President Biden has pledged to pursue “extreme competition” with the Chinese Communist Party, but his administration’s diplomatic outreach to the regime suggests otherwise. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national-security adviser Jake Sullivan will meet their Chinese counterparts, Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, for high-level talks in Alaska later this month, the South China Morning Post reported yesterday and Bloomberg confirmed this morning.
This development hardly comes as a surprise, given Biden’s and Blinken’s repeated overtures for cooperation with Beijing. Both have stated multiple times that the U.S. should compete with China while still leaving room for cooperation on key issues. “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be,” Blinken said earlier this month, during his first major address as secretary of state.
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