Blinken walks the diplomatic tightrope to Beijing

Nothing can stop US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing this time. Not from the Chinese army. “unsafe” movements in the South China Sea. not a war of words on Chinese fentanyl exports. and not even the revelations of a multi-million dollar Chinese espionage base in Cuba.

In a dramatic reversal of opinion over the weekend, the Biden administration reversed its denials of a Wall Street Journal report on the basis of spying to say instead that it was not even news: the spying basis, he said, had in fact been known to US intelligence since the Trump administration.

That only raised more questions about the initial denials.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, strongly denied Monday that last week’s repudiation of the story was intended not to derail Blinken’s upcoming trip to China, as the spy balloon saga did with his deceased trip cancellation in February.

Kirby told reporters at the White House that the denials were due to the verb forms used in last week’s reports. The headlines should have used the past tense, he said, not the present.

Still, he denied that the White House got caught up in a clumsy cover-up of untimely news and questioned the reason for the leak.

“It’s shameful that someone, or someone, somehow thinks it’s okay to put this kind of information into the public bloodstream,” Kirby said. “We were as forthcoming as we should have been and could have been at the time, and we remain that way now.”

We need to talk

Blinken’s trip has yet to be officially announced by the State Department, but media reports suggest he will arrive in Beijing on Sunday and meet with senior Chinese government officials during an event on Monday.

The visit comes after nearly a year of tense relations between Washington and Beijing, which began with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August and has been marked by an almost endless list ever since. of disputes between the two main world powers, including technology. export bans and the increase in near misses at sea.

Amid these complaints, some have consulted why the White House is trying so hard now for a thaw, even having “withheld human rights-related sanctions, export controls, and other sensitive actions to try to limit the damage to the US-China relationship,” according to a report.

It’s all part of the precarious act of managing the extensive economic ties and military tensions that President Joe Biden has. called “the most important relationship” the United States has.

“The Biden administration is trying to walk a fine line,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told Radio Free Asia, noting that the White House’s main goal was to build a “coalition balance to prevent China from gaining hegemony in Asia”.

“But they also want to cooperate with Beijing in other areas and avoid a complete economic or political breakdown” that would hurt both sides, he said. “A thaw with Beijing will also reassure our Asian allies, who sometimes freak out when the risk of war seems too high.”

These last two goals, Walt explained, require dialogue, which China It has been turned off since Blinken’s banned February trip. But that also means that the US side stands to gain more from the resumption of talks.

“For the United States, restarting the regular dialogue and clarifying some points of agreement would be enough,” he said. “China faces a more difficult task: ‘success’ probably means getting the US to walk away from some of his recent measuresAnd that’s unlikely to happen.”

To thaw or not to thaw

Some, including Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the US German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific Program, don’t even view Blinken’s trip amid rising tensions as seeking a thaw.

“Rather, it seeks to responsibly manage competition with China, which is impossible to do in the absence of dialogue,” Glaser told RFA. “Blinken probably hopes to restore dialogue mechanisms that have been suspended, especially military dialogues, and revitalize cooperation on global issues.”

“I hope it covers the full range of issues in the relationship, including human rights, actions against Chinese companies, the war in Ukraine, North Korea, Iran and Taiwan,” he said.

There are also more practical reasons to re-engage in talks, especially since US defense officials continue to warn about the risks of war.

While the United States and China may be locked in a “strategic competition” to influence world politics in their favor, they are also economically intertwined in a way that the United States and the Soviet Union never were during the Cold War, said Richard Harknett, director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnat.

“Competition is not inevitably conflict, and neither country’s interests are furthered through direct conflict/war,” Harknett told RFA. “Only speaking at high levels is an advance, as it reduces the chances of misperceptions leading to unwanted incidents.”

He said that could only be achieved by restoring dialogue to create “some ground rules of the road” that benefit both sides in the long run.

“This is setting ground rules for decades to come,” he said.

Biden Xi

In the short term, said Kharis Templeman, director of Stanford University’s Taiwan Project in the Indo-Pacific region, the bilateral dialogue is also “useful in clarifying US interests and capabilities” to Beijing, even if the most problems “will not be solved”. be solved simply by talking.”

That will put the United States in a better position in its competition with China, he said, and could help avoid conflict. Other than that, “it doesn’t cost much to send Blinken to Beijing,” Templeman argued.

“It is also useful because the US side can learn more about the CCP leadership,” he added, referring to the Chinese Communist Party, and it is valuable to see “who is advising Xi Jinping, how Xi uses his time, what issues he wants to address.” talk and avoid, and so on.”

“The main way that hot-button conflicts occur is through a misperception of the other party’s interests, commitments and capabilities,” he said.

In the end, the many points of contention between the United States and China could also be seen more as a reason for a meeting between their top diplomats than an impediment to it, said Carl Thayer, professor emeritus at the Australian Defense Force Academy. in Canberra.

“It is precisely because of the growing list of issues affecting bilateral relations that there is a greater urgency for dialogue to address these disputes and stabilize relations,” Thayer said, and to break a cycle of “both blaming each other for the failure”. of the dialogue.”

In addition to allowing both sides to “take stock of the major irritants in bilateral relations and how they can be handled,” the trip could set the stage for another face-off at the ASEAN summit in Jakarta in September or the ASEAN summit in G-20 in September. New Delhi in December, she added.

“It is likely that both China and the United States would be interested in scheduling a meeting between Xi and Biden before the end of the year, when the regional diplomatic calendar of events provides a convenient opportunity for them to meet,” Thayer said. .

Edited by Malcolm Foster.