It’s working; just not like what was anticipated: The sudden rise of Bilaterals

So the weekend is upon us and this week's 'Alan's Newsletter' Substack piece is also upon us. Enjoy, and if you do, please feel free to subscribe

Well, in my last Substack Post, 'Maintaining Entanglement' APEC Discussions and More’, I noted a relatively strong hint that President Xi Jinping and President Biden were likely to meet at the margins of the APEC Summit. Well, it does seem as though this bilateral tete-a-tete is now on. In fact the White House announced just that this Friday morning. As recently noted in NikkeiAsia:

It will mark the seventh engagement between the two leaders since Biden became president in January 2021, but only their second face-to-face meeting over the period, partly due to COVID travel restrictions.

The US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, further reinforced the need for such an encounter. Yellen has worked for some time to stabilize the bilateral relationship and encourage a resumption of talks between the two including the two leaders. In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post Yellen set out what she sees as the serious need for such a leader summit: 

As a foundation, our two nations have an obligation to establish resilient lines of open communication and to prevent our disagreements from spiraling into conflict. But we also know that our relationship cannot be circumscribed to crisis management. Together, the United States and China represent 40 percent of the global economy. A constructive economic relationship can not only serve as a stabilizing force for the overall relationship but also benefit workers and families in both countries and beyond.

Not surprisingly, given her position as Secretary of the Treasury, Yellen focuses on economic prosperity and well being. She also emphasizes what she sees as unfair practices by China: 

But healthy competition requires a rules-based, level playing field. This week, I will speak to my counterpart about our serious concerns with Beijing’s unfair economic practices, including its large-scale use of non-market tools, its barriers to market access and its coercive actions against U.S. firms in China.

While Yellen has focused on global economic issues, other officials have targeted regional and global security tensions.  There is no question that high, very high on the US wish list, as described in the NYTimes is an agreement that the two leaders could possibly announce that would signal the restart of military-to-military discussions: 

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., told reporters on Friday that re-establishing the military dialogue between two of the world’s most powerful militaries was a goal of the Biden administration, and that he had sent a letter to his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Liu Zhenli, “to say that I would like to do that.

These discussions have been suspended by China following then Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. 

Meanwhile, it appears that another bilateral summit is a real possibility for the APEC Summit. This bilateral would be between President Xi of China and Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kashida. As reported in the South China Morning Post (SCMP): 

China’s top diplomat met Japan’s top security adviser in Beijing on Thursday, amid reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida might meet in San Francisco during the Apec summit next week. 

In a just earlier piece from NikkeiAsia:

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, with Kishida likely stressing the importance of continued dialogue toward resolving bilateral disagreements. … In his meeting with Xi, Kishida is expected to stress the importance of continued dialogue toward resolving bilateral disagreements. Relations between their countries have suffered recently over the release of treated radioactive wastewater from Japan's disaster-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and China's subsequent import curbs on Japanese seafood, as well as the October arrest of a Japanese executive at drugmaker Astellas Pharma in China.

As the SCMP article continues:

If it happens, the talks would be the first one-on-one meeting between Xi and Kishida since November last year in Bangkok when they affirmed stable bilateral ties on the sidelines of the Apec forum. It was the first time leaders from the two nations had met face to face in three years.

Now this slightly surprising possibility comes on top of a decision by China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (Korea) to restart the Trilateral Summit that has been suspended since 2019 due in part to political tensions between Korea and Japan and maritime tensions between China and Japan near the Senkakus. 

So, how are we to interpret this ‘blossoming’ of bilaterals? Well, it seems to me it describes the state of global summitry at this current moment. While I never bought the view  - often promoted by opinion columnists  from the FT, that these global summits were no more than ‘talk shops’, they have struggled to advance collective global governance policies in climate change, financial reform, debt management and AI and digital governance.  These summits have been impacted by the rise in geopolitical tensions most particularly between the US and China. Collective action has been ‘slowed’, if not stopped by contending positions and a growing distemper between US and China. In addition, there has been strong and growing frustration from Global South leaders. What they see and bristle at is that their countries are expected to tackle issues and to contribute to solutions - like climate change, that they have had little to create in the first place.  

For these and other reasons global governance progress though global summits such as the G20 and APEC have been hard to find. But the opportunities have not been totally foregone. These leader gatherings following the many ministerial, working groups and special gatherings have encouraged leaders to set up key bilateral meetings. These bilateral meetings at the ‘margins’ of various leader summits have provided the settings for leaders to tackle problems that have harmed or largely ended communications as the evident instance of US-China relations.   

So for the moment the margins have become the center. It is not perfect but it is something valuable.