Gloom on Sino-US relations resisted
Experts see scope for collaboration on global issues in pullback from tensions
Despite the strains between the United States and China, experts are confident that the world’s two largest economies can collaborate in many areas for their own benefit and that of the world.
Kevin Rudd, president and CEO of the Asia Society, proposed “a framework of strategic competition” for the administration of US President-elect Joe Biden during a webinar recently held by his organization. Biden’s inauguration is scheduled for Wednesday.
Within that framework, there’s room for collaboration in areas such as climate change, pandemic management and global financial market stability, said Rudd, who served two stints as Australia’s prime minister between 2007 and 2013, and as foreign minister after his first leadership period ended.
“Biden and the Democrats are deeply committed to the future of climate change action, and you cannot achieve progress on climate change unless the world’s two largest emitters — China and the US — are not just talking with each other but negotiating with each other and creating the critical leverage necessary to achieve a wider global outcome in terms of the level of greenhouse gas emissions to be achieved globally, as well as the national actions which need to underpin that,” said Rudd.
Although the two countries have been experiencing tensions, “we’re not in a cold war with China, and perish the thought that we will end up in one”, Rudd said of the US. “Therefore, the relationship now between China and the US is nowhere as fundamentally adversarial as what we had between the then-Soviet Union and the US.
“There are vast differences between that cold war and what we now have with China, not least because of the high degree of economic interdependence between Beijing and Washington still.”
Strategic understandings
He also noted that one of the lessons from the Cold War was how both countries decided to have a mutually agreed set of strategic understandings “after the neardeath experience of the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s”, which prevented these countries from “sliding into the nuclear abyss”.
Rudd’s assessment was echoed by Evan Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University and a former National Security Council staff member. “I think the (Biden administration) inherited a relationship that’s in a pretty bad place, but it’s not in total and utter freefall,” Medeiros said.
The entire architecture for communicating with China has “atrophied away” under the current administration, and the relationship itself needs “a lot of renovation”, he said. But “the good news” is China also wants stability and doesn’t want to go back to the volatility in the confrontation, he said.
“The relationship’s in a rough state that needs quite a bit of work, but I see incentives on both sides to find some kind of equilibrium point,” said Medeiros.
The US-China relationship is going to be “the most important one” and “there are all kinds of opportunities here to do some things differently”, William Fallon, former head of US Central Command, told the webinar.
Addressing the policies of US President Donald Trump’s administration toward China, Fallon said he “found little than nothing” in what it has accomplished on this agenda in the past three years.
“The idea that we whack them (China), try to inflict pain, just poke in the eye because we’re unhappy with something seems to be generally counterproductive,” he said.
The US side lacks “focus” and “strategic policy directed toward China”, said Fallon. The US should “spend more attention on ourselves” and “what we want ourselves to do particularly in this relationship with China over the next five to 10 years”, he said.
The US needs to “get out of the reactive business and start doing a little bit of premeditated thinking and acting to put us in a better place than we apparently are headed”, he added.