Open Questions | Chad Sbragia on why a breakdown of US-China defence links could be ‘really dangerous’
The former senior Pentagon official discusses the past and present state of relations between the two countries’ militaries
How would you evaluate the progress of the resumption of US-China defence contacts and exchanges so far?
The re-establishment of defence contacts and exchanges, I do think is important. They were on a good footing, [with] a good plan in place and how that fell off the cliff early in the Biden administration was really kind of remarkable. It takes away opportunities to correct the record, to communicate clearly. It takes away opportunities to perhaps find some common ground in areas of cooperation.
We have several hundred US service members that are still missing someplace in China, [a reference to troops killed in the second world war] and that was an area of cooperation that lasted for a long period of time. That’s an area of cooperation that’s now two years behind for no reason.
Now that they’ve restarted [defence contacts], the way I would characterise it, is the defence relationship has partially restarted.
Neither defence establishment restarted any of the senior dialogues. The most senior dialogue they restarted was the deputy assistant secretary-level dialogue, the defence policy coordination talks. But the other higher level dialogues, at the assistant secretary level or the undersecretary level or higher, none of those were restarted. That’s an anomaly in a relationship, and it’s also confusing about why.
I think that’s a great deal of risk when you have no mechanism to resolve larger strategic policy disagreements in place. It raises questions: does either side expect to resolve large policy disagreements? Or is there no interest on either side in resolving those disagreements?
