Washington, (EFE).- The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, travels this weekend to China, in the first visit by a foreign minister from his country in five years, in an attempt to smooth things over and avoid a hypothetical war over Taiwan.
For now, Blinken’s trip between February 5 and 6 continues, despite the fact that this Thursday the US denounced that it had detected a supposed Chinese spy hot air balloon over its territory.
If the visit finally materializes, the head of US diplomacy will travel to China amid an environment of growing tension between the two countries that is reminiscent of the Cold War.
In fact, its objective is to prevent the tension from ending in a war, State Department spokesman Ned Price explained on Thursday.
“It is simply one thing,” Price said, “that we approach the most relevant and complex bilateral relationship on the planet thinking that competition (between the two) does not lead to conflict.”
The war in Ukraine and other issues
From the White House, the spokesman for the National Security Council, John Kirby, anticipated that the talks between Blinken and the Chinese officials will focus on the war in Ukraine and other issues, such as the armed forces of both countries and the climate crisis.
For the White House, those issues have been put to one side after China launched major military exercises to protest the visit to Taiwan last August by then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi. .
Therefore, Blinken intends to get the conversations on these issues “restored and revitalized,” Kirby said.
So far, the US government has not confirmed whether Blinken will meet with the president, Xi Jinping, during his stay in China, as the British newspaper Financial Times has announced, citing people familiar with the plans for this trip.
The visit of the head of US diplomacy comes after the meeting that Xi and Biden held in Bali (Indonesia) last November before the G20 summit, in their first face-to-face since the American came to power in January. of 2021.
That meeting served to stage a rapprochement between the two with the goal of preventing the rivalry between the two powers from leading to an open conflict, although both were firm with their red lines, especially regarding Taiwan.
Following that meeting, the US government anticipated that it would work with China to make Blinken’s visit possible in early 2023.
Experts agree that the meeting is a good approach
Despite the importance of the gesture that this trip implies, experts from the Center for Strategic Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, ruled out in a talk this week that the visit will yield great results.
This was stated by Jude Blanchette, an analyst specialized in China at that center, who, however, was of the opinion that the trip itself is not a bad idea, “given the deterioration of the relationship in the last five years.”
In his opinion, “the White House sees this trip as one more step” when it comes to continuing to de-escalate the situation after the meeting between Biden and Xi.
“They don’t say it that way, but I think the goal is basically to move this Cold War into its phase of detente, thus avoiding a ‘Cuban crisis of the thousands,” Blanchette reflected.
This expert ruled out that the US and China are rushing into conflict, as was extracted last week from an internal memo by US Air Force General Mike Minihan.
“I hope to be wrong. My intuition tells me that we will fight in 2025”, can be read in the text by Minihan, dated February 1, published by the US media.
Whether or not that hunch is true, the truth is that the Philippines and the US took a step forward on Thursday in their historic security alliance by agreeing to access US troops to four “strategic” bases in the Asian archipelago, a key move before a possible invasion of Taiwan by China and its expansionism in the Pacific.
China’s alleged spy balloon
Also on Thursday, the Pentagon warned of the presence of China’s alleged large spy balloon, which it decided not to destroy for fear that its falling debris would pose a danger to people on the surface.
And it is that the US Department of Defense has been assuring for a long time that no matter how much the US is supporting Ukraine with military equipment to defend itself against the Russian invasion, its main focus of interest and concern is China.
In this context of long-term rivalry, the tension between Washington and Beijing skyrocketed last August after Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, although it is not that there had not previously been acrimony.
The US has always claimed that it supports the “one China” principle, which means that the only Chinese government Washington recognizes is the one based in Beijing, which distances it from Taiwan’s independence aspirations.
However, the US promised in 1979 to defend that island without making it clear, yes, if it would intervene in the event of a Chinese attack, in a policy known as “strategic ambiguity”.
During the Administration of Republican Donald Trump (2017-2021), the US declared a trade war on China by imposing tariffs on its products and the president himself maintained combative rhetoric towards the Asian country during the pandemic with his allusions to the “Chinese virus” to refer to the coronavirus.