Secretary of State Blinken’s Trip to China: A Concerning Prioritization of Engagement over America’s Interests

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently traveled to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping. Despite the picture released from their final discussion showing Blinken seated just to the side of Xi, the trip was important for high-level diplomatic contact, even with an adversary like the Chinese Communist Party. However, the State Department’s persistent prioritization of engagement with China for its own sake and at the expense of America’s interests is concerning. The trip’s stated goal was to stabilize communication between the US and China, but the main breakthrough hoped for—the resumption of military-to-military dialogue—has not been secured. Blinken did manage to get a commitment to explore the establishment of a US-China “working group” on preventing the export of fentanyl precursor chemicals from China. However, Beijing has only promised to talk about curbing their export, and there were few other concrete results from the talks. Reports suggest that the State Department is slow-walking several key measures responding to Beijing’s misbehavior and has declined to release the results of the FBI’s probe into the contents of the Chinese military-surveillance device that the PLA floated over several key US bases in February. While Blinken did bring up human rights concerns in his meetings, promoting human rights was a peripheral concern on this trip. The trip paves the way for other cabinet officials and climate envoy John Kerry to visit Beijing in the coming months, but there’s a chance that the administration will continue to pull its punches to keep this process on track. This would be national-security malpractice, and Congress may need to force the administration’s hand on the measures it is apparently slow-walking.