Overheard in Washington D.C. last week: 

OMG do you think they’ll see each other? 

LOL. It’s going to be so awkward, bruh. 

Facts. They haven’t talked in, like, years.

It was Prom season in the nation’s capital, so you’d be forgiven for thinking you had eavesdropped on the latest tea being spilled about some or another drama-filled, high-school romance. But you’d be mistaken, because international media and foreign policy commentators were approaching the discourse surrounding the 2023 Shangri-la Dialogue, held in Singapore on June 2-4, with a similar tone and vocabulary, in particular in assessing prospects for a meeting between U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Gen. Li Shangfu, the PRC Minister of Defense. It was surprising nobody started throwing shade on their choice of conference attire. 

The Shangri-la Dialogue (SLD), which bills itself as Asia’s premier security summit, has been around for two decades, and is now regularly attended by senior-level military and security delegations from approximately 50 countries, with scores more observers and assorted hangers-on. The conference organizers schedule plenary sessions, breakout sessions, keynote speeches – Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had top billing this year – and give a strong impression that ‘Important’ and maybe even ‘Momentous’ subjects will be discussed. Of theatrics there will have been plenty: reputations won and lost, grudges forged and forgiven, rivalries – both among and within national delegations – solidified and dissipated. In other words, perhaps not so different from this year’s senior prom after all. 

It must be said outright: as the security architecture in Asia is currently constructed, the respective strategic objectives of the United States and China are incompatible.

But surely between the kabuki and behind the shadow puppetry some business must have been getting done — so why such intense focus on one potential meeting between the United States and China, between whom not much work has gotten done for years? 

Part of the reason, of course, is that a competition for power and influence in Asia between the two countries, which has been playing out subtly for decades, has now bubbled to the surface. At the core of this competition sits its military componentry: in the case of the United States, the architecture of alliances, bases, access agreements, and partnerships that constitute the U.S. forward presence and leadership in a region deemed critical to its national destiny since the 1800s; in the case of China, a military improvement program that levers the country’s rapid economic and technological development of the last three decades, extends its operational reach, and aims to present a credible, coercive capacity — at least to deter what it would view as actions adverse to China’s interest in the Western Pacific, and at most to exercise effective control of an area Beijing views as its sphere of influence. 

It must be said outright: as the security architecture in Asia is currently constructed, the respective strategic objectives of the United States and China are incompatible. The United States will invest in strengthening its deterrence architecture, while China will invest in probing it for vulnerabilities and opportunities for breakout.

So not much to discuss, then. Irrespective of names, resumes and personalities, the SLD could invite the U.S. and PRC heads of defense every year, and every year anyone looking for a breakthrough or at least an indication of productivity would likely be disappointed. 

The respective political constraints within which the PRC and U.S. heads of defense operate, and the further incompatibility those constraints impose, also detract from the supposedly candid exchanges to which the SLD claims to aspire. Gen. Li, wearing his ministerial hat, participates in a state governance apparatus that has been weakened under Xi Jinping’s campaign to return the Communist Party of China to the forefront of all consequential planning and decision making. This would not change much for Gen. Li, who as a People’s Liberation Army man has spent his whole career serving the Party, not the state. But even in his influential Party position, as a member of the Central Military Commission Gen. Li sits at a lower rung than the CMC’s two vice chairmen, a protocolary hitch that has long snagged U.S. officials hoping for productive dialogue between the U.S. Secretary of Defense and their PRC counterparts. 

This year, in addition, there was the inconvenient matter of the sanctions the United States slapped on Gen. Li in 2018, for the role he played, in his previous capacity, in facilitating the PRC’s acquisitions of combat aircraft and missile systems from Russia. Gen. Li’s sanctioned status means any meeting with a U.S. official would be considered “sus” by the U.S. Congress, while for a PRC military that habitually leaves U.S. ‘snaps’ unopened, the sanctions likely all but assured his promotion to Minister of Defense. 

So the SLD dancefloor, as it were, was instead set for a kind of popularity contest between the United States and PRC defense delegations, something that even those at the pinnacle of the world’s defense and security establishments seem to love. The event’s well-worn procedure is for the United States and PRC principals to use their dueling plenary addresses to restate long-held national positions, repackage old bromides related to peace and stability, and issue a flex or two aimed at undercutting the position of the other. The presence of the SLD’s two main contestants then creates a kind of secondary market within which other politicians and policy luminaries compete for the spotlight by offering their own sage formulations on the state of the world, some of which the media then amplifies. 

The TikTok-ization of what counts for today’s foreign policy discourse – its oversimplification, emotive triggering, and dismissal of historical continuity – is doing great disservice to global audiences…

As always, this year’s party ended without any discernible change in the main storyline, and yet most of us may have missed the other dynamics at play. Such is the state of the discourse now that too many commentators portray events like the SLD as binary dramas played out between two major geopolitical personalities. But geopolitics isn’t a sport, and the strategic competition now underway between the United States and China isn’t the Superbowl. This is a multidimensional competition that will play out over decades and will be subject to factors and influences, only a few of which can be seen and predicted. Any memory of whether the senior defense officials from the United States and China hooked up, or ghosted each other at SLD 2023 will be of minor importance approaching total inconsequence. A more interesting analysis might take a wider view of how a multiplicity of stakeholders in the Indo-Pacific and beyond are adjusting to a new reality of U.S.-China antagonism, and pursuing their own security interests and creative approaches thereto in light of this new paradigm. 

Such a change in coverage could have been the one productive outcome from an SLD in which the United States and China did not, in the end, hold an official meeting. Any such encounter would likely have achieved nothing, even if giving the foreign policy commentariat something to talk about (Look at the ink spilt over the handshake that did occur between Gen. Li and Secretary Austin).

It would be overly stodgy to insist that popularity, performance, celebrity, and gossip have no purchase in international diplomatic events like the SLD (“OK boomer!”), but they are not the most important factors. The TikTok-ization of what counts for today’s foreign policy discourse – its oversimplification, emotive triggering, and dismissal of historical continuity – is doing great disservice to global audiences and may be seeping its way into actual diplomatic interactions — many of which have themselves become more performative than substantive. It’s all just so cringe.

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