Ambiguity and National Interests: Foreign Policy Frames and U.S.-China Relations

Abstract

Ambiguity and National Interests:Foreign Policy Frames and U.S.-China Relations Wenting He (bio) and Wesley Widmaier (bio) In early 2023, one might have been excused for expecting that a downward turn in U.S.-China relations would only accelerate. Indeed, two years earlier in January 2021, despite Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign having cast Donald Trump as a threat to the "soul of this nation,"1 Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, singled out Trump's China policy for praise. In his confirmation hearings, Blinken declared that "Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China."2 Over the Biden administration's first two years, U.S.-China relations accordingly maintained a broadly confrontational tone. While the administration dropped the crudely nativist language of the Trump administration, it substituted instead the crusading narrative of a global struggle between democratic and authoritarian regimes. This approach would be reinforced by an initially cool diplomatic tone toward China, spanning a tense bilateral meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, in March 2021 to the postponement of Blinken's February 2023 visit to China, prompted by the dispatch of a Chinese spy balloon into U.S. airspace. Nevertheless, one could go too far in anticipating an accelerating decline. Despite tensions over specific technological exchanges, the Biden administration has also persistently rejected wider arguments for a "decoupling" of the U.S. and Chinese economies, seeking to place a floor under any broader decline in relations. Indeed, in April 2023, [End Page 41] Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attracted considerable attention with a speech at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies that, while acknowledging the primacy of security concerns, warned against any attempt to decouple the two economies, even holding out hope for the possibility of economic and environmental cooperation.3 Further, in July 2023, Yellen visited Beijing, where she stressed the need for joint U.S.-China leadership in addressing common interests concerning the global macroeconomy, developing country debt, and climate change. This essay suggests that the coexistence of Blinken-styled tensions and Yellen-styled accommodation encapsulates a more enduring feature of U.S.-China relations. Throughout interpretations of policy challenges, "zero-sum" framings, which draw on security discourses and trade metaphors to highlight concerns for relative position, have existed in tension with oft-overlooked "positive-sum" framings that reflect Keynesian perspectives that stress the need for cooperation in the face of uncertainty and instability. To enable an understanding of these tensions, this essay offers an analysis highlighting the ambiguity of national interests, which are in turn shaped by agents acting as interpretive practitioners who construct events in ways that shape interests in cooperation or conflict.4 To draw attention to the overlooked potential for U.S.-China cooperation, we specifically reference enduring Keynesian frames that lead states to perceive common interests in cooperating to address shared threats. Moreover, even as such predispositions originate in the economic sphere, we suggest that this potential for cooperation may transcend economics on the grounds that Keynesian ideas that lead countries to identify shared interests in global economic governance may also shape interests in global environmental governance. Tracing these dynamics, this essay offers a narrative of U.S. debates on cooperation with China, emphasizing the role of "New Keynesian" economist and long-standing policymaker Janet Yellen across economic and environmental issues. The ambiguity of U.S. national interests as the outcome of disparate policymaker preferences can be seen in Yellen's Keynesian approaches toward cooperating with China on global issues, [End Page 42] particularly when contrasted with recent approaches to economic diplomacy that span the Trump administration's mercantilist-styled stress on the balance of payments to the more targeted security-focused approach of Biden administration figures such as Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.5 First, the essay examines mid-1990s debates over the Asian financial crisis, the Kyoto Accords, and China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), focusing on Yellen's Keynesian position that highlighted the existence of potential global public goods; second, it addresses the 2008 global financial crisis, which Yellen's perceived as a possible impetus for joint activism between the United States...