From the meeting that Presidents Xi and Biden had in Bali last year to their summit on Wednesday near San Francisco, the watchword was the same: calm and “stabilize” Sino-American relations. Since, from Bali to San Francisco, these relations have not improved at all, Washington and Beijing are today installed in a posture where, far from seeking lasting solutions to their confrontation and to global challenges, they are sticking to to try to police their wars of influence and their major maneuvers of mutual destabilization. As a leitmotif, Joe Biden and his entourage repeated that it was a question of “managing rivalry responsibly so that it does not turn into conflict”. Xi Jinping has shown himself willing to play the game. Fierce competition to impose his hegemony, yes, but with civility, as much as possible. Relations between the two superpowers, one an increasingly assertive post-Orwellian dictatorship, the other a drifting democracy, will continue to become strained. As if there was a calculated acceptance, on both sides, of seeing things get even worse.
Humanity is in a “labyrinth” of problems and conflicts and cannot find anyone to help it get out of it, “neither the Westerners nor their many adversaries,” writes Amin Maalouf in his latest opus (The labyrinth of the lost). Breaking with the defeatism induced by a realpolitik without horizon, we dream with him of “rethinking in depth the way in which our world is governed”, outside of “endless struggles for supremacy”.
The “real progress” that Joe Biden welcomed at the end of the meeting held on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is rather relative. First: Beijing has only vaguely committed, which it had already done without keeping any promises, to fight against the illegal export of components used in the manufacture of fentanyl, this opioid responsible for a health crisis serious public in the United States and Canada. Second: while the planet is gasping for air, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world have promised, but nothing more, to “work together” to fight global warming. The most concrete “progress”: reopening of the communication channels between the armies of the two countries, closed by Beijing in response to the visit to Taiwan in 2022 by Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House of Representatives. Which is certainly not without importance given the build-up military in the South China Sea and the multifaceted tensions surrounding the hyper-delicate Taiwanese question, but does not necessarily lay the foundations for real detente.
However, the terrain will be even more explosive in 2024, when elections will be held on January 13 in Taiwan, where the leading presidential candidate defends autonomist positions that enrage Beijing. Year of all dangers? Against a backdrop of military bravado, Xi will not stop hammering home the inevitability of reunification, while a presidential campaign will take place in the United States where the Republicans, with or without Donald Trump, will loudly compete with the Democrats in rhetoric hostile to Chinese expansionism.
In 2024, the White House will remain on the side of Ukraine, as it will remain unwaveringly on the side of Israel, even if Joe Biden once again becomes an apostle of the two-state solution. In the same way that China will continue to support Vladimir Putin, this annoying vassal that Beijing basically neither wants to see win nor lose in Ukraine, just as it will work to consolidate its ties with Iran and present itself as a hero of the Global South, taking advantage of the growing disenchantment with the United States.
The main obstacle to a radical deterioration in Sino-American relations remains of course the economic and financial interdependence of the two countries. She is, all things considered, the glue that keeps Xi and Biden from coming to blows. If the “dictator”, to use the word dared by Mr. Biden at the end of the press conference, gave measured signs of affability during this summit, it is because he had an interest in being more conciliatory while that the Chinese economy is faltering and that American sanctions are making it suffer.
In San Francisco, presiding over a gala dinner on Wednesday evening in the presence of the elite of Silicon Valley and the business community, Mr. Xi was therefore as much on a commercial mission as a political one. Giving him a standing ovation, the elite told him that China remained essential to maintaining its profit margins. Also, although Washington may talk about “decoupling”, the approach can only be partial, given the dependence of the Western consumer economy on made in China and to supply chains that largely pass through China. Between rivalry and complementarity, MM. Biden and Xi have done little more than present us with the hackneyed but well-choreographed spectacle of a world with perspectives reduced to its binary ordering and its “endless struggles for supremacy.”