In the previous installment I defined a diplomatic campaign as a well planned and coordinated series of actions designed to impart an impression in the minds of foreign leaders, signal our intentions, magnify our influence, or generate persuasive force. The new Biden administration waged such a campaign in the Indo-Pacific region as soon as it entered office in early 2021.
I once told a senior Vietnamese diplomat that it seemed unlikely that the U.S. would be able to eject the Chinese from the disputed features in the South China Sea that they already occupied. “Given this situation,” I asked, “of what value to Vietnam were continued U.S. Navy freedom of navigation challenges to unlawful Chinese claims?” “It’s simple,” he shot back. “American diplomatic and military activities in the South China Sea signal your intention to remain engaged in the region, and when the Chinese know you’re engaged, they treat us better.”
That’s what the United States wants: a region in which China treats its smaller neighbors better; in which countries like Vietnam have room to maneuver diplomatically; in which a balance of power with robust U.S. and allied participation prevents anyone from dominating it. A free and open region, we have always thought, would be more receptive to American influence, military presence, our exports, our investments, and our ideas. Indeed, this is the kind of region that Southeast Asians want.
But it appeared to the incoming Biden administration that President Trump had not adequately engaged the Indo-Pacific region and that the Chinese were making gains as a result. The Trump administration issued a National Security Strategy in 2017 for the first time declaring that we would place strategic priority on competing with China as part of an effort to establish a “free and open Indo-Pacific” region. But it was unclear to what extent the President understood or supported the new strategy. He had failed to attend three out of four Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits in the region during his tenure. He had abused our allies, pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific partnership trade agreement, expressed admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinping, and generated huge uncertainties regarding the sustainability of our presence.
It became clear in the early days of the new Biden administration that between the 2020 election and the inauguration Biden transition officials had planned what the U.S. would do to correct Trump’s mistakes. The White House would need to reassert American regional leadership; demonstrate the return of coherent national strategy; elevate the strategic priority of the Indo-Pacific region; reassure our allies of the strength of our commitments, and engage China from a position of strength. We needed to send a clear signal to the region that America was back and we needed to execute a concerted diplomatic campaign to achieve this goal.
This diplomatic campaign spanned the globe from Washington, to India, to Northeast Asia, and all the way back to Anchorage Alaska. The campaign included phone calls, a multilateral summit meeting, cabinet level trips to important allied and partner capitals, and strong public messaging, all leading to a contentious March 2021 meeting in Alaska with the Chinese.
Presidential Phone Calls
The campaign began with a few phone calls.
New presidents spend considerable time after their inauguration calling foreign leaders to introduce themselves. The press pays little attention to these seemingly ceremonial events, but foreign embassies in Washington and their home governments watch them closely. These calls are fraught with diplomatic signaling. Foreign governments attempt to determine from these calls what the new administration’s priorities are and what messages the new president wants to stress.
President Biden called Japanese Prime Minister Suga on January 27, first among our Indo-Pacific counterparts, signaling, as was customary, that the new administration placed the highest importance on our alliance with Japan. The White House readout of the call echoed traditional themes: our alliance with Japan was the “cornerstone” of regional peace and prosperity; we remained committed to defending our ally; we shared our views on China and North Korea and pledged to cooperate more closely together in the fight against COVID-19. These were all familiar tropes, but if we ever left them out of a call readout the region would want to know what had changed in the relationship.
The President spoke with Australian Prime Minister Morrison and ROK President Moon on February 3 and Indian Prime Minister Modi, a friendly non-ally, on February 8. And with the momentum provided by allied and partner calls, the President called Chinese President Xi on February 10. According to the White House readout, the President wished Xi a happy Chinese New Year and conveyed our concerns about Chinese trade practices, human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region.
A Quad Summit
New Secretary of State Blinken hosted a virtual Quad Foreign Ministers meeting on February 18; on March 3, the White House released the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance outlining Biden’s national strategy; Secretary Blinken revealed administration foreign policy priorities in House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) testimony on March 10; and the White House hosted a virtual summit of Quad leaders on March 12. This was an administration in a hurry to broadcast its priorities.
The Quad is a “mini-lateral” group composed of the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India founded in 2004 to coordinate disaster assistance in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami. The Quad went dormant in 2007 after Australia pulled out in deference to its ties with Beijing. The group revived in 2017, during the first Trump administration, as regional concerns about China mounted. Australia joined the other three countries in the annual “Malabar” military exercise in 2020.
Optimistic military officers in the region see the Quad as a nascent military alliance, but India’s interest in maintaining balance in its relationships with Washington, Beijing, and Moscow limit the near term military uses of the group. The Quad nevertheless has a high diplomatic value. It signals solidarity and keeps India engaged in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. The Quad shows China and the region that the U.S. is not only engaged, but that it’s working closely with three of the region’s biggest players. A strong Quad magnifies the leverage of each of its members and says to Beijing “We have options; we have leverage; and we don’t need to accommodate ourselves to your interests.”
The March Quad summit was the first leader-level meeting of the group. It issued a statement broadcasting participants’ fidelity to international law and the rules based order and pledging cooperation in COVD vaccine distribution, critical technology development; climate change, and cybersecurity. The four leaders also published a rare, attention-grabbing op-ed in the Washington Post the day after the meeting to highlight their efforts. This meeting marked the first flowering of the Quad as an instrument of summit-level diplomacy, as well as a potential future military tool, and it opened the administration’s effort to strengthen its Indo-Pacific alliances and partnerships
Cabinet Level Trips to the Region
New Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited the headquarters of our Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu on March 15. He rendezvoused with Secretary of State Blinken in Tokyo for a March 16 meeting between Japanese and American defense and foreign ministers. These four-way gatherings, called 2+2 meetings, are meant to convey the importance each side places on the relationship and to demonstrate alliance solidarity. Getting cabinet secretary level officials together is challenging, and putting all of them in the same place magnifies the importance and public visibility of the meeting. The two secretaries supplemented the 2+2 with a highly visible joint call on Prime Minister Suga and attended bilateral meetings with their Foreign and Defense ministers. Blinken and Austin moved to Seoul for a 2+2 meeting with their South Korean counterparts.
In each location Blinken and Austin were seen meeting with the head of state and with their cabinet level counterparts. They made highly visible public appearances and spoke extensively with the local press. A joint statement issued after the Tokyo meeting reiterated the strategic importance that United States placed on the Indo-Pacific region, committed both sides to renewing and strengthening the alliance, called for North Korean de-nuclearization, expressed mutual concern with Chinese behavior, and called for stability in the Taiwan Strait. A statement issued after the Seoul meeting stressed similar themes without direct mention of China or Taiwan, pointing to differences in the Japanese and South Korean approaches to China at the time.
It is common practice for presidents and secretaries of state and defense to travel to Northeast Asia as early as possible in their term. A George W. Bush trip was delayed until early 2002 due to the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. President Obama visited Tokyo in November 2009, while President Trump made the trip in November 2017. President Biden did not reach to the region until May 2022, perhaps owing to his focus on Russia and Ukraine in the run-up to the invasion. Secretaries of State have often made the Northeast Asia trip their first foray abroad. It has always been important for the senior-most American travelers to stop in Tokyo and Seoul before moving on to Beijing in order to demonstrate to the Chinese and to the region-at-large the importance we place on our alliances. And, again, the region would wonder what big changes might be afoot if we did it differently.
Secretary Austin broadcast similar messages during his March 19-21 visit to India. Austin met with Prime Minister Modi, National Security Advisor Doval, and the ministers of defence and external affairs, stressing our interest in a free and open Indo-Pacific region and seeking to strengthen defense ties to India. Meanwhile, to amplify our message of strong engagement in the region, the U.S. Third Fleet’s USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group deployed to the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans during February and March to augment the presence in the region of the USS Ronald Reagan, then at Yokosuka Naval Base in Tokyo Bay.
Alaska Chill Pervades the U.S.-China Meeting in Anchorage
In his March 10 HFAC testimony Secretary Blinken told committee members that the U.S. needed to engage China from a position of strength. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki then placed Blinken’s statement in the context of a U.S. diplomatic campaign to establish that position. In a press briefing on the same day she said, “it was important to us that this administration’s first meeting with Chinese officials to be held on American soil and occur after we have met and consulted closely with partners and allies in both Asia and Europe.”
If anyone cherished the thought that the March 19 meeting in Anchorage between senior American and Chinese officials would warm the relationship, their hopes were dashed in the days before the meeting took place. On March 10, the day the White House announced the meeting, the destroyer USS Finn transited the ever-sensitive Taiwan Strait, challenging Beijing’s claim to these waters. On March 16 the new administration sanctioned 24 Chinese officials in response to Beijing’s abuses of human rights in Hong Kong, including Communist Party Politburo member Wang Chen. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said of the sanctions that the American act "fully exposes the U.S. side's sinister intention to interfere in China's internal affairs, disrupt Hong Kong and obstruct China's stability and development.”
The meeting in Anchorage between State Counselor Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the Chinese side and Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on the American side started with a bang. Blinken opened by briefly describing American interests in the Indo-Pacific region and enumerating American complaints with Chinese behavior in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. In what should have been two minutes of introductory remarks by the Chinese side, State Counselor Yang delivered an embittered, sixteen minute scold, accusing the Americans of hypocrisy, lambasting American foreign policy, and urging Washington to stay out of Chinese domestic affairs. As the surprised press filed out at the close of Yang’s remarks, Blinken called them back to deliver a rejoinder, to which Yang demanded his own response. What should have been a five minute photo-op turned into a rancorous, hour long verbal duel.
American officials had tried to lower public expectations for the meeting before they left Washington. Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during his March 10 hearing that the meeting would be “an important opportunity to lay out in frank terms many concerns the US has with Beijing’s actions,” but he did not signal an American intention to court Beijing’s favor and failed to mention possible concrete outcomes.
The meeting appeared to have fulfilled Blinken’s low expectations. Emerging from the conference room at the close of the two-day talks, the Secretary of State told the press that “we wanted to share with [the Chinese] the significant concerns that we have about a number of the actions that China has taken and the behavior it’s exhibiting – concerns shared by our allies and partners. And we did that.”
Assessing the Campaign
The discerning reader may be forgiven for wondering what concrete outcomes emerged from all of the diplomatic gyrations. The answer is that concrete outcomes, like Quad agreements to work on COVID vaccine development, were incidental to the main purpose of the whole campaign, which was diplomatic signaling.
The outcomes that the administration sought were intangible, indeed, psychological, meant to impart the impression to the region that we “were back;” to our allies that we remained committed to their defense; to the Chinese that we were not going to return to pre-Trump administration engagement, and to the American people that a presidential administration could still conduct vigorous, competent diplomacy.
The Americans certainly succeeded in reassuring our allies. Echoing other leaders throughout the region, South Korean President Moon Jae-in welcomed “the return of diplomacy and alliance” in public remarks to Secretaries Austin and Blinken after the Seoul 2+2 meeting. The meetings in allied capitals also set the stage for progress in alliance relations down the road. The Quad met again at the leaders level in September, the U.S. announced the AUKUS agreement with Australia and the UK the same week, changes in South Korean and Japanese administrations cleared the way for fundamental improvements in Tokyo-Seoul relations later on, and administration efforts to bolster the alliance with Japan encouraged Prime Minister Kishida’s dramatic 2022 increase in defense spending.
It is less clear what the administration accomplished vis a vis Beijing. Blinken and Sullivan surely succeeded in conveying to the Chinese the American intention to continue the Trump team’s competitive approach. Brookings Institution analyst Thomas Wright reported shortly after the Alaska meeting that during the transition the Chinese had offered to mend ties frayed during the Trump years by offering to cooperate on the COVID pandemic and climate change. The Biden team rejected this, according to Wright, “because any agreement to cooperate would have collapsed beneath the weight of Beijing’s actual behavior…Now that the dramatic public exchange has set a more honest approach for a competitive era, the two sides can progress to the much harder phase.”
And to a much harder stage the two sides progressed. The Anchorage meeting ushered in a chill in U.S.-China relations characterized by months of almost no communication below the cabinet level. This lasted until the November 2022 meeting in Bali between President Biden and President Xi. The chill returned with a vengeance in 2023 when a Chinese observation balloon traversed the United States and with House Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, to again ease only with another Biden-Xi meeting in November 2023.
The mixed results achieved by the Biden administration’s early 2021 campaign demonstrate that statesmen rarely get all they want from a diplomatic campaign no matter how well crafted, just like they rarely get all they want from a military campaign, no matter how well fought.
