In response to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) remarks at a meeting of the World Economic Forum, White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday last week said that US President Joe Biden would adopt a new “strategic patience” approach in the relationship with Beijing to deal with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is increasingly authoritarian internally and assertive in its foreign policy, and is challenging US national security, prosperity and values.
The strategic patience policy of the Biden administration is common in the history of US diplomacy. The term strategic patience, also known as “strategic tolerance” or “strategic restraint,” which means “benign negligent,” was first seen in 1997 when then-US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott gave a lecture at Standard University, titled The End of the Beginning: The Emergence of a New Russia.
He said that the US’ approach toward Russia was not to deal with current crises and events, but that the US should instead look to the young generation for a longer-term strategy.
Although Russia implemented electoral democracy in 1991, it still has not become a completely free country, due to the US’ strategic patience policy, and has been marked as an “unfree” authoritarian regime in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.
After former US president Barack Obama took office in 2009, then-US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton adopted a strategic patience policy in response to North Korea’s nuclear weapons crisis at the end of that year, hoping to combine international support and peaceful means to wait for the North Korean regime to make a decision to denuclearize.
However, during Obama’s two terms of office, North Korea conducted four nuclear weapons tests, claiming to have developed the ability to attack the US.
Former US Department of State official Joel Wit wrote in Foreign Policy magazine that strategic patience is tantamount to strategic blunder.
Many pundits also criticized the strategy’s lack of deterrence and deemed strategic patience as a completely failed policy.
When former US president Donald Trump assumed office in 2017, he declared that the strategic patience policy toward North Korea had failed and the era of strategic patience was over.
The US’ “engagement policy” with China since 1972 can be seen as another strategic patience approach, hoping to spur China’s economic and social development through diplomatic interactions, and promote its political openings and democratization.
However, in response, the CCP suppressed a democratic student movement in 1989.
When the US led the CCP’s accession to the WTO system in 2001, allowing China to become the world’s second-largest economy in less than 10 years, Xi gave back to the international community by issuing “Document No. 9,” which strictly prohibits the promotion of Western democratic constitutionalism, universal values, civil society, press and publishing freedom, and forbids any challenge to socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The “strategic patience” of the US toward China has become a “strategic opportunity” for the CCP, which has had a decisive influence on its striving to enhance its national power.
The strategic patience policies adopted by the US against authoritarian China, Russia, and North Korea over the past 50 years have all ended in failure. The setbacks of the past are not far away.
Biden’s approach might not be enough to maintain the “status quo.” His administration must carefully review the failure of past China policies to avoid strategic patience turning into a strategic blunder, and becoming yet again another strategic opportunity for CCP.
Michael Sun is director of the Culture Center for Taiwanese in Canada.
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