What Will 2024 Hold for U.S.-China Relations?

U.S.-China relations have worsened quite a lot in just the last two years. They could easily keep deteriorating in the next two.

Stephen Walt argues that the Biden administration will try to avoid any big foreign policy blowups in the run-up to next year’s election. That seems correct, but I’m not so sure that other governments will be as accommodating as he expects them to be. For instance, he says this about China:

Yellen and Sullivan may want to cool things down, but there are plenty of hawkish pundits and members of Congress who would like to keep raising the heat. Biden and co. are betting that extending an olive branch will keep things quiet for the time being, and my guess is that they are right. Chinese President Xi Jinping has his hands full already, and China’s interests are better served by a long-term effort to build influence and create an attractive alternative to U.S. primacy than by a short-term confrontation with the United States. U.S.-China relations aren’t going to get better in the next year or so, but they won’t get dramatically worse, either [bold mine-DL].

That could be right, but we should bear in mind that U.S.-China relations have worsened quite a lot in just the last two years. They could easily keep deteriorating in the next two, and I wouldn’t assume that the deterioration won’t be punctuated by sharp declines. Unforeseen and avoidable episodes have caused a much faster deterioration than a lot of observers would have expected at the start of Biden’s presidency. The Biden administration is still trying to repair the damage caused by the balloon incident and their mistaken decision to cancel Blinken’s trip to Beijing, and they have not made much progress on this front in the last few months.