Both the United States and China are adding yet more pressure to their already strained bilateral relationship. This week, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled details of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, Britain, and the United States, designed to push back against China in the Indo-Pacific by supplying nuclear submarines to Australia. A few days earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping consolidated his grip on power at China’s annual parliamentary meetings. During the meetings, he unveiled a range of new appointments, including a new defense minister, and delivered a tough-worded speech accusing the United States of attempting to contain China’s development.
These latest moves come at a newly dangerous moment in the U.S.-Chinese standoff. After a brief, false thaw following a friendly Biden-Xi meeting in November, neither Beijing nor Washington seems capable of taking meaningful and sustained steps to increase trust, let alone induce cooperation. Both are also readying further measures to compete with one another in the economic, military, and technological domains—which raises the risk that competition could all too easily spill over inadvertently, or even deliberately, into conflict. The Biden administration hopes for a relationship characterized by competition with “guardrails.” But it risks a new period of tit-for-tat competition with no guardrails at all.
Only a few short months ago, an air of tentative optimism had settled over Sino-U.S. ties. After the nadir of last year’s trip by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, Biden and Xi’s bilateral November meeting in Bali, Indonesia, inaugurated what looked like a thaw. “The last thing the Chinese need right now is an openly hostile relationship with the United States,” U.S. National Security Council Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell said last December. “They want a degree of predictability and stability, and we seek that as well.”
Biden’s team feels it is working well with Indo-Pacific allies and partners to develop new measures targeting China.
This positive tone did not last. First, the furor over China’s surveillance balloon prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a planned trip to China. Blinken then had a notably frosty meeting with Wang Yi, director of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Foreign Affairs Office, at the Munich Security Conference. Which side is to blame for this negative turn is in many ways less important than the perceptions each has of the other’s position. Both blame the other and therefore feel justified in readying new measures to signal their displeasure.
Take the mood in Washington first. Biden’s team feels the United States is in a good place with respect to China, for three reasons. The first is policy successes, notably last October’s rules limiting Chinese access to advanced semiconductors. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in September 2022 that the United States aimed to “maintain as large of a lead as possible” in advanced technology. The subsequent chip measures were clinically targeted at critical chokepoints in the global chip supply chain, and have since been backed by important partners, including Japan and the Netherlands, two key players in the advanced semiconductor ecosystem. The balloon episode was viewed broadly positively in Washington too. Biden’s decision to deploy an F-22 fighter jet armed with Sidewinder missiles to down the balloon, albeit after a delay, made the United States look decisive. Meanwhile, China’s shifting explanations for its balloon activities looked evasive at best.
Second, Biden’s team feels it is working well with Indo-Pacific allies and partners to develop new measures targeting China. Of those, AUKUS has the highest profile. But in January, the United States and Japan unveiled a slew of moves to deepen their mutual economic and military ties—so many, in fact, that U.S. officials in conversation with the author dubbed the month “Japanuary.” To take one example, the U.S. Marine Corps’ new 12th Marine Littoral Regiment will move to Japan over the coming years—a step that U.S. Assistant Defense Secretary Ely Ratner may have had in mind late last year when he predicted imminent “transformative” changes for the U.S. military’s force posture in the Indo-Pacific. Ties between India and the United States are also buzzing following the unveiling last month of the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, a deal to co-develop technology and establish supply chains circumventing China.
Finally, Biden’s foreign policy team has been lifted by the Democratic Party’s performance in last November’s mid-terms. At this midway point in the U.S. political cycle, exhausted national security officials often head for the exits. But the recent departure of Laura Rosenberger, senior director for China and Taiwan on the U.S. National Security Council, was notable for being the exception rather than the rule, as Biden’s defense and foreign policy teams are largely staying in their posts and plotting new measures targeting China. First up will be new rules to limit U.S. outbound investment and stop American venture capitalists from putting money into China’s defense and technology sectors. Other measures are likely to focus on critical minerals, green technologies, and cloud computing. At the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summit in Australia and the G-7 summit in Japan, both of which will take place in May, more initiatives are likely.
It is harder to gauge China’s mood. But judging by Xi’s public remarks, Beijing is also in no mood for compromise. Xi gave a tough speech in early March, assailing Washington in unusually blunt language. “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said, according to news agency Xinhua.
Last week, Xi announced plans to boost Chinese defense spending by more than 7 percent this year. Two major new plans to develop international partnerships in Asia and beyond—the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative—are likely to be fleshed out over the coming year. And while Beijing’s 12-point peace plan for Ukraine was not taken seriously by either Ukrainian or Western officials, China’s recent brokering of a Saudi-Iranian détente shows Beijing can nonetheless wield formidable diplomatic clout.
There are of course people within both nation’s security elites who would prefer to see bilateral cooperation, if only to balance all the competition. Blinken had planned to raise specific areas of potential cooperation during his aborted visit to Beijing. Biden still says he hopes to build a “floor” under the relationship, as one senior U.S. official put it prior to the Biden-Xi meeting in Indonesia. But it is unclear what this floor might look like in practice—or how it can be built. At present, there appears to be little communication between Chinese and U.S. officials. Moves to balance competitive measures with possible cooperation have largely flopped. Senior officials in China and the United States have precious few incentives to compromise.
This pattern is likely to be a feature, not a bug, of Sino-U.S. ties in the coming years. International relations scholars often talk about security dilemmas, in which actions taken by one state to boost its security will look threatening to a rival, leading to countermeasures in a continuing cycle. The resulting downward spiral of tit-for-tat measures is often associated with Robert Jervis, a prominent political scientist who mentored many senior officials in Biden’s China team. In 1968, Jervis wrote a landmark article titled “Hypotheses on Misperception,” in which he suggested governments “tend to see the behavior of others as more centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than it is.” Great powers such as China and the United States are primed to view an adversary’s potentially threatening behavior as both intentional and malign—and thus respond in kind.
There is a risk that Washington, rather than Beijing, comes to be viewed—fairly or unfairly—as the more antagonistic party.
Both Beijing and Washington are now caught in just such a security dilemma, producing a doom loop of tit-for-tat actions and plunging trust. Yet it is far from clear that the United States has another, better strategy to follow. Some in Washington hope China’s rise may slow naturally, weighed down by unfavorable demographics, a slower-growing economy, or a political system that is increasingly authoritarian—and thus potentially sclerotic. But reasonable assumptions suggest China’s geopolitical and military power will continue to rise over the medium term. The Indo-Pacific balancing strategy led by officials such as Campbell and Sullivan therefore remains the most plausible means to counter China’s growing strength, preserve elements of the existing regional order, and create a new, stable, long-term regional balance of power. All of this, in turn, requires the United States to work with its allies and partners to push forward new balancing initiatives such as AUKUS.
This kind of balancing, however, raises two fundamental dilemmas. The first is that China will respond with tit-for-tat measures targeting the United States directly or by redoubling attempts to extend its geopolitical influence into new regions, as it has done recently in the Pacific Islands. The second is that many countries in the Indo-Pacific will come to view Washington’s initiatives as destabilizing and provocative. Here, Washington’s regional partners often demand a near-impossible dual goal: Even as they support (at least in private) long-term measures to balance China’s rising power, they also want these measures introduced in ways that do not risk exacerbating tensions with China in the short-term.
Leaders of non-aligned states in Southeast Asia are especially alarmed by sinking Sino-U.S. ties. Many want a period of de-escalation, although this largely means asking Washington to stop upsetting Beijing, rather than asking Beijing to limit its own confrontational behavior. Biden’s team are unlikely to heed that advice. But as the administration presses forward, there is a risk that Washington, rather than Beijing, comes to be viewed—fairly or unfairly—as the more antagonistic party.
There is then the problem of the unexpected. U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s plan to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California this year—rather than following Pelosi’s footsteps by going to Taiwan—has removed one potential looming crisis. But there are plenty of others that might pop up, from the run-up to Taiwan’s next presidential election, due in early 2024, to possible visits to Taipei by hawkish Republican presidential candidates as they gear up for the 2024 U.S. election. It is also hard to judge which of Biden’s planned anti-China measures will get a strong reaction from Beijing. Last year, China reacted with fury at Pelosi’s Taiwan visit. But it did almost nothing to respond to October’s semiconductor rules, which arguably are the far greater threat to China’s long-term security.
Of course, diplomacy can help defray tensions. Blinken’s visit to China will likely be rescheduled in time. But Biden and Xi are unlikely to meet in person until the G-20 summit in India in September, with another potential meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco in November—if Xi decides it is in his interest to visit the United States. Absent a personal meeting, another call between Biden and Xi will be needed soon to reset the relationship and re-build guardrails that keep being knocked down. Reports suggest such a call may be in the works.
The best that can currently be said of Sino-U.S. ties is that Biden and Xi, when they do actually talk, tend not to make things worse. That this is the only positive bilateral note, however, only underlines how perilous the situation between the two great powers is growing.
