“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war” is a quote by former British prime minister Winston Churchill that fits the rationale for the summit this week between President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping.  After all, since their last meeting a year ago, U.S.-China relations have deteriorated, especially over strategic competition on the economic and national security fronts.  It’s better for the leaders to “jaw,” and hopefully that will delay “war.” 

In November 2022, the presidential optics at the Bali summit were telling.  Cameras caught Biden smiling anxiously as he approached Xi, while the Chinese dictator appeared dour and confident, almost dismissive of the American.  At the time, President Xi was fresh from the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress, where he had gained an unprecedented third term as chairman and where he announced his goal of world dominance, stating, “The East [China] is rising while the West [the U.S.] is declining.”

Biden came to Bali promoting universal human rights, climate change mitigation, and the Western international order and complaining about China’s “coercive and increasingly aggressive actions” toward Taiwan.  Xi quickly dismissed Biden’s other agenda items to focus on “the Taiwan question,” which he said is a “red line that must not be crossed in China-US relations.” 

Expect the San Francisco meeting to address Xi’s “red line,” especially given Taiwan’s presidential election, set for January 2024, which could move the island closer to permanent independence from China.  Of course, Biden isn’t especially reassuring for Xi because of the American’s repeated ambiguous promises to come to Taiwan’s aid if attacked by Beijing.

On other national security issues, at their last meeting, Biden and Xi agreed that “a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won.”  However, since that meeting, the Chinese regime increased its arsenal of operational nuclear warheads to 500 and is on track to field 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, according to the Pentagon.  Will Biden demand Beijing join a new nuclear arms reduction agreement?

Still other security issues on Mr. Biden’s agenda are likely to be rebuffed: the Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, the crisis in the South China Sea and North Korea.  Don’t expect Xi to show Biden any daylight between him and Moscow regarding the Ukraine war, nor is Xi about to slight Iran over the Israel-Hamas war, which ships China three million barrels of oil every day.  Further, Beijing considers the South China Sea its sovereign area, and there’s no incentive to rein in North Korea’s ballistic missile tests, nor Pyongyang’s ammunition for Russia in the Ukraine war.

The strategic trade issues between the two nations are dismal as well.  President Xi’s economy is struggling with low consumer confidence, a true real estate crises with global implications, weak domestic demand, and falling exports.  It faces a period of deflation.  He needs Biden to cooperate and give him relief.

What Beijing desperately wants is to return to the time a decade ago when our countries enjoyed amicable trade relations, and Beijing was prospering.  However, in recent years, the U.S. imposed export controls on advanced technology in response to China’s retaliatory economic coercion, its unrelenting theft of our intellectual property, and Beijing’s expanding data sovereignty policies as well as scrutiny of Western businesses.  Don’t expect Biden to grant any relief to China, given that he faces a tough re-election bid and a poor economy as well.

On a related issue, Biden will press Xi to sign onto international climate commitments, Biden’s headline issue, which Xi will ignore, given that Beijing elected an energy transition strategy that is much slower than virtually every other significant country in the world.

In conclusion, I don’t expect the Biden-Xi summit at APEC this week to devolve into a shouting match, much like what happened at the Alaska summit of March 2021.  Rather, Xi will mostly ignore Biden’s insistence on a host of issues, albeit as Biden repeats what he said after the Bali meeting that “we share responsibility ... to show that China and the United States can manage our differences.”

Those are fine words, but likely they promise a do-nothing summit, other than “jaw-jaw,” which at this point, given the strategic economic and national security troubles in our world, is much better than “war-war.” 

Mr. Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author ten books.  The most recent is Divided We Stand: The Globalist Scheme for a One-World Government.

Image: 李 季霖 via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.