Commentary

There’s talk, and there’s productive talk. You would sometimes think U.S. officials are paid by the word and are content with the former sort of talk.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen have recently visited China. Climate Czar John Kerry is currently visiting.

These visits and attendant dialogue are invariably described as “candid and constructive,” “direct, substantive, and productive,” vital to “maintain open channels of communications,” “responsibly manage competition,” “reduce risk of misperception and miscalculation,” and “to learn more about each other.”

And the subtext is that if the Americans stop talking, then war with China is just around the corner.

The idea seems to be that enough talking and the right words or incantations will bring Beijing to its senses. Exactly how isn’t clear. It’s not as if the Chinese don’t understand what the Americans are saying.

Maybe they’ll just get fed up with blabby Americans and concede? Or maybe it’s Blinken, Yellen, and Kerry’s sheer animal magnetism that is supposed to win over the Chinese communists? Add in a visit by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Beijing, and the animal magnetism will be overwhelming.

That said, suggest to our foreign policy elite and even our military top brass that talking for talking’s sake is unproductive, and you’ll get eye-rolling ridicule.

However, we’ve been talking nonstop to communist China for 30-plus years.

How well is dialogue and engagement working to modify Chinese behavior?

You can make your own scorecard.

Does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) do any of the following?

There are a few dozen others, at least, but you get the idea.

Don’t get your hopes up, however.

Everything described above that needs improvement happened during the previous 30-plus years of talking, engagement, and accommodation of the CCP that was supposed to moderate communist Chinese behavior and turn it into a “responsible stakeholder.”

One is skeptical that more talking will improve things.

Dialogue and diplomacy are not the same thing. One observer recently described dialogue as being to diplomacy what “hyper-inflation is to money.”

Talk when you have something to talk about, and you are in a position to defend and enforce your interests.

The American statesman George Schulz aptly stated, “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”

Mr. Schulz is gone, but one imagines what he would have said about talking for talking’s sake.

He might have agreed with an astute scholar of diplomatic history who recently noted that “diplomacy is not psycho-babble or social work.”

We’ve been talking to China for a long time. Without results, for us, at least. But China has done quite well.

Putting it in baseball terms, the United States is batting .000.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are batting about .950—having tolerated American dialoguing over the last 50 years while using American, Western, and Japanese investment and market access in the democracies to turn a dirt-poor nation into a super-power aiming for global domination.

The only exception was the Trump administration—where certain officials who understood China were finally putting some wood on the ball—despite fierce opposition from the engagers and the “don’t provoke China” crowd inside and outside the administration.

But in 2021, they were sent to the showers, and a team of .000 hitters replaced them in the line-up.

So the next time you hear that talk and more talk is good, get out the abovementioned list and see if China is doing anything differently.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.