The cancellation of Blinken’s symbolic trip underscores the tensions and difficulties for Washington and Beijing to repair ties
More than icy winds what flies over the relationship between USA y China It is a true polar vortex. The incident caused this week by the entry into US airspace of a balloon (civilian and dedicated to the investigation according to Beijing; surveillance according to Washington) has frozen the steps that were being taken to seek even symbolic rapprochement between the two countries. . The most representative, a trip that the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was going to make this weekend, has been postponed until further notice. A tension that could increase after the Pentagon reported this Friday (early Saturday morning in Spain) of a second Chinese balloon flying over Latin America.
Click like this, and at least for now, a diplomatic effort that the presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping tried to relaunch in their November face-to-face meeting in Bali, vowing to find ways to resume the cooperation in matters such as the fight against climate change. And it goes back in the efforts to try to break a exacerbated tension dynamics that has brought the bilateral relationship to one of its lowest points.
Not that there were great hopes for Blinken’s trip, about which no official information had even been given to the public, but at least it gave the opportunity to project a high-level bilateral dialogue picture that had not been seen since October 2018, when during the government of Donald Trump Mike Pompeo went to China, an occasion on which Xi Jinping did not even grant him a formal greeting. The image is now blurry again.
of the diaries
The US and Chinese agendas are driven by different interests and goals, in both cases with strong internal political components. They move even in political and diplomatic rhetoric as in a dialogue of the deaf, with the US defending “the international system based on rules” and China accusing Washington of acting with a “Cold War mentality” and “bloc politics” or ” zero-sum games”. And for now they continue to show irreconcilable.
For Biden, as he has said on several occasions and also as Blinken himself had explained before canceling the trip, it is important to establish “guardrails” that prevent any confrontation from escalating into conflict. The Democrat’s Administration moves with the philosophy of the three Cs (competition, confrontation and cooperation) with whom he considers the main threat to the US, a country he also accuses of accelerating the expansion of its nuclear program. And it has maintained and even hardened the hard line towards Beijing, both in the geopolitical field and in terms of military, commercial relations or in the field of technology.
With the division of power in Washington that has come as the Republicans take control of the House, Biden also seems to be forced, or determined, to project a image of firmness.
In China, meanwhile, Xi seeks to launch the image of a China that is re-emerging from closures after three years of zero covid policy, leaving behind problems such as the economic coup or citizen protests and re-establishing ties abroad. But in the relationship with the United States, his primary objective is to ensure that a series of principles such as the peaceful coexistence or the mutual respect Mark the relationship from now on.
His goal is to create on those principles a new “fundamental framework” that would force Washington to stay out of any way on political issues that Beijing considers Red linesof his approach to human rights to its territorial aspirations in the South China Sea.
taiwan
None of these red lines is more marked, in any case, than everything related to Taiwan, where Beijing sees no room for any kind of compromise. But tensions in that area have only increased. They did so especially after the visit in August Nancy Pelosi, then president of the Lower House, to which China responded by suspending high-level bilateral contacts for cooperation in the fight against drugs as well as military dialogues. They have also done so as US arms sales to the island continue (18 billion dollars since 2017).
Tensions are also rising, now that the new ‘speaker’, the Republican Kevin McCarthy, has also announced that he will travel to Taiwan. And this same week Washington took steps that clearly do not present a message that calms down Beijing, such as signing a new agreement with Manila whereby it will increase its military presence in the Philippines, adding an arc that already runs from Australia to South Korea and Japan, or open an embassy in the Solomon Islands.
other frictions
On the friction map there are many more explosive points. Washington has escalated a campaign to limit China’s access to security technology. semiconductors, limiting exports by US companies and getting Japan and the Netherlands to restrict sales of advanced equipment to manufacture them. pound one too technological warfare hardened against giants like Huawei or TikTok. And it is developing agreements with India to increase cooperation in advanced weapons manufacturing, semiconductors and other fields by intensifying efforts to search for alternatives that reduce Chinese dominance in high technology.
China, for its part, continues with its aggressive military operations in the region, is violating sanctions against the purchase of Iranian oil and, according to the US, strengthening economic ties with Russia weighs a la guerra which launched almost a year ago in Ukraine. It also maintains a passive role in the face of advances in North Korea in their nuclear tests.
