Diplomacy & Crisis News

Two supercarriers, 2,000 troops, and lots of planes are aimed at keeping Iran’s proxies out of the war zone.

Israel’s use of the deadly chemical would violate international norms.

New export controls, a year after the first, are cautious but pack a punch.

At this week’s summit to celebrate Xi’s signature initiative, the headwinds facing it were clear.

Moscow may temporarily profit from the West’s focus on the Middle East, but navigating its ties in the region will be tricky.

Escalating violence could set Israel and Iran on a collision course.

The culture of intelligence agencies paved the way for disaster. Regional war could revive the nuclear specter that haunted the world in 1973.  

The administration’s regional security concept has collapsed. Does the president know it?

The West has wasted precious time in developing a common strategy.

Holding Putin to account will require offering the court more than just intelligence.

The Israel-Hamas war presents a conundrum for Islamabad.

The White House is trying to balance its commitment to Israel with the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.

In a dramatic display of collective frustration, the streets of Baghdad recently became a theatre of dissent as around 300 Iraqis took to Nisour Square to protest acute water shortages. The demonstrations were held on 18 July near the Turkish embassy and marked a crucial moment in Iraq’s ongoing water crisis. They highlighted mounting tensions in the Middle East over shared water resources, the repercussions of climate change and poor governance.

The protests weren’t an isolated event. They were a manifestation of long-simmering discontent with the water crisis in Iraq. Faced with dwindling access to potable water and a significant decline in river levels, citizens took to the streets to demand accountability from a government perceived to have mishandled the nation’s most precious resource.

Iraq’s water scarcity comes back to its geography. It sits at an intricate intersection of water resources. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, originating in neighbouring Turkey and Iran, respectively, are vital lifelines for Iraq. However, unyielding demand for water upstream has led these countries to construct dams and diversions that diminish flows downstream, devastating Iraq’s water supply.

The Baghdad protests drew attention to the delicate balance needed among nations that share water and the pressing need for cooperation in water management. Turkey’s and Iran’s dams on the Tigris and Euphrates have been contentious because they significantly alter flows downstream in Iraq. Tensions have made it challenging to achieve consensus on equitable sharing agreements, but also made diplomatic efforts to foster cooperation even more urgent.

Water is pivotal in any country’s development, but with Iraq experiencing sharp population growth and rising food demand, it’s feeling the pinch hardest. In Syria and Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates supply the vast majority of water. The Euphrates provides around 85% of Syria’s renewable water, and the two rivers combined make up nearly 100% of Iraq’s supply. Ownership of the rivers’ basins is divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The Tigris originates in Hazar Lake in Anatolia and flows out of Turkey through Syria and Iraq before its confluence with the Euphrates at the Shatt al-Arab canal in southern Iraq. The water conflict in the Euphrates–Tigris basin has been ongoing since the 1960s with Turkey, Syria and Iraq competitively constructing large-scale water-supply schemes.

Diplomatic resolutions are complicated by the unpredictable flow of the Tigris, but Turkey’s control of 88.7% of the Euphrates basin’s water potential is the main strain on water relations. The Euphrates’ salinity has also been increasing beyond sustainable levels on the Syria–Iraq border, hindering irrigation. Yet all three countries have initiated extensive development plans to harness yet more of this water in hopes of achieving food security for their rapidly growing populations.

During the Syrian civil war, water was frequently used as a weapon. In May 2015, for instance, Islamic State took control of the Ramadi Dam in Iraq and reduced the outflow of the Euphrates River, diverting water into Lake Habbaniya. This drained the water supply of several provinces, hurting civilian communities. Other parties to the conflict in Syria also weaponised water access to punish or gain leverage over populations and exacerbated the already dire water crisis.

The war also severely damaged water infrastructure. Plants and pipes were hit directly by fighting, but also indirectly through energy infrastructure. This worsened the humanitarian crisis, leaving many Syrians without access to clean water for drinking, sanitation and agriculture.

Longstanding tension, environmental challenges and the impact of the war have combined to push the water crisis to a critical level. Addressing it will require not only sustainable water management practices in each country on the rivers; it will also require better conflict resolution, infrastructure and humanitarian aid across the region to protect access to clean water.

Meanwhile, climate change looms ominously over the Middle East. Rising temperatures and erratic precipitation patterns have disrupted the water cycle, reduced river flows and increased evaporation rates. Scarcity of water is a common challenge in the Middle East, with downstream states suffering the most, and water often triggers conflict as states compete to control it. While conflict is rare in regions with abundant water, areas with less often fight over vital supply sources. As the climate continues to change, Iraq’s water situation will deteriorate and strain the nation’s capacity even further.

Governance challenges have also affected Iraq’s ability to effectively manage water resources. Decades of conflict have severely hampered the maintenance and development of essential infrastructure. Mismanagement, corruption and a lack of coherent policies have compounded its water crisis, exacerbating discontent among Iraq’s citizens and highlighting the need for robust and accountable governance.

There have been steps in the right direction. Iraq recently joined the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes, becoming the first country in the Middle East to do so. The landmark decision makes Iraq the 49th party to the framework and reflects its commitment to cross-border cooperation on water. In addition, Iraq has chosen to participate in the United Nations Water Conference.

Iraq has also sought to better collaborate with Turkey, and in March they signed an agreement to double water releases from dams on the Tigris River for one month. During the same visit, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated their plans to establish a joint water resources research centre in Baghdad to cooperatively address water challenges and develop sustainable water management strategies.

With the region home to 12 of the most water-scarce countries on the planet, the significance of effective, collaborative water management cannot be understated. Communities in the Middle East rely on water that crosses international boundaries, and cooperation is needed to ensure its equitable access and responsible use.

Arushi Singh is a researcher at the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers and a geopolitical risk analyst for a private consulting firm based in the Middle East.

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

A recent intelligence report published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence about Russia’s attempt to capture the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region is the latest illustration of just how much the conflict in Ukraine is becoming a war of attrition. Russia’s push to mount a new offensive in the east has resulted in substantive “personnel losses” for its military.

In the west, many assume that every inch of Ukrainian land that is liberated brings Russia closer to military defeat and Europe to peace. But Russia has adapted to both internal and external shocks. As of August, it was estimated that Russia had suffered “as many as 120,000 deaths”. That number will have risen in recent weeks. And as the death toll climbs, the ability to replace troops becomes as important as military equipment and technology.

Even though many young men left Russia rather than be sent to the front, the country still has a large pool of young men from which to recruit and has claimed to have enlisted a large number without resorting to general conscription – although the Kremlin’s figures have been questioned by other sources.

But the question remains as to how many Russian military deaths is too many for Putin to retain the support of the Russian people. And it’s a very difficult question to answer. In Russia, the notion of military sacrifice plays an important role in informing national identity.

Russia’s national story is constituted by loss. It has lived and continues to live a tale of self-induced suffering. Even just considering the past century, military losses during the second world war and in Afghanistan – followed by the loss of a sense of identity after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 – have all come to define Russia’s character today. The sense of the “loss of empire” is what has driven Vladimir Putin’s foreign adventurism in Georgia and Ukraine.

For the motherland

For the British people, the death of 179 solidiers in Iraq was traumatic enough for leaders to change course. But military sacrifice has a different meaning in Russia, one that is diametrically opposed to the value the liberal west places on the individual subject.

For Russia, every dead soldier in Ukraine constitutes a step towards victory and reclaiming the great power image of the country’s Soviet past. While the west’s liberal philosophy promulgates the importance of individual rights, Russia is defined by a system of collectivism. Within its value system, the individual subject confers prestige through their self-sacrifice for the collective wellbeing.

In Soviet iconography, tropes of self-sacrifice and fatal injury tend to be closely tied to nationalist ideas of pride and superiority. They pervaded propaganda posters during the “great patriotic war”.

Take the image For the Motherland! (1942) by Aleksei Kokorekin as an example. It conveyed Soviet resilience through the portrayal of a wounded soldier fighting on bravely and showing no sign of physical weakness despite his injuries.

This juxtaposition between the injured self and national status is telling. Kokorekin’s depiction of Soviet heroism was also indicative of the Soviet mentality on death – where the emphasis on physical suffering became a source of national superiority.

Spirituality of loss

This logic permeated the consciousness of subsequent generations and in how they interpreted military sacrifice. For her 1990 study Tsinkovye mal’chiki (translated as Zinky Boys) by Nobel prize-winning writer Svetlana Aleksievich, the author interviewed army veterans from the campaign in Afghanistan. She recalled how in one interview an artillery soldier described war as “a spiritual experience”, while referencing the self-sacrifice of the Red Army during the great patriotic war.

This experience of spirituality through war not only reflects how Russians seek to replay and become part of the past, but speaks to the religious dimension of Russia’s discourse on self-sacrifice. This theme emerged strongly in comments by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in September 2022, in which he was encouraging Russian men to join up.

…if a person dies in the performance of this duty [war], then they have undoubtedly committed an act equivalent to sacrifice. They will have sacrificed themselves for others. And therefore, we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.

His statement rationalised the self-sacrifice of the Russian soldier on the basis that it served a transcendental duty – a Christ-like sacrifice – which would ultimately absolve them from sin. The patriarch’s comments speak to a particular historical tradition of religious masochism – the practice of self-induced physical trauma – in Russia, which dates back to “the early days of Christian Rus’”.

Military martyrdom

Deciphering this internal logic governing the way many Russians deal with loss is imperative to the west’s understanding of the Ukraine war. Putin draws on a language of sacrifice which has its cultural and historical roots in Russian Orthodox thinking and Soviet mythology.

This language reveals something important about Russian psychology when it comes to dealing with news of large-scale casualties on the battlefield. A soldier’s body is a potent mixture of the political and spiritual in the Russian psyche.

The death of that body is for Russia a step towards achieving the fantasy of national prestige. For some Russians (by no means all), the trauma of military loss does not mean that they should stop fighting in Ukraine. On the contrary, it can represent a pathway to martyrdom.

Ben Soodavar is a Researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: kibri_ho / Shutterstock.com

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, has now advanced more than $330 billion, which is about 80% of the lending of the World Bank over that period.

The BRI mainly lends to infrastructure projects, while the World Bank increasingly focuses on ‘capacity-building’ projects, such as education and agriculture reform, but both are operating in the same field of development lending.

It is less widely appreciated that China is also competing with the International Monetary Fund, in providing liquidity or ‘lender of last resort’ finance, principally through its central bank, the People’s Bank of China.

A World Bank working paper published earlier this year estimated that $170 billion had been used to provide liquidity support across 128 rescue lending operations to 13 countries, using currency ‘swap’ arrangements set up since 2009.

In addition to the swap financing, the World Bank study establishes that China’s state-owned banks have provided a further $70 billion in balance-of-payments support to troubled BRI borrowers. This lending and the swap arrangements amount to about 20% of IMF liquidity support over the past decade.

With both the BRI and the liquidity backstop operations of the PBOC, China is turning its chronic and massive balance-of-payments surpluses to its geopolitical advantage.

Unusually among developing nations, China has built up huge foreign exchange reserves, thanks to its model of export-led growth, so it has money to lend. It also has expertise and spare capacity in building infrastructure.

China has attracted representatives of 130 nations to its BRI forum being held in Beijing this week, after the IMF and World Bank meetings held in Marrakech last week.

Currency swap arrangements among central banks were pioneered by the US Federal Reserve at the peak of the 2008–09 global financial crisis, when global liquidity in US dollars almost disappeared. They were designed to ensure that US currency was available for international transactions.

The PBOC followed suit and now has a total of $570 billion in bilateral swap arrangements (including one with the Reserve Bank of Australia for A$40 billion). While these were initially seen as a means of facilitating trade in renminbi, they are increasingly being used to assist BRI borrowers facing financial difficulty.

The biggest users of the country’s liquidity supports have been Argentina, Mongolia, Pakistan and Suriname. Egypt, Nigeria and Russia have also tapped these facilities multiple times.

Argentina, which established a $19 billion swap with the PBOC in 2009, tapped it in both July and August this year for a total of $3 billion to meet a scheduled repayment on a 2018 IMF loan.

Argentina was in desperate straits. It had negotiated a new $44 billion loan from the IMF and was due for a $7.5 billion disbursement, but it had exhausted its foreign exchange reserves, had no funds to meet the repayment on the earlier loan and had no access to private banks.

The IMF will not lend anything to a country that falls into arrears and nor will the World Bank. By using the swap agreement with China to meet a repayment on the old IMF loan, Argentina was able to keep the new IMF loan alive and, when the $7.5 billion disbursement was finally made, the first use of the funds was to repay the PBOC.

Argentina was in a position to use the swap agreement because its finance minister, Sergio Massa, had travelled to China in May and negotiated to double the portion of the swap line over which Argentina had complete discretion to $10 billion.

Reuters quoted the former head of the IMF’s western hemisphere department, Alejandro Werner, saying the deal demonstrated how ‘much more agile Chinese external financial diplomacy can be, and it’s an additional virtue that countries see in maintaining a constructive relationship with China’. It’s unthinkable that the US Federal Reserve would countenance its swap arrangements being used in this way.

The geopolitical advantage that China gains from this transaction may prove ephemeral. The frontrunner in next week’s Argentine elections, the conservative populist Javier Milei, has said that if he wins he will freeze relations with the Chinese government, which he described as an ‘assassin’, and adopt the US dollar as the country’s currency.

China has often been accused of recalcitrance in negotiating the restructure of debts of troubled borrowers. The central issue has been that China won’t accept writing down the value of debts when the IMF and the World Bank also refuse to do so.

China sees the IMF and the World Bank as essentially Western institutions and as its peers in supporting poorer nations. Although China is a member of both funds, their governance is dominated by the Western nations. The managing director position of the IMF is reserved for a European, while the World Bank president is always an American.

China’s voting share in the IMF is less than Japan’s and a third of that of the United States. The US voting share gives it sole veto rights over major IMF decisions. Last week’s IMF and World Bank meetings agreed to an increase in contributions, but the US rejected any increase in China’s share.

The IMF and the World Bank, as a matter of principal, won’t accept any losses on their loans, although they insist that commercial lenders and other national development banks should do so. China has demanded equal treatment with the IMF and the World Bank.

A prolonged impasse on this point over Zambia’s debts was resolved last year with an agreement on an interest-rate grace period and extended repayment terms, rather than writing down the value of the debt.

China last week surprised Sri Lanka’s Western creditors and the IMF by being the first to strike a deal over the rescheduling of debt. The agreement is expected to defer payments on $4.2 billion of debt to China. Other creditors must also agree to debt restructuring before the IMF will release funds from a $2.9 billion facility.

The World Bank notes that Chinese loans differ from IMF loans by being opaque, carrying relatively high interest rates, and being offered exclusively to BRI borrowers.

‘China has developed a system of “Bailouts on the Belt and Road” that helps recipient countries to avoid default, and continue servicing their BRI debts, at least in the short run,’ the paper says.

The paper says China’s role as an international crisis manager is similar to that of the US Treasury during previous Latin American debt crises and the European Union’s stability mechanism that was deployed during the Greek debt crisis in 2010. It helps to avert or resolve defaults by highly indebted borrowers. Its financing is more like ‘bridging finance’, than the extended support provided by the IMF.

The geopolitical advantage gained by China from its international lending is hard to assess. A study by a US-based research institute, Aiddata, examined more than 13,000 BRI projects and found that 35% had implementation problems, such as corruption, labour conflicts, environmental problems or public protest.

However, the same study notes that China is an active financier of infrastructure in low-income countries that struggle to obtain funding from anyone else.

David Uren is a senior fellow at ASPI.

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: John Wreford / Shutterstock.com

One of the key tasks of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to monitor member countries’ economic and financial policies and provide them with sound economic policy advice. This activity is known as surveillance. 

It would be a gross understatement to say that the IMF failed miserably in this task last year, particularly in the United States, the IMF’s largest member country. Despite all the warning signs, it managed not to sound the alarm about the inflationary dangers that lay ahead due to irresponsibly loose fiscal and monetary policies. Unchastised by this experience, the IMF now looks like it is failing in the opposite direction. It is doing so by cheerleading central banks on the need for high-interest rates for longer. Never mind that the world economy is slowing, long-term bond yields are spiking, and cracks are appearing in the global financial system. 

In March 2021, the Biden administration secured passage of its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to support the economy. Added to the previous year’s COVID budget stimulus packages, the Biden stimulus implied that the economy would receive cumulative budget support equivalent to a staggering 20 percent of GDP. Yet unlike former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who characterized this budget policy as the least responsible fiscal policy in the past forty years, the IMF was disappointingly silent in voicing criticism. 

It is equally regrettable that in 2021, the IMF did not take issue with the Federal Reserve’s excessively easy monetary policy that contributed to inflation’s surge to a multi-decade high. This is all the more inexcusable, considering that the Federal Reserve allowed the broad money supply to increase by 40 percent in 2020 and 2021. At the same time, it was fueling asset price and credit market bubbles at home and abroad through aggressive bond-buying activities. 

Fast forward to today, where we find that the IMF is cheerleading the Federal Reserve in its call for high interest rates for longer to reduce inflation. This is the case even though the Fed has raised interest rates by 525 basis points in the short space of eighteen months, and the broad money supply is now contracting at an unprecedented pace. It is also the case that even though the ten-year Treasury bond yields have spiked to 4.75 percent—their highest levels in the past sixteen years—signs of credit restraint abound.

Making the IMF’s acquiescence to the Fed’s currently hawkish monetary policy stance all the more difficult to understand is the fact that the IMF’s own Global Financial Stability Report (GSFR) highlights the point that financial stability risks remain elevated and risks to global growth are skewed to the downside. Among the worrying factors that it notes are the erosion in the capacity of borrowers to repay debt as rate hikes have continued, the challenges faced by the commercial real estate sector as a result of low occupancy rates with defaults on the rise, the worsening of non-bank financial institution vulnerabilities as a result of high-interest rates, and the fact that an increasing share of small and mid-sized firms in both advanced and emerging market economies have barely enough cash to pay their interest expenses.

It seems to have escaped the IMF’s notice that the recent sharp spike in Treasury bond yields could heighten the chances of a financial crisis next year. It could do so by further undermining the banks’ balance sheet position by causing further losses on their bond portfolios. This would seem to be the last thing the banks need when they are likely to be hit by a wave of defaults, especially on their commercial real estate lending.

The IMF also has forgotten that monetary policy operates with long lags. Based on past experience, it is only now that we should expect the full impact of the Fed’s earlier tightening to occur. This would suggest that the prudent course for the Fed and other central banks would be to pause and wait to see the full effect of their earlier aggressive monetary policy tightening. Yet the IMF is urging continued monetary policy hawkishness.

If the IMF again fails in its surveillance function of U.S. economic policies, it will do serious damage to its credibility. After all, the United States is the world's largest economy, and an unnecessarily deep economic recession to regain inflation control will send seismic reverberations throughout the world economy.

Desmond Lachman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was previously a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging-market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.

Image: Shutterstock. 

In the early weeks of the war, peace was still possible before the unimaginable loss of life, the devastation of infrastructure, and the loss of land in Ukraine. That peace was possible three times: in talks in Belarus, in talks mediated by then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, and, most promisingly, in talks in Istanbul. In all three, the war could have been ended on terms that satisfied Ukraine. In all three, Ukraine was willing to renounce membership in NATO. And, in all three, the United States blocked the negotiations.

Though the negotiated terms satisfied Ukrainian goals, they did not satisfy U.S. goals. The United States told Ukraine to go on fighting instead of negotiating and promised weapons, training, and intelligence for “as long as it takes.” The three-day war that might have ended in Belarus and the weeks-long war that produced a signed tentative agreement in Istanbul became a now year-and-a-half-long war.

The United States pushed Ukraine into a disastrous counteroffensive, knowing that it “didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces." Instead, U.S. officials counted on “Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness” and “envisioned Kyiv accepting the casualties.”

There is a dawning realization in the political West that the war is not going to end with a military victory for Ukraine and that it is not going to end by attaining the goals necessary to force Russia to concede Ukraine’s key demands at the negotiating table. It is long past the moment when Ukraine is in the best position “on the battlefield [to] be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

Hundreds of thousands of lives and limbs after peace could have been attained in Istanbul, Ukraine will likely be forced to sign an agreement on the same terms—but worse—than it could have signed in Istanbul. As in Istanbul, Ukraine will still have to guarantee neutrality, but they will do so without at least parts of the Donbas, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, all of which they could have kept at that time.

Since Istanbul, Ukraine has suffered the loss of lives, limbs, and land only to sign an agreement that they were willing to sign at the start of the war. That is the tragedy. The whole war was fought to end the same way it could have ended weeks into the war, but on worse territorial terms and with horrendously greater loss of life.

The war’s beginning was Russia’s fault; the war’s end will be America’s.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative, as well as other outlets.

Image: Shutterstock. 

There has been much speculation about an imminent U.S.-China rapprochement. President Joe Biden predicted an approaching “thaw” in U.S.-China relations that would open the path to a better relationship. This year, the Biden administration has sent a series of top officials to China to actualize the thaw. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Climate Envoy John Kerry visited the Middle Kingdom quickly to demonstrate their commitment to this new direction. It remains to be seen if the Biden administration can convince Beijing to engage in substantive cooperation. 

At this point, it has become a cliché to say that Beijing’s decision-making process is a black box. Nevertheless, the aphorism holds. The conversations and policy debates within Zhongnanhai (the compound that houses the CCP leadership) remain a mystery to outside observers. The best approach to predicting how China will respond to these new advances is by understanding their recent behavior. A study of recent events demonstrates that the most significant barrier for Washington is China’s fundamentally different approach to cooperation. 

The Two Lists & Three Bottom Lines

The Biden administration has consistently aimed to create space for areas of cooperation even when the U.S.-China relationship was at its most tense. In 2021, Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman went to China to defend U.S. interests. Even in a tense conversation, Sherman stressed the importance of cooperation, highlighting climate change, drug control, and international and regional hotspot issues, as well as strengthening crisis management capacity and general conflict avoidance. The Chinese response was less than enthusiastic.

Rather than embrace Sherman’s proposals, her Chinese counterparts countered with what has been called the “two lists” and “three bottom lines.” The two lists primarily include an inventory of grievances the United States must “unconditionally” reverse to be rewarded with good relations with China. The demands included ending restrictions on Confucius Institutes, withdrawing the extradition request for Meng Wanzhou, and lifting visa restrictions for CCP members, government officials, and students. 

The more concerning elements came from the “three bottom lines,” the first being: “The U.S. must not challenge, slander, or even attempt to subvert the path and system of socialism with Chinese characteristics—this is a core interest.” It is essential to understand that socialism with Chinese characteristics is not just China’s development strategy but contains fundamental revisionist and coercive elements that undermine U.S. interests. If the United States adhered to this bottom line, it would almost certainly entail abandoning U.S. assistance to Taiwan and American support for allies and partners in the region. 

In the context of the two lists and three bottom lines, Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it more bluntly when he stated, “The U.S. side wants the climate change cooperation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-U.S. relations. However, if the oasis is all surrounded by deserts, then sooner or later, the ‘oasis’ will be desertified. China-U.S. cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations.”

These demands indicate a larger pattern of how Beijing sees engagement with Washington. Beijing prefers a rigid linkage between the two spheres of cooperation and competition. This experience shows that unless Washington is ready to surrender in the great-power competition, China will not cooperate even on issues of converging interests.

The Four To-Do Lists

A year later, the Biden administration once again sought to delink areas of cooperation with Beijing and lower tensions. When Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Secretary Blinken in Bali, Yi did not present Blinken with their original two lists and three bottom lines but instead gave Blinken a new configuration known as the “four to-do lists.” While never fully released, the first three lists were screeds against American “wrongdoings” and other perceived transgressions. However, the fourth list seemed to offer the administration some hope. It was a list of eight areas of mutual cooperation, including climate change, public health, and people-to-people exchange. Even if this list was to be a bright light, the follow-through on the Chinese side has been non-existent.

However, the U.S.-China meetings in Bali were a turning point in the relationship. Since Bali, China has abandoned these lists. However, this should not be mistaken for a shift in policy but rather a shift in tactics and rhetoric. U.S.-China cooperation is still essentially non-existent because China does not value delinking cooperation. Despite the recent high-level visits, the United States and China have failed to produce substantive cooperation.

U.S.-China Crisis Hotline

Even though China’s list diplomacy has primarily stopped and its rhetoric has cooled, its approach has not changed. How Beijing has handled the U.S.-China hotline and other critical communication channels is a good illustration. Crisis hotlines have been around for some time. The goal is to provide a quick and direct line of communication for policymakers to avoid misunderstandings and reduce tensions. During the Cold War, crisis communications were a reasonably reliable way for the United States and the Soviet Union to communicate during crises. These were never a means for ending rivalries or resolving disputes but simply a mechanism to manage competition. While not a form of diplomacy like the previous examples, China’s stance on this form of communication demonstrates its broader approach to cooperation. 

Initially formed in 2008, the U.S.-China hotline now lies dormant. When the Biden administration decided to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. airspace earlier this year, Defense Department officials called the hotline to communicate with the Chinese military. The Chinese refused to pick up the phone. Moreover, the Chinese military has refused over a dozen meeting requests from the United States at multiple levels since 2021. The most recent rejection came this summer when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sought a meeting with Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu. Blinken pushed to establish a direct military line of communication between Washington and Beijing, and President Xi Jinping flatly rejected the initiative. 

Like the other examples, the Chinese have said they will resume crisis communications when the United States has “created a proper atmosphere.” While crisis hotlines are more of a tool used during competition and less of an area of explicit cooperation like climate change or global pandemics, this example still indicates how Beijing approaches working with Washington. Crisis hotlines do not require China to sacrifice any national interests. All the Biden administration seeks is that they answer the phone. China’s reluctance to engage in an area vital to managing competition demonstrates that these two countries’ approaches to cooperation are far apart.

The Australian Example

This fundamental difference in approaches to cooperation ultimately explains why the recent visits to China were disappointing. However, this does not mean U.S.-China relations will enter a doom cycle. The China-Australia case might illuminate how the United States should approach this dilemma.

In 2020, China slapped Australia with a laundry list of tariffs for criticizing China. These tariffs were imposed on critical Australian exports like coal, wine, red meat, timber, and an 80 percent tax on barely exports—a severe hit to the Australian economy. Similar to the American experience, as Australia sought to engage with China, Australian officials were hit with a list totaling fourteen demands before cooperation could proceed. Even when Beijing welcomed the change in Canberra from the conservative-controlled Scott Morrison government to the new Labor-dominated Anthony Albanese premiership, China still issued four new demands. In response, Prime Minister Albanese also emphasized cooperation by stating, “We will cooperate with China where we can… But we will stand up for Australia’s interests when we must.” China’s demands failed to soften Canberra.

Fast forward to today. China has announced it is lifting its harsh barley tariffs, and negotiations are underway to remove a 218 percent tariff on Australian wine. Since 2020, Australia has met none of China’s demands. Instead, it released a defense review calling for the modernization of the Australian Defence Force and entered into a new security partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom (AUKUS).

The explanation for China’s reversal is simple. Canberra demonstrated its resolve by boosting competitive policies and illustrating that Chinese coercion will not get Australia to the negotiating table. When Canberra decided to take a firm stance, Beijing adjusted. As the United States continues to think about diplomacy with China, Washington should recognize the precedence set by this scenario. 

The Dead End of Engagement

Every administration has sought engagement with China, with varying levels of success. High-level diplomatic visits can have utility. The United States should continue meeting and talking with Chinese officials. Normalizing communication and dialogue can help prevent a complete deterioration of relations, and it costs the United States very little. It can help manage our competition and stymie a misunderstanding. While the United States and China have accomplished no concrete initiatives, they have established several consultation mechanisms that might grease the wheels of further engagement. However, policymakers must be clear-eyed about how the Chinese view engagement and cooperation. Since the Biden administration has taken office, U.S. officials have made several overtures to Beijing about cooperation. China’s unwillingness to delink areas of competition from realms of cooperation and its demand for unconditional concessions is the most significant barrier to a U.S.-China rapprochement. Beijing’s recent behavior demonstrates that China is not interested in reciprocal reconciliation. Washington must not sacrifice our interests for a goal that may be unattainable.  

Connor Fiddler is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. His research focuses on U.S.-China relations, U.S. alliance management, and Asian security. His research has been published in The Hill, The Diplomat, RealClearDefense, and American Purpose, among others. He tweets at @Connor_Fiddler.

Image: Shutterstock. 

Will North Korea give up its nuclear weapons? Probably not in the near future. However, it does not mean North Korea will never return to the negotiation table. Despite several denuclearization pledges by North Korean leaders and U.S. diplomatic efforts to guarantee the regime’s security, North Korea is unlikely to move to a complete denuclearization. North Korea has had several agreements with the United States, including the Agreed Framework in 1994, Six-Party Talks from 2003 to 2009, the “Leap-Day Deal” in 2012, and the Singapore Summit in 2018, but it has failed to implement those agreements.

One of the most challenging questions in U.S. diplomacy is persuading Pyongyang to implement the agreements. When we look at these agreements, we find that they have a similar pattern. A crisis catalyzed talks, which stalled for a considerable period but eventually reached a consensus. Nonetheless, when they reached the implementation stage, the agreements collapsed. The United States has been involved in diplomatic engagements with North Korea to de-escalate the crisis but primarily focused on intensifying sanctions and deterrence when North Korea conducted nuclear and missile provocations.

It is essential to understand this pattern when analyzing U.S. agreements with North Korea. In particular, the process of reaching an agreement includes two different phases: crisis and negotiation. What caused the crisis each time before the U.S. obtained a deal with North Korea? In what conditions and circumstances did the denuclearization dialogue proceed after the crisis? What factors led to an agreement on denuclearization with North Korea, and what conditions were agreed upon? The key issues here are the crisis in the process leading to the denuclearization negotiation and the failure of the implementation, finally leading to the agreement's collapse. So, it is necessary to assess the three-decade-long U.S. diplomacy toward the denuclearization of North Korea and its failed efforts through the crisis and negotiation phases.

This pattern may also emerge during the Biden administration. Even with Pyongyang’s hardline policy of “heads-on breakthrough,” this crisis may catalyze new talks with North Korea. Of course, it does not necessarily mean that there would be another agreement between the United States and North Korea. The Biden administration has not pursued any active North Korea policy to break out of this pattern. President Biden reiterated the goal of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and described his North Korea policy as a “calibrated and practical approach.” 

However, it looks more like Obama’s “strategic patience,” a wait-and-see approach where Washington would not move until North Korea changed its course of action first. Furthermore, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the strategic rivalry with China, the Biden administration lacks the time and interest to focus on North Korea.

The problem is that North Korea is not likely to engage the United States either. Pyongyang has recently recognized the return of the Cold War order in international relations and seeks to take advantage of it on the Korean Peninsula. This is the reason for Pyongyang’s efforts to improve ties with China and Russia. A crisis may become a catalyst again, but it would be difficult to get out of the old pattern. So, the stalemate will continue.

Jihwan Hwang is a professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Seoul.

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