I want to give two examples of how the United States is doing diplomacy wrong, one from several years ago and one just recently. In 2023 Secretary of State Antony Blinken received a phlegmatic greeting when he landed in China. Khaleda Rahman reported at Newsweek:
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken received a muted greeting as he arrived in China on Sunday to kick off high-stakes diplomatic talks.
He was welcomed by Yang Tao, Director General of the Department of North American and Oceanian Affairs of the Foreign Ministry, and U.S. Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, as he landed in Beijing.
Blinken is the first top U.S. diplomat to visit China in five years, continuing frosty U.S.-China relations. A February trip was postponed following the diplomatic tumult sparked by what the U.S. said was a Chinese spy balloon flying over American airspace.
I think the Biden Administration bungled its response to what was rather obviously a deliberate slight by the Chinese leadership. They would have interpreted that as our acceptance of a lower status. My kneejerk reaction was that the next time that President Xi went to the White House he should have been admitted through the tradesman’s entrance. Or placed off-center in all photo opportunities. At the very least his visit should not have been with a military band and red carpet treatment but by a low level protocol officer. There are even more provocative alternatives but you get the idea.
The private signal would have been “Don’t do that again. We respond.”
Here’s the more recent instance. We’ve just learned that the Venezuelan oil tanker was not the first time the Trump Administration had used the military to interdict a shipment. Benoit Faucon and Lara Seligman report at the Wall Street Journal:
A U.S. special operations team boarded a ship in the Indian Ocean last month and seized military-related articles headed to Iran from China, U.S. officials said, a rare interdiction operation at sea aimed at blocking Tehran from rebuilding its military arsenal.
The ship was several hundred miles off the coast of Sri Lanka when the operatives boarded it and confiscated the cargo before letting the vessel proceed, the officials said. The U.S. had been tracking the shipment, according to the officials and another person familiar with the operation.
The previously undisclosed raid was part of a Pentagon effort to disrupt the Islamic Republic’s clandestine military procurement after Israel and the U.S. inflicted heavy damage on its nuclear and missile facilities during a 12-day conflict in June.
It was the first time in recent years that the U.S. military is known to have intercepted cargo with Chinese origins on its way to Iran. The name of the ship and its owner couldn’t be determined.
I think that was another bungled opportunity, guided by a lack of understanding. My inclination would have been to return the crew of the ship to the Chinese authorities with a statement to the effect that since we know that China would never condone such activities we are confident that these are criminals that should be returned to you. A useful comparison is the 1993 Yinhe incident. I think that was similarly bungled and now that it has been made public the Chinese are likely to respond now as they did then—with large, public demonstrations for greater Chinese nationalism.
My interpretation of those incidents is that at best our public diplomacy is tone-deaf. At worst we are communicating the wrong messages due to cultural ignorance. How the U.S. handles maritime interdictions with China matters far more for future relations than the actual cargo.
