FOREIGN
AFFAIRS
US-China meetings fail to produce breakthrough on
Red Sea shipping attacks
Lack of progress in addressing two key international
crisis points underscores the limitations in the Biden administration’s
diplomatic outreach to Beijing.
By PHELIM
KINE
01/27/2024
02:43 PM EST
The U.S.
failed in two days of talks to prod China into pressuring Iran to stop Houthi
attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, an administration official said
Saturday.
National
security adviser Jake Sullivan raised U.S. concerns about the ongoing attacks
in the meetings with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bangkok, Thailand, on
Friday and Saturday. But the talks ended with no sign that China is willing to
take decisive steps to use its economic influence on Iran — which funds and
equips Yemen’s Houthi militia — to stem the threat to global supply chains.
Those
attacks, which began two months ago, have prompted multiple U.S. and British
air strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen in recent weeks.
“Beijing
says they are raising this with the Iranians … but we’re certainly going to
wait before we comment further on how effectively we think they’re actually
raising it,” a senior administration official told reporters during a call on
Sullivan’s meeting on Saturday.
The Biden
administration has been making the case to Beijing that it should help “in
terms of quieting some of those attacks, but whether it chooses to use that
leverage in that way I think that remains to be seen,” the official said.
The Biden
administration is also hitting a brick wall in trying to prod Beijing to
convince close ally North Korea to scale back its nuclear weapons program,
curtail support for Russia’s war on Ukraine and ease up on its increasingly
hostile rhetoric toward South Korea.
“I wouldn’t
characterize anything recently as constructive” in terms of Beijing’s influence
on Pyongyang, the officials said.
Sullivan
had better luck engaging with Wang on the ongoing civil conflict in Burma,
where a military offensive by an alliance of ethnic militias launched in
October has inflicted a series of defeats of government forces.
Much of the
fighting, which has fueled a humanitarian crisis by displacing large numbers of
civilians, has occurred along Burma’s border with China, which has close ties
to Burma’s military dictatorship. Sullivan and Wang “discussed the ongoing
crisis and we hope to have follow up discussions at lower levels in the coming
weeks and months,” the official said.
A Chinese
Foreign Ministry readout of the meeting published Saturday called the
Sullivan-Wang talks “frank, substantive and fruitful,” but didn’t make any
specific mention of the Red Sea shipping crisis.
The readout
instead described the perceived threat of Taiwan independence as “the biggest
challenge to China-U.S. relations.”
The
statement also reiterated Beijing’s concerns that the U.S. is using export
restrictions “to contain and suppress the development of other countries” and
said that the two countries will discuss “the boundary between national
security and economic activities” in future meetings.
China’s
reluctance to use its diplomatic and economic heft to support U.S. moves to
address the Red Sea disruptions or temper North Korea’s provocations
underscores the limitations of the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach
efforts to Beijing over the past eight months.
That has
included a series of cabinet officials’ trips to Beijing that climaxed with
President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s meeting in San Francisco in
November.
Biden and
Xi will follow up that meeting with a phone call “this spring at some point in
the coming months,” the official said. But Beijing’s deaf ear to U.S. calls for
Chinese assistance in the Red Sea and on the Korean Peninsula suggests that
China sees greater value in sitting by the sidelines of two ongoing
international crises rather than actively siding with the U.S. against two key
allies.
The two-day
meeting was a follow-up to Wang’s visit to Washington in October in the run-up
to the Biden-Xi encounter in San Francisco in November. That meeting ended with
agreements to resume military-to-military contacts, bolster bilateral
counter-narcotics cooperation and to begin discussions on the use of artificial
intelligence.
Bilateral
efforts to deliver on those agreements are bearing fruit. A U.S.-China
Counternarcotics Working Group will have an inaugural meeting in Beijing on
Tuesday, the official said. And a series of military-to-military contacts that
Beijing suspended in 2022 in reprisal for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
Taiwan trip — including “communication between theater commanders and at the
Minister-Secretary level” — will resume in the coming months, the official
said.
A
U.S.-China initiative to address “safety and risks posed by advanced forms of
AI” will culminate in a joint meeting “sometime in the spring,” the official
added.
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