High-level communication between the U.S. and China is key. Absent that communication, mistrust and miscalculation might see this increasingly hostile relationship inadvertently slip into war. But beyond limited improvements to communication, the prospect of a U.S.-China detente is nearly nonexistent.
President Joe Biden hinted at such a detente last weekend, observing that U.S.-China tensions would "begin to thaw very shortly." Biden was likely referring to high-level meetings. National security adviser Jake Sullivan recently met with the Chinese Communist Party's Central Foreign Affairs Commission director, Wang Yi. In Washington this week, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will meet with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Wentao. The U.S. hopes Secretary of State Antony Blinken will then be invited to China. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Biden's climate czar John Kerry have also shown interest in visiting Beijing.
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This aspiration for greater high-level communication is positive. Only very senior Chinese officials are allowed to stray from their Beijing talking points and engage in some measure of back-and-forth dialogue (and even then, nowhere near to the degree of U.S. officials). But by these talks, Washington can pursue greater understanding of Beijing's position and broadcast U.S. interests back to Xi Jinping. The exception here is John Kerry, who the Chinese view only as a means of extracting U.S. concessions in return for carbon reduction pledges they have no intention of fulfilling. Military-to-military communication is the most important priority, although China has suspended most of these channels.
The U.S. likely hopes that by reinforcing its disinterest in a military showdown over Taiwan, China might refocus on its economic interest in boosting cooperation with the U.S. China's economy, after all, is facing increasingly significant structural problems. Yet the central obstruction to any U.S.-China detente is that Beijing views the U.S. as wholly responsible for Sino-American tensions. In turn, Beijing expects impossible concessions as prerequisites for its own steps to improve relations.
As the Global Times (supervised by the Communist Party's Central Foreign Affairs Commission) editorialized on Tuesday, "the root cause lies entirely in the erroneous perception of China by the U.S. side." Lamenting that Biden's interest in improved relations has gone unmatched by conciliatory action, the Global Times demanded the U.S. remove sanctions on certain Chinese officials. Washington should also, Beijing's mouthpiece said, "lift tariffs on Chinese goods; it should stop blocking and suppressing China in the high-tech sector; it should stop fabricating human rights issues and using them to suppress specific industries in China; it should remove unreasonable restrictions and interference on cultural exchanges between China and the US, especially ideological visa restrictions, and so on." Oh, and the Global Times also reiterated Beijing's red-line expectation that the U.S. significantly reduce its support for Taiwan.
At one level, these grand demands reflect Beijing's emotive inability to understand the seismic shift in U.S. policy toward China that began under former President Donald Trump and has generally sustained under President Joe Biden. Beijing dreams of the days when former President Barack Obama essentially focused on China as a trading partner without much regard for Beijing's broader international security agenda.
At the procedural level, however, Beijing simply refuses to recognize why the U.S. is doing what it is doing. It refuses to recognize, for example, that the U.S. is maintaining tariffs in order to pressure China into fairer market access for U.S. businesses. Beijing refuses to recognize that the U.S. is securing Western semiconductor, AI, and other high-tech supply chains in fear of China using that technology to strengthen its military and intelligence apparatus. Beijing refuses to recognize that U.S. restrictions on "cultural exchanges" are in response to Beijing's intelligence apparatus translating "cultural exchanges" as "send legions of intelligence agents to steal American research." And Chinese officials refuse to recognize that the U.S. is supporting Taiwan not to annoy China, but rather because the U.S. wants to defend a democratic partner and uphold an international order centered on democracy and rule-of-law-based trade.
That China cannot or will not recognize these realities means the avenues for a substantial warming in U.S.-China relations are almost nonexistent. Put simply, these two nations are engaged in a new Cold War. The best that can be hoped for is that which defined the last Cold War: the maintenance of relative peace and occasional cooperation even amid politically defining disagreements.