President Biden’s top national security advisers are planning for a “very blunt” conversation with Chinese officials, U.S. officials said in the lead-up to a high-profile encounter between the two rival powers.
“I’m not very confident that we’re going to be able to persuade the Chinese of the error of their ways and the righteousness of ours just over the course of a couple of hours’ worth of talks,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday evening. “But I think it is important that each side know where the other does stand.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will converge on Alaska to meet Friday with two top members of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy brain trust. The meeting is expected to feature contentious conversations about China’s aggressive policies and human rights abuses.
“I think they’re going to be in pretty tough conversations in Anchorage,” said the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper, a China expert who worked at the Pentagon and the White House during George W. Bush’s presidency. “Both sides are gonna leave frustrated … The [Biden] administration’s view is that’s not the end of the world.”
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Biden’s team made clear that “there will not be a joint statement” at the end of the meeting, eliminating one traditional form of diplomatic window-dressing. Blinken and Sullivan will seek to dispel any “illusions” that Beijing might have about the new team, the senior administration official said. That process begins with the meeting’s structure as a joint appearance by Blinken and Sullivan, which another senior administration official offered as an example of the Biden administration learning from experiences during former President Barack Obama’s tenure.
“We’ve seen a track record from China in the past of attempting to try to play favorites within an administration, and in particular to play the secretary of state and national security adviser off each other,” the senior administration official said. “We felt it was really important to underscore, from the get-go, that this administration is unified and coordinated when it comes to China policy … and that the games that China has played in the past to divide us, or attempt to divide us, are simply not going to work here.”
Blinken previewed the trip for lawmakers last week, putting an emphasis on the importance of condemning China’s human rights abuses and threatening posture in the disputed waterways near the shores of the communist regime and U.S. allies. He carried that message to Japan on the first stop of a trip that will include a visit to South Korea before turning homeward to Alaska.
The conversations with Northeast Asian allies are part of the pre-meeting outreach that has U.S.-friendly governments confident about the Biden team’s approach.
“You know, the last administration … at the Trump level, a lot of it would be more personality-based, so I think there would be a lot less insight going into the talks [about what] would be discussed,” an Indo-Pacific official told the Washington Examiner. “This administration, there’s the consistency both publicly and privately. I’m sure it’s not just us, but other countries are relieved as well that there won’t be as many surprises.”
The details of the meeting will inform future talks with allies about how to mitigate the threats from China, according to the senior administration officials, who noted that Biden’s China strategy is still under development.
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“The inputs that we’re getting from our allies and partners are really core to that understanding where we have some opportunities to work together and where we can best build shared leverage,” one of the senior administration officials said. “But inputting where our Chinese interlocutors are at as well … will be important to informing where we go in our China strategy going forward.”
