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US President Joe Biden takes part in a virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. This was the first meeting of the two leaders since Biden was inaugurated 10 months ago. (AFP/Yonhap News)

In their first summit held by videoconference on Monday, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to explore discussions on “strategic stability,” the White House said.

The message was meant to stress that the US was taking the first steps to get China to the dialogue table for nuclear arms reductions, although the tepid response from China has raised questions about whether any meaningful results can be achieved.

Whatever comes out of these discussions, however, will have a profound impact on the political situation surrounding the Korean Peninsula.

During a seminar at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said, “President Biden did raise with President Xi the need for a strategic stability set of conversations [. . .] that needs to be guided by the leaders and led by senior empowered teams on both sides that cut across security, technology and diplomacy.”

“And the two leaders agreed that we would look to begin to carry forward discussions on strategic stability,” he continued.

The term “strategic stability” refers to reducing the threat of nuclear war from nuclear and other strategic weapons. It has also been used in the context of dialogue on nuclear armament control between the US and Russia.

Sullivan’s remarks came in response to a question from moderator and Brookings Institution President John Allen, who cited China’s nuclear warhead buildup and hypersonic missile testing as examples of a growing arms control issue and asked whether there had been discussions between Washington and Beijing on how to address it.

While Sullivan did not explicitly mention “nuclear arms controls,” the context of his remarks led some analysts to interpret them as meaning that the two leaders had agreed to explore beginning discussions on nuclear and other arms controls. No related content was included in the two countries’ announcements on the summit outcomes.

Sullivan also indicated that the dialogue was a different matter from the US-Russia nuclear arms control efforts, which have a history dating back to the Cold War era.

“[The dialogue] is not the same as what we have in the Russian context with the formal strategic stability dialogue that is far more mature, has a much deeper history to it,” he stated.

“There is less maturity to that in the US-China relationship,” he continued, adding that it was “now incumbent on us to think about the most productive way to carry it forward from here.” His remarks could be seen as indicating a willingness to begin discussions with China at a very basic level toward achieving nuclear arms reductions.

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security advisor, discusses Monday’s US-China summit at a Brookings Institution virtual seminar on Tuesday. (screen capture from the Brookings Institution)

Historically, the US and Russia have experience with signing agreements aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, which prohibited the possession, manufacturing and experimentation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles; the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 1991, which pledged reductions in nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and the New START of 2010, which pledged to reduce the number of deployed nuclear warheads to below 1,550. The US and Russia also agreed on a five-year extension of the New START last February, ahead of its expiration.

Since China’s rise began in earnest, the US has been working to draw it into the arms control framework. Taking advantage of the agreements constraining activities by the US and Russia, China has been developing various intermediate-range missiles of its own.

On the strength of that, China has been pursuing an anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy that involves threatening forward-deployed US forces in South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Guam and other location in order to block US aircraft carriers and other vessels from entering the first island chain stretching from Kyushu to Okinawa and Taiwan, while inhibiting free movements within the second, outer island chain that encompasses Guam.

Recognizing the changing situation, the US withdrew from the INF Treaty in August 2019 and began calling for the creation of an arms reduction framework that would apply to itself, China and Russia. At the same time, the US itself has been proceeding with plans to begin deploying intermediate-rate ballistic missiles in East Asia in 2023.

In its analysis of a budget request submitted by the US Indo-Pacific Command in July, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that “a total of US$2.9 billion over the next five years has been appropriated to build a network of surface-launched missiles with ranges of 500 km or more to be deployed along the first island chain.”

The only candidate sites for the missiles’ deployment would be the Korean Peninsula, the main islands of Japan, or Okinawa and other parts of the Ryukyu Islands. This means that if the plan goes ahead, it could lead to a conflict incomparably larger than the dust-up over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery deployment in 2016 and 2017.

Additionally, the current situation is one of heightened alarm over China’s buildup of nuclear weapons and missiles, with US analysts recently predicting that China could increase its nuclear warhead stockpile to 1,000 by 2030. China’s hypersonic missile testing last summer also prompted many concerns that it represented a “Sputnik moment.”

But the likelihood of China agreeing to nuclear arms reduction talks as readily as the US hopes is almost zero.

One Chinese official was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that the two sides had not decided on a dialogue format along those lines during their summit, while suggesting that one option could involve “Track II” discussions with non-government experts taking part.

Another possibility is that Sullivan read too much into Xi’s remarks suggesting that the two sides should “meet and talk things over.”

In response to US demands for its to join an arms reduction framework, China has consistently maintained that its nuclear capabilities are “not a threat to anyone” and that it is “strictly limiting nuclear capability development based on defensive needs.” Indeed, an analysis by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute calculated China’s number of nuclear warheads at 350 — far lower than the 5,550 possessed by the US or the 6,225 possessed by Russia.

By Hwang Joon-bum, Washington Correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]