US President Joe Biden’s news conference after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, revealed no progress on the increasingly tense US-China relationship. The conventional diplo-speak Biden used to describe their exchange of views — “We had an open and candid conversation about our intentions and our priorities” — raised more questions than it answered.
In their candor, did they say to each other’s face what they have repeatedly stated in public? Did Xi say that Taiwan’s integration into what can only be called the Chinese empire — including Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Macau and Hong Kong — cannot be deferred for another generation and will be accomplished by force if Taiwanese do not submit “peacefully”? Did he also repeat that the US must stay out of it and not cross one of China’s many red lines?
Did Biden tell Xi directly what he told reporters and interviewers four times — that the US would use military force to defend Taiwan if China attacked it?
If the two were that frank with each other, how did the conversation proceed after they had established that their countries would go to war over Taiwan? Or did Biden issue the kind of warning a parent gives a misbehaving child, or the US gave Moscow when it failed to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “there will be consequences”?
Did they discuss escalation scenarios and what each would do in response to the other’s actions? For example, if China sank a US aircraft carrier or two with anti-ship missiles built and deployed for that purpose, killing 5,000 to 10,000 sailors, as one Chinese admiral recommended last year, would Washington retaliate by destroying bases in China, and/or the ships, planes or submarines from which the attack was launched? Did Biden inform Xi how the US Congress and the US public would react?
Did they examine the dangers of one side or the other resorting to nuclear weapons, as Chinese generals have also repeatedly threatened against hundreds of US cities? Or, that any exchange of military blows between the US and China would automatically mean World War III, as Biden said in response to Kyiv’s request for a US no-fly zone over Ukraine?
Did the two acknowledge to each other — and to themselves — that their respective red lines on Taiwan — Xi’s threat of force to achieve unification and Biden’s pledge to forcefully resist it — would inevitably be crossed and make war inevitable? Or did they simply express mutual satisfaction at having had a frank exchange?
Were these merely recitations of talking points for their domestic audiences?
Biden seemed to indicate there was a genuine meeting of the minds on the US’ commitment to Taiwan when he said: “I’ve met many times with Xi Jinping, and we were candid and clear with one another across the board. And I do not think there’s any imminent attempt on the part of China to invade Taiwan.”
Biden’s equanimity regarding China’s peaceful intentions toward Taiwan clashes with the views expressed by former and present US Navy officials.
Admiral Philip Davidson, a former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, last year said that China could attack Taiwan by 2027.
US Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral John Aquilino said: “This problem is much closer than most people think.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Beijing no longer accepts the “status quo” across the Taiwan Strait and has accelerated its time line to seize Taiwan.
Biden’s confidence in Xi’s peaceful intentions evokes his predecessor’s assertion that he had not been “duped” by Xi’s assurances about COVID-19.
Biden also said he told Xi that “the ‘one China’ policy — our ‘one China’ policy has not changed.”
The interjection of “our” was an allusion to Beijing’s invocation of its “one China” principle, which states that there is only one China in the world — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — and that Taiwan is part of it. For Beijing, the pre-existing Republic of China no longer exists.
Biden did not bother to educate his audience that Washington agrees with the first half of China’s articulation — that there is only one Chinese state, the PRC — but whether Taiwanese choose to be part of it is their decision alone, a self-determination commitment that is anathema to the Chinese Communist Party.
We will eventually learn whether Biden demanded that the all-powerful Xi stop his officials from repeating the false assertion that Washington ever accepted Beijing’s claim that Taiwan belongs to China, and only recognized that this is China’s claim.
Biden should remind Xi that even former US president Richard Nixon, the father of US-China engagement, in 1994 wrote that China and Taiwan are now “permanently separated politically.”
Similarly, Biden must proclaim in an official statement that cannot be walked back by his staff that the antiquated US policy of strategic ambiguity on defending Taiwan is over.
Strategic clarity is the only way to avoid the strategic miscalculation that Biden fears from China and it cannot come from offhand responses to reporters.
Joseph Bosco, who served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense, is a fellow of the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the Global Taiwan Institute’s advisory committee.
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