as they compete. These systems are
incompatible in many respects, but they are also intertwined in a myriad of
ways. The goals of U.S.-China diplomacy should initially be modest, to avoid
unintentional provocations and to facilitate transactional cooperation on
shared interests. Eventually, if China’s behavior and the geopolitical
conditions are favorable, the two sides could explore broader cooperation and
even the possibility of a détente—a general thawing of tensions—but that is a
long way off.
Historically, the most volatile periods
of rivalry between major powers is in the early stages; think of the late 1940s
and the 1950s in the Cold War. The red lines become apparent only through
interactions in crises. The greatest risk is for either side to miscalculate
the resolve or intentions of the other. By getting real in Anchorage, both
sides have taken the important first step toward a more stable relationship by
acknowledging the true nature of their relationship.
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