Kindling trust, reducing risk

Despite sparring over tariffs and myriad security disputes, the U.S. and China forge ties on two shared threats with touches of personal warmth and respect.

The Monitor's View

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced billions of dollars of new tariffs on goods from China ranging from steel products to electric cars. The move may reassure blue-collar voters, who could decide whether Mr. Biden keeps his job in November. Yet it sends an aggressive signal at an already tense point in the competition between Beijing and Washington for global influence.

Great-power rivalries, however, are seldom uniformly antagonistic. On Tuesday, Chinese and American envoys launched a new partnership in Geneva to reduce the security risks of artificial intelligence. That followed a first meeting in Washington last week of the new top policy chiefs on climate change from the two countries.

These diplomatic channels show how a shared recognition of mutual threats can motivate rivals to dissolve suspicion and build trust. The two initiatives have a common ingredient. The AI talks fulfill a commitment made by Mr. Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a garden summit in San Francisco last fall. The head of the U.S. climate delegation, John Podesta, hosted his counterpart, Liu Zhenmin, for dinner in his home.

Such personal touches in diplomacy enable adversaries to find their common humanity. “Trust depends on a mix of calculation and bonding,” wrote Nicholas J. Wheeler, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham in England, in his book “Trusting Enemies.” “The calculative element disappears,” he noted, as rivals “place a high value on the other’s security and care about that person’s well-being as an end in itself.”

On both issues, U.S. and Chinese negotiators have a ready model of interpersonal diplomacy to draw upon. Mr. Podesta and Mr. Liu inherited a working group shaped by the mutual respect and shared affections their predecessors cultivated during a long collaboration. Their next meeting is already booked, in Berkeley, California, at the end of May.

Reviewing his first summit with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, then-President Ronald Reagan said his priority was “to eliminate the suspicions which each side had of the other. The resolution of the other questions would follow naturally after this.” Alan Gotlieb, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States, held a similar conviction. “Sometimes personal relationships don’t fit into analysis schemes," he told a University of Toronto conference in 2011. "They’re one card, but the most important card in international relations.”

A broad range of competitive and ideological disputes divide Washington and Beijing that the new Biden tariffs may now complicate. But on two critical issues, climate change and AI, the rivals may be poised to nourish new views of each other beyond adversity.