SAN FRANCISCO—U.S. President Joe Biden met his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco this week, in one of the most highly anticipated foreign meetings of Biden’s presidency. Though the aims of the meeting were limited, it has put to the test whether presidential diplomacy—and the right level of personal rapport between world leaders—can actually pave the way for major breakthroughs between the rival powers to avert the worst-case scenarios of an emerging new cold war.
In 1969, newly elected U.S. President Richard Nixon set out a mantra for his approach to foreign policy during a meeting with reporters on a trip to Europe: “When there is trust between men who are leaders of nations, there is a better chance to settle differences.” That stance led to historic foreign-policy breakthroughs—before Nixon resigned in disgrace—including major arms control deals with the Soviet Union and Nixon’s famous 1972 visit to China, dubbed as “the week that changed the world.”
More than five decades later, Biden is making a similar gamble against the backdrop of a new high-stakes geopolitical game with China: that face-to-face diplomacy with Xi can start to build up some trust and help stave off the risk of a conflict between two superpowers.
Many Western and Asian diplomats, as well as outside experts, lauded Biden’s efforts to dial down tensions with China, though whether that meeting yields results remains to be seen. “The Biden-Xi meeting sends a much-needed message to the rest of the world that even as the two countries compete, their leaders are committed to at least managing tensions and avoiding conflict,” said Prashanth Parameswaran, a fellow at the Wilson Center. Still, he added, “this is at best one step in a long road to finding a floor in the U.S.-China relationship, and it will not be without its share of obstacles.”
Every modern U.S. president has gambled on face-to-face meetings to net big gains on major foreign-policy initiatives. But it didn’t always used to be that way, and history shows inconsistent results when presidential diplomacy and personal rapport between world leaders aim for major foreign-policy wins.
The atmosphere of the Biden-Xi meeting in San Francisco—at least the portion reporters were allowed to see—was polite, if choreographed. Still, it belied the mood in Washington, where U.S. lawmakers and other top foreign-policy experts describe China as an “existential” threat to the United States. The relationship is so fraught that some even castigated Biden for meeting with Xi in the first place.
“China is not a normal country—it is an aggressor state,” said Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Biden is caving to Xi in exchange for a series of meaningless working groups and engagement mechanisms.”
Biden didn’t come to the meeting looking to resolve all the challenges of the U.S.-China relationship. He was, however, looking to refresh ties with Beijing with limited agreements on issues such as military communications and countering drug trafficking—and all the while banking on the personal touch to help him out. “There is no substitute to face-to-face discussions,” he told Xi on Wednesday, as the two met for a working lunch.
The question for many officials in San Francisco—and back in Washington and other capitals of U.S. allies—is whether even face-to-face discussions can ultimately mend U.S.-China ties.
“China watchers have seen this movie many times before, and it never ends well for Washington,” said Craig Singleton, a China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Despite signs of renewed engagement, both Xi and Biden remain committed to their current confrontational course, which means the prospects for stabilization remain distant at best and foolhardy at worst.”
Xi during his opening meeting with Biden acknowledged the stakes of the meeting and the global power that the relationship between these two men potentially holds. “For two large countries like China and the United States, turning their back on each other is not an option,” he said. “Mr. President, you and I, we are at the helm of China-U.S. relations. We shoulder heavy responsibilities for the two peoples, for the world, and for history.”
Before reporters were shuffled out of the room, a Western reporter shouted a question in Mandarin to Xi on whether he trusts Biden. Xi took the translation earpiece out of his ear to hear the question. But he didn’t respond.
The British politician and diplomat Harold Nicolson, deeply involved in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that led to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, summed it up in his book Peacemaking 1919. “Nothing could be more fatal than the habit … of personal contact between statesmen of the world,” he wrote.
In the United States, this changed markedly under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed personal diplomacy and major summits with Allied leaders, including in Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945, that charted the strategy for winning World War II and the future of the postwar world.
Some of his successors shuddered at the notion. “This idea of the president of the United States going personally abroad to negotiate—it’s just damn stupid,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, in what was seen as a rebuke of the Yalta and Potsdam meetings his predecessors attended that solidified Soviet gains over Eastern Europe and entrenched the Cold War battle lines. “Every time a president has gone abroad to get into the details of these things he’s lost his shirt,” Eisenhower said.
That line of thinking didn’t last. The personal touch may have been a Roosevelt family heirloom; Theodore Roosevelt, in one of the earliest feats of U.S. presidential diplomacy, brokered the end of the Russo-Japanese War in a marathon of diplomacy that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. Jimmy Carter brokered peace between Israel and Egypt in the 1978 Camp David Accords. Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev almost succeeded in clinching a sweeping nuclear arms control agreement to dismantle both sides’ nuclear weapons during a fateful conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 that remains one of the biggest “what ifs” of Cold War history. A so-called “shirt sleeves” summit in 2013 between Xi and Barack Obama at the Sunnylands estate in California and a state visit in 2015 struck a positive tone for bilateral relations that largely held for the rest of Obama’s tenure.
For every success story, there are also the failures: John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s first meeting in 1961 was meant to set the stage for a new and warmer era in U.S.-Soviet relations, but it completely backfired when the two leaders personally clashed. George W. Bush, upon first meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2001, famously said: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” Obama vowed to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East during his first term, a plan that joined a long string of successive failures of U.S. presidents to finally resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—failures that presaged the current Israel-Hamas war. And Donald Trump put his own self-proclaimed deal-making skills to the test with two historic summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to find a way to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal. That effort ended in failure.
In addition to his failed North Korea gambit, Trump also tried to put his own mark on U.S.-China relations when he met Xi in 2017. When Xi visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, many expected the two leaders to openly clash, given Trump’s relentless criticism of China as the root of many problems in the United States. Trump and Xi surprised everyone by ending their meeting with no signs of confrontation. Trump said they cultivated an “outstanding” relationship while they dined on “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake.” Warm words and beautiful cake aside, however, the U.S. relationship with China only went downhill from there.
Biden’s current gamble on personal diplomacy with Xi comes as no surprise given the role of the president’s personal hand in modern U.S. foreign policy. He had a head start, getting to know Xi during his time as vice president from 2009 to 2017. But this bet also has a lot working against it.
There are numerous systemic issues in the U.S.-China relationship that some diplomats and lawmakers see as insurmountable: military tensions over Taiwan, spy (and spy balloon) scandals, Xi’s sharp authoritarian turn at home and crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang that the U.S. government and others consider a genocide, massive trade disputes, and the overall surge in anti-China politics in Washington.
Two other wildcards next year could derail the limited progress Biden and Xi sought to hammer out at the APEC summit. The first is the upcoming presidential election in Taiwan, the independently governed island that Washington supports diplomatically and militarily but which China views as a breakaway state. The second is the U.S. presidential election, where Trump, who tried to center his foreign policy on combating China’s rise on the world stage, stands a real chance of being reelected.
And there’s diplomacy itself. Video calls make face-to-face contact easier than ever. But there’s no business like the business of showing up. Roosevelt clinched the 1905 peace deal that ended the Russo-Japanese War only after senior Russian and Japanese delegations spent a month together with him in New Hampshire. Nixon spent an entire week in China with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during his historic 1972 visit that paved the way for the United States and China to later formally reopen ties. Carter only finalized the vaunted Camp David Accords after devoting two full weeks to negotiations with Israeli and Egyptian leaders at the remote presidential country retreat in Maryland.
It’s the nature of modern diplomacy, and modern politics, that U.S. presidents just don’t take those types of lengthy trips anymore. Biden’s whirlwind tour of the APEC summit, where he met with multiple Asia-Pacific leaders, lasted just two days. His working meeting with Xi lasted four hours.
Still, Team Biden touts that they didn’t come away empty-handed. He and Xi announced a number of new initiatives during the APEC summit in a bid to ease tensions. That includes efforts to restore some military-to-military communication channels between the countries’ armed forces, which could prevent an accident or miscommunication from spiraling into a full military confrontation. They also announced a deal to crack down on the illicit flow of fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid often manufactured in China before being smuggled to the United States, and announced new initiatives to cooperate on climate change and discuss artificial intelligence.
The U.S. president also scored some points, if not with Xi, then with his wife. Biden wished Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, a happy birthday. (The two share the same birthday, Nov. 20.) Xi said he was working so hard he forgot that his wife’s birthday was next week until Biden mentioned it, according to a U.S. official who briefed reporters on the meeting on condition of anonymity. It’s unclear if all that progress was lost when Biden later referred to Xi as a “dictator” in off-the-cuff remarks to reporters. Xi, for his part, won some soft-power points in the name of panda diplomacy by signaling that China could send new pandas to U.S. zoos again after the last remaining bears at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington were repatriated.
“Personal rapport matters because the buck stops with the leaders in a potential crisis,” said Parameswaran of the Wilson Center. This factor played a major role in Reagan’s negotiations on arms control with Gorbachev; without their warm personal relationship, many historians have concluded, they wouldn’t have come so close to a major arms deal at Reykjavik.
Did it make a difference for Biden and Xi? Most officials at APEC agreed that it was too soon to tell whether China will adhere to all the agreements hashed out in San Francisco. Others say the agreements are nice but without ways to enforce it, they could be empty talk. “We can have all sorts of negotiations, but if there’s nothing that can enforce it, I don’t know that they mean a whole lot,” said Carolyn Bartholomew, the chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which just released a scathing report on U.S.-China relations and the hopes for personal diplomacy.
Biden, for his part, came out of all the APEC meetings insisting he had a good read on Xi. “I think I know the man. I know his modus operandi,” Biden told reporters. “We have disagreements. He has a different view than I have on a lot of things. But he’s been straight. I don’t mean that he’s good, bad, or indifferent. He’s just been straight.”
Rishi Iyengar contributed to this report.
