For US, relationship a zero-sum game: China Daily editorial

Citing catastrophic global consequences of potential missteps, former US treasury secretary Larry Summers told the 2024 Aspen Security Forum that "managing successfully the relationship between the United States and China is our most important global challenge".

Summers' remarks reflect the growing global concerns about the recent trajectory of the fraught China-US relationship, which appears to be in an unsalvageable nosedive.

Yet Washington doesn't seem to have the patience for caution.

As both US State Secretary Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan indicated at the forum, the present US administration is not in the mood for that kind of crisis management, let alone fence-mending. It is not only making its own "all-of-government" efforts to counter China, but also doing everything possible to isolate it internationally.

China featured heavily in Aspen, but mostly as a prevailing security threat. According to Blinken and Sullivan, Beijing is enabling Russia's military operation in Ukraine and threatening to "invade" the island of Taiwan.

The US secretary of state claimed that China was "working closely" with Moscow to enable Russia to work around Western sanctions. While Sullivan sought to plant the Stars and Stripes in the moral high ground by saying "We think China should stop because we think it is profoundly outside of the bounds of decent conduct by nation states".

Which is rich given the US' culpability for the conflict.

While Beijing has repeatedly reiterated neutrality regarding the ongoing conflict and appealed for a negotiated end to it, the US and its allies have sought to prolong the hostilities engineered by Washington and decried China's normal trade with Russia as support for its military.

They have been trying to build an image of China as the leading supplier of dual-use goods that sustain Russia's military industrial base. They are hence extending the so-called "small yard with a tall fence" Washington originally designed for its technological blockade against Beijing to the security realm.

And, not for the first time, the chief US diplomat tried to take advantage of the Ukraine conflict to drive a wedge between Beijing and Brussels, by disingenuously saying that China cannot say it wants better relations with Europe "when it is actually helping to fuel the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War".

Sullivan, for his part, sought to do the same with India, cautioning it against deepening ties with Russia and China. "Russia is getting closer and closer to China and as the junior partner to China is not necessarily going to be a great reliable friend to India in a future contingency or crisis," he said.

In the meantime, he announced greater US support for the Philippines in the latter's standoff with China in the South China Sea. The US will do what is necessary to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on Ren'ai Reef that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll, he declared. The priority given to the Philippine resupply missions runs counter to his correct observation that "de-escalation" of the tensions between China and the Philippines is "the most important thing right now", since those missions will inevitably be escalatory.

The remarks of the two US officials at the forum only serve to show that for the current US administration managing the relationship with China means stepping up confrontation with Beijing by means of its allies. To that end it wants them to have no cooperation with Beijing, whatever the cost they might have to bear for their enabling efforts to help the US to gain a competitive advantage.