Within hours of an Air Force F-22 shooting down a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, with the The goal was to strike up a quick general-to-general conversation that could explain things and ease tensions.
But Austin’s effort on Saturday foundered when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe refused to speak, the Pentagon says.
China’s Defense Ministry says it rejected Austin’s call after the balloon was shot down because the US had “failed to create the right atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The US action “seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,” a ministry spokesman said in a statement issued late Thursday.
It’s been an experience that has frustrated American commanders for decades when it comes to putting their Chinese counterparts on a phone or video line as an exacerbated crisis is heightening tensions between the two nations.
From the Americans’ perspective, the lack of the kind of reliable crisis communication that helped get the US and the Soviet Union through the Cold War without an armed nuclear exchange is increasing the dangers of the US relationship. tensions with the US are on the rise.
Without that ability for generals in opposing capitals to clear the air quickly, Americans worry that misunderstandings, false reports or accidental collisions could turn a minor confrontation into major hostilities.
And it’s not some technical shortfall with the communications team, said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of Indo-Pacific studies at the German Marshall Fund think tank. At issue is a fundamental disparity in how China and the US view the value and purpose of military-to-military hotlines.
The faith of US military leaders in hotlines from Washington to Beijing as a way to defuse outbreaks with China’s military has been met with a very different perspective: a Chinese political system that is based on a slow deliberative consultation by political leaders and leaves no room. for one-on-one real-time conversations between rival generals. And Chinese leaders are suspicious of the entire American notion of a hotline. They see it as an American channel to escape an American provocation.
“That’s really dangerous,” Deputy Defense Secretary Ely Ratner said Thursday of the difficulty of army-to-army crisis communications with China, when pressed by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley about China’s latest pushback on the setup. from the direct line of Beijing and Washington.
The US generals are persisting in their efforts to open more lines of communication with their Chinese counterparts, the defense official said, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “And unfortunately, to date, the PLA is not responding to that call,” Ratner said, referring to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Ratner accused China of using vital communication channels simply as a more forceful messaging tool, shutting them down or opening them again to underscore China’s displeasure or delight. In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning referred questions about Wei’s refusal to take Austin’s call to the Defense Ministry.
China’s resistance to military hotlines as tensions rise puts more urgency in the efforts of President Joe Biden and his top civilian diplomats and security aides to build their own channels of communication with President Xi Jinping and other senior officials. Chinese politicians, for situations where military hotlines can go. no response, say US officials and China experts.
Both the US and Chinese militaries are preparing for a possible confrontation over US-backed self-rule of Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. The next outbreak seems only a matter of time. It could happen with an expected event, like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s promised visit to Taiwan, or something unexpected, like the 2001 collision between a Chinese fighter and a US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane. the US over the South China Sea. Without commanders talking in real time, the Americans and the Chinese would have one less way to avoid a major conflict.
“My concern is that the EP-3-type incident will happen again,” said Lyle Morris, China country director for the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2019 to 2021, now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “And we will be in very different political environments of hostility and mistrust, where that could quickly go wrong.”
Biden has emphasized building lines of communication with China to “responsibly manage” their differences. A November meeting between Xi and Biden resulted in an announcement that the two governments would resume a series of talks that China had shut down after a visit to Taiwan in August by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Last weekend, the US canceled what would have been a relationship-building visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken after the transit of the Chinese balloon, which the US said was for espionage. China claims it was a civilian balloon used for weather research.
The same week China’s balloon flew over the US, Austin was in the Philippines to announce an expanded US military presence there, neighboring China, said Tiehlin Yen, director of the Taiwan Center for Security Studies, a group of experts. “The United States is also very nationalistic these days,” Yen said.
“From a regional security perspective, this dialogue is necessary,” Yen said.
What passes for military and civilian hotlines between China and the US are not the classic red telephones on a desk.
Under a 2008 agreement, the Sino-US military hotline amounts to a multi-step process whereby one capital transmits a request to the other for a joint call or video conference between senior officials over encrypted lines. The pact gives the other side 48 hours or more to respond, though nothing in the pact prevents top officials from speaking immediately.
Sometimes when the US calls, current and former US officials say, Chinese officials don’t even answer.
“No one answered. It just rang,” said 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’s chief of naval operations. At one point they surrounded a US surveillance ship in the South China Sea and demanded that the US leave US and Chinese military officials finally spoke, but some 24 hours later.
Washington lobbied for decades for Beijing to accept the current system of military crisis communications, said David Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who negotiated.
“And then once we had it in place, it became clear that they were very reluctant to use it for any substantive purpose,” Sedney said.
Test calls from Americans on the hotline would be answered, he said. And when Americans called to congratulate a Chinese holiday, Chinese officials would answer and say thank you, he said.
Anything more sensitive, Sedney said, the staff members answering the phone “would say, ‘We’ll check it out. As soon as our leadership is ready to talk, we’ll be in touch with you.’ Nothing would happen.
