The news made noise at the beginning of the year. On February 4, off the coast of South Carolina, the US Army USA shot down an alleged Chinese spy balloon that had been traveling for four days from west to east to 60,000 feet high over North America. First sighted in the skies of Montana, the balloon traveled to the Atlantic Sea, where it was shot down by order of the president Joe Biden, and later recovered by Navy personnel.
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The government of the Chinese president, Xi Jinpinghe protested angrily, there was an exchange of bitter accusations between Washington and Beijing and the alert levels of both military apparatuses were raised, in what analysts described as the lowest – and most dangerous – point in relations since the rapprochement marked by the president’s visit. Richard Nixon to China in 1972.
The most serious thing is that, as a result of the growing differences over the dispute over the island of Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory, but which remains autonomous and under protection and supply of weapons from Washington, the communication channels between military of both countries, considered as an effective mechanism for preventing conflicts and war escalationhad been cut off in August 2022.
Many times in the history of the Cold War, similar channels between Moscow and Washington have cleared up misunderstandings about aircraft and submarine movements that, if escalated, would have brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust.
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Similarly, since the mid-1970s, communication between the Chinese and American militaries built mutual trust while allowing each side to better understand the military movements of the other, so that no signal would end up being misinterpreted and generate the risk of military escalation. All this until August 2022, when that bridge broke.
And it is precisely the reestablishment of such valuable communication that is the greatest achievement – not the only one – of the lunch that Presidents Biden and Xi held last week in the area of San Francisco, California, within the framework of the summit of the Asia-Pacific cooperation mechanism (Apec).
The US president said that the meeting on Wednesday the 15th, which lasted more than four hours, allowed him to have with Xi “some of the most constructive and productive discussions we have had.” “We have not always agreed,” Biden explained, but “I know the man, I know his modus operandi, I looked him in the eye (…), he has a different vision than mine, but he has been upright. ..”
For its part, China’s official Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying that “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutual and beneficial cooperation are the lessons that the two sides have drawn from 50 years of relations.” According to Xi, “for China and the United States Turning your back is not an option…” But there was more than the good tone of those statements.
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Agreements
After the balloon incident in February, the possibilities of reestablishing communication between the two gigantic military devices had been reduced to a minimum. And the risks rose daily.
“Here in Europe we feared that this lack of dialogue would lead to a serious incident in the China Sea, where the movements of Beijing’s planes and aircraft carriers are closely followed by American ships that provide surveillance support to Taiwan,” he told EL TIME a European diplomat in Paris.
A State Department source had told CNN, before the summit, that Biden would insist with Xi on that point, but that Washington was not optimistic, since until then the Chinese had “been reluctant” due to the distrust that grew up through the history of the globe.
Planet Earth is big enough for both countries to succeed
The visits to Beijing in June by the Secretary of Defense were necessary, Lloyd Austin and the national security advisor, Jake Sullivanand days later that of the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to give Xi and his team reasons to take the step.
According to a complete CNN report on the content of last Wednesday’s dialogue, the US president started the talk with his Chinese counterpart there. “I think it is essential that you and I understand each other clearly, leader to leader, without misconceptions or miscommunication,” Biden told Xi in the preliminaries to lunch, in an isolated mansion in south San Francisco.
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Xi’s response was on point. “Planet Earth is big enough for both countries to be successful,” said the Chinese president through a translator. “The China-United States relationship has never been easy in the last 50 years (…) and always faces problems of one kind or another. However, it has continued to move forward…” he added.
From then on it was much easier to achieve, among other points, the reestablishment of military-to-military communication that Washington had worked so hard for during the previous months.
But there were more achievements. Washington had been insisting for years on Beijing to commit its authorities to the fight against fentanyl, one of the main opioids at the heart of the epidemic that has been plaguing the United States for several years and that in 2022 left nearly 110,000 deaths there. due to overdose.
Much of the fentanyl that arrives smuggled into American cities comes from factories in China that export this synthetic opiate to Mexico, where illegal laboratories process it and send it to its northern neighbor.
For United States anti-drug authorities, if Beijing manages to control this production, the supply to Mexican drug traffickers will be reduced. and, consequently, less fentanyl will reach the big cities of the world’s leading power.
A third agreement between Biden and Xi proposes launching joint work to study the implications of artificial intelligence in a series of domains, especially the military industry. The agreement on this point is based on the recognition of both governments of the “real risks” posed by AI being “used in military affairs or in nuclear operations.”
(Also: China and the US agree to restore high-level communication between their militaries.)
Did Biden take advantage?
For Xi, his great success lies in the summit itself and the climate of détente that characterized it. This has been explained by several international study centers, such as the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), which closely follows Washington-Beijing relations.
“On the Chinese side,” Marc Julienne, an Ifri expert, said this weekend, “the priority was to provide certainty to American investors about the stability of the relationship with Washington and about the stability of China’s economy, at a time when that “The country faces significant challenges,” including weakened growth that may not reach 5 percent this year, well below the 8 percent average in previous years.
On the Chinese side, the priority was to provide certainty to American investors about the stability of the relationship with Washington and the stability of China’s economy.
But it is likely that Biden gained the most advantage. On the eve of a very complicated election year, the summit may have served to ensure that, in terms of its relations with China, no major shocks arise that complicate its day-to-day life.
But in addition, reactivating communication channels between the military without having been forced to renounce its warnings in favor of Beijing’s respect for Taiwan’s autonomy, or the sale of weapons to that island, sends a signal of strength, something that Biden needs just over two months before the start of the primary election campaign with a view to the presidential elections in November.
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And as for fentanyl, although it is difficult to know how much Xi will commit his government to controlling opioid manufacturers, Biden’s success lies in the fact that this was an issue that China had always refused to talk about, as it rejected outright plane that sectors of its powerful pharmaceutical industry could be involved in its sale to Mexican cartels.
As Nicolas Baverez, French essayist and author of the book Democracies against authoritarian empires, explains, “Joe Biden imposed the American approach of reasoned management of the competition between the two powers, and also his agenda.
“Xi Jinping carried out a tactical retreat – added Baverez in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro – in the face of the failure of his strategy of frontal opposition, and sought to convince the leaders of large American companies to reinvest in China.
“This evolution – Baverez concludes – reflects the transition in favor of the United States of the correlation of strength between the two giants that dominate the history of the 20th century.” Perhaps that is why Biden was able to insist, after lunch, on calling Xi a “dictator” – a word that he immediately relativized – without this translating into a harsh Chinese response.
Baverez and other analysts agree that, even so, The achievements of the meeting are limited and that even if Biden gained some advantage, he failed on a critical point: convincing Xi to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin not to continue with his escalation of the war in Ukraine.
But that black dot fails to overshadow the summit. This is how The Washington Post concluded in its Sunday editorial: “Even with few formal agreements announced, dialogue is preferable to insults, and constant communication is better than conflict (…). Dealing with China is a delicate balancing act. However, a recalibration based on reality, not hype, will make the world a little safer.”
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MAURICIO VARGAS
ANALYST
TIME
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