China and the United States affirm, on the same line despite the strong differences between the two superpowers, the “need to stabilize” the difficult relations”. The question is whether they will succeed. “There is a difference of opinion on how the situation”, said Francesco Sisci, an expert on geopolitics, to Adnkronos at the end of the talks in Beijing between the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the Chinese leadership. “The Americans would like to stabilize the situation substantially by formalizing the military patrols around China . The Chinese would like to stabilize it by limiting these American patrols”, says Sisci, who also invites us to look at “how the war in Ukraine will evolve” and points out how a visit “which started with very low expectations and on which there were great risks” instead “went better than expected” because “some points have been set”.
Blinken, the first US secretary of state to visit China since 2018, told reporters that he “raised US concerns, shared by a growing number of countries, about provocative actions in the Taiwan Strait as well as in the South China Sea.” and oriental” by the Asian giant. According to Sisci, “it is possible” that Beijing and Washington have “found an agreement on certain meeting protocols, but – he points out – there is no hotline for military communications”, the “most important thing the Americans wanted” and which would be crucial to avoid accidents after the two near misses (at the end of May when the USA denounced the “aggressive manoeuvre” of a Chinese jet in the skies over the South China Sea, where an American reconnaissance plane was flying, and at the beginning of the month when there was a risk of a collision in the Taiwan Strait between a Chinese warship and the destroyer Uss Chong-Hoon, in transit in the area with a Canadian unit).
“I believe that in the near future Chinese planes and ships will be more cautious”, continues Sisci, according to which it will be essential to see the evolution of the conflict in Ukraine, which exploded in February last year after the Russian invasion never explicitly condemned by Beijing, because “the success or otherwise of the Ukrainian counter-offensive will change the dynamics”.
Meanwhile, he continues, “we have reached the lowest level of bilateral relations since Nixon’s trip” in 1972 and “the situation could get even worse” because – he says – “there are a thousand uncertain things”, even if “perhaps it wouldn’t be a deterioration at very high speed”. “We are in a very cold situation – he observes – I think the temperature will continue to drop, but while it has fallen in recent months, it should now be more or less under control”.
Blinken, he observes, invited Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang to visit the US, but “a vague answer came from Qin”, i.e. he will go but it is not known when, and “if Qin does not go” to Washington Joe Biden he may be “the first American president in 40 years not to visit China during his presidency.” And, the expert notes, the face-to-face between Blinken and Qin “seems to have lasted seven and a half hours, or an infinity which indicates the distance between the two positions”.
Sisci invites us to look beyond the Chinese borders. Today in Berlin, the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier received the Chinese premier Li Qiang, who arrived in Germany to “try to mend or – the expert points out – to mend a new relationship”. And then Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected in the United States on 21 June.
“This – says Sisci – is changing the entire political geography of the world because Modi arrives in the US already with a cooperation agreement in the defense industry and it is possible that there are other great initiatives”. At the beginning of the month, the US Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, was in India with the aim of strengthening the partnership in the defense sector between India and the US, already united in the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Japan and Australia).
Blinken’s talks in Beijing were all-encompassing, “robust” as the secretary of state himself defined them, and produced – Sisci points out – “a significant result with the creation of a working group on exports of chemical drug components (fentanyl) to the United States”. At the end of Blinken’s visit to Beijing, concludes the expert, Chinese leader Xi Jinping “smiled and gave a ‘positive angle’, pointing out that it is the responsibility of China and the United States to maintain good relations and that peace in the world depends ” and also the US secretary of state gave “a positive tone” with the words on the economy aimed at reassuring the Asian giant.
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