President Joe Biden’s push to turn U.S. attention toward China has been thwarted by Russia’s aggressive posture toward Ukraine.
And while presidents can multitask, Biden is just the latest commander in chief whose overarching foreign policy shift toward China has been undermined by emerging threats.
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The United States has been distracted from China since the “rebalance” announcement a decade ago, according to former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell.
“Every time, something has taken over. Up until last summer, it was Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria,” he told the Washington Examiner. “It’s just gonna keep happening until we get serious.”
And now, as President Vladimir Putin reinforces his military presence along Ukraine’s border despite telling the world he was withdrawing troops, the distraction is Russia.
Putin’s bullish behavior is of international consequence. But it has also had repercussions for Biden regarding China, overshadowing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent Quadrilateral Security Dialogue meetings with Australia, India, and Japan. The alliance was renewed under Biden to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, yet Blinken was questioned about Russia.
For Stilwell, a Vandenberg Coalition advisory board member, the matter is exacerbated by the misconception that China is “a 10-year, 20-year problem.” That attitude is outdated before this week’s 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s China trip, he said, citing World Trade Organization disputes as an example.
“We didn’t hold them up to their agreement,” he said. “We said, ‘There’s still time to bring them on as a responsible stakeholder, get them to actually contribute.’ Well, it’s become increasingly clear over the last five years or more that they’re not interested in doing that at all.”
Another instance is China’s defiance as host of the 2022 Winter Olympics amid criticism of its poor human rights record.
The U.S., the United Kingdom, and Canada led an Olympic diplomatic boycott, which was joined by Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, India, Kosovo, and Lithuania, over human rights abuses. Instead of demurring like it did for the 2008 Summer Games, China choose Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier of Uyghur descent, to light the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony. The U.S. has called China’s repression of the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang-based ethnic group a “genocide.”
“The first one was ‘China has arrived on the global stage,'” Stilwell said. “This one is ‘China has taken the center of the global stage and will dictate terms.'”
China’s public embrace of Russia is similarly problematic for the U.S., according to Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and Putin engaged in high-level discussions on the opening ceremony’s sidelines, a symbolic middle finger to Biden’s democracies vs. autocracies rhetoric.
“It makes it more difficult for the U.S. to deter Russia when Russia and China relations are much closer than they’ve been for a long time,” Kennedy said.
Although many national security experts predicted Putin would not invade Ukraine until after the closing ceremony out of respect for Xi, his antics have dominated news media coverage that may have otherwise been dedicated not only to human rights violations in Xinjiang but Hong Kong as well.
Yet Kennedy, who encouraged Biden to explore bilateral opportunities with China, contended that China is not as “comfortable” as Russia with “chaos” since it does not benefit from it.
“This marriage of convenience has become at least a civil union because they both share a deep antipathy toward the United States and its focus on human rights,” CSIS’s Chinese business and economics trustee chairman said. “At the same time, they have real big differences in their economies and the specific issues that matter to them.”
“I do hope that we have a quiet close of the Olympics where there’s just medals being hung around folks’ necks as opposed to metal being lobbed in Ukraine,” he added.
Biden addressed the nation for the second time this week to provide an update on the Russia-Ukraine situation, telling reporters he is “convinced” that Putin has decided in favor of military action against his neighbor.
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“We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to attack Ukraine in the coming week — the coming days,” Biden said Friday from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. “We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.”
