Joe Biden and Xi Jinping talks a step in the right direction

US President Joe Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Woodside, California, on Thursday (AEDT). Picture: AFP

Few nations want to see harmonious Sino-US relations as much as Australia – to maintain our prosperity and avoid being drawn into a potentially cataclysmic war – so Canberra would be pleased with the optics and outcomes of Xi Jinping and Joe Biden’s meeting in San Francisco.

However small, tensions eased a little.

The US President said he believed his second meeting with his Chinese counterpart as leader was “most constructive and productive” in smoothing over increasingly strained relations between the world superpowers, at odds over everything from Beijing’s errant spy balloons and intellectual property theft to the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Xi, for his part, said he “firmly believed in a “promising future” for the bilateral relationship, conceding “to resume on the basis of equality and respect high-level military-to-military communication” according to the Chinese foreign ministry, reducing the likelihood of dangerous mis­understandings.

The agreed communication boost didn’t stop at the military. “He and I agreed that each one has to pick up the phone call directly and be heard immediately,” Mr Biden revealed in the press conference after the marathon talks, which reportedly lasted more than four hours.

Paring back the thicket of pleasantries, platitudes, statements of the bleeding obvious and the usual bromides about climate change, not a great deal changed on the outskirts of San Francisco on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), apart from promises to communicate more frequently.

China’s promise to crack down on fentanyl manufacturers that supply the Mexican drug cartels whose products are killing tens of thousands of Americans every year would have been the most interesting and relevant announcement for any ordinary Americans who were following the talks.

The scourge of fentanyl, a highly deadly substance that finds its way into other recreational drugs, has ravaged ordinary communities in America, killing 77,000 typically young Americans over the 12 months to April 2023, more than who died in the entire Vietnam War.

It remains to be seen whether Beijing follows through.

Similarly, the third “big announcement” to emerge – a mutual undertaking to ensure emerging artificial intelligence remains a force for good – will be difficult to enforce. It certainly did not require a leader-level meeting to enact.

The paucity of announcements was a stark reminder of just how little the world’s two most powerful nations agree, especially over the future of Taiwan, Beijing’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s expansionary behaviour in the South an East China seas.

China’s support for Israel in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks has been somewhere between ambivalent and non-existent.

Xi even bristled at Biden’s repeated claim that the US and China should restrict their inevitable fierce economic competition so that it “does not veer into ­conflict”.

“I am still of the view that major country competition is not the prevailing trend of current times and cannot solve the problems facing China and the United States or the world at large,” Xi said at the start of the meeting.

“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed, and one country’s success is an opportunity for the other.”

Even if promises to talk more were the most tangible outcome from the Biden-Xi talks, something is better than nothing. There’s no substitute for in-­person interaction between leaders, away from the prying cameras.

Yet if the world became a little safer after San Francisco, Biden himself emerged further diminished. Foreign policy was meant to be one of his strengths (at least according to him and his supporters) but his press conference performance was embarrassing, giving bumbling, incoherent and often barely audible answers to only a handful of questions.