US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s long-delayed
trip to Beijing has come and gone. Despite the predictable optimistic spin on the visit – both sides agreed to strengthen people-to-people exchanges and promised to continue talks – it did little to defuse the increasingly fraught conflict between the United States and China.
The failure to re-establish
military-to-military communications is especially worrisome given the recent near-collisions between the two superpowers’ warships in the Taiwan Strait and aircraft over the South China Sea. This is to say nothing of reported Chinese
surveillance activity in Cuba, which bears an eerie resemblance to the events that precipitated the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 – one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War. The risks of accidental conflict remain high.
The underlying problem is overreliance on personalised diplomacy. Yes, that played a crucial role in the early days of the US-China relationship. More than just stagecraft, US president Richard Nixon’s
historic trip to China in 1972 was a decisive strategic gambit aimed at the triangulation of the Soviet Union. Multiple layers of personal connections helped to tip the balance of power in the Cold War: Nixon and Mao Zedong at the top, underpinned by Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai working out the details of US-China engagement.
But those days are over. Personalised diplomacy has outlived its usefulness. With management of the US-China relationship in the hands of politically constrained, thin-skinned leaders, disputes between the two superpowers have become exceedingly difficult to resolve. Neither leader can afford to be seen as weak. Conflict resolution is now more about face, less about grand strategy.
President Xi Jinping, for example, insisted on sitting at the head of the table in his brief 35-minute meeting with Blinken, casting the senior US diplomat in a decidedly subservient light. No sooner had Blinken left the country than US President Joe Biden referred to the Chinese leader
as a dictator, further inflaming China’s sensitivities.
Such an approach no longer works because diplomacy derives its legitimacy from domestic politics. On the US side, poisonous anti-China sentiment tied Blinken’s hands long before he set foot in Beijing. US Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the new House Select Committee on China, has the audacity to blame the country’s China problem on engagement, arguing on CNBC and in The Wall Street Journal that “engagement invariably leads to appeasement in the face of foreign aggression”.
