US and China agree to restart military communications after Biden-Xi meeting

Washington-Beijing relations have been tested over the past year through a series of crises

A thaw is emerging in United States-China relations, if not an icebreaker, between the largest two global rivals. IThat became clear on Nov. 15 when the nations announced the reestablishment of their military-to-military communications. The agreement followed President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, in an effort to ease recent tensions.

U.S.-China relations have had their ups and downs, to put it mildly, since Washington and the communist regime in Beijing established full diplomatic relations in 1979. Chinese-U.S. relations have been tested particularly over the past year. Flashpoints have included Chinese surveillance balloons flown over the U.S., China increasing military exercises over Taiwan after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit there, and the U.S. tightening a stranglehold on China’s access to advanced technology.

Beijing initially severed the military communications between the two nations last year in response to the Taiwan trip by Pelosi, a persistent and vocal China critic going back to her early House years in the late 1980s, representing San Francisco and its large expatriate Chinese community. Without the trans-Pacific communications channels in place, there was a raised possibility of an escalation or incident between U.S. and Chinese forces in the region.

U.S. officials have sought for months to restart these lines of communication, though the president only announced the resumption after his four-hour meeting with Xi in the Northern California community of Woodside, on the San Francisco Peninsula. The tete-a-tete took place amid the Nov. 15-17 APEC summit, a forum for 21 countries in the Pacific Rim to discuss free trade and other economic topics.

Biden, at a Woodside news conference after the meeting, said the U.S. and China are “back to direct, open, clear, [and] direct communication,” which he described as “critically important.”

The agreement marks a good start to improved relations between the two nations, said Sourabh Gupta, a resident senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies.

“This will take a little time,” Gupta told the Washington Examiner. “But this is an important takeaway [or] outcome from the meeting. An expected one, but an important one, because remember, these guys don’t just meet at the defense secretary level.”

Department of Defense officials warned last month that there had been a dramatic increase in the number of unsafe or reckless maneuvers near U.S. aircraft and naval vessels in the Pacific region in recent years. U.S. defense officials have argued that the lack of military leadership communications only exacerbates the possibility of an unintended escalation, hence their persistence in seeking to restart these communication channels.

There were more such incidents, nearly 200, in the past two years than in the previous decade. And the total number of intercepts against U.S. forces and its allies in the last two years are near 300, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said at the time.

Ratner argued that the People’s Liberation Army’s “coercive and risky

behavior” was designed to “intimidate and coerce members of the international community into giving up their rights under international law,” while the U.S., he said, has a vision defined as “respect for sovereignty, adherence to international law, belief in transparency and openness, freedom of commerce and navigation, equal rights for all states and the resolution of disputes through peaceful means, not through coercion or conquest.”

Gupta does not believe the interceptions of the U.S.’s and allies’ aircraft or naval vessels in the region will stop immediately.

“So, what we are going to see is not immediate results, but we are going to see something like a gradation and gradual slope where we will see fewer of these more dangerous encounters that have been happening,” Gupta said. “The encounters are not going to cease entirely because it’s not by mistake that it’s happening. These guys are deliberately coming close because they want to show that things can just spiral out of control.”

Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, reiterated that sentiment, telling the Washington Examiner in a statement, “History suggests China will not use military exchanges to reduce accident risks,” and he added, “China fears hotlines could be used as a potential pretext for a U.S. presence in areas it claims as its own. Moreover, there is little evidence that Beijing views current military tensions as a problem to solve but rather as leverage to demand U.S. concessions on other issues.”

The restarting of military communications between the U.S. and Beijing is one facet of the military competition between them that long predates the Biden administration, even if those ties soured under his tenure.

A congressionally mandated report released in October found that the Chinese military is “continuing to quite rapidly modernize and diversify and expand its nuclear forces,” a senior defense official described at the time. The department estimates China has “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads as of May of this year” and believes Beijing’s buildup will exceed 1,000 by 2030.

The Nov. 15 meeting between Biden and Xi also marked the first time the leaders met since a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental U.S., traveling east, until the U.S. military shot it down off the coast of North Carolina. The U.S. has said definitively that the instrument had surveillance capabilities and traveled near sensitive military sites, while Beijing has repeatedly denied those claims. ★

Mike Brest is a defense reporter at the Washington Examiner.