"Three Takeaways From the Biden-Xi Meeting" - by CWP alum Isaac Kardon

The resumption of some U.S.-China military-to-military dialogues met the rather minimal expectations for Wednesday’s summit. Both Beijing and Washington pledged to reinstate paused defense policy coordination talks, military maritime consultation meetings, and direct telephone links between operational commanders. None of these channels is new, and none is sufficient to meaningfully mitigate growing military tension between the two countries.

Historically, Beijing has withheld defense contacts to express its displeasure at U.S. actions in other facets of the relationship. Resuming these activities is then dangled as a “concession” and traded off against other political objectives—and that is precisely the pattern witnessed in San Francisco this week. Defense contact was last suspended in August 2022, and a series of senior-level dialogues were “refused, cancelled, or ignored” since then, according to the Pentagon. This is in keeping with a long pattern of on-again, off-again, bilateral military dialogue.

YUKON HUANG,  ISAAC KARDON,  MATT SHEEHAN 

• NOVEMBER 16, 2023 - https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/16/three-takeaways-from-biden-xi-meeting-pub-91042

Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D., (孔适海博士) is a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is concurrently adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and was formerly assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), where he served as a research faculty member in the China Maritime Studies Institute.

Isaac’s research centers on the People’s Republic of China’s maritime power, with specialization in maritime disputes and the international law of the sea, PRC global port development, PLA overseas basing, and China-Pakistan relations. His writing appears in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Naval War College Review, as well as other scholarly and policy publications. Isaac’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023) analyzes whether and how China is “making the rules” of regional and global order.

Photo Credit: 

By The White House - https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1725329586668401034, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=140934835

English: President Biden participates in a family photo with APEC economies and guest economies.