Interest is growing as to whether or not Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco on Nov. 14. But if Xi does attend, President Joe Biden should meet with him.
There's one caveat: The U.S. should not make concessions simply to get Xi and Biden in the same room. Beijing revels in its attempts to link irrelevant concerns for its own interest. In return for its carbon reduction commitments, for example, Beijing often demands technology concessions. As the APEC summit approaches, Beijing wants to leverage a Xi meeting to extract U.S. concessions on issues such as tariffs and technology export regulations. The U.S. shouldn't provide those concessions. Instead, Washington should argue that the rationale for a Xi-Biden meeting is simple: It would serve both sides.
IS CHINA WILLING TO START A CONFLICT WITH THE PHILIPPINES?
Some disagree. On Fox News on Sunday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts argued this weekend that a Biden-Xi meeting at APEC would be a mistake because Xi is "evil." Flipping China's script in reverse, Roberts suggests that Biden not allow Xi to visit the U.S. until Beijing makes certain concessions.
I share Roberts's view that China is the "greatest adversary the United States has ever had in its history." And he's right that Biden must avoid suggesting to Beijing, Pat Gelsinger, and Wall Street that China might soon receive U.S. policy concessions. Still, Roberts neglects the importance of dialogue in and of itself.
True, any Xi-Biden meeting would be highly unlikely to produce major policy benefits. The U.S.-China relationship is now fundamentally defined by a Cold War-style struggle between incompatible ideologies and interests. The U.S. is seeking to maintain the post-1945 democratic order, and China is seeking to replace that order with a Beijing-led order of feudal mercantilism. A new order in which trade and prosperity are divvied out by Beijing in return for political submission. That said, a Xi-Biden meeting might help dilute Xi's paranoid fears over what the U.S. actually wants.
It would be a welcome development were Biden even to disabuse Xi slightly of the notion that the U.S. seeks to constrain China's economic growth and encourage Taiwan's formal independence, for example. These are existential concerns for Xi and his Communist Party. At the same time, a meeting would also allow Biden to make clear that the U.S. is determined to prevent China's intellectual property theft, territorial imperialism, and threats of war against Taiwan. And that China's support for Russia amid the war in Ukraine vanquishes Beijing's credibility in claiming that sovereignty is the sacred principle of international order. Again, the key interest in any meeting would be to make Xi better understand U.S. policies rather than assuming worst-case scenarios. The ramifications of a military miscalculation alone justify this effort.
Top line: As Winston Churchill memorably put it, "Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war."