Balloon bursts hopes for end to spiraling U.S.-China tensions
WASHINGTON — Monday was supposed to be a day of modest hope in the U.S.China relationship. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was going to be in Beijing, meeting with President Xi Jinping in a high-stakes bid to ease ever-rising tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
Instead, Mr. Blinken was spending the day in Washington after abruptly cancelling his visit late last week as the U. S. and China exchanged angry words about a suspected Chinese spy balloon the U.S. shot down. As fraught as the U.S.-China relationship had been ahead of Mr. Blinken’s planned trip, it’s even worse now and there’s little hope for it improving anytime soon.
Even as both sides maintain they will manage the situation in a calm manner, the mutual recriminations, particularly since the shootdown of the balloon on Saturday that drew a stern Chinese protest, do not bode well for rapprochement.
The setback comes at a time when both sides were looking for a way to potentially extricate themselves from a low point in ties that has had the world on edge.
White House National Security Spokesman John Kirby noted Monday that Mr. Blinken’s trip was delayed, not canceled. But prospects for rescheduling remain uncertain.
“I would put this at a six” on a scale of 10, said Danny Russel, a China expert and former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration, on the damage to current diplomatic efforts between the two countries.
“The signals I see suggest that there has to be a pause and a line drawn under the incident but once the drama has gone through its final
act, there seems to be every intention to re-engineer a trip by the secretary of state,” said Mr. Russel, who is now vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
The administration will be “starting at a serious deficit,” Mr. Russel said. “This is a setback but it’s not impossible to see a return. Absent mismanagement, this is recoverable.”
Mr. Blinken and senior Chinese officials do plan to attend at least two international gatherings — the Munich Security Conference in mid-February and a meeting of the Group of 20 foreign ministers in India in early March — that could provide venues for renewed engagement.
“Blinken’s visit to China had offered a way to stabilize the U.S.–China relationship,” said Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. The postponement has now “greatly reduced” the window for that, he said.
Quite apart from the political implications for both, the developments have laid bare the extremely fragile nature of what many had hoped could be a manageable economic, political and military rivalry.
Over the last five years, China-U.S. relations have entered a new and worsening phase of confrontation, conflict and competition, said Mr. Da, calling the current period a “new kind of Cold War.”
“It’s very different from the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but if we define cold war as the two biggest countries in the world being locked in fierce confrontations and conflicts in a way that doesn’t involve military and wars ... we are rapidly moving in that direction.”