United States President
Joe Biden’s diplomatic overtures during his first week in office signalled an early effort to rally allies for a collective
approach to China, a message that US partners in Asia have appeared more receptive to than those in Europe.
The Biden team’s initial conversations with foreign leaders highlighted China and the security of the
Indo-Pacific region as foreign policy priorities, as the US president’s first calls this week were to close US allies, including Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Japan. In the same vein, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin held conversations with other key US partners, including partners in the
Quad security group – Japan, Australia and India – as well as defence allies
the Philippines and Thailand.
“It’s not a secret that the relationship between the United States and China is
arguably the most important relationship that we have in the world going forward,” Blinken told reporters on Wednesday. “It’s going to shape a lot of the future that we all live, and increasingly that relationship has some adversarial aspects to it. It has competitive ones. And it also still has cooperative ones.”
Analysts say the Biden administration will largely continue the
tougher approach to China taken by the former Trump government, albeit by embracing relationships with allies in a way the previous administration disdained. This comes as public sentiment and a bipartisan political consensus in the US has shifted against China, and as Beijing took up an increasingly aggressive foreign policy approach during the pandemic and in defending its domestic political repression.
But while Washington’s early efforts towards a more collective approach on China were embraced by governments in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, there has been hesitancy from European leaders.
White House readouts of Biden’s calls with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel all included China as one of the shared foreign policy priorities, but this was noticeably left off statements coming from European records of the exchanges.
Andrew Small, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Asia Programme, said the Biden administration made clear in its initial calls that both China and the Indo-Pacific would be high on its agenda with allies, including explicitly with Europe.
