Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at the Yale Law School and former chair of Morgan Stanley Asia, is author of ‘Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives’ has made a commonsense proposal in the Financial Times of 18 July.
It deserves to be read by anyone who values world peace and want to avoid a nuclear Armageddon between the US and China.
US/China relations are in a worse state now than they have been for many years.
A Republican former US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, describes China as an “enemy.
President Biden has described his Chinese counterpart as a “dictator”, language which may be accurate but which is not helpful to efforts by members of his own Administration (Blinken and Yellen) to put a “floor” under US/China relations ie. prevent them from getting even worse.
Each side is paranoid about the other.
Roach argues that the Biden Administration is using the same failed approach to China as the George W Bush and Obama Administrations.
This consisted of two Summits each year between the leaders. These Summits were triumphs of event management, but did not lead to any progress. In fact, relations got worse.
This was inevitable in the absence of an institutional architecture underneath the Summits to work on a year round basis to remove misunderstandings and develop constructive proposals to give substance to the Summits.
Roach proposes that US/China Secretariat be established, located in neutral country, to monitor all aspects of the relationship, military, political, technology, trade, climate and all other relevant issues.
I endorse this proposal.