The two most powerful men in the world have a date.
Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will have a long awaited get together at the G20 summit in Bali on Monday, meeting for the first time since the former became president.
They badly need to talk. US-Chinese relations are arguably at their rawest point since then-US President Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing in the 1970s. Tensions are acute over Taiwan after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taipei and China’s response — a vast military exercise that demonstrated its growing capacity to cut off the democratic island from the rest of the world.
For decades, strategists on both sides have envisioned a future when rising superpower China would confront the established one, the United States. Given the Chinese leader's increasingly nationalistic and militaristic leadership and Washington’s determination to stay in East Asia, that’s no longer a theoretical argument. The moment is here. Both sides have enshrined their standoff as the organizing principle of respective national security doctrines.
“What I want to do with him when we talk is lay out what each of our red lines are,” Biden told reporters of Xi at the White House on Wednesday, as he basked in a better-than-expected Democratic performance in the midterm elections. Biden said the meeting would focus on “what (Xi) believes to be in the critical national interests of China, what I know to be the critical interests of the United States, and to determine whether or not they conflict with one another — and if they do, how to resolve it and how to work it out.”
Xi, who secured a norm busting third term last month, might seek clarity on exactly what Biden’s policy toward Taiwan really is. Biden has repeatedly vowed to defend the island if China attacked, only for aides to deny he watered down the US policy of strategic ambiguity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ears will also be burning. Biden will try to drive a wedge in the friendship with the Russian and Chinese leaders forged before the invasion of Ukraine — only for the war to turn into a debacle. The president sees himself as a bit of a Xi whisperer, having built a relationship of sorts when they were both vice presidents and traveled together in the US and China a decade ago (below). Playing on this history, Biden tried a bit of psychological warfare on Putin, who won’t be at the G20, before he left for Asia.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of respect that China has for Russia or for Putin," Biden said. "I don’t think they’re looking at it as a particular alliance. Matter of fact, they’ve been sort of keeping their distance a little bit."
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and then-Chinese Vice President Xi in Los Angeles on February 17, 2012.
