What a Three-Part Diplomatic Push Reveals about U.S. Strategy on Asia

By David Ignatius

Over the next week, we’ll see an unusual road show dramatizing the Biden’s administration’s foreign-policy strategy for Asia.

The week’s meetings with senior officials of China, India and Japan will highlight the three essential power centers in the Indo-Pacific. By seeking greater engagement with all three, President Biden is attempting to create a more stable strategic balance. Rather than walking a bipolar tightrope between Washington and Beijing, the United States is trying to build a matrix of relationships, with the United States as a key interlocutor in each node.

Make no mistake: The strategic challenge that will animate the three sets of meetings is how to avoid a disastrous conflict between the United States and China. Dialogue with China should reduce uncertainties and potential risks in what will be a continuing Sino-American competition; partnering with India should enhance India’s ability to deter China, and U.S. deterrence, as well; deeper cooperation with Japan and its neighbors, South Korea and the Philippines, should help buffer the danger of a catastrophic U.S.-China collision.

The headline event will be Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing, the first visit to China’s capital by a secretary of state in five years. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, summed up its importance in an interview with me this week: “The secretary’s meeting is the opening of a new phase in the relationship. Both sides have recognized that the absence of conversation is dangerous.”

China has been signaling its readiness for improved cooperation since the meeting in Vienna last month between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi. The frank discussions there opened the way for the trip by Blinken, who is likely to be followed soon to Beijing by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen.

What’s ahead on the U.S.-China agenda is fuzzy: U.S. officials hope for greater economic cooperation, perhaps including an initiative to provide debt relief for poor countries. The United States has encouraged Chinese mediation of a settlement of the Ukraine war that doesn’t reward Russia’s aggression. A breakthrough seems unlikely while Ukraine is waging its counteroffensive. One tantalizing possibility is talks about limits on AI, which Chinese President Xi Jinping said last month needs “a new security architecture.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington this week could be the week’s real strategic centerpiece. India’s population is now bigger than China’s, and its economy is growing much faster. India will keep its independence as a swing power, but Modi’s visit will demonstrate that it leans increasingly toward American-led rule of law – with growing economic, intelligence and military ties to the United States.

“India could be the most important bilateral relationship for the United States in the 21st century,” argued a senior admin- istration official. He explained in an interview that where strategists talked a decade ago about America and China as the “G-2,” the world’s only superpowers, the U.S. relationship with a rapidly growing India may provide an alternative G-2.

New Delhi won’t be an easy partner for Washington. The prickly Indian bureaucracy can be resistant to transparency and cooperation. Modi’s Hindu nationalism has frightened minorities in India, and his governing style sometimes verges on authoritarian. But India remains a genuine democracy, and its elites increasingly favor close ties with the United States.

The high ground in America’s future competition with China will be technology, and here India’s deepening ties with the United States may be a trump card. The Biden National Security Council has framed an “initiative on critical and emerging technology” with India that, according to a January NSC fact sheet, will involve bilateral cooperation on AI, quantum technologies, advanced wireless systems, semiconductor supply chains, space systems and other technologies. That’s a potential game changer.

What has pushed Modi toward Wash- ington is his mounting concern about Chinese aggression on his border. Though few Americans know it, China and India fought a bloody border skirmish in June 2020 in the Galwan Valley, in the Himalayan border region. The two sides avoided gunfire, but they fought a grisly medieval battle with spears and shields that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.

Washington has shared intelligence with Modi about China’s rapid buildup along the border, including a new army division headquarters and road and rail networks for supply, according to the senior administration official. But Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cautions in a recent Foreign Affairs article: “New Delhi will never involve itself in any U.S. confrontation that does not directly threaten its own security.” Washington’s partnership with Delhi may be deepening, but it won’t become a NATO-like alliance.

The sleeper in the new Asia power game is Japan, which is combining its growing military power with supple diplomacy to mend fences with Asian neighbors that share Tokyo’s fear of Beijing. On Thursday, Sullivan met in Tokyo for two trilateral strategy sessions – first a South Korea/U.S./Japan meeting, followed by a Philippines/U.S./Japan session. “We have a diplomatic and political tail wind, and China knows it,” Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, said in an interview this week.

Competition between China and the United States will be inescapable in the Indo-Pacific region. It will probably get more intense through most of our lifetimes. But diplomacy is producing some needed speed bumps – and a widening safety net – that should reduce the likelihood of a fatal crackup.