To Avoid a New Cold War, Abandon Containment

High-level meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials are welcome, but it is a measure of how dreadful relations are that these meetings are so remarkable.

David Ignatius gives a glowing review of the meetings between Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi in Vienna last week:

Biden’s opening to China has been motivated by one simple idea: The United States doesn’t want to start a new Cold War. Biden took too long to implement this insight, bowing to the new conventional wisdom in Washington that the more strident the confrontation with China, the better. But he seems to have found his voice.

A few green sprouts don’t guarantee blossoms in spring, let alone a ripe summer. But based on Chinese and American accounts, what happened last week in Vienna was the beginning of a process of regular, direct engagement that will benefit both sides.

High-level meetings between U.S. and Chinese officials are welcome, but it is a measure of how dreadful relations are that these meetings are so remarkable. These sorts of contacts should be so routine that they are taken for granted. Instead, they are headline news for days. Biden has been president for more than two years, so it is hardly a triumph of diplomacy that there is finally a “beginning of a process of regular, direct engagement” after all this time. It is good that the Biden administration is trying to repair the damage that has been done, but it would have been far better if they hadn’t caused so much of the damage in the first place.