US-China relations: Alaska’s chill mirrors the outlook for talks between nations’ diplomats
- Both sides come into Thursday’s meeting with a long list of complaints that are likely to hamper any breakthrough or significant progress
- But the fact that they’re meeting at all suggests a willingness to at least set a new tone
Get back on track, stake out your position and expect very little. That is the essential playbook on both sides as China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, sits down with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday in Alaska, the superpowers’ first meeting since President Joe Biden took office.
Anchorage’s frigid temperatures and 10-foot snow mounds underscore the deep freeze the two giants are in as they circle each other warily. The fact that they are meeting at all, however, suggests a readiness to at least entertain an engagement process and set a new tone after years of trans-Pacific trade wars and bitter name calling.
“Both sides have got to lay down markers,” said Richard Boucher, a senior fellow with the Watson Institute and former US consul general in Hong Kong. “This is not only for domestic consumption. It’s also to signal ‘I’m not going to get pushed around any more, things aren’t going to be the way they used to be.’
“China is going to say, the Chinese people stood up. And the US is going to say, you don’t have a free hand any more.”
While the Biden team has been working to hone its strategy of aligning other frustrated democracies against China – seen this week as Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin travelled to Japan and Korea – it cannot afford to wait indefinitely given that several of its priorities, including climate change and economic renewal, require some level of cooperation with Beijing.