US peace efforts with China have failed? Don’t be fooled by the narrative

The US isn’t serious about detente or any form of reconciliation. Instead it has been laying the foundation for a cold war or worse, and fabricating a moral high ground

Josef Gregory Mahoney

Published: 5:30am, 28 Sep 2023

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American efforts to foster detente with China have failed: it’s time to acknowledge this and move on. This argument has emerged in recent weeks in several important publications, including The Washington Post and Foreign Affairs, expressed by key opinion leaders considered close to the Biden administration and those representing more conservative positions.

These views have not been endorsed officially by the administration but suggest a consensus coalescing on both sides of the American political spectrum. They seem to express the next chapter of a dark narrative arc established when Joe Biden took office.

The arc points especially to the Xi-Biden meeting on the sidelines of last year’s G20 summit and the follow-up cabinet-level visits to Beijing during the summer. In short, the story goes, the US made good-faith efforts for detente but got nothing in return from a China determined to impose an intolerant and intolerable sphere of influence in Asia and beyond.

This narrative has a double value. First, it normalises zero-sum approaches that raise the spectre of military conflict while portraying a new cold war as a best-case scenario.

US policy has been criticised – including by a group of leading American scholars of different political stripes – as being too aggressive, and the narrative is a response to such criticism.

But it promotes the lazy pseudo-intellectualism of reductive, “historical” arguments that such confrontations are inevitable, by warning of the Thucydides trap, a clash of civilisations, and, most recently, what happens when two countries become “enduring rivals”.

Second, it asserts that the US can claim the moral high ground and sustain it by pursuing a cold war. Moral arguments remain important to Americans and American allies who want to believe they’re the “good guys” and on the right side of history. More importantly, this claim aims to discount whatever wrongs the US might have committed as the lesser of two evils, and thereby provide a clean slate to justify even more aggressive policies.

This final point ought to alarm all of us, even those who believe American hegemony is preferable to Chinese power or a necessary counterweight.

But other than the dangers associated with justifying increased aggression, the problem with this story is that many Chinese analysts – and likely Chinese officials too – have been been aware of malign US intentions since the initial meeting of senior officials in Alaska after Biden’s inauguration.

China was clearheaded about US intentions as senior US leaders undermined the one-China principle and policy of strategic ambiguity, with Biden indicating military support for Taiwan and others visiting Taipei; as US military units increased near encounters in the South China Sea; as the US built the Aukus alliance and promoted the Indo-Pacific concept and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; and as the US attempted to expand Nato’s remit to target China.

China saw how Biden kept in place the Trump trade war and advanced it with new national industrial policies and tech restrictions that aim to cripple Chinese development, along with intense pressure on other countries to follow suit. Beijing has its eye on the US plan for investment curbs to choke Chinese access to foreign investment.

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China also saw how the Biden administration continued the Trump administration’s claim of genocide in Xinjiang, pursued the suggestion that Covid-19 was produced in a Wuhan laboratory, and accused China of “considering” providing Russia with lethal aid against Ukraine.

It’s likely China was clear-eyed about the G20 meeting itself. Did Biden take the meeting with President Xi Jinping because of worries that allies such as France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz were planning their own summits and possibly wavering in their willingness to commit to a reinvigorated US-led world order? It seemed like it.

In other words, it wasn’t a meeting Biden wanted but it was necessary to look like he had tried to improve relations. When the G7 leaders in Tokyo this year endorsed “de-risking” from China, the payoff seemed clear.

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These developments run contrary to the idea that Washington ever wanted detente or something other than what we have now. This understanding crystallised once and for all during the balloon brouhaha earlier this year, when the US stirred up anti-China hysteria that culminated in a dramatic shootdown.

The only problem with this is that it was never a spy balloon. As US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley recently conceded, it was neither collecting nor transmitting sensitive information – directly refuting key officials who took the accusations as established facts, and that were used to then delay the high-level meetings promised at the G20 summit, poisoning the relationship and world opinion about China.

With all of these points in mind, the rest of us should be clearheaded as well. The US hasn’t been serious about detente or any form of reconciliation. Instead it has relentlessly laid the foundation for a cold war or worse, and its claims of a moral high ground are spurious.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of even more aggressive US policymaking will not only risk war but also increase existential threats like a global failure to address climate change, conflicts like the war in Ukraine, future pandemics and the widespread economic malaise undermining global recovery.

Josef Gregory Mahoney is professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University, and a senior research fellow with the Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics at Southeast University