Blinken in Beijing

When does the value of talking for talking’s sake outweigh the costs? That’s one of the perennial questions of statecraft and it’s rarely a simple calculus. Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s visit to Beijing earlier this week highlights the dilemma. By all accounts his discussions with senior Chinese officials, including leader Xi Jinping, produced few if any tangible results. China even refused Blinken’s modest request to re-establish military-to-military communications between the Pentagon and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

But the Secretary’s trip did serve to re-open the dialogue window between the United States and China that had drawn closed over the past year. Tensions over issues such as Taiwan, American restrictions on technology and capital flows to China, and the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States had frozen almost all high-level contact between the two sides.

And yet, the plain fact is that there is real value in keeping discussion channels open between two nuclear-armed rival nations. Doing so can help manage possible crises and prevent dangerous escalations, in addition to sometimes leading to constructive agreements.

The George W. Bush administration (in which I served for five years) discovered this firsthand in April 2001 when a PLA fighter jet recklessly crashed into an American Navy EP-3 spy plane operating in international airspace. The American plane crash-landed on Hainan Island and Chinese forces took the 24 American crew members captive. President Bush and his national security team, just three months into office, made the unhappy discovery that they had no reliable channel to China’s senior leadership. The crisis came close to escalating into a bigger conflict. Fortunately, multiple channels were established, and negotiations soon led to the crew’s release.

However, there are both risks and costs to visits such as Blinken’s. The Biden Administration had been signaling to Beijing with growing fervor in recent months its desire for resuming dialogue. The Chinese Communist Party exploited these entreaties to portray the United States as a weak supplicant rather than a confident superpower. North Korea piled on, calling it Blinken’s “begging trip.” This is mostly bluster, especially since the CCP is feeling pressure from its fragile economy and seeks relief from American sanctions. As the astute Walter Russell Mead points out, by welcoming Blinken, Beijing conceded that it feels the need to reduce tensions.

Nonetheless, China’s negotiating strategy treats almost everything as a zero-sum formula. The CCP even posits its very willingness to negotiate in the first place as a special favor. Beijing saw allowing Blinken’s visit as a no-cost token to offer the United States, instead of making meaningful policy concessions such as releasing prisoners of conscience, ending its toxic export of fentanyl precursor chemicals, closing its intelligence and military installations in Cuba, or curtailing its threats against Taiwan. The White House slipped into this Chinese trap and missed an opportunity not to insist on a substantive policy gesture by China as a precursor to the talks.

Diplomacy is much more than exchanging words. It is rather a complex choreography of many elements of national power, aimed to influence multiple audiences. It includes the time, place, and nature of the meetings. It also includes the people present and absent in the room (and even the size and positioning of the chairs the leaders sit in), as well as the framing of the issues discussed and agreements signed.

Regular readers know that I am wont to invoke foreign policy lessons from President Ronald Reagan, and this column is no exception. When Reagan took office in January 1981, at an apex of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, every single one of his predecessors since Harry Truman had met during his first presidential term with his Soviet counterpart. The Kremlin had learned to exploit some of these summits, such as when Nikita Khruschev humiliated the new president John F. Kennedy in 1961 in Vienna, or when Leonid Brezhnev wielded the upper hand over Jimmy Carter in their 1979 encounter.

Reagan genuinely desired to talk with a Soviet leader, but insisted on doing so only when he could negotiate from a position of strength. He disregarded the precedent of summitry-for-summitry’s sake in his first term. The situation was further complicated by the fact that three of his Soviet counterparts died in succession in just three years, symbolizing the sclerosis of the entire edifice of Soviet communism. (Reagan joked that he had wanted to meet with a Soviet leader but “they kept dying on me.”)

Instead, Reagan waited until America had restored sufficient economic and military power to bolster his diplomacy, and until he had a Soviet counterpart in Mikhail Gorbachev who was a willing negotiating partner. In Reagan’s second term, his several summits with Gorbachev produced landmark agreements that reduced the risk of nuclear war and pointed towards America’s peaceful victory in the Cold War. Talk is good, but the talk that leads to results is the best kind of talk.