Josef Gregory Mahoney

Opinion | US peace efforts with China have failed? Don’t be fooled by the narrative

The US isn’t serious about detente or any form of reconciliation. Instead it has been laying the foundation for a cold war or worse, and fabricating a moral high ground

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Josef Gregory Mahoney

Published: 5:30am, 28 Sep 2023

American efforts to foster detente with China have failed: it’s time to acknowledge this and move on. This argument has emerged in recent weeks in several important publications, including The Washington Post and Foreign Affairs, expressed by key opinion leaders considered close to the Biden administration and those representing more conservative positions.

These views have not been endorsed officially by the administration but suggest a consensus coalescing on both sides of the American political spectrum. They seem to express the next chapter of a dark narrative arc established when Joe Biden took office.

The arc points especially to the Xi-Biden meeting on the sidelines of last year’s G20 summit and the follow-up cabinet-level visits to Beijing during the summer. In short, the story goes, the US made good-faith efforts for detente but got nothing in return from a China determined to impose an intolerant and intolerable sphere of influence in Asia and beyond.

This narrative has a double value. First, it normalises zero-sum approaches that raise the spectre of military conflict while portraying a new cold war as a best-case scenario.

US policy has been criticised – including by a group of leading American scholars of different political stripes – as being too aggressive, and the narrative is a response to such criticism.

But it promotes the lazy pseudo-intellectualism of reductive, “historical” arguments that such confrontations are inevitable, by warning of the Thucydides trap, a clash of civilisations, and, most recently, what happens when two countries become “enduring rivals”.