When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called Beijing via a special hotline to discuss the downing of the Chinese balloon last month, the call went unanswered. That coolness, experts say, underscores glaring misunderstandings in the US-China relationship and key differences in how global rivals view crisis management.
“The problem for Washington is that ‘China’s military’ has never been interested in these channels,” says Michael Green, National Security Council Asia adviser in the Bush and Obama administrations. The Chinese, he says, are wary of any move that might encourage or normalize what they see as provocative behavior.
why we write this
How do you preserve crisis communications with an adversary who suspects your use? The United States is finding that China is not interested in hotlines, which spells trouble as their rivalry intensifies.
“They don’t want to make it easy for us to do what we’re already doing, like flying patrols over the South China Sea,” says Dr. Verde. “Trust-building and confidence aren’t exactly priorities.”
When bilateral relations were rocked in 2001 by a mid-air collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a US Navy reconnaissance plane, “President Bush made 12 attempts to communicate with his counterpart,” Jiang Zemin, “but he couldn’t do it.” dr. it says green.
That was very concerning in the White House at the time, he adds, “but everything suggests that we are no better off 20 or 25 years later.”
Shortly after the US Air Force shot down a Chinese balloon that had traversed the continental United States for several days last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called his counterpart in Beijing.
At your disposal: a special hotline aimed at helping the two increasingly competitive world powers prevent sudden tensions from escalating into full-blown crises.
The call went unanswered.
why we write this
How do you preserve crisis communications with an adversary who suspects your use? The United States is finding that China is not interested in hotlines, which spells trouble as their rivalry intensifies.
The Pentagon later lamented the missed opportunity for the two sides to talk about the balloon burst before it turned, as it soon did, into a diplomatic imbroglio.
For its part, the Chinese Ministry of Defense confirmed that its boss, Wei Fenghe, had refused to answer the call because the US with its action “failed to create an adequate atmosphere” for a bilateral dialogue.
The episode was instructive, say national security experts. China’s indifference to a call from the Washington hotline highlights glaring misunderstandings in the US-China relationship and key differences in how the two sides view crisis management.
Furthermore, they add, it most likely portends a future in which tense moments in an increasingly tense confrontation between great powers end in larger crises due to a lack of reliable communication channels and mutual trust.
“It’s concerning when, as we saw in the Chinese response to the ballooning incident, there’s this rejection of communication channels that could help prevent something dangerous from getting out of hand,” says Victor Cha, Korea’s president and senior vice president. for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
The United States got used to working with what some call simply “hotline diplomacy” after decades of resorting, figuratively at least, to the famous hotline to defuse tensions with its main Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. . Diplomats say partial credit for the fact that the world’s two major nuclear-armed powers managed to avoid a nuclear confrontation should go to the crisis communication channels they both established.
Evidence that those channels are still operational with post-Cold War Russia emerged last month when the White House revealed that it had informed the Kremlin of President Joe Biden’s unannounced trip to Kiev hours before his departure from Washington. The notification was given “for dispute resolution purposes,” according to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who did not provide further details “due to the sensitive nature of those communications.”
The difference with the case of China is that both Washington and Moscow value the lines of communication and trust their interlocutors at least enough to share sensitive and even difficult information with them, experts say.
Increasingly for Washington, they add, the challenge will be: How to establish potentially disaster-preventing channels of communication with an adversary when the other party doesn’t want them and is suspicious of their motivations for wanting them?
“The problem for Washington is that the PLA has never been interested in these channels,” says Michael Green, a National Security Council adviser for Asia in the Bush and Obama administrations, referring to the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military. “He sees transparency and trust-building communications as a disadvantage for them.”
The Chinese, he says, are wary of any move that might encourage or normalize what they see as provocative behavior.
“They don’t want to make it easy for us to do what we’re already doing, like flying patrols over the South China Sea,” says Dr Green, now executive director of the Center for US Studies at the University of Sydney.
“They want us to be anxious and nervous,” he adds, “so building trust isn’t exactly a priority.”
Accordingly, news reports have cited several unnamed official and unofficial Chinese sources considered “close to the government” as saying in the wake of the globe crisis that Beijing sees the US obsession with “hotlines”. and crisis management as a way to normalize increasingly brazen behaviour.
For Dr. Cha at CSIS, China’s reluctance to use communications as a crisis management tool points to deep differences in the nature of the two powers’ military systems.
“In our system, our main goal is to prevent an escalation and resolve the situation,” he says. “In the Chinese system, impulse should not be blamed for a mistake and not be the bearer of bad or difficult news. It is not just that the PLA does not want to talk to our army, ”he adds. “It’s that nobody wants to be the one to bring the bad news to the top.”
dr. Green has nearly three decades of experience in the US government when he worked on initiatives aimed at facilitating communications with China.
The two sides reached a Maritime Security Cooperation Agreement in the late 1990s designed to allow the commander of the US Pacific Command to “pass quickly and directly” to his Chinese counterpart when some movement of ships or confrontation threatened to boil over. “It didn’t work,” he says.
In 2001, when bilateral relations were rocked by a mid-air collision over the South China Sea between a Chinese fighter jet and a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane, Dr. Green he was serving on President George W. Bush’s Asia national security team.
“President Bush made 12 attempts to communicate with his counterpart,” Jiang Zemin, “but couldn’t get through,” he says. That was very concerning in the White House at the time, he adds, “but everything suggests that we are no better off 20 or 25 years later.”
In fact, many former US and Chinese officials and experts say the lack of useful communication channels is, if anything, more worrisome today. That’s because the relationship has become more adversarial and tense as China has increased its military might, including its nuclear arsenal, while asserting itself more strongly in its neighborhood, including in Taiwan. At the same time, the US is rebuilding and expanding its military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.
dr. Cha says that, in his opinion, the Chinese are not being “tactical” with their lack of transparency. “I don’t think they want to be unpredictable as a way to discourage you.”
But he says that, as the balloon incident demonstrates, “they don’t want to communicate, so they jump right into disinformation.” He also points out that instead of dialogue, the Chinese have increased provocative actions near Taiwan and intensified their “harassment” of US reconnaissance planes.
“China is supposed to be a great power, but that’s not how great powers act,” he says.
And no one seems to think that China’s approach to great power communications and crisis management will change any time soon, as it is so entrenched in their system.
dr. Green reviews the evolution of crisis management and hotline diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union, noting that it was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the sense that the world had teetered on the nuclear precipice that convinced both sides of the need to open channels of communication.
“The cynical view today would be that we only have to come to the brink of world destruction for the Chinese to realize this,” he says. In fact, he adds, it’s not just cynics who “worry that a Cuban missile crisis may be needed to establish these kinds of crisis management lines” that both sides respond to.
