Global Courant
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing is a wave on the tide of President Joe Biden’s decisions not to promote dialogue or expert understanding. It has not interrupted the slide into war.
Under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and, in part, Donald Trump, the two countries had institutionalized large-scale communications, especially through the Strategic Economic Dialogue (Bush), the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (Obama), and the Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (Trump). . Dozens of senior officials met regularly.
Those dialogues failed to resolve the big issues like Taiwan or intellectual property, but officials began to understand each other and manage differences.
When Donald Trump became president, Xi Jinping was determined to keep communication open and relations constructive. Chinese scholars say the lavish welcome was historically exceptional.
As with other relationships, Trump initially responded with, “President Xi is a brilliant man. If you searched all over Hollywood for someone to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find him. There’s no one like that. The looks, the brains, the whole thing. Similarly in Davos in 2020: “Our relationship with China has probably never, ever been better now…. He’s for China, I’m for the US, but apart from that, we love each other.”
But Trump’s mood shifted, the dialogue lapsed, and Biden chose to permanently abandon institutionalized dialogue. Blinken’s journey only slightly reverses that decision and diminishes the coldness that Blinken deliberately instilled in his first meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage.
U.S. presidents traditionally ensure the presence of a few cabinet-level officials with expertise and experience on the most vital national security issue: No Cold War president would have been without the top-level expertise brought to the table by Kissinger, Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and others. the task was brought.
In this joint episode of the China in the World podcast and the US-China Nexus podcast, Eleanor Albert interviews Paul Haenle and two of his former National Security Council (NSC) colleagues, Dennis Wilder and Faryar Shirzad, about US policy towards regarding China during the George W. Bush administration.
George W. Bush was in many ways a foreign policy failure, but under the leadership of Treasury’s Hank Paulsen and NSC’s brilliant CIA China expert Dennis Wilder, he balanced his strong support for Taiwan’s security with strong support for the peace accords of the 1970s and was admired by both Taipei and Beijing.
Obama ended the tradition of China expertise at the cabinet level. Trump followed suit. Biden has been exceptionally high-profile in stating that China is the ultimate threat to America’s foreign policy, but he is not hiring top expertise on China. His secretary of state, national security adviser and CIA director spent their careers in the Middle East and Europe; his defense minister on the Middle East.
Even Biden’s ambassador to China is a career official in the Middle East and Europe. Its National Security Council Asia czar has no direct experience with China and became famous for demanding a withdrawal based on the false claim that US involvement in China would democratize presumed involvement.
Some of these officials, such as CIA Director William J Burns, are outstanding and have used their European expertise to resist Russian aggression. But on China, imagine the CEO of a giant food company announcing that grains are the biggest opportunity and biggest competitive threat, then announcing that the heads of the Wheaties division, the Cheerios division, the oatmeal division, and everyone else experts would be.
Below the leadership level it is worse. Intelligence and defense department officials say it has become so difficult for anyone with Chinese expertise and experience to get a security clearance that the US has partially blindsided itself. Scholars and business leaders bridging the two countries are frightened and large numbers are considering leaving for China. Some of the visiting Chinese professors, including the two most pro-US international relations scholars and one personally invited by Jimmy Carter, have been treated very badly by the US Immigration Service.
In short, Biden has continued and exacerbated Trump’s gap between strategic imperatives and leadership ability, Trump’s disregard for expertise, and Trump’s (belated, partial, possibly temporary) resignation from institutionalized dialogue. No weekend trip can improve on this basic reality.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday. Photo: Leah Milis/Pool/Al Jazeera
Magnifying the fallout is an essential difference between Trump and Biden. Trump always looked for the deal (albeit a misconceived deal): the trade war was about trade differences, and if Beijing took specific actions, the trade war would decrease proportionally. Biden offers no deal, only escalating sanctions.
Given the overwhelming evidence that tariffs on steel and aluminum are hurting the US more than China, raising prices and costing many tens of thousands of American jobs, most economists assumed that the president whose slogan is “a foreign policy for the middle class” would to cancel. But no, US trade envoy Katherine Tai says they are needed to maintain “leverage” on China. There is, of course, no leverage of policies that harm America more than China.
The Biden administration has completely rejected the peace compromise so successfully negotiated by Kissinger and Brzezinski.
Lacking expertise, Washington often seems clueless about how the world views its China policies. Excel and Biden, for example, frequently aired versions of Biden’s June 9 statement that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a “debt and confiscation program.” Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo similarly featured Belt & Road.
World development leaders, who often compare China’s development offerings to Washington’s readings or the ubiquitous Special Forces teams, know this is false. Every China specialist knows the study of 1100 Chinese loans which showed that there was not a single case where China used debt problems to seize collateral.
Does the US president have no idea what he is talking about or is he systematically spreading disinformation? In any case, developing countries reject many of the US policies. For example, many believe in the argument that the problem in both Europe and Asia is US efforts to encircle and destabilize their adversaries. That is why all of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East are aligning themselves with China on US sanctions against Russia.
The big problem is Taiwan. Henry Kissinger warns that we are sliding into a war over Taiwan. The Biden administration has completely rejected the peace compromise so successfully negotiated by Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Washington pledged to refrain from any official relations or alliance with Taiwan. But President Biden has pledged four times to defend Taiwan; that’s an alliance.
Former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger attend the Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Oslo, Norway, December 11, 2016. Photo: NTB Scanpix / Terje Bendiksby
Speaker Pelosi stressed that her August trip to Taipei was an “official” one; immediately following her meeting with President Tsai, the president’s spokeswoman went on island-wide television proclaiming, “We are a sovereign and independent country.”
George W. Bush, his secretary of state and his deputy secretary of state, not panda-hugging liberals, responded to minor provocations and distanced the US and warned Taipei to stop. Instead, Minister Blinken continues to welcome such official relations and tell the Chinese not to “overreact”.
The angry reaction of the people of China to Xi’s failure to act decisively on such US initiatives is the only risk that could throw Xi Jinping from power. That concern is the only thing that could prompt him to launch a direct attack on Taiwan.
Biden has no senior adviser who understands such things. Blinken and Sullivan act based on how they think China should theoretically respond, not knowledge of actual Chinese politics.
If war comes, it won’t be the limited conflict of American war games. China will hit or lose Okinawa immediately. The US will strike or lose mainland Chinese bases immediately. China will react against the US.
The common denominator of Trump’s MAGA policy, Biden’s MAGA-plus policy and Representative Mike GallagherThe US ultra-MAGA policy is a rejection of the promises and norms the US accepted when Nixon, Carter, Mao and Deng compromised to eliminate the dire risk of conflict over Taiwan.
The cover for that refutation is an endless repetition of the claim that China is planning an invasion of Taiwan, a claim for which US intelligence has no evidence.
In fact, Washington’s far left and far right have always hated compromise. The pragmatic center has evaporated for domestic reasons and the self-righteous ideologues rule Congress. No weekend trip, no fog of diplomatic niceties will stop the resulting return to pre-1972 war risk.
(China took an equally dangerous turn, also for domestic reasons. Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Canadian hostages, economic war against Australia and many more are serious problems. But this article is about the US; previous US administrations dealt with medium-sized problems without slide into war.)
Biden was chosen by the pragmatic center, but he has no China team, no China policy, no strategic vision. He must be wary of taking even the slightest risk that history will remember him for the first accidental world war of his choosing. Weekend trips for marginal changes of tone do not solve the problem.
William H. Overholt, senior researcher at Harvard, wrote the first book (1993) in which he argued that China would become a superpower; a 2018 book stating that China was moving into an era of financial and political stress, and a 2023 article stating that China will become the slowest-growing major economy on its current trajectory.
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