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Will the war in Ukraine end with a treaty signed in Beijing? Russia says that China’s proposed peace plan for Ukraine could be a framework for settling the conflict. President Joe Biden is reportedly willing to encourage China to help bring an end to the war. Some commentators have proposed joint American–Chinese mediation for a grand “great power peace plan.”
But President Xi Jinping might ask Biden, “Who needs you?”
Communist China is increasingly taking a leading role in global diplomacy. We saw this last month with the surprise normalization deal between Mideast archrivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. The surprise was multifaceted — first, that Riyadh and Tehran made a deal at all; second, that the United States was uninvolved and seemingly uninformed; and third, that Beijing brokered the deal.
This was not a customary role for the People’s Republic of China, but it signaled a new phase in Chinese diplomacy. Beijing is entering the peace business in ways that used to be the province of the “indispensable nation,” the term coined during the Clinton administration when we seemed to crossing the bridge to another “American century.” Now it seems that the United States is optional, if not exactly dispensable.
China took the lead in recent global debt relief talks — appropriate since Beijing is one the world’s largest creditor nations and has practiced debt-trap diplomacy in the developing world. The readout from the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable was that China was committed to implementing a common framework for debt relief — on Beijing’s terms, of course. Yet the debtor countries seem to be OK with that. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers noted that an attendee from the developing world told him, “What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.”
China also sent Foreign Minister Qin Gang to the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the Neighboring Countries of Afghanistan in Uzbekistan, which included Taliban representatives.
