Biden’s goal in the meeting with Xi: avoid a spiraling conflict
When President Biden meets President Xi Jinping of China on Wednesday at a lavish estate on the edge of Silicon Valley, his main goal will be simple: find a way to prevent increasingly bitter competition with China from spiraling into conflict.
For two leaders who have agreed on very little while their nations find themselves in the worst relationship in four decades, there are indications that they will try to find some semblance of agreement. A senior administration official said they are expected to reach the broad outlines of an agreement that would require Beijing to regulate components of fentanyl, the drug that has caused a devastating opioid epidemic in the United States. But China has made similar commitments before.
They are likely to announce a new forum for a discussion on how to keep artificial intelligence programs away from nuclear command and control — at the same time the United States is denying China the advanced chips it needs to develop and train AI programs . And they will likely discuss resuming military-to-military communications, which China severed after Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year when she was Speaker of the House of Representatives. But since the administration of George W. Bush, there have been periods of military-to-military contact.
The interactions between the two leaders when they meet at the lush Filoli estate, a historic house and garden just northwest of the Stanford campus, are carefully choreographed. Senior Chinese officials discussed them in meetings with Biden’s most trusted aides, including Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state.
But there remain plenty of thorny issues complicating discussions that some of Biden’s aides say they plan to raise, such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the upcoming elections in Taiwan, an island with self-government that China claims as its own island. .
In briefing after briefing, administration officials have tried to temper expectations about the kind of concrete commitments that surrounded such summits, saying that the mere fact that the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, and the world’s most powerful militaries, are communicating again , in itself a sign of progress.
Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and author of a book asking whether the two countries are destined for war, wrote in The National Interest that the meeting would summarize what he called “two contradictory but nevertheless inescapable facts.”
“First, the US and China will be the greatest rivals history has ever seen,” he wrote. “Second, the survival of each nation requires some degree of cooperation from the other.”
Mr. Biden arrived in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon while the city was on lockdown for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, known as APEC, a group of 21 countries spanning the Pacific Ocean. (He sent Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen to meet Mr. Xi when he landed in San Francisco on Tuesday evening.)
Mr Biden’s only public event on Tuesday was a fundraiser alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, in which he suggested that economic headwinds in China, along with the Biden administration’s work to build a network of partners in the Indo -Building Pacific to counter Chinese ambition, Mr Xi had brought to the negotiating table.
“President Xi is yet another example of how the restoration of American leadership in the world is taking hold,” Biden told the crowd. “They have real problems, people.”
It was not the first time Mr Biden had referred to China’s economic slowdown, and only five months ago he called him a “dictator”, a comment his advisers quickly tried to endorse.
There will be no joint statement on Wednesday to try to smooth over such tough talk. U.S. officials say each administration will provide its own account of the discussions.