Joe Biden and Xi Jinping meet in Indonesia with tensions excessive

For the primary time as president, Joe Biden met President Xi Jinping in particular person on Monday on the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. The stakes couldn’t be larger, and each leaders need the world to know they perceive that.

“As the leaders of our two nations, we share a responsibility, in my view, to show that China and the United States can manage our differences, prevent competition from becoming anything ever near conflict, and to find ways to work together on urgent global issues that require our mutual cooperation,” Biden stated Monday.

Xi echoed that, saying the 2 nations wanted to raised meet the world’s expectations: “We need to find the right direction for the bilateral relationship going forward and elevate the relationship,” he stated.

Biden arrived having just lately amped up the financial conflict on China, with tensions over Taiwan excessive, and far of Congress standing behind this extra bellicose posture. Bipartisan quarters in Washington have largely internalized a hawkish view of China that sees the nation as a rising energy that the US must win in opposition to, no matter precisely successful means. A sequence of escalatory measures has led some on the Chinese facet to get the sense that the US coverage of containment is again. The Biden administration has, in some ways, doubled down on former President Donald Trump’s method to countering China. What’s been lacking is an affirmative imaginative and prescient of what “winning” in opposition to China would appear to be.

Meanwhile, Xi left China — till just lately, the pandemic saved him confined to its borders. He has simply additional consolidated energy in a 3rd time period following China’s Communist Party Congress final month.

The two have talked on Zoom previously two years, and had met extensively throughout the Obama years. But for his or her first in-person assembly, the White House had set remarkably low expectations. “I don’t think you should look at this meeting as one in which there’s going to be specific deliverables announced,” nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan informed reporters final week.

Instead, their sit-down was spent making an attempt to outline the bounds of the more and more tense relationship. In a three-hour assembly, the 2 leaders mentioned Taiwan, the conflict in Ukraine, and several other different matters, based on readouts from every nation. Biden informed reporters Monday that he and Xi had agreed to have Cabinet secretaries and different high-ranking officers meet to proceed discussing unresolved points.

The assembly encapsulates the accentuated set of strains that now outline the US-China relationship — and how necessary it’s to keep up the present energy steadiness, nevertheless tenuous it’s. Détente, not to mention a brand new conception of secure and productive relations, appears a far approach off.

“To put a fine point on it, it’s an inflection point, because the relationship stands at a point at which it could spiral downward very, very rapidly,” Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown professor who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, stated final week. “There is a 1950s quality to the US-China competition.”

Can the Biden-Xi assembly assist calm tensions?

For Biden, whose overseas coverage outlook could be very a lot pushed by personalities and private relationships with world leaders, the Xi assembly was a possibility. Few heads of state have banked so many hours attending to know the Chinese chief. (Biden stated Monday that he discovered Xi “the way he’s always been.”)

But tensions between the US and China are decidedly larger than when Xi and Biden first met as then-vice presidents of every of their nations.

The risks have particularly peaked round US coverage towards Taiwan. In addition to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August go to to the democratic island nation that China claims as its personal, Biden has 4 occasions stated that the US would defend Taiwan ought to China invade it, in contradiction of the acknowledged US coverage of strategic ambiguity. Earlier this week, a senior Department of Defense official emphasised that US coverage towards China has not modified and that there have been no new developments in how the US sees Taiwan below its longstanding “One China” coverage.

Medeiros stated that the “sloppy way” the Biden administration has managed Taiwan coverage would make the go to tougher. “It’s statements and actions by the State Department and statements by the DOD,” he informed me. “The Chinese are less concerned about Americans coming to Taiwan’s defense and more that the US is trying to move away from the One China policy and as a result, give Taiwan greater incentive to move in that direction.”

During Monday’s assembly, Biden informed Xi the US hasn’t modified that “One China” coverage, but additionally warned that China’s “coercive and increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan … undermine peace and stability,” per the US readout. Xi countered, per China’s readout, that whereas Beijing has “always strived for maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” Taiwanese independence “is as incompatible” to that purpose as “fire and water.”

One concern is that the US, by specializing in countering China’s affect, could find yourself making an attempt to out-China China, based on Cornell political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss. She has warned of the US mirroring China’s actions, and in so doing, falling into traps of zero-sum competitors, similar to overly protecting financial measures, anti-Asian hate-mongering, and intensely militaristic rhetoric. Those techniques find yourself being detrimental to US pursuits.

“Even though both governments have sought to prevent direct military escalation, recent statements and actions by both sides have contributed to the action-reaction cycle that has put the two countries on a collision course, particularly over Taiwan,” Weiss, who just lately spent a 12 months within the State Department, informed me in an electronic mail final week. “In this context, their first face-to-face meeting represents an important opportunity to stabilize the escalatory spiral in US-China relations, though such efforts will take time to bear visible fruit.”

The background dynamic, past US insurance policies centered on boxing out China’s tech prowess that additional heighten competitors, is a world the place US energy is altering. The conflict in Ukraine has uncovered the exceptional depth of American alliances in Europe and Asia, whereas on the identical time highlighting the boundaries of the US as a unilateral superpower and its strained clout within the rising non-aligned nations of the Global South. As Biden visits the G20 assembly in addition to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, it’s value emphasizing that the period of the US because the indispensable nation, in former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s coinage, is historical past. At this second, the US depends upon alliances and cooperation greater than ever.

Keeping channels of communication and negotiation open between two world powers is an efficient unto itself. But consultants warn that in the present day’s summit can solely do however a lot.

“There are an increasing number of issues that the United States and China just cannot agree on,” Tyler Jost, a professor who researches China’s overseas coverage at Brown University, informed me final week. “As such, you can try to put in place a series of release valves or safety nets that try to manage the tension, but the fundamental tension is pretty well locked in, and the structural reasons behind it have not changed.”

Coming from the UN’s COP27 local weather summit in Egypt, the place Biden warned of a “climate hell” if the US and its companions don’t get their act collectively, there may be an urgency to advance dialogue with China over planetary points that transcend so-called strategic competitors.

As CIA director Bill Burns stated this summer time, “The People’s Republic of China is the biggest geopolitical challenge that our country faces as far ahead in the 21st century as I can see, [and] the biggest existential threat in many ways is climate change.”

Update, November 14, 11:15 am: This story, initially revealed November 13, has been up to date to incorporate details about Xi and Biden’s assembly and their public feedback about it afterward.