The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready For The Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict

Updated: 3-6-2023: Since 2018, the military has shifted to focus on China and Russia after decades fighting insurgencies, but it still faces challenges to produce weapons and come up with new ways of waging war. The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready For The Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict

Clint Hinote returned from a deployment in Baghdad in the spring of 2018 to a new assignment and a staggering realization.

A classified Pentagon wargame simulated a Chinese push to take control of the South China Sea. The Air Force officer, charged with plotting the service’s future, learned that China’s well-stocked missile force had rained down on the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the region, turning American combat aircraft and munitions into smoldering ruins in a matter of days.

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“My response was, ‘Holy crap. We are going to lose if we fight like this,’” he recalled.

The officer, now a lieutenant general, began posting yellow sticky notes on the walls of his closet-size office at the Pentagon, listing the problems to solve if the military was to have a chance of blunting a potential attack from China.

“I did not have an idea how to resolve them,” said Lt. Gen. Hinote. “I was struck how quickly China had advanced, and how our long-held doctrines about warfare were becoming obsolete.”

Mammoth Shift

Five years ago, after decades fighting insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the U.S. started tackling a new era of great-power competition with China and Russia. It isn’t yet ready, and there are major obstacles in the way.

Despite an annual defense budget that has risen to more than $800 billion, the shift has been delayed by a preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pursuit of big-ticket weapons that didn’t pan out, internal U.S. government debates over budgets and disagreement over the urgency of the threat from Beijing, according to current and former U.S. defense officials and commanders.

Continuing concerns in the Mideast, especially about Iran, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have absorbed attention and resources.

Corporate consolidation across the American defense industry has left the Pentagon with fewer arms manufacturers. Shipyards are struggling to produce the submarines the Navy says it needs to counter China’s larger naval fleet, and weapon designers are rushing to catch up with China and Russia in developing superfast hypersonic missiles.

When the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies ran a wargame last year that simulated a Chinese amphibious attack on Taiwan, the U.S. side ran out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles within a week.

The military is struggling to meet recruitment goals, with Americans turned off by the long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially leaving the all-volunteer force short of manpower. Plans to position more forces within striking range of China are still a work in progress.

The Central Intelligence Agency, after two decades of conducting paramilitary operations against insurgents and terrorists, is moving away from those areas to focus more on its core mission of espionage.

The U.S. military’s success in the Mideast and Afghanistan came in part from air superiority, a less well-equipped foe and the ability to control the initiation of the war. A conflict with China would be very different.

The U.S. would be fighting with its Asian bases and ports under attack and would need to support its forces over long and potentially vulnerable supply routes.

If a conflict with China gave Russia the confidence to take further action in Eastern Europe, the U.S. and its allies would need to fight a two-front war.

China and Russia are both nuclear powers. Action could extend to the Arctic, where the U.S. lags behind Russia in icebreakers and ports as Moscow appears ready to welcome Beijing’s help in the region.

This article is the first in a series examining the challenges faced by America’s military as it enters a new international era.

The U.S. military is still more capable than its main adversaries. The Chinese have their own obstacles in developing the capability to carry out a large-scale amphibious assault, while the weaknesses of Russia’s military have been exposed in Ukraine.

But a defense of Taiwan would require U.S. forces, which are also tasked with deterring conflict in Europe and the Middle East, to operate over enormous distances and within range of China’s firepower.

The threat is mounting. Beijing has in recent years shifted the security terrain in its favor in the areas around China. In the South China Sea, it has built artificial islands and fortified them with military installations to assert control over the strategic waterway and deny the U.S. Navy freedom to roam.

Decades of ever bigger military budgets, including a 7% boost in spending this year, have improved the lethality of China’s air force, missiles and submarines, and better training has created a more modern force from what was once a military of rural recruits.

China is developing weapons and other capabilities to destroy an opponent’s satellites, the Pentagon says, and its cyberhacking presents a threat to infrastructure.

The CIA said President Xi Jinping has set 2027 as a deadline for the Chinese military to be ready to carry out a Taiwan invasion, though it said Mr. Xi and the military have doubts whether Beijing could currently do so.

A China in control of the South China Sea and Taiwan would hold sway over waters through which trillions of dollars in trade passes each year.

It would also command supplies of advanced semiconductors, threaten the security of U.S. allies such as Japan and challenge American pre-eminence in a part of the world it has dominated since World War II.

In its efforts to meet the new challenge, the Pentagon has expanded its access to bases in the Philippines and Japan while shrinking the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East. New tactics have been devised to disperse U.S. forces and make them less of an inviting target for China’s increasingly powerful missiles.

The Pentagon’s annual budget for research and development has been boosted to $140 billion—an all time high.

The military is pursuing cutting-edge technology it hopes will enable the military services to share targeting data instantaneously so that U.S. air, land, sea and space forces, operating over thousands of miles, can act in unison, a current challenge.

Many of the cutting-edge weapons systems the Pentagon believes will tilt the battlefield in its favor won’t be ready until the 2030s, raising the risk that China may be tempted to act before the U.S. effort bears fruit.

A conflict in the Western Pacific might also give Russia’s military, which has been badly battered in Ukraine, the confidence to carry out President Vladimir Putin’s goals of reviving Russian power in what it believes to be its traditional sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

“This is a massive problem to dig out of,” said Eric Wesley, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as the deputy commanding general of the Army Futures Command, which oversees that service’s transformation. “We are in a vulnerable period where we are pursuing this deterrence capability and their time is running out.”

Chris Meagher, a top Pentagon spokesman, said that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was directly overseeing the implementation of the U.S. defense strategy to counter China and that the department’s forthcoming spending request would advance the effort.

“The challenge posed by the PRC is real, but this Department is tackling it in historic ways with urgency and confidence,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

“Our strategy drove last year’s budget request and is driving our soon-to-be released budget, which will go even further in matching resources to our strategy.

We are continuing our work developing new operational concepts, deploying cutting-edge capabilities, and making investments now and for the long term to meet the challenges we face.”

Unassailable U.S.

A little more than a generation ago, the U.S. looked unassailable. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid success of the U.S.-led Desert Storm campaign to evict Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait in 1991 demonstrated Washington’s ability to wage a new type of war, using precision-guided munitions and stealth technology to vanquish regional dangers.

President George H.W. Bush declared a “new world order” with the U.S. as its anchor.

In 1995, Beijing began a series of aggressive military exercises near Taiwan to underscore its objections to a visit to the U.S. by Taiwan’s president.

The Clinton administration responded with the largest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War, sending U.S. ships through the Taiwan Strait and positioning two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region the following year.

Strategists at the Pentagon’s in-house think tank nonetheless saw trouble ahead.

By using long-range missiles, antisatellite weapons and electronic warfare, Beijing could turn the tables on Washington by attacking the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the western Pacific to project power, potentially keeping the Americans far from the conflict.

Guided by his defense advisers, candidate George W. Bush proposed to skip a generation of technology and move to advanced tools, such as long-range weapons, sensors and data-sharing technology to counter Beijing’s “anti-access” strategy.

Then the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks changed the threat, and the Pentagon’s mission.

“There was a moment when we thought ‘Huzzah, the transformation of the force is actually going to happen,’ ” recalled Jeff McKitrick, who worked at the Pentagon think tank and is now a researcher with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon-supported research center. “Then 9/11 came and everybody focused like a laser beam on the global war on terror.”

Soon this became the mission of Gen. Hinote, then a major, as well. He was known by the call sign “Q,” after the fictional character in the James Bond stories who runs the spy service’s gadget lab, because of his skill in programming the radars and sensors of fighter jets.

At the outset of the 2003 Iraq war, he was assigned to a squadron of “stealthy” F-117 fighter jets.

He helped plan the operation to strike at military targets in Baghdad and disable the air defenses of Saddam Hussein’s forces.

“We had a really good plan for taking down the Iraqi communications infrastructure, leadership infrastructure and what we thought were the weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “China learned from that.”

As the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, the top U.S. Air Force officer in Japan warned that China’s air defenses were becoming impenetrable to all but the most sophisticated U.S. fighters.

In 2009, Robert Gates, defense secretary from 2006 to 2011, limited the procurement of F-22 fighter jets to 187 to free up funds for other weapons programs.

The Air Force’s Air Combat Command said at the time that would leave the service nearly 200 short of the premier air-to-air fighter jets it previously sought for potential conflicts with China and Russia. Such air-to-air combat experience was limited:

The June 2017 shootdown of a Syrian Su-22 jet by a Navy FA/18 over Syria was the first time a U.S. fighter pilot had blasted an enemy plane out of the sky since 1999.

Mr. Gates said he sought to hedge against future threats while also focusing on the war on terror. “My concern as secretary was all about balance,” he said, in an email response to questions.

“The need to prepare for future potential large-scale conflict with Russia and China while properly funding the long-term ability to deal with smaller-scale conflicts we were most likely to face in the future.”

Mr. Gates said both Presidents Bush and Obama saw cooperation with China as possible and thought a conflict “was low probability.” He said that changed when Mr. Xi came to power in 2013.

The Chinese president has backed a stronger Chinese military and a more assertive foreign posture as part of his campaign to expand Beijing’s global clout.

In 2011, Congress and the White House agreed to multiyear spending limits known as sequestration to curb the federal deficit.

The move forced a series of across-the-board cuts and hampered initiatives to transform the military, including on artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing.

“With the grinding wars in the Middle East taking $60 billion to $70 billion a year, and service chiefs worried first and foremost about declines in force readiness, we simply didn’t have the necessary resources to cover down on all of the more advanced threats like hypersonics,” said former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work.

“The U.S. responses to China and Russia’s technical challenges were therefore delayed—and when it did respond, its choices were constrained by sequestration.”

Taiwan In Focus

In 2018, the Pentagon issued a National Defense Strategy saying the U.S. would prepare for a new world of “great power competition.”

Deterring China from invading Taiwan, a longstanding U.S. partner that Beijing claims as Chinese territory, defines the challenge.

Allowing China to take Taiwan, just 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, and then trying to wrest it back, Pentagon officials concluded, would involve the U.S. in a protracted fight and might spur China to escalate to nuclear weapons.

The U.S. needed to demonstrate it could prevent Beijing from seizing the island in the first place—a requirement included in the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy issued in 2022.

In 2019, Gen. Hinote, using his new authority in the Air Force’s future war office, organized another classified wargame.

The simulation postulated a Chinese attack on Taiwan and assessed how two U.S. forces might fare in contesting it: an “outside force” made up entirely of long-range U.S. bombers and missiles, and an “inside force” of aircraft, ships and troops that would fight within the range of Chinese planes and missiles.

The conclusion was that neither approach would succeed on its own.

“We needed a mix to protect Taiwan and Japan,” he said. “Ever since, we have been gaming, simulating and experimenting to determine that mix.”

A more recent wargame conducted by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff showed the U.S. could stymie a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and force a stalemate if the conflict was fought later in the decade, although high casualties on both sides would result.

That simulation assumed that the U.S. would have the benefit of new weapons, tactics and military deployments that are currently being planned at the Pentagon.

To prepare for the future, the Marine Corps has gotten rid of its tanks and is reinventing itself as a naval infantry force that would attack Chinese ships from small islands in the western Pacific.

A new Marine littoral regiment, which operates close to the shore and will be equipped with anti-ship missiles, is to be based in Okinawa by 2025.

In an exercise in May 2021, the Marines lugged a 30,000-pound Himars missile launcher across a choppy sea to the Alaska shoreline, loaded it into a C-130 transport plane and flew it to a base in the wilderness.

The purpose was to rehearse the sort of tactics the Marines would employ on islands in the western Pacific against the Chinese navy.

The Army, which saw its electronic warfare, short-range air defense and engineering capabilities atrophy amid budget pressures and the previous decades’ wars, is moving to develop a new generation of weapons systems that can strike targets at much longer ranges.

It is planning to deploy a new hypersonic missile in the fall though its utility against Chinese forces will depend on securing basing rights in the Pacific.

The Navy, which is confronting budget pressures, personnel shortages and limits to American shipbuilding capacity, is currently planning to expand its fleet to at least 355 crewed ships, a size still smaller than China’s current navy. In the near term, the U.S. will have around 290 ships.

The Air Force, which has one of the oldest and smallest inventory of aircraft in its 75-year history, has rolled out the first B-21 bomber and is pursuing the capability to pair piloted warplanes with fleets of drones.

It has tested a new hypersonic missile that will be fired from fighter aircraft, and developed plans to disperse its planes among a wider range of bases in the Pacific.

Decades-old B-52s are being refurbished to fill out the bomber fleet. The service has decided to buy the E-7 command aircraft—originally produced by Australia—and is procuring advanced weapons to attack Chinese invasion forces.

At times, the pace has been slower than Gen. Hinote would have liked.

“As we began to push for change, we lost most of the budget battles,” he said. “There is more sense of urgency now, but we know how far we have to go.”

The general has pushed to equip cargo planes with cruise missiles to boost allied firepower, the use of high-altitude balloons to carry sensors and electric “flying cars” to carry people and equipment throughout the Pacific island chains—ideas that have led to experiments but so far no procurement decisions.

He thinks a future Air Force could rely more on autonomous, uncrewed aircraft and deploy fewer fighters. “When push comes to shove and you have to decide if you are going to field unmanned vehicles, or keep flying old aircraft, we’ve never made that decision,” he said.

“I think we’ve got a recipe for blunting” a Chinese attack, he said. “I just think you have to reinvent your force to do it.”

Updated: 3-10-2023

Saudi Arabia, Iran Restore Relations In Deal Brokered by China

The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready For The Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict

Accord marks diplomatic victory for Beijing in a region where U.S. has long dominated geopolitics.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations Friday in a deal mediated by China, ending seven years of estrangement and jolting the geopolitics of the Middle East.

The deal signals a sharp increase in Beijing’s influence in a region where the U.S. has long been the dominant power broker, and could complicate efforts by the U.S. and Israel to strengthen a regional alliance to confront Tehran as it expands its nuclear program.

It comes as the U.S. has been trying to broker a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, an effort now clouded with uncertainty.

China in recent years has built closer economic ties with Iran and Saudi Arabia, both of which are important suppliers of oil to the world’s second-largest economy.

But this bridge-building effort is the first time Beijing has intervened so directly in the Mideast’s political rivalries.

It comes at a time when relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, long aligned with Washington, have grown strained over America’s diminishing security guarantees and Riyadh’s decision to cut oil production to keep crude prices high during Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia was hammered out behind closed doors in Beijing between top officials of the two countries, they said in a joint statement.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping raised the idea of the talks most recently during a state visit to Riyadh in December, according to people familiar with the matter.

As part of the deal, Iran pledged to halt attacks against Saudi Arabia, including from Houthi rebels it backs in the Yemen civil war, according to Saudi, Iranian and U.S. officials. Iran and Saudi Arabia will reopen their embassies and missions on each other’s soil within two months and agreed that their foreign ministers will hold a summit soon to hammer out other details.

For Tehran, the accord eases the international isolation it has faced since antigovernment protests last fall and the collapse of talks aimed at restoring a 2015 international nuclear deal dashed its hopes of relief from economic sanctions.

For Riyadh, it gives the kingdom more leverage as it seeks new U.S. security guarantees from the Biden administration.

“For Iran it’s about escaping diplomatic isolation. For China, it’s about deepening their engagement in the region and showing it’s not just an energy consumer. And for Saudis it’s about the Americans,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and former State Department official and former U.S. diplomat.

But re-establishing diplomatic relations isn’t likely to immediately lessen the longstanding security and sectarian tensions that have divided Riyadh and Tehran for decades and fueled their competition for regional dominance, analysts said.

Ties between the two countries were cut in 2016 after the Saudi Embassy in Tehran was overrun amid protests over the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric by the Saudi government.

Since then, the Iran-Saudi rift has represented the often violent schism between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that has dominated the Middle East for decades.

The Saudis and Iranians have backed opposite sides in conflicts ranging from Syria to Yemen for nearly a decade. In 2019, they were on the brink of war when Iran was blamed for missile and drone attacks on a Saudi oil field.

The current rapprochement follows signs that the proxy wars waged by Riyadh and Tehran were cooling. A United Nations-supported truce between Saudi- and Iran-backed sides in the Yemen war has held for nearly a year.

The civil war in Syria has largely been won by President Bashar al-Assad’s government, with help from Iran and Russia.

Another Persian Gulf rival of Iran, the United Arab Emirates, reopened its embassy in Iran last year and has been pursuing trade and open lines of communication with Tehran.

The deal left unaddressed Iran’s nuclear program, which has been a source of friction between Tehran and much of the world, including China, for two decades. U.S. sanctions on Iran have left its economy in ruins, with a currency crisis in recent weeks roiling the country.

The Saudi government had kept U.S. officials apprised of their discussions to re-establish diplomatic relations with Iran, which dates back to talks in recent years in Baghdad and Oman, and supported the efforts in the hope that it would resolve some of the growing tensions in the Gulf, officials said. The U.S. wasn’t directly involved in these talks, officials said.

Ultimately, U.S. officials said the aim was to prevent any further attacks against Saudi Arabia, including those by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen.

The officials believe that Iran had an incentive to join the talks because it wants to ease the growing political and economic pressure at home, and hopes that any diplomatic breakthroughs with its immediate neighbors might help.

U.S. officials said the next two months, until the official reopening of the embassies, would be critical in gauging how serious Tehran is in honoring the agreement.

“This is not a regime that typically does honor its word, so we hope that they do,” White House National Security Council Strategic Coordinator John Kirby told reporters Friday. “We’d like to see this war in Yemen end, and that this arrangement that they have, might help lead us to that outcome.”

Mr. Kirby added: “This is not about China. We support any effort to de-escalate tensions in the region. We think that’s in our interests, and it’s something that we worked on through our own effective combination of deterrence and diplomacy.”

China’s role in the talks marks a watershed moment for Beijing’s ambitions in the region, a part of the world where the U.S. has waged war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars in providing security for allies.

Along with Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war, China’s diplomacy is another sign of the U.S.’s waning influence.

China has stepped up its relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran in recent years as it became a major buyer of Middle East oil, but its ambitions had long appeared commercial, with little interest in involving itself in the region’s messy disputes.

Beijing has provided a lifeline to sanctions-hit Iran, becoming its main remaining crude buyer since the U.S. pulled out of a nuclear deal in 2018.

But it has also sought closer ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival, for which it is the biggest trade partner and a top oil buyer. Riyadh has also started importing sensitive missile technology from the Chinese military.

Tehran had been increasingly worried Beijing’s growing ties with Saudi Arabia could leave it further isolated. Mr. Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia in December triggered a backlash in Iran after Beijing joined an Arab statement calling on Tehran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency over its nuclear program.

The Gulf-China summit in Riyadh in December was key in getting Beijing more interested in de-escalating tensions between Riyadh and Tehran, said Ayham Kamel, head of Middle East and North Africa at political-risk advisory firm Eurasia Group, calling it a “quick win that showcases a new framework” of cooperation between China and the Middle East.

“Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s view that China can accommodate some of Riyadh’s security interests has been partially vindicated,” said Mr. Kamel.

China’s ability to broker a deal between two Middle East heavyweights “opens the first chapter of Beijing emerging as a key diplomatic power in the region,” he added.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran U.S. negotiator in the Middle East, said the deal reflects smaller powers readjusting to Washington’s de-prioritization of the region.

“The Saudis see a multipolar future with China and Russia as important partners—fellow autocrats who don’t ask questions about human rights,” said Mr. Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“But it’s also a real slap in the face to Biden. At a time when U.S.-China relations are getting colder, MBS is getting cozier with Beijing,” he said, using Prince Mohammed’s initials.

The growing rapprochement between Shia-led Iran and the region’s leading Sunni states has unfolded despite U.S. efforts to keep Tehran economically and diplomatically isolated.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. exited the 2015 nuclear deal reached by former President Barack Obama, restored sanctions and turned up efforts to choke off Iran’s oil exports and strangle its economy.

Saudi officials told U.S. officials shortly after the Biden administration took office in 2021 that they planned to continue to explore improving ties with Tehran, and the U.S. raised no objection though saw little prospect of a rapprochement, U.S. officials have said.

The White House kept most sanctions in place and embarked on its own effort to restore the nuclear deal. But after Iran’s harsh crackdown on antigovernment protesters last fall the talks were suspended.

“For Tehran, rapprochement with the kingdom formally breaks the anti-Iran maximum pressure coalition, offering it less isolation with the potential for economic engagement.

For Riyadh, it showcases a shift towards directly managing its tensions bilaterally rather than outsourcing to external actors,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are restoring relations at a time when the U.S. is trying to broker a peace deal between the Saudis and Israel, which would add to the growing ties between Israel and the Arab world.

Iran is a rival of Israel, opposing the normalization deals and waging a covert war against the country.

Arab countries have embraced ties with Israel in part for intelligence sharing on Iran, and there have long been hopes in Washington for a so-called Arab NATO that would counter Iran.

In Israel, the announcement of restored Saudi-Iran ties was met with dismay.

“The Saudi-Iran deal is a total failure of the Israeli government’s foreign policy,” said Yair Lapid, the opposition leader. “It’s the collapse of a regional defense wall we started building against Iran.”

Updated: 3-13-2023

Xi To Call Ukraine’s Zelenskiy After Russia Visit Next Week

* Talks Would Be First Since Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine
* Xi Planning To Visit Moscow As Early As Next Week, WSJ Reports

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy plan to speak by video link in what would be their first conversation since Russia’s invasion, a Ukrainian official familiar with the preparations said.

No date has yet been set for the conversation, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that aren’t yet public. There was no immediate comment from Zelenskiy’s press office.

The session would come after a visit by Xi to Moscow expected next week, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

There was no immediate official confirmation of that trip from Russia or China. But both countries have said for weeks that a Xi visit was in the works as China seeks to position itself as a broker to end the war in Ukraine while it maintains close ties to the Kremlin.

Putin said in February he was looking forward to hosting Xi in Moscow, and China’s annual National People’s Congress legislative session wrapped up on Monday.

Zelenskiy, meanwhile, has long sought talks with China, which had emerged as one of Russia’s largest global supporters amid the conflict.

Beijing last month released proposals to achieve peace in Ukraine, its most ambitious diplomatic foray into the conflict, but they were quickly rejected as one-sided by Kyiv’s allies in the US and Europe.

Zelenskiy was less categorical, saying at the time, “it’s good that China has started to talk about Ukraine” and welcoming Beijing’s commitment to the principle of territorial integrity.

For its part, Russia welcomed the initiative, which came days after Putin hosted Chinese State Councilor Wang Yi at the Kremlin.

Xi’s diplomatic foray into the Ukraine conflict would come as the US and China remain at odds on a broad range of issues. Washington and Kyiv have warned Beijing against providing lethal aid to Moscow, something China so far says it has no plans to do.

Although Xi last week accused the US of seeking to encircle and contain China, some of his harshest direct criticism to date, new Premier Li Qiang on Monday appeared to open the door for talks to resume between Washington and Beijing.

Xi is expected to speak soon with US President Joe Biden to put the relationship back on track after tensions over an alleged Chinese spy balloon derailed positive momentum following a November summit.

China achieved a major diplomatic win late last week, when it helped facilitate an agreement by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic ties.

At the meeting of Group of 20 foreign ministers in New Delhi in early March, Russia and China rejected wording on the war that had been agreed at the leaders’ summit in Indonesia less than six months before.

They teamed up to block India, the host country, from negotiating a compromise.

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