The head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, travels to China this weekend in peace. The visit, the first by a US Secretary of State to Beijing in five years and in which Blinken will meet with his counterpart, Qin Gang, continues the talks that leaders Joe Biden and Xi Jinping held in November inside the G-20 summit in Bali; a meeting settled with the agreement to “keep the lines of communication open” at a time of great bilateral tensions.
Such tensions are more palpable than mutual good wishes. Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Lloyd Austin, announced in Manila a pact for the access of the North American power to four “strategic” military bases in the Philippines.
Neither Austin nor his Filipino counterpart, Carlito Galvez, wanted to reveal the location of the new bases. They will soon, they assured. Galvez specified that instead of military bases they would call them “sites”, and Austin assured that Washington “is not looking for a permanent base in the Philippines.”
The agreement expands and improves the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Pact (EDCA), signed in 2014 by both countries and which already allowed the Pentagon to make use of five bases in the archipelago.
The strengthened pact provides for direct military cooperation between the two armies, which can thus train together and plan common operations and exercises. This is something “especially important when China continues to increase its claims in the Philippine Sea” or South China Sea, Austin stressed yesterday.
Thus, the priority objective of containing China’s influence in the region and its growing presence in the Indo-Pacific, materialized above all in the continuous pressure on Taiwan, became crystal clear.
Added to this cause of friction are Washington’s efforts to restrict China’s own and foreign exports of components to manufacture microchips; concern about possible direct or indirect aid from Beijing to Moscow in the invasion of Ukraine, as well as concern about the constant attacks by the eastern power against human rights.
As if that were not enough, this week the Pentagon located an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon over the western United States that it avoided shooting down only because of the risk that this would have entailed for people on the ground.
To top it off, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives has just created a bipartisan committee to study how to deal with and combat Chinese competition.
Blinken and Qin want to exchange words of peace, but cold war drums keep beating in the background.
