US & China in Anchorage: A Flashpoint?
Suhas Nannapaneni
The rising threat of China as a formidable economic, political, and military power is of no surprise to anyone who peruses blogs covering international relations. Perhaps most readers have concluded that the US and China have entered the opening salvos of a new Cold War. Of course, there will be many unprecedented aspects in this new Cold War such as cyberwarfare and unexpected alliances, but it is safe to say there is much we can learn about our old enemy, the USSR, that we can apply to China in this opening stage.
Certain events, such as the Fall of the Berlin Wall, reverberate throughout the world as an eternally immortal moment – seared in the minds of the millions of viewers who watched it live and the billions who learned about it after. However, there are other events that gain their importance in the historical record only in hindsight. For instance, George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”, written in 1946, that articulated the United States’ analysis of the Soviet Union and advocated the containment policy which informed the structure of Cold War policy over the next four decades.
Nearly no one outside the Federal Government was attentive to this telegram and few outside of Cold War scholars understand its impact. In the telegram, Kennan outlines Soviet policy as “devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet state: intensive military-industrialization; maximum development of armed forces…designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponents in the dark”. Furthermore, he makes a pointed comment about Soviet strategy writing that “Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see opportunity of extending Soviet power…efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points…such as Northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm”. This was a major political turning point in devising America’s priorities and response to the rising Soviet threat.
Of course, one should not paint the present with the colors of the past, but that does not preclude us from taking lessons from it. In the last week, the United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with their Chinese counterparts Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi and waged an “undiplomatic war of words”. Senior American diplomats accused China of threatening world stability and violating human rights while Chinese officials retaliated with accusations of hypocrisy regarding race relations and America’s endless wars in the Middle East.
The two countries already find themselves at odds with each other from cyberattacks to long-standing trade disputes. Although official statements from Sullivan convey a rosy outlook such as “we do not seek conflict, but we welcome stiff competition, and we will always stand up for our principles”, it is clear that this crucial and under-reported meeting set the stage for harsher diplomatic relations going forward.
In response to US allegations that there exists a genocidal campaign against Uighur Muslims, Beijing responded by telling the US to butt out of such “internal matters” and pointing out that black people are being “slaughtered” in the United States. These pugnacious statements all occurred in an explicit breach of protocol where each country was allotted two minutes for statements and China unheedingly went on for nearly twenty.
The specific discussions, memos, personal interactions, and all of the other diplomatic activity that goes on behind closed doors will eventually be revealed in the inevitable memoirs of Biden’s administration following their service and through the historical record, but it is safe to conclude that they will not reveal anything close to Sullivan’s rosy statements. What Anchorage indisputably revealed is that US-China relations will get much worse before they get better and both countries are hunkering down and emboldening their long-term strategies in order to deal with the others’ geopolitical mindset, whether it be increasing defense spending, strengthening strategic alliances, or neo-imperialism.
In many ways Kennan’s Telegram and the Anchorage Meeting are similar. The event itself is rather opaque, yet its effects will be long felt and studied by future historians. However, it is the job of an international relations strategist to predict what deserves historic importance before it becomes historic.