President Joe Biden will be flanked on Monday by a 377-foot submarine – the USS Missouri – as he announces an accelerated timeline for Australia to receive its own nuclear-powered submarines early next decade.
But looming much larger will be the increasingly tense US relationship with China, which has emerged as a central focus of Biden’s presidency. That relationship has been magnified in recent weeks by a slew of global events, from the dramatic downing of a Chinese spy balloon to the revelation that Beijing is considering arming Russia – all taking place amid Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unprecedented consolidation of power and a growing bipartisan consensus in Washington about the risks China poses.
US officials readily acknowledge that tensions with China are higher than they have been in recent years and that Beijing’s heated public rhetoric of late is reflective of the state of private relations. It’s why Biden’s multi-pronged China strategy has involved a bid to normalize diplomatic relations even as the US pursues policies like Monday’s submarine announcement designed to counter China’s global influence and its military movements.
That effort to re-open lines of communication, especially between each country’s top military brass following the spy balloon incident, has shown no signs of progress, according to a senior administration official.
“Quite the contrary, China appears resistant at this juncture to actually move forward in establishing those dialogues and mechanisms,” the official said. “What we need are the appropriate mechanisms between senior government officials, between the military, between the various crisis managers on both sides to be able to communicate when there is something that is either accidental or just misinterpreted.”
Against that backdrop, Biden faces a series of decisions over the coming…
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