Obama should clarify US relationship with China

Despite its entanglement in crises in the Middle East and Europe, Barack Obama’s administration insists Washington will not alter its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, which aims to bolster the United States’ strategic goals in the region. Next week when Obama meets with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, there will be more at stake than U.S.-China relations.

The Obama-Xi meeting will likely cover several key issues, ranging from climate change to cybersecurity and North Korea. But perhaps more crucial will be the debate over what Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice has called “a new model of major power relations.” A follow-up to the two-day short-sleeve summit in Sunnylands, California, in June 2013, the Beijing session will be watched by U.S. allies and rivals alike. While the phrase was introduced by Beijing, both Obama and Xi spoke of big power relations after their meeting in California, leading many to question the rationale for using such terminology. In Beijing, Obama should seize the opportunity to reassure Washington’s allies and partners in the region by laying out a clearer vision of the United States’ interpretation of the concept. Instead of abandoning the proposed model, the U.S. should strike the right tone and set expectations to build on the pivot to allow Washington and Beijing to work together on key regional and global issues.

Since the Sunnylands summit, the Obama administration has tried to add nuance to its understanding of the term and reassure allies — including Japan and the Philippines — that the United States does not intend to elevate China to a group-of-two status. “What we mean by a new model is not the notion of some sort of G-2 condominium but rather a conviction that the U.S. as an enduring power and China as a rising and important nation,” the U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Daniel Russel, said earlier this year. “We are not in the business of recreating the Cold War … China’s growth and development can occur in a way that contributes net-net to the prosperity and the stability and the interests of the region and ultimately the world … One of the vehicles that helps us achieve that is direct, candid and high-level dialogue with China.”

Secretary of State John Kerry has sought to further distance the Obama administration from the major power model. “Make no mistake,” he said in remarks at the East-West Center in Hawaii, “this new model relationship of great powers is not going to happen by engaging in a slogan or pursuing a sphere of influence. It will be defined by more and better cooperation on shared challenges. And it will be defined by a mutual embrace of the rules, the norms and institutions that have served both of our nations and the region so well.”

So how should we read the incremental rhetoric on this major power model?

First, the catch-up game in Washington with regard to the U.S.-China relationship is similar to the confusion over the true nature of the pivot to Asia. Obama and China’s then-President Hu Jintao agreed to respect each other’s core interests during a similar summit in 2009. Washington did not see this as a concession because it was essentially maintaining its one-China policy, in place since the 1970s, which does not look to intervene overtly on issues regarding Tibet or Taiwan (unless the latter was attacked by Beijing). China, however, saw this as an opening in U.S. policy that respected Beijing’s regional influence.

Kerry’s remarks in Hawaii unambiguously upended this notion of spheres of influence. In addition, he took China to task on its assertiveness in regional maritime disputes in the East and South China seas. “We firmly oppose the use of intimidation and coercion or force to assert a territorial claim by anyone in the region,” Kerry said. “And we firmly oppose any suggestion that freedom of navigation and overflight and other lawful uses of the sea and airspace are privileges granted by a big state to a small one.” 

Japan and the Philippines, the two U.S. allies with the most acute maritime disputes with China, welcomed Kerry’s comments. Tokyo was equally pleased when Obama, during his visit to Tokyo in April, affirmed that the Senkaku Islands (referred to as the Diaoyu by China) were covered under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which binds the U.S. to come to Japan’s assistance in the event that China seizes the islands.

While the U.S. has been trying to recalibrate the notion of major power relations since Sunnylands, the Beijing summit offers the Obama administration a great opportunity to narrow the communication gap on the rebalance as well as the proposed new model. Obama should use the summit to clearly explain the thinking and goals behind the U.S. rebalancing policy. He should reassure Beijing that the rebalance seeks to engage China on a range of economic and security issues. This counters a dominant interpretation in China that the pivot is largely a military strategy aimed at containing China’s rise.

Similarly, Obama should build on Kerry’s remarks and stress the notion that great powers have great responsibilities — including adherence to international norms and working with international institutions. This would help frame U.S. opposition to Chinese coercion in the maritime domain against its allies. More pointedly, Obama should stress his displeasure with China’s decision to unilaterally impose an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea last November. This is important both to reassure Japan and to discourage China from imposing a similar zone in the South China Sea.

Finally, Obama needs to leverage China’s preference for a new model of major power relations to press for more transparency and cooperation on resolving the region’s other key security challenges, including North Korea’s expanding nuclear weapons program. While U.S.-China relations have improved over the past few years, huge gaps and strategic uncertainties remain. By defining his administration’s strategic goals and expectations behind these catchphrases, Obama can regain lost momentum in relations with China as well as his pivot to Asia.