Maintaining ‘Entanglement’: APEC Summit Discussions including the Xi-Biden Bilateral Summit

Doing some quick catch up on the APEC Summit that was held between November 11th and 17th in San Francisco. The main event, as it turned out, was the much discussed bilateral summit between China’s Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden. While the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) meetings to receive some attention – more for what didn’t happen than what was secured – the APEC gathering activity was dominated by US-China Bilateral Summit and there was some attention paid to the other bilateral Summit of note that between President Xi and the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

The Post here is constructed from several Substack Posts in Alan’s Newsletter: “Maintaining ‘Entanglement‘: APEC Summit discussions and more” and “It’s working; just not like what was anticipated: The sudden rise of Bilaterals”; and “So Success, or What? Final thoughts on the Summits in San Francisco”. Feel free to subscribe to my Substack: Alan’s Newsletter

Maintaining ‘Entanglement’: APEC Summit discussions and more

It appears that we are likely to see a meeting this month of President Xi and President Biden at the margins of the APEC Summit. I think that is a good thing. What can we, or should we, expect from such a summit of leaders of the two leading powers? While contemplating this question, I was caught by two articles written by Brookings colleague, Ryan Hass. Ryan has recently been named director of the John L. Thornton China Center and holds the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies at Brooking is also a senior fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. Ryan has contributed two first rate articles on US-China relations – what they are, and what they need to be.*

First, there is the big question of where US-China relations are, and then where they need to be? There is little question that Ryan is correct in believing that the US and the global order would be far worse off if China were to exit the current international system fragmenting what is still a critical -and I believe necessary – ‘single international community’. As Ryan urged in one of the two contributions, this a recent Foreign Affairs piece:

Washington should aim to preserve a functioning international system that supports U.S. security and prosperity—and that includes China rather than isolates it. Meanwhile, the United States should maintain a strong military to deter China from using force against the United States or its security partners and seek to sustain an overall edge over China in technological innovation, particularly in fields with national security implications. … Washington’s goal should be to keep China entangled in a global system that regulates interstate behavior and pushes Beijing to conclude that the best path to the realization of its national ambitions would be to operate within existing rules and norms.

‘Entanglement’ as a strategic aim strikes me as ‘right on target’.

As Ryan turns to the immediate circumstances, he describes at least a bilateral tactical objective of, I suppose, let’s keep talking, because putting it in to well known historical terms, it is better to ’jaw jaw than war war’. He then paints a picture of growing ‘high level’ engagement. As he puts it in his Brookings article:

The resumption of U.S.-China high-level engagement has restored several habits that previously supported stability and predictability in relations. These include a reciprocal commitment to “no surprises” for managing relations. Even as both sides continue to take actions they view as protective but the other side views as unfriendly, they have each previewed their actions privately to the other side in advance to clarify the intentions and limits of their respective approaches. Both sides have set up diplomatic channels to address specific issues, such as export controls, commercial issues, and strategic concerns. Washington and Beijing also have resumed coordinating with each other on global crises, such as following the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Hamas.

That all seems quite hopeful and one could add agreement by the two sides to “hold a rare discussion with China on nuclear-arms control as the U.S. seeks to head off a destabilizing three-way arms race with Beijing and Moscow. … Monday’s session will provide American officials with an opportunity to probe their Chinese counterparts about Beijing’s nuclear doctrine and the ambitious buildup of its nuclear arsenal, which for decades has been much smaller than the U.S.’s and Russia’s. ”

But Ryan then provides a bit of a reality check:

Under the surface, though, tensions continue to boil. Neither side has resolved nor lessened any significant challenges in the relationship. Increased frequency of communication has not yielded convergence around key issues. Instead, the relationship has settled into a period of communication without concessions in either direction.

So, where does this leave us – with the bilateral relationship and the larger multilateral one?

The key to maintaining the global order and “China’s entanglement” in the rules-based order starts, I’m afraid, with the US and not necessarily with China. Ryan more than hinted at this in his Foreign Affairs piece but let me underscore it. There was no greater shock to the global order than the first Trump Administration. And the prospect of a second Trump presidency with the 2024 election must give great pause to members of the order from allies and partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to competitors namely China. The only gleeful souls over such a prospect of a Trump return are likely to be adversaries of the US such as Iran and Russia. Meanwhile, undermining the current order is none other than the current Administration and the real prospect of even greater chaos with the prospect of a second Trump Administration:

On trade, global health, climate change, and arms control, the United States has shown diminishing tolerance for accepting the requirements and limitations imposed by the current order.

The current dilemma the international system faces is a presumption, certainly by the current Administration of continued American leadership while at the same time barely tolerating the current global order norms, rules and policies. As Ryan points to:

American policymakers will face hard choices on whether to support adjustments that could help the existing system survive. If China ultimately balks at remaining in the system and instead invests its resources in mobilizing an anti-West bloc to oppose the international system, the United States will want the rest of the world to see Beijing as the culprit for the system’s fragmentation.

And while it may be that the rest of the world will see China as the culprit, it may not be nearly as ‘cut and dry’ as US policymakers may like to think. In the face of rising concerns about US actions all the more reason for the US Administration to put some energy into the pending Xi-Biden gathering. At a minimum, according to Ryan, the Chinese officials “will want to project to their domestic audience that Xi is received by Biden with dignity and respect.” As for the US side, “In return, the United States will want to lock in concrete progress on its priorities,” including, perhaps agreement to reduce the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals, progress in AI governance, a return to significantly more people to people exchanges and possibly agreement on humanitarian assistance in the face of the continuing conflicts. As Ryan suggests, however,

Beyond such specific issues, though, both leaders have an opportunity to use this meeting to create a lasting impact by setting a direction for the bilateral relationship for the year ahead. With presidential elections approaching in the United States in 2024, it is unlikely the two leaders will meet in person in the year ahead.

As Ryan smartly concludes:

Both leaders have an opportunity to advance their respective interests when they meet in San Francisco. Time will tell whether they prove capable of seizing it.

*It should also be remembered that Ryan has served in the US government. From 2013 to 2017, Hass served as the director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council (NSC) staff. In that role, he advised President Obama and senior White House officials on all aspects of U.S. policy toward China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and coordinated the implementation of U.S. policy toward this region among U.S. government departments and agencies.

It’s working; just not like what was anticipated: The sudden rise of Bilaterals

Well, in my last Substack Post, ‘Maintaining Entanglement‘ APEC Discussions and More’, I noted a relatively strong hint that President Xi Jinping and President Biden were likely to meet at the margins of the APEC Summit. Well, it does seem as though this bilateral tete-a-tete is now on. In fact the White House announced just that this Friday morning. As recently noted in NikkeiAsia:

It will mark the seventh engagement between the two leaders since Biden became president in January 2021, but only their second face-to-face meeting over the period, partly due to COVID travel restrictions.

The US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, further reinforced the need for such an encounter. Yellen has worked for some time to stabilize the bilateral relationship and encourage a resumption of talks between the two including the two leaders. In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post Yellen set out what she sees as the serious need for such a leader summit:

As a foundation, our two nations have an obligation to establish resilient lines of open communication and to prevent our disagreements from spiraling into conflict. But we also know that our relationship cannot be circumscribed to crisis management. Together, the United States and China represent 40 percent of the global economy. A constructive economic relationship can not only serve as a stabilizing force for the overall relationship but also benefit workers and families in both countries and beyond.

Not surprisingly, given her position as Secretary of the Treasury, Yellen focuses on economic prosperity and well being. She also emphasizes what she sees as unfair practices by China:

But healthy competition requires a rules-based, level playing field. This week, I will speak to my counterpart about our serious concerns with Beijing’s unfair economic practices, including its large-scale use of non-market tools, its barriers to market access and its coercive actions against U.S. firms in China.

While Yellen has focused on global economic issues, other officials have targeted regional and global security tensions. There is no question that high, very high on the US wish list, as described in the NYTimes is an agreement that the two leaders could possibly announce that would signal the restart of military-to-military discussions:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., told reporters on Friday that re-establishing the military dialogue between two of the world’s most powerful militaries was a goal of the Biden administration, and that he had sent a letter to his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Liu Zhenli, “to say that I would like to do that.

These discussions have been suspended by China following then Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Meanwhile, it appears that another bilateral summit is a real possibility for the APEC Summit. This bilateral would be between President Xi of China and Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kashida. As reported in the South China Morning Post (SCMP):

China’s top diplomat met Japan’s top security adviser in Beijing on Thursday, amid reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida might meet in San Francisco during the Apec summit next week.

In a just earlier piece from NikkeiAsia:

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, with Kishida likely stressing the importance of continued dialogue toward resolving bilateral disagreements. … In his meeting with Xi, Kishida is expected to stress the importance of continued dialogue toward resolving bilateral disagreements. Relations between their countries have suffered recently over the release of treated radioactive wastewater from Japan’s disaster-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and China’s subsequent import curbs on Japanese seafood, as well as the October arrest of a Japanese executive at drugmaker Astellas Pharma in China.

As the SCMP article continues:

If it happens, the talks would be the first one-on-one meeting between Xi and Kishida since November last year in Bangkok when they affirmed stable bilateral ties on the sidelines of the Apec forum. It was the first time leaders from the two nations had met face to face in three years.

Now this slightly surprising possibility comes on top of a decision by China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (Korea) to restart the Trilateral Summit that has been suspended since 2019 due in part to political tensions between Korea and Japan and maritime tensions between China and Japan near the Senkakus.

So, how are we to interpret this ‘blossoming’ of bilaterals? Well, it seems to me it describes the state of global summitry at this current moment. While I never bought the view – often promoted by opinion columnists from the FT, that these global summits were no more than ‘talk shops’, they have struggled to advance collective global governance policies in climate change, financial reform, debt management and AI and digital governance. These summits have been impacted by the rise in geopolitical tensions most particularly between the US and China. Collective action has been ‘slowed’, if not stopped by contending positions and a growing distemper between US and China. In addition, there has been strong and growing frustration from Global South leaders. What they see and bristle at is that their countries are expected to tackle issues and to contribute to solutions – like climate change, that they have had little to create in the first place.

For these and other reasons global governance progress though global summits such as the G20 and APEC have been hard to find. But the opportunities have not been totally foregone. These leader gatherings following the many ministerial, working groups and special gatherings have encouraged leaders to set up key bilateral meetings. These bilateral meetings at the ‘margins’ of various leader summits have provided the settings for leaders to tackle problems that have harmed or largely ended communications as the evident instance of US-China relations.

So for the moment the margins have become the center. It is not perfect but it is something valuable.

I could not resist a final thought(s) on the APEC San Francisco Summit and the first bilateral meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden since the Bali Summit.

Notwithstanding the mumbling and grumbling from numerous experts, analysts and opinion writers, I think the bilateral summit between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, at the margin of the APEC Summit, will be described in the future as a measured success. The bilateral summit was clearly not the “be all and end all”, but after a year of tension and ‘tit for tat’ actions by these two major powers, the bilateral summit was a reasonable effort to lower the temperature in the relationship. Does it build in the guardrails that the US seems determined to construct in the US-China relationship – probably not. Does it create conditions for enhanced conflict avoidance, not likely. But at least the agreements reached did improve the lines of communication between the US and China. And a number of agreements were reached desired by one side or the other. And possibly, just possibly, when the next near-miss, or worse occurs in the South China Sea or around Taiwan, the communication lines established, or renewed can cap violence rather than having it spiral out of control. Thus, a key result was the resumption of comprehensive military-to-military communication. As expressed in the White House Readout:

The two leaders welcomed the resumption of high-level military-to-military communication, as well as the U.S.-China Defense Policy Coordination Talks and the U.S.-China Military Maritime Consultative Agreement meetings. Both sides are also resuming telephone conversations between theater commanders.

Importantly, as well, the US and China did agree apparently to tackle the fentanyl crisis. Again as described in the White House Readout:

They welcomed the resumption of bilateral cooperation to combat global illicit drug manufacturing and trafficking, including synthetic drugs like fentanyl, and establishment of a working group for ongoing communication and law enforcement coordination on counternarcotics issues.

On the people-to-people front, the leaders agreed that scheduled passenger flights between China and the U.S. will increase starting from early 2024, and China is ready to invite some 50,000 students over the next five years. It would have been positive for Biden to express support for the renewal of the Fulbright US student program to China but not yet it seems.

But there did appear to be a change in tone, at least for the immediate future. Commentators from the NYTimes noted President Xi’s view that there was clearly room for both:

All of this has led to a tonal change in the relationship; when Mr. Xi repeated his line that the planet was big enough for both countries, he was signaling that the two military, economic and technological superpowers could give each other some space.

Were the post summit comments by leaders, at least President Biden who held a short press conference consistent with a more benign appraisal, well not exactly. Biden confirmed his use of the term ‘dictator’ in reference to President Xi Jinping. Some of my Washington colleagues expressed the view that this Biden follow up calling Xi a ‘dictator’ – that caused original consternation in Beijing and strong criticism – had to have been scripted and designed to shield Biden from criticism that he was too soft on China. But not surprisingly, it did lead to serious frustration from Beijing.

And, it should not be forgotten, and notwithstanding criticism that the two leaders did not announce a joint climate agreement, in fact before the Summit gathering the two nations signaled progress in their joint effort to reduce emissions. This has implications for COP28 that will commence on November 30^th. As Lisa Friedman of the NYTimes described:

But both countries agreed to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030.” That growth should reach levels high enough “so as to accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation,” the agreement says. Both countries anticipate “meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction” in this decade it says. That appears to be the first time China has agreed to specific emissions targets in any part of its economy.

Finally, a word about the APEC Summit itself. Well, I am not sure what to say. It is hard to discern really what went on. There was, in fact, a ‘2023 APEC Leaders’ Golden Gate Declaration’. Unfortunately, like so many of these summit statements it was long on presumed collective effort but without specificity or any ‘hard’ commitment. I must say I was struck by one commitment – and this on the WTO and reform. Remember this APEC was led by US officials so I was more that surprised by a collective commitment on the WTO:

We are committed to necessary reform of the WTO to improve all of its functions, including conducting discussions with a view to having a fully and well-functioning dispute settlement system accessible to all members by 2024. We call upon APEC economies to work towards the timely and effective implementation of WTO agreements and reaffirm our commitment to engage constructively to ensure MC13 is a success and delivers positive outcomes.

There, then, is the United States leading this effort and yet the United States is the major impediment to WTO reform including the dispute resolution system which the United States has brought to a grinding halt.

Still, all-in-all the summit activity was seemingly helpful. Now we need to follow the US-China relationship and determine whether the relationship has stabilized.

Image Credit: Asia Society

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Maintaining ‘Entanglement’: APEC Summit Discussions including the Xi-Biden Bilateral Summit

Maintaining ‘Entanglement’: APEC Summit discussions and more

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