Opinion | China-US relations are too important to leave to Xi Jinping and Joe Biden

Name: US President Joe Biden foresees ‘extreme competition’ with China
Uploaded: 2021-02-08T17:30:08.000Z
Duration: 1 min 8 s
Description: US President Joe Biden foresees ‘extreme competition’ with China

While high-level dialogue is critical as the Biden team shapes its China policy, a breakthrough in cooperation on major issues is unlikely

It’s up to the rest of us – scientists, professors, health leaders, concerned citizens – to forge relations outside politics to create the momentum for peace

Reading Time:4 minutes

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Tom Plate

Published: 1:30am, 9 Feb 2021Updated: 10:59am, 18 Feb 2021

The late George Kennan became a diplomatic legend for advocating, while stationed in Moscow, a singular foreign policy idea that famously worked. It was called “containment”. Its steadfast observance by the US and its allies undoubtedly helped lead to the welcome collapse of the Soviet Union.

So, now, for China too – containment anew? No: to the end of his years at Princeton, this deep thinker came to warn against simple slogans or faulty formulations that would never work for the complex and dynamic world in which we live today. In the face of China, the guru of perhaps the most famous strategic phrase in modern US diplomatic history pointedly shied away from grand designs of any sort.

If honest intellectual humility in trying to size up the world was good enough for Kennan, the new Biden foreign-policy team might try it on for size. My concern with some of the new National Security and State Department appointments, especially in the nerve-jangling Korean peninsula policy portfolio, is that bookish competence is too blithely conflated with true knowledge, and long experience with automatic sagacity.

The best advice for US President Joe Biden is to make sure he thinks things out for himself. The blunders of John F. Kennedy (Bay of Pigs), Lyndon B. Johnson (Vietnam) and George W. Bush (Iraq) were made because of, not despite, advice from the so-called best and brightest.

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US President Joe Biden foresees ‘extreme competition’ with China

For Beijing’s part, perhaps a wise Kennan-esque retreat into reality might incline the action-prone Xi Jinping government towards more Confucian self-reflection. China is now perched on a high economic plateau, but can the government take it to the next level, or will the weight of all its accumulated debt knock it off its high horse?

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