The long-awaited virtual meeting on Monday between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping was less about improving frosty relations, and more about avoiding further escalation of what some see as a developing Cold War between the US and China. There was no breakthrough, but none had been expected. The two leaders could not even agree a joint statement afterwards.
Instead they separately listed areas of disagreement on trade, regional security friction and Taiwan and traded veiled and not-so-veiled threats. Xi warned on Taiwan that US support for the island's diplomatic efforts at international recognition "is like playing with fire, and those who play with fire will get burned".
They did not even agree to convene meetings of officials to thrash out differences, except in one respect, what Biden has called nuclear “strategic stability”, a first sign of a willingness to ease tensions over serious security issues, of which there are a few, and specifically US concerns at China’s plans to quadruple its nuclear warhead stockpile to at least 1,000 by 2030.
Although the US has about 3,800 warheads, it is alarmed that Beijing appears to be shifting its five-decade-old nuclear posture away from "minimum deterrence" based on maintaining just enough weapons to retaliate against an enemy strike. Defence analysts warn that a shift in the nuclear balance might allow China believe it could defeat the US in a conventional clash over Taiwan, and would facilitate Chinese domination of areas like the South China Sea.
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The trade war that Donald Trump started, although on pause, remains unresolved, with China still more than $180 billion short of a pledge to buy $380 billion in American products before December 31st , and the US continues to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. No progress there, or on human rights abuses in Xinjiang or Hong Kong.
Xi also made clear that new hopes of cooperation on issues like climate change will be conditional on an improvement on issues across the spectrum of the relationship – a tall order.