Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions.
But Austin\u2019s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.
China\u2019s Defence Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the US had \u201cnot created the proper atmosphere\u201d for dialogue and exchange. The US action had \u201cseriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,\u201d a ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement issued late Thursday.
It\u2019s been an experience that\u2019s frustrated US commanders for decades, when it comes to getting their Chinese counterparts on a phone or video line as some flaring crisis is sending tensions between the two nations climbing.
From Americans\u2019 perspective, the lack of the kind of reliable crisis communications that helped get the US and Soviet Union through the Cold War without an armed nuclear exchange is raising the dangers of the US-China relationship now, at a time when China\u2019s military strength is growing and tensions with the US are on the rise.
Without that ability for generals in opposing capitals to clear things up in a hurry, Americans worry that misunderstandings, false reports or accidental collisions could cause a minor confrontation to spiral into greater hostilities.
And it\u2019s not about any technical shortfall with the communication equipment, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of Indo-Pacific studies at the German Marshall Fund think tank. The issue is a fundamental disparity in the way China and the US view the value and purpose of military-to-military hotlines.
US military leaders\u2019 faith in Washington-to-Beijing hotlines as a way to defuse flare-ups with China\u2019s military has been butting up against a sharply different take \u2014 a Chinese political system that runs on slow deliberative consultation by political leaders and makes no room for individually directed, real-time talk between rival generals. And Chinese leaders are suspicious of the whole US notion of a hotline. They see it as an American channel for talking their way out of blowback for a US provocation.
\u201cThat\u2019s really dangerous,\u201d Assistant Secretary for Defence Ely Ratner said Thursday of the difficulty of military-to-military crisis communications with China, when Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley pressed him about China\u2019s latest rebuff on Beijing\u2019s and Washington\u2019s hotline setup.
US generals are persisting in their efforts to open more lines of communication with Chinese counterparts, the defense official said, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. \u201cAnd unfortunately, to date, the PLA is not answering that call,\u201d Ratner said, referring to China\u2019s People\u2019s Liberation Army.
Ratner accused China of using vital channels of communication simply as a blunter messaging tool, shutting them down or opening them up again to underscore China\u2019s displeasure or pleasure.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning referred questions about Wei\u2019s refusal to take Austin\u2019s call to the Defence Ministry, China\u2019s resistance to military hotlines as tensions increase puts more urgency on efforts by President Joe Biden and his top civilian diplomats and security aides to build up their own communication channels with President Xi Jinping and other top Chinese political officials, for situations where military hotlines may go unanswered, US officials and China experts say.
Both US and Chinese militaries are building up for a possible confrontation over US-backed self-ruled Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. The next flare-up seems only a matter of time. It could happen with an expected event, such as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy\u2019s promised visit to Taiwan, or something unexpected, like the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter and a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. Without commanders talking in real-time, Americans and Chinese would have one less way of averting greater conflict..
\u201cMy worry is that the EP-3 type incident will happen again,\u201d said Lyle Morris, a country director for China for the Office of the Secretary of Defence from 2019 to 2021, now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. \u201cAnd we will be in much different political environments of hostility and mistrust, where that could go wrong in a hurry.\u201d
Biden has emphasised building lines of communications with China to \u201cresponsibly manage\u201d their differences. A November meeting between Xi and Biden yielded an announcement the two governments would resume a range of dialogues that China had shut down after an August Taiwan visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Last weekend, the US cancelled what would have been a relationship-building visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the transit of the Chinese balloon, which the US says was for espionage. China claims it was a civilian balloon used for meteorological research.
The same week that China\u2019s balloon flew over the US, Austin was in the Philippines to announce an expanded US military footprint there, neighbouring China, noted Tiehlin Yen, director of the Taiwan Centre for Security Studies, a think tank. \u201cAmerica is also very nationalistic these days,\u201d Yen said.
\u201cFrom a regional security perspective, this dialogue is necessary,\u201d Yen said. What passes for military and civilian hotlines between China and the US aren\u2019t the classic red phones on a desk. Under a 2008 agreement, the China-US military hotline amounts to a multistep process by which one capital relays a request to the other for a joint call or videoconference between top officials on encrypted lines. The pact gives the other side 48 hours and up to respond, although nothing in the pact stops top officials from talking immediately.
Sometimes when the US calls, current and former US officials say, Chinese officials don\u2019t even pick up.
\u201cNo one answered. It just rang,\u201d recounted Kristen Gunness, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation. Gunness was speaking about a March 2009 incident when she was working as an adviser to the Pentagon\u2019s chief of naval operations.
Chinese navy vessels at the time surrounded a US surveillance ship in the South China Sea and demanded the American leave. US and Chinese military officials eventually talked – but some 24 hours later. It took decades of Washington pushing to get Beijing to agree to the current system of military crisis communications, said David Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who negotiated it.
\u201cAnd then once we had it in place, it was clear that they were very reluctant to use it in any substantive purpose,\u201d Sedney said.
Americans\u2019 test calls on the hotline would get picked up, he said. And when Americans called to give congratulations on some Chinese holiday, Chinese officials would pick up and say thanks, he said.
Anything more sensitive, Sedney said, the staffers answering the phone \u201cwould say, We\u2019ll check. As soon as our leadership is ready to talk, we\u2019ll get back to you.\u2019 Nothing would happen.\u201d
AP feature<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions.But Austin\u2019s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defence Minister […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}