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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy chief Wang Yi during their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, July 13, 2023.
Top diplomats meet in Laos to discuss Myanmar & South China Sea
On Thursday, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations met in Vientiane, Laos, to kick off a three-day summit focused on resolving Myanmar’s violent civil war and cooling tensions in the South China Sea. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are also attending – each with their own interests in mind.
In Myanmar, ASEAN nations have failed to make progress toward their “five-point consensus” unveiled in April 2021, two months after a military coup. Since then, the country has spiraled into a humanitarian crisis – with over 3 million displaced and more than 5,400 Burmese killed. ASEAN’s plan seeks an immediate cessation of violence, which has largely been ignored by junta leaders, calling into question the efficacy of the bloc amid fears of regional spillover.
This week’s talks hope to revive the much-criticized plan but are likely to face significant obstacles as competing geopolitical interests leave countries – including the US and China – supporting opposing factions.
On the South China Sea sovereignty issue, ASEAN is hoping to capitalize off the progress made on Sunday’s deal between China and the Philippines and to finalize a similar agreement of their own – a protracted code of conduct including China. Still, pessimism looms over how much these nations can achieve to ease these protracted issues in the region.
Blinken meets Xi in Beijing
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and Tony Blinken is not. No, he's coming back from Beijing, the US Secretary of State, the once-postponed and now-on-again weekend trip to Beijing. It's the first time he, as Secretary of State, has been there. Also, this was a last-moment meeting that included President Xi Jinping, and that's very important because on the ground in China, no attention being given publicly to the trip until Xi meets with Blinken, 35 minutes long, and then suddenly it is everywhere, and it's over 1 billion views, and it's all over state media, and it's all over social media. In a sense, the Chinese blessing the visit to their public and showing that they want to have a more constructive or at least stable relationship.
The other takeaway, marginal but still not unimportant, is the willingness to create a fentanyl working group. That's something the Americans have been pressing on for a while, which provides a little bit of cover for Biden that he's actually getting something done with the Chinese. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and execution on that is something that everyone is going to be skeptical about and watching.
Okay, that's the good news. What's the bad news? There is no trust within this relationship. The US-China relationship continues to be very contentious, very conflictual. It's true that the Chinese gave their standard speaking points on Taiwan, and we can go to war, and we maintain the status quo. The Americans said, "We're not changing the status quo, and we don't want war." And everything will be fine. But the status quo is changing. The status quo is changing in a couple of ways. First of all, the Americans are doing whatever they can to make Taiwan less important. The export controls on Taiwan's semiconductors. Let's keep in mind that until very recently, until about a year ago, TSMC was producing 92% of the most important semiconductors in the world. The highest speed, smallest, fast. This is critical. Suddenly, that's down to 80%. Why? Because the Americans want to get away from vulnerability to Taiwan.
That's going to be down to 50% probably within five years. And as that happens, you've got Foxconn now moving all of their supply chain away from mainland China and towards India and Vietnam and Canada and other countries. Why are they doing that? And the answer is because the Americans see the status quo as risky, and they're trying to de-risk the status quo, which means less exposure to Taiwan, which makes a lot of sense for the Americans. But if you're the Chinese, you see that as actually leading to confrontation. You're saying, "Wait a second, we no longer have the ability to get access to this high-level technology. We have to build it ourselves." So when they do that and Taiwan becomes less important, it of course, becomes an area that's easier to have direct conflict.
Part of the reason the Americans were able to put unprecedented levels of sanctions against the Russians is because the Americans do almost no business with the Russians, Taiwan becomes less important, and the Americans de-risk the broader US-China relationship. It becomes easier to have confrontation with the Chinese, and as the Chinese take similar steps, they do the same thing. The one thing that didn't happen in this meeting was a willingness to re-engage on the military-to-military front. The Americans have been asking for it. Chinese have said no. They continue to say no this weekend. At the same time that the Chinese have taken really aggressive measures in the Taiwan Straits, in the South China Sea that potentially could risk direct accident/conflict with American military warships, jet fighters operating in the area. The fact that the Chinese are willing to tolerate that level of risk is they would argue analogous to the Americans being willing to tolerate greater levels of risk around the broader US-China relationship and around Taiwan.
That's not going to change. It's not going to change because Biden thinks he's got the right policies right now for China, because the politics of the relationship are heavily constrained by hawkish Democrats and Republicans, and because we're heading into the 2024 election. Now, the one thing that's useful is that in this relationship, Biden and Xi know each other well, they've known each other for a long time. Biden actually speaks with a lot of pride about that when you talk to him personally about how much time he spent with Xi. Not that he necessarily likes everything about him or trusts everything he says, but he respects him as a leader as opposed to Biden's view of Putin, which is exactly the opposite. That means that when they meet face-to-face, maybe there'll be a video call soon, but certainly looks likely on the sidelines of the APEX Summit in San Francisco this fall. Biden's going to go for a couple of days. That has the potential to strengthen the stabilization of the relationship, even as the structural forces are heading more towards conflict. I wish I had better news, but I'm glad the meeting happened. I'm glad it went as well as it actually did.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (L) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
What We’re Watching: Blinken’s Middle East chats, Erdogan’s bid to split Nordics, Peru’s early election, China offers baby incentives
Blinken meets with Middle East leaders
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken picked a volatile time to visit the region. After first stopping in Egypt to meet with President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, the US’ top diplomat touched down in Israel on Monday, where he took part in a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. But Blinken’s visit comes amid a violent flareup in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last week, Israel carried out an operation in Jenin in the West Bank, targeting members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in an operation that killed nine people, including civilians. Meanwhile, on Friday night, a Palestinian opened fire on Jews praying at a synagogue in East Jerusalem, killing seven. Then on Saturday, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy shot a father and son in Jerusalem’s Old City. What’s more, Israel is currently in the throes of a constitutional crisis as Netanyahu’s right-wing government seeks to dilute the power of the independent judiciary. But analysts say that the top agenda item is undoubtedly Iran. Over the weekend, Israel reportedly struck a compound in the Iranian city of Isfahan used to manufacture long-range missiles. (For more on the Isfahan attack and why Iran is feeling increasing pressure at home and abroad, watch Ian Bremmer’s Quick Take here.) It’s unclear whether the US was informed in advance about the strike, but Israeli leadership has in the past clashed with Washington over Jerusalem’s go-at-it-alone approach to dealing with Iran. As things become increasingly volatile in the Iran-Israel shadow war, Blinken presumably wants to make sure that the US is kept in the loop. On Tuesday, Blinken will meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel's opposition leader Yair Lapid.
Finland sticks with Sweden, despite Erdoğan’s wedge
Many thought Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession bid was all sewn up last summer. But it requires approval from all 30 bloc members, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan now says he is willing only to greenlight Finland’s bid. Erdoğan’s decision to hold out on Sweden comes in the wake of outcry over a protest in Stockholm where a Quran was burned earlier this month. Despite speculation that Finland, which shares a 1,300-kilometer (810-mile) border with Russia, might proceed without Sweden, Finland’s foreign minister said otherwise on Monday. He explained that his country is willing to wait until the Swedish issue is resolved thanks to security assurances from the US and Britain. In exchange for NATO membership, Erdoğan has also demanded the two countries hand over scores of Turkish and Kurdish dissidents and stop more Erdoğan critics from seeking refuge there. Expect this standoff, which is helping Erdoğan whip up nationalist fervor at home, to continue until Turkey’s presidential election on May 14.
Will Peruvians vote this year?
Peru's Congress on Monday voted to reconsider holding an early election in October to help end violent protests that broke out after former President Pedro Castillo was impeached and removed in December 2022. So far, at least 58 people have died in the rallies, the majority of them Indigenous people from Peru's rural highlands who support Castillo. If the early election proposal is voted down, current President Dina Boluarte will likely present her own plan, which would also call for a first-round vote in October and a runoff in November. If that fails and the protests continue, Boluarte might just cave to the protesters by resigning, which would force the Congress president to call an immediate election, as mandated by the constitution. Confused? So are we. The bigger questions are whether angry Peruvians can wait several months to vote before the situation gets out of control, and what happens if it does. The only thing we do know is that 60% of Peruvians want elections ASAP and a whopping 89% of them resent how Congress is handling the crisis.
One Chinese province tries for more babies
For the first time since the 1960s, China’s population shrank in 2022, setting off alarm bells that its one-child policy (in place from 1980-2015) created a looming demographic crisis that will stunt the country’s economic growth and force older Chinese into poverty. With fewer young people to support the elderly in a country with a still underdeveloped social safety net, public officials are now scrambling for ways to encourage citizens to make more babies. Another sign of the times: Sichuan, home to more than 80 million people, has become the latest province to allow unmarried couples to register children to receive health benefits. (Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, has made similar changes. The city of Shanghai offered these reforms in 2021 before rescinding them within weeks.) The change, effective February 15, will allow unmarried women and men to register with local authorities to receive insurance to cover child-related medical bills and to keep their salaries during maternity leave. The debate within China that pits economic imperatives against family values has only begun to heat up.
Who is Tony Blinken?
The person a US president taps to assume the coveted role of secretary of state, the nation's top diplomat, says a lot about that president's foreign policy ambitions and global vision.
Indeed, the selection of Henry Kissinger (Nixon and Ford), James Baker (George H.W. Bush), Hillary Clinton (Obama) and Rex Tillerson (Trump) to head the State Department, provided an early window into the foreign policy priorities — or lack thereof — of their respective bosses.
President-elect Joe Biden has now tapped his longtime adviser Antony (Tony) Blinken to head the US State Department, a sprawling bureaucracy with some 70,000 employees. The nomination of Blinken — an aide Biden has referred to as his "go-to-guy" — suggests that the president-elect has an ambitious foreign policy agenda that he wants to be driven only by a person he knows well and trusts.
What do we know about Tony Blinken and how he might shape US foreign policy?
Global alliances are key. Blinken, who served as deputy secretary of state under president Obama, has long maintained the importance of strong global alliances. It is through revitalizing relationships strained during the Trump years, he has said, that the United States can reassert leadership on the world stage and better position itself to meet a host of pressing challenges: "Even a country as powerful as the United States can't handle them alone," he said this past July.
Indeed, this offers insight into how Biden might tackle key foreign policy issues like China's increasingly assertive policies in Asia and beyond. But Blinken has also argued that traditional alliances need to be redesigned in order to better tackle issues like global health, cybersecurity, and climate change: "Why shouldn't Germany and France work with India and Japan on strategic issues?" he says.
Rebuilding the State Department itself. Under President Trump, who mistrusts non-partisan civil servants, the State Department — which oversees an annual budget of $54 billion (2019) — has fallen on hard times. Career foreign service personnel reported that morale hit rock bottom in recent years amid sharp budget cuts, hiring freezes, and the politicization of the agency. (In 2017, the Atlantic reported that "the normal day-to-day operations at the department had stopped, leaving employees with little to do and anxious about the future.")
Blinken will surely prioritize the refilling of senior State Department positions that have remained vacant under Rex Tillerson (2017-2018) and Mike Pompeo (2018-present), President Trump's secretaries of state. He may even rehire career diplomats who were fired after threatening to expose Trump administration misdeeds, a process that Foreign Policysays led to "the State Department hemorrhaging its own talent."
Blinken the centrist. As deputy secretary of state under President Obama, Blinken was instrumental in laying out America's Middle East policy during the tumultuous years of the "Arab Spring." As civil war gripped Syria — and later Libya — Blinken advocated a more interventionist position, breaking with Obama — and even Biden at times — who favored a more restrained approach.
Indeed, during his years in the Obama orbit, and more recently, Blinken has made no secret of his belief that America should sometimes intervene in foreign conflicts to safeguard human rights. (He has described US retrenchment in recent years as the "progressive cousin" of Trump's "America First" foreign policy.) Blinken attributes his support for humanitarian intervention to his experience as stepson of a Polish-born Jew and Holocaust survivor.
Bottom line: If President Trump's administration aimed to topple the global order and deprioritize America's relations with traditional allies, Biden's choice of Blinken to head the State Department shows that his administration plans to do the exact opposition: deepen engagement with allies and bury the "America first" mantra as quickly and fully as possible.