Tag Archives: US-China

Measuring American Foreign Policy for ‘Competition without Catastrophe’: The Alaska US-China Summit

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With President Biden’s first official news conference last Thursday March 25th, the news conference brought the curtain down on the first meeting of top foreign policy officials from the United States and China. The public side of the Summit was a rather fiery uncooperative back and forth between the leading government officials from both China and the United States. We are led to understand, however, that the private meetings that went on into the next day were more productive. And with both encounters past, the shape of the competition between China and the United States began to take some public shape.

For some time now we have been made aware that a more confrontational  approach in US-China relations was likely. As David Sanger describes in a recent NYT article, the ‘Washington beltway’ view has crystallized around a far more competitive foreign policy with China. And the Biden foreign policy has reflected, seemingly, this rare political consensus:

For a president barely 10 weeks into office, casting the United States as confronting a global struggle with the Chinese model has some clear political benefits. One of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans is the need to compete head-on with Beijing.

William Galston at Brookings reviewing American public opinion toward China underscores how American public opinion has turned against China particularly after the Trump years:

All things considered, the Biden administration will enjoy substantial public support if it places competition with China at the center of its foreign policy, and it will pay little price for the blunter rhetoric its senior officials employed during the recent meetings in Alaska with their Chinese counterparts. On the other hand, most Americans have not focused on the military dimensions of this emerging relationship and are not prepared for a possible conflict over Taiwan.

Advisors to Joe Biden during the election period, and many of these same folk now as officials for President Biden, are describing and clarifying US policy toward China that they had previously written about pre-election. The dominant position as articulated by the senior policy folk such as Jake Sullivan, now National Security Advisor to the President and Kurt Campbell now the ‘Asia Tsar’ is strategic competition, or slightly more poetically, ‘competition without catastrophe’ the title of their consequential 2019 FA article. Continue reading →

China-West Relations: Reading the Dynamics and Getting the Mix Right

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China-US relations are at a critical juncture in fashioning global order relations in the 2020s.  As Joe Biden approaches inauguration day, there is increasing speculation on what approach he will take toward China.  Theories abound.  There are those in foreign policy circles who are seen as “restorationists” (see Thomas Wright at TheAtlantic for these terms) who tend to have a greater focus on the cooperation component of the relationship.  There are “reformists” who have come to the conclusion that competition and rivalry must define the path for US-China relations.  There are those who see China as the culprit in job loss, technology theft, trade imbalances, the pandemic, climate change and other hits on American pre-eminence.  And there are many with cultural, societal and business ties to China who hope for a period of predictability, and hopefully opportunity.

Clear-eyed self-interest and deep understanding of the new political dynamics need to guide Biden foreign policy. For Biden and his team, it is not just a question how to reframe US international relations after Trump, but how to shape them in response to changed circumstances, domestic constraints, and new defining elements in the global landscape. 

For starters, Asia is more pressing than Europe, the Indo-Pacific region more demanding than the trans-Atlantic, China is more important than Russia, social and environmental issues are more compelling than trade and financial policies, and domestic pressures everywhere mean that international policies are now constrained by and tethered to internal conditions affecting ordinary people.  Global inter-connectivity may be vividly evident, but domestic politics are dominant in defining strategic thrusts.

Biden and his team seem to “get” most of these circumstances, constraints and defining elements.  But, it is not clear that the incoming Administration has yet stared down the underlying political dynamics that will define geopolitical relations among leading powers, especially how to approach China in ways that makes sense to the other significant global players, that will be effective with China and with domestic political constraints. For this, the various “schools of thought” contending with each other to define the overall narrative for US relations with China, each by themselves are less helpful than combining them to address the complexity and importance of this most crucial relationship.

The starting point has to be a clear understanding that China does indeed have strategic interests in meeting US dominance in the Pacific. Additionally, China does use the state and public resources to advance its economic dynamism, does use techniques for internal control which violate international norms on human rights, and does have the scale, scope and dynamism to be a challenger to US predominance, a rival in the Pacific and a competitor in the global economy.  There is no doubt that this is the reality of China today.  The hardening of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule in the last four years is real and worrisome. 

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Declaring Engagement Dead!

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Opinion and analysis writing often seems to come forward in ‘waves’. It is almost never just one piece but a veritable series of similar narrations that seeks to identify the trends.  This wave-like writing certainly is evident when it comes to US foreign policy making and in particular the rising tensions between the two leading powers – the United States and China. There was a first wave of  ‘New Cold War’ articles, that as I suggested along with some of my V20 colleagues seemingly impacted partisans of both Parties in the United States. Then, there was the wave US-China trade war tensions. And now we see the current wave in the ‘Rising US-China’ tensions and the return to a view that this may indeed be a new sorta ‘Cold War’ and dire predictions of decoupling between the two leading economies and the ‘deer in the headlights’ of US allies trying to avoid choices between the two.

This newest wave of US-China tensions has been orchestrated in part by the Trump Administration with speeches from senior officials William Barr, the Attorney General,  Robert C. O’Brien, National Security Advisor,  Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, Mark Esper Secretary of Defense and, finally with the icing on the cake the speech by  Michael Pompeo the  current Secretary of State at a highly significant location – the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum at Yorba Lind, California.

It is interesting that these declarative words all began with the Donald Trump’s actions – the chaos, the denigration of multilateralism, the strong-arming of allies and the threats to end key alliance relations of the liberal order – NATO, US- Japan and US-Korea security treaties. While these initiatives and threats heralded Trump’s America First policy they have been superseded most recently with the targeting of China. It reflects, one suspects, the ‘Hail Mary’ approach that Trump seems to have chosen with falling numbers on his reelection. It is China ‘all the time’, by these officials, attacks on the Communist Party of China and even the targeting of regime change by these US officials.  Additionally, and I don’t think prematurely US foreign policy analysts are at the same time attempting to anticipate a foreign policy under a Biden Administration. But we’ll save that examination for another moment.

Meanwhile the language is barely restrained . As my CSIS colleagues Scott Kennedy and Matthew Goodman conclude in a recent post:

Through a series of speeches and tough actions, the Trump administration has clearly signaled that it views a Xi Jinping-led China as an existential threat to the West, and hence, is trying to mobilize its friends and allies to form a united front against Beijing.

Here is William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States describing China and its current ambitions in a speech he delivered on July 16th:

… that is, the United States’ response to the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.  The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world.  It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship.

The objective is according to Barr, clear:

The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower.

And, the dire views of Barr are only amplified, indeed ‘accelerated’ a now favored term in this ‘Age of the pandemic’ by Mike Pompeo:

But I have faith we can do it. I have faith because we’ve done it before. We know how this goes. I have faith because the CCP is repeating some of the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made – alienating potential allies, breaking trust at home and abroad, rejecting property rights and predictable rule of law.

And as pointed up above the location of the Pompeo speech was no accident. It is the Nixon library – the archive of the President that set in motion along with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the dramatic alteration of US policy toward Mao’s China – one of the seminal diplomatic events of any President in the post WWII period. And why deliver the speech there? Well, to pronounce that policy a dramatic mistake:

As time went on, American policymakers increasingly presumed that as China became more prosperous, it would open up, it would become freer at home, and indeed present less of a threat abroad, it’d be friendlier. It all seemed, I am sure, so inevitable.  But that age of inevitability is over. The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.

This puts the end of the decades long engagement. ‘Engagement is dead’.

But is it?

Image Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Without Trust and Without Paranoia: US-China Relations

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It was a time for informal face-to-face contact – just ended – the California summit between Presidents Xi and Obama. There is a strand of global summitry that emphasizes contact between leaders. Such contact can be disastrous of course. Kennedy’s encounter with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, left leaders with misconceptions about the other that ultimately led each to take steps that raised threats and crisis. Let’s hope that nothing like this occurs as a result of this summit. And the reality is that the ‘world of summits’ has changed mightily. The two presidents will see each other again shortly in St. Petersburg Russia at the G20 Leaders Summit. And they will meet again shortly thereafter in Asia at the EAS.

What can we draw as the consequences of this informal meeting of the leaders of these two great powers? Ostensibly the two leaders are searching for a “new type of great power relationship” (xinxing daguo guanxi) – The announcement of this informal summit and the search for a different kind of relationship – read all that as an effort by IR types to avoid what international relations theory tells is the likely outcome of rivalry, friction and conflict between an established superpower and a rising one. Thus many of the foreign policy experts have indeed waded in to describe what might result from such a meeting – and give some expression to the ongoing Sino-American relationship.

Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy, the consummate realist suggested a modest result:

Neither Obama nor Xi can alter the core interests of the two countries, or wish away the various issues where those interests already conflict or are likely to do so in the future. The best they can achieve is a better understanding of each other’s red lines and resolve and some agreements on those issues where national interests overlap. In this way, each can hope to keep things from getting worse and at the margin make relations a bit warmer. … But even if Obama is successful this weekend, this effort is unlikely to prevent Sino-American rivalry from intensifying in the future. The basic problem is that the two state’s core grand strategies are at odds and good rapport between these two particular leaders won’t prevent those tensions from reemerging down the road.

Walt acknowledges the description just referred to is a pessimistic one (he does describe a far more optimistic alternative) based on “… Sino-American rivalry in the future no matter how well Obama and Xi (or their successors) get on this weekend. And so for Walt “intense competition is likely”.

Then there is Walt’s FP compatriot – Dan Drezner. Now Drezner is no realist – and in fact in some ways leans more to a neo-liberal framing of international relations (I suspect Dan may not buy this). But Drezner reflected on this upcoming summit at his blog (I anticipate that this blog post is not his final word on this) by referencing Harvard’s Iain Johnston in a piece Jognston wrote recently for International Security examining the growing Chinese assertiveness – which Johnston largely rejects. The lesson for Drezner is China is no revisionist power. As he argues, “Since 2008, China has had multiple opportunities to disrupt the US-Created international order, and Beijing has passed on almost all these opportunities.” So for Drezner the landscape is filled with collaborative opportunities between the US and China:

Now let’s be clear – China is doing almost all of this to advance its own narrow self-interest. None of the above means that China is suddenly going to embrace the US perspective on human rights or the South China Sea. Still, there are a healthy number of issue areas where China’s interests are pretty congruent with the United States, and where China has taken constructive policy steps. … My main point here is that China is a great power that is inevitably going to disagree with the United Sattes on a host of issues. China is not, however, a revisionist actor hell-bent on subverting the post-1945/post 1989 global governance. To use John Ikenberry’s language, recent Sino-American disputes are taking place within the context of the current international order. They are not about radical changes to that international order. Indeed, contrary to the arguments of some, the current system has displayed surprising resilience.

In a curious way this perspective resonates if only a little with a far more pessimistic view – that expressed most pointedly by Yan Xuetong the Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. A strong nationalist, and realist, Yan Xuetong is not well known outside China-expert circles. FP did themselves and their publics a great favor in printing a post by the Dean entitled, “Let’s Not be Friends“. For some time now Yan Xuetong has been arguing that leaders and their officials should not promote a vision of a trust-based collaborative relationship – those arguing for it will only be disappointed. The US and China are competitors. But that need not prevent incidents of collaboration:

States cooperate not because of mutual trust, but because of shared interests that make cooperation safe and productive. China and the United States should look hard to identify what these incentives and shared interests are – and focus on developing positive cooperation when their interests overlap or complement one another, such as on denuclearization of the Korea Peninsula, and preventive cooperation when their interests conflict, such as on preventing collisions in [the] South China Sea. … Preventive cooperation differs from positive cooperation because it is based on conflicting — rather than shared — interests. … Areas of friction are likely to become more common in the coming years, but the two countries can skillfully manage their competition if they work to minimize these emerging conflicts — not only in the military sector but also in nontraditional security sectors such as energy, finance counterterrorism in the Middle East, anti-piracy in Somali Sea, and even climate change. … Encouraging China and the United States to prioritize preventive cooperation does not mean they should abandon efforts to build mutual trust. However, it does mean the two countries can stabilize their strategic relations without it. The worst-case scenario is not that China and the United States is not that China and the United States will face more strategic conflicts in the coming years, but that they never learn how to develop cooperation based on the lack of mutual trust, thus allowing a small conflict to escalate into a major one.

I suppose it is a framing a little like: “don’t trust but verify”. The dilemma I fear however is that all this realist formulation will lead – at least in US circles if not Chinese ones – to analogize the relationship to something like the cold war contestants, even as they draw distinctions between the two sets of rivals. Simplistic competitive framing is too easy and too familiar. The Washington-types that always lean on “hedging” and insist on greater military preparedness will target the competitive and forget the collaborative. Inexorably the US and China will be characterized as the new cold war rivals.

I have argued for the necessity of wedging cooperation into the relationship and rejecting any logic to US-Soviet competition. In the past I have argued that “both friend and foe” (yi di yi you) is the better framing for the great power relationship than “neither friend nor foe” (fei di fei you) – a framing often used by Chinese experts. Starting at the post, “Not Required to Choose – A Strategy for US-China Relations” I have argued that defining the relationship as including a collaborative dimension is necessary to avoid sliding into a more difficult unpleasant great power relationship. Yes, it will be difficult especially for US decision-makers to retain the partnership aspect – that is both collaborative and competitive. -Without that collaborative element to the relationship, however, Washington leadership will be all too willing to accept just a rivalrous competitive relationship with China. It is after all politically so much easier.

Let’s not make it easy for the claque.

Image Credit: channelnewsasia.com