The Question Looming Over Biden’s White House Summit: Where Are the Exit Ramps?

Ten years ago, when I was in the late stages of research for a book about China’s sense of its power across the ages, I flew to Palawan, a little-heard-of, elongated island in the Philippines that sits hundreds of miles to the south of Manila.

Not far to the west of the shores of this sleepy fisherman’s paradise lay what then seemed like one of the world’s most important legal frontiers, Second Thomas Shoal. There, an out-of-service and badly rusting warship had been intentionally grounded years ago by the government of the Philippines as an unconventional way of demonstrating its territorial claims to the area. Access to the Philippine ship, the BRP Sierra Madre, was tightly restricted by Chinese coast guard vessels that patrolled the shoal’s waters as part of Beijing’s efforts to prevent repairs to Manila’s slowly disintegrating ship and thereby enforce its own rival maritime claims.

Then, this still seemed like a legal dispute, despite the tense cat-and-mouse game playing out with quasi-military means, because the Philippines had taken the matter to an international maritime tribunal at the Hague for arbitration. It was my expectation that despite China’s repeatedly stated vow that it would not recognize any adverse ruling, higher interests of global image and soft power would eventually force Beijing to soften its position, if for no other reason than to avoid coming across as an imposing international bully. In defense of my naivete, even common sense pointed to the need for China to seek a face-saving way to back down or compromise. The disputed shoal sat less than 200 nautical miles away from Palawan, whereas China’s closest undisputed territory, Hainan Island, lies nearly three times more distant.

The 10 years since the time of my visit scarcely seem adequate to encompass the many twists and turns that have occurred in the faceoff between these two countries. What is certain, however, is that this situation has grown immensely in terms of its complexity over this period, and along with this, so has the danger.

Maritime disputes between China and its neighbors have been a centerpiece of high-level diplomatic discussions in Washington this week, as U.S. President Joe Biden receives his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, for a state visit that will include an unusual three-way meeting with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. Like the Philippines, Japan has been locked in a long-standing dispute with China over a group of tiny islands, the Senkakus, that Tokyo considers falling within its maritime territory and presently controls. To raise the stakes and complicate matters further, the Biden administration has gradually enlisted Japan and the Philippines in its contingency plans for defending Taiwan in case of any attempt by Beijing to take over that island by force. China has long claimed Taiwan as an inalienable part of its territory.

Not to put too fine a point on things, but the fault lines in each of these disputes are scary and have immense implications both for superpower competition and for world peace generally. And with each of them, it is far easier to imagine ways in which the opposing parties could stumble into catastrophic war than it is to imagine a way to settle or even defuse the underlying conflicts.

Before going any further, it is worth quickly summarizing some of the most important developments of the busy last decade. Firstly, in 2016 the Philippines won a unanimous law-of-the-sea ruling at the Hague, which invalidated China’s claims to any historical rights to the seas of the Spratly Islands, which encompass Second Thomas Shoal. In fact, China claims much more than this. It has not only rejected this Hague ruling, but it has also continued asserting its exclusive rights to virtually the entire South China Sea and has pushed ahead with an ambitious campaign of building and arming artificial islands in this vast, strategically critical waterway in order to enforce its claims.

Soon after my visit to Palawan, the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte as president. Despite the maritime tribunal’s ruling in his country’s favor, during most of his six years in office, Duterte distanced his country from the United States and drew closer to China, deemphasizing his country’s sea dispute with its giant and powerful neighbor. This was seemingly done with the mostly unrealized expectation that China would invest massively in the Philippines, thus helping transform its economy.

The turnabout in Manila’s foreign policy roughly coincided with dramatic changes in American foreign policy under Donald Trump. Biden’s predecessor deemphasized long-standing American alliances, and this was not limited to NATO. Trump also downplayed American commitments in Asia, casting doubt among allies there, and foremost in Japan, over whether the United States would honor its treaty commitments to defend that country in case of war with China.

In turn, this helped stoke preexisting efforts by the late Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to strengthen Japan’s own defense capacities and to begin to whittle away the restrictions in Japan’s so-called peace constitution, which tightly limit Japan’s use of arms in international disputes.

Returning to the near-present, Biden has worked hard to reinvigorate Washington’s alliance systems. This has not only meant the enlargement of NATO as a means of containing Russian expansion in Europe, but even more consequentially, if possibly less visibly to a Western public, strengthening America’s alliance relationships throughout maritime Asia. Whereas the challenge with Russia has been one of dealing with an old and in many ways declining power, Washington’s challenge with China has been constraining a much richer, larger, and more capable power that is still manifestly gaining strength. That’s what this week’s three-way summit in the White House is all about, and that’s what deepening American (and Japanese) ties with Australia is about as well. Remarkably, against this same general backdrop, Biden’s Washington has also managed to help catalyze improved relations between Tokyo and Seoul, which have long been acrimonious. If it were granted its dreams, the United States would also like to draw both India and Vietnam into this growing web of containment, but barring monumental missteps by China, each of these countries seems committed to hedging and unlikely to commit to an American-led alliance system in Asia.

What is missing from this complex puzzle should worry everyone concerned, meaning the entire planet, and it can be summed up in a phrase: an exit ramp toward peaceful coexistence. No one knows how China, a regional giant that is persuaded of its special rights in its neighborhood, can be convinced that it should not enforce its claims to Taiwan through military might, or by the same token, how it can be persuaded to make less expansive claims in the East and South China seas. The only thing I’ve ever heard suggested is a call to more strength from those who wish to constrain Beijing. China, though, is itself growing stronger, which only means that each of these situations is steadily becoming more dangerous.

The history of contests between great powers doesn’t offer much hope, but something more creative is going to be needed here, and time is pressing. There are columns where I feel like I have things to point out that other people have missed, on rare occasions even clever or hopeful pathways forward. This is not one of them. Finding a better modus vivendi in this part of the world is urgently needed, and nobody seems to have a clue.