Por Melvin Goodman
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| Alexander the Great cuts the Gordian Knot by Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743–1811) |
In two weeks, President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will meet in Beijing, where they will have an unusual opportunity to ease the Cold War environment between their countries. Xi is in a favorable political situation in view of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy failures. Trump’s trade and tariff policies have weakened him at home, and the Iran War has compromised his credibility and influence abroad.
Trump has a weak national security team, and there is no indication that its members appreciate the necessity of stabilizing Washington’s most important bilateral relationship—the Sino-American relationship. The United States and China are the two most important countries in the global arena. They represent the two largest economies, the two largest defense establishments, and the two largest defense budgets. The global community will not be able to deal with its greatest crises—the climate crisis and now the energy crisis—without the cooperation of the world’s two major polluters and biggest consumers of energy—the United States and China.
Trump has weakened U.S. relations with key Asian states, including Japan, South Korea, and Australia, while Xi Jinping recognizes the importance of playing a more stabilizing role with these key nations in the Indo-Pacific. In the past year, China has softened its aggressive behavior in the region, improving relations with Japan, South Korea, and Australia. China has also been offering debt relief to Asian countries.
Over the past several years, Xi used meetings with the late Henry A. Kissinger, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Elon Musk to signal an awareness of the need to improve relations with Washington. Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, sent Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and White House adviser John Kerry to Beijing for talks with their counterparts. These officials were well received.
Trump has not made any attempt to follow up on such visits to Beijing. Instead, he has appointed a group of China hawks, such as undersecretary of defense Elbridge Colby, who are taking a hard line on bilateral relations. The trash-talking Trump will have to change his modus operandi if he hopes to establish a favorable relationship with Xi.
One favorable piece in the bilateral mosaic is the resumption of the military-to-miitary dialogue between the two nations. If the United States and China are going to reduce bilateral friction, they must consult on operational security regarding fighter aircraft and naval vessels in the Pacific in order to reduce the risk of miscalculation. China’s military buildup over the past several years and its increased air and naval activity around Taiwan add to the current frictions. U.S. power projection is a concern for China, and the misguided invasion of Iran has created economic and energy problems for China.
A major U.S. concern is China’s abandonment of its concept of limited deterrence, which kept its strategic arsenal at fewer than 300 nuclear warheads for the past several decades. Currently, China appears oriented to pursue strategic parity with the United States. A modern aircraft carrier has achieved full readiness; hypersonic weapons have received significant investment; and anti-satellite technology has progressed. In return, the military-industrial community in the United States is citing increased strategic weaponry in both China and Russia to press for greater strategic modernization in the United States. The huge increase in U.S. defense spending is one more irritant.
Not since the Clinton administration 25 years ago has a U.S. president made an attempt to enunciate a vision for what is wanted from China. The Obama-Biden administration made a huge mistake in 2011 when it called for a “pivot” from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific that indicated the transfer of military resources to the Pacific as the first step in the “containment” of Chinese power. Even one of the fathers of the “pivot,” the late Jeffrey Bader, acknowledged that the policy had become too militaristic and confrontational, and that the emphasis from the start should have been on “rebalancing” relations. No one in the Trump administration is using the word “rebalance” in discussing the future of bilaterals with China. As for the “pivot,” the Middle East is still our briar patch.
The Biden national security team took no steps to “rebalance” relations toward Beijing, and the political and pundit communities echoed support for a Cold War posture. Biden left Donald Trump’s first-term tariffs and trade restrictions in place, and his team included too many hardliners on China, including national security adviser Sullivan; deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell; key advisers to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and even Austin himself. Congress can boast of few areas of bipartisanship, but the bloated defense budget and the opposition to China articulated in the Special Committee to Investigate the Chinese Community Party have received overwhelming support.
It’s long past time for the United States and China to tone down their propaganda attacks, and to set the parameters for a strategic dialogue. The United States is certainly in a position to do so because its strategic position is unassailable in East Asia, with military superiority in important areas. Xi’s anger over the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will complicate efforts to achieve a thaw in bilateral relations. There is speculation that China has sent shoulder-fired missiles to Iran, but no evidence that Chinese missiles have been used against U.S. or Israeli forces.
China, meanwhile, lacks strategic allies (other than Russia) and has made no effort to project power into Third World areas outside its own zone of influence. If China is willing to adopt more transparency in its military programs and its development of strategic weaponry, this could contribute to the opening of serious military-to-military talks. Soviet-American arms talks led to the Soviet-American detente of the 1980s. Sino-American talks on stabilizing their military activities could have a similar impact, and prevent the two nations from sleepwalking toward greater hostility.
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.
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