The Price of Blinken’s China Trip

National Review Online

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken just spent two days in Beijing, meeting Xi Jinping’s underlings before securing an audience with the Chinese leader himself. The picture released from that final discussion showed Xi seated at the head of a table, with Blinken humiliatingly placed just to his side.

 

That Blinken went to China is not a problem. Indeed, there’s always an important role for high-level diplomatic contact, even with such an adversary as the Chinese Communist Party. The State Department, however, has reverted to persistent, old U.S. habits prioritizing engagement with China for its own sake and at the expense of America’s interests.

 

The stated goal of the trip was to stabilize high-level communication between Washington and Beijing, amid the rapid deterioration of the diplomatic relationship this year. At least in that sense, Blinken met the low expectations that Foggy Bottom had set for the trip.

 

He and the Chinese officials agreed to forge ahead on some relatively marginal issues: resuming more flights between the U.S. and China, restoring educational and cultural exchanges, and seeking other areas of potential cooperation. The biggest item that Blinken seems to have secured is a commitment to “explore” the establishment of a U.S.-China “working group” on preventing the export of fentanyl precursor chemicals from China.

 

But the main breakthrough that many hoped would result from the trip — the resumption of military-to-military dialogue — is still being withheld by the Chinese side, Blinken revealed at a press conference Monday. That Xi is still refusing to instruct Chinese military officials to engage in risk-mitigation talks with their American counterparts, after several recent near-collisions in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait provoked by reckless PLA naval and aerial maneuvering, underlines his intentions. To Blinken’s credit, his attempt to get cooperation here demonstrates to other countries that Beijing is putting up roadblocks to responsible military communications in the region.

 

However, there were few other concrete results from the talks. Even on fentanyl precursors, Beijing has merely promised to talk about curbing their export — that’s nothing approximating a promise to crack down.

 

Meanwhile, what Team Biden has given up just to get Blinken in the room for a 35-minute meeting with Xi is far more significant.

 

Reports say that the State Department is slow-walking several key measures responding to Beijing’s misbehavior.

 

They also indicate that in order to secure the meeting the administration has declined to release the results of the FBI’s probe into the contents of the Chinese military-surveillance device that the PLA floated over several key U.S. bases in February. The Biden administration’s response to the spy-balloon incident still irks Chinese officials who prefer, obviously, to sweep it under the rug.

 

That’s also why President Biden has downplayed the balloon’s significance in recent weeks, calling it “silly” and saying that for China “it was more embarrassing than it was intentional.” Of course, the balloon’s path over key U.S. military sites was obviously intentional, as Biden aides conceded at the time.

 

And while Blinken says he brought up Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in his meetings, promoting human rights was a peripheral concern on this trip — and in the days leading up to it.

 

When Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, traveled to Beijing on June 4, to lay the groundwork for Blinken’s visit, he apparently declined to raise the matter of accountability for the Tiananmen massacre. Worse, the State Department’s annual statement on the killings was noticeably shorter and more perfunctory than it has been in recent years.

 

Blinken’s trip now paves the way for other cabinet officials, and climate envoy John Kerry, to visit Beijing in the coming months. This parade of officialdom might culminate in an in-person meeting between Biden and Xi on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco later this year. Accordingly, there’s a chance that the administration will continue to pull its punches to keep this process on track. That would be national-security malpractice, and, in this scenario, it would be critical for Congress to force the administration’s hand on the measures it is apparently slow-walking.

 

Reducing the possibility that a spontaneous crisis turns into conflict is a worthwhile goal. But U.S. weakness, rewarding the CCP’s strategy of escalation to force engagement, carries its own risks that are likelier to be more significant over the long run.