An angry exchange of words with China was most undiplomatic but entirely necessary.
There’s been much hand-wringing by US establishment foreign policy commentators about the unseemly public spat between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Yang Jiechi, his counterpart from China, at the first high level meeting between the two superpowers since Biden’s inauguration, which took place in Anchorage on Thursday. Many bad puns about frigid relations were used, followed by a general sense of surprise and disappointment. The expectation seemed to have been that after Trump, diplomacy with China could go back to where it was under Obama, where any disagreements were papered over with impenetrable diplomatese and happy words about “areas of cooperation” and US appreciation of sincere promises of change made by the Chinese. Instead we had the diplomatic equivalent of a knife fight. The reaction from senior (old), establishment (predictable and unchanging) foreign policy commentators in the US was to clutch their pearls and tut-tut about “grave concerns” the urgent need to “reduce tensions”. My take is that, one, this is the first interesting transcript of diplomats talking I’ve ever read and, two, I’m happy that both sides are “getting real” with each other, even if that means we sometimes “lose our shit”.
For Blinken and Biden, when deciding on the optimal strategic approach to China, there were two models from recent history to consider: Obama (and every US President since at least Bush I) and Trump. Trump’s was obsequious (Trump: “camps in Xinjiang? Great idea! Can you help with my reelection?”), impossible (Navarro: “give us all our jobs back! Now!!”), cheaply bought off (China: “we’ll double our soybean imports for two years” Trump: “it’s a deal!”) and constantly changing. Under Obama and his predecessors (particularly Clinton), we were under the silly illusion that the CPC would, with enough big carrots and one or two tiny sticks, open up, become more democratic and capitalistic, all under our patronizing tutelage. The Chinese were happy to take what we gave (admission to the WTO being the most important) without making any real concessions. Clearly, something new was called for.
To a very great extent, what happens in the world over the next fifty years will be result of how the relationship between the US and China plays out. I don’t know if the new approach by the US will be successful but what we had been doing was idiotic. The piece below in The Atlantic by Thomas Wright, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, makes a compelling case that the Anchorage meeting was a good first step towards a more clear-eyed, and hence productive, relationship
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.
“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.”