It risks accidentally turning a cold war with China into a hot one.
A Chinese spy balloon’s brazen incursion across the breadth of the continental U.S. in February exposed some unnerving features of the present Sino-American dynamic. One of the most disturbing discoveries prompted by the People’s Liberation Army’s big adventure across America’s skies is the lack of high-level military-to-military points of contact between Washington and Beijing.
“It has been the People’s Republic of China’s decision to ignore, reject, or cancel multiple U.S. requests for senior-level communication,” the Pentagon related earlier in May amid a diplomatic offensive designed to open reliable deconfliction channels. The U.S. military’s Chinese counterparts were curt in rejecting American overtures. As the spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in the U.S., Liu Pengyu, insisted, “communication should not be carried out for the sake of communication.”
The U.S. has reportedly sought to arrange a meeting between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chinese defense minister Li Shangfu at a neutral venue, but the Chinese side has resisted. They insist that there can be no meeting if Li remains under U.S. sanctions in relation to a 2018 transfer of Russian armaments to China. This weekend, Beijing formally rejected Lloyd’s offer in what the Wall Street Journal revealed was described by the Pentagon as “an unusually blunt message”:
The rebuff could spark concerns among Southeast Asia allies nervous about being caught between the two powers, some U.S. officials warned. They held open the prospect of a Singapore meeting between lower-level officials.
“We’ve had a lot of difficulty, in terms of when we have proposed phone calls, proposed meetings, dialogues, whether that’s the secretary” or other top U.S. defense leaders, Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Security, said last week at an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
If Chinese defense officials intend to insist on the loosening of U.S. sanctions of Chinese sanctions violators as a prerequisite for establishing reliable channels of communication with the American military, Beijing’s conduct is going to make that difficult. A report in Semafor on Tuesday revealed that Ukrainian officials presented evidence to Chinese envoys indicating that the Russian weapons raining down on their cities have a “large numbers of Chinese electronics” in them. “Ukraine’s military has concluded that at least 15% of the electronics found in Russian arms — including cruise missiles, helicopters, and Iranian-supplied drones — are from China and Hong Kong,” the report added. Biden administration officials have repeatedly warned Beijing against providing material support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
But that China and the U.S. are backing distinct sides in the war in Europe should not thwart the establishment of reliable communications channels designed to de-escalate a conflict before it arises. Indeed, despite their opposition toward one another’s geostrategic objectives, the U.S. and Russia maintain robust deconfliction channels. As the number of theaters in which Russian units are engaged in hostilities against targets operating with American support has increased over the last decade, those channels have gotten a workout.
Without sacrificing economic leverage over Beijing, establishing high-level points of contact between the U.S. military and the PLA should be a priority, especially for Americans who want to see Washington take a more confrontational approach toward relations with Beijing. At least it should if those Americans don’t want to see a cold war with China accidentally spiral into a hot one.