The war in Ukraine continues unabated. Thousands are dead in Israel and Gaza. Millions of Afghans face deportation from Pakistan, and civil war in Sudan is leading to horrific civilian casualties.
So with that list of calamities, it’s important to note when a positive story emerges — and it happened this week in San Francisco when President Joe Biden sat down with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Expectations for the summit were modest, and Biden and Xi met but did not surpass them. But after months of seemingly unrelenting ill will between the two most powerful countries in the world, Biden and Xi’s meeting put U.S.-China relations on a positive track for the first time in more than a year. That is an unqualified good thing and reason for cautious optimism.
Of perhaps greatest importance, the two sides announced the resumption of military-to-military communication channels.
Until recently, relations between Washington and Beijing had been on a downward spiral for a while. A visit to Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2022 enraged Beijing. Then, in January, China was caught flying a surveillance balloon over the continental United States — and all hell broke loose.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a diplomatic visit to China. Random weather and recreational balloons were getting shot out of the air all over the United States, and the rhetoric from Capitol Hill, which has featured near-constant China bashing since Biden took office, only got worse.
It set up a cycle of recrimination between the two countries, with Chinese-run media slamming the U.S. and American lawmakers, who raised red flags over everything from China’s aggressive behavior toward Taiwan to continued allegations of a Chinese government cover-up on the origins of Covid-19 to concern over Chinese ownership of the social media site TikTok.
The Biden-Xi summit didn’t solve all these issues, but at the very least, it arrested the slide. Of perhaps greatest importance, the two…
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