China-US Military Hotline Is Good News in a Sea of Bad
As Beijing becomes more aggressive on the ocean and in the air, it’s important that the top brass from both countries are back in contact.
Getting aggressive.
Photographer: Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images
Ready for some good geopolitical news as 2023 concludes? Last week, the uniformed military leaders of China and the US spoke on video for the first time in well over a year. The head of the People’s Liberation Army, General Liu Zhenli, and the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, talked for about an hour at a very generic level about the need for good relations and avoiding miscalculations between the forces.
Military-to-military communications were abruptly cut off following the August 2022 visit of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. An agreement to restore them came out of last month’s summit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden near San Francisco. This was one of the key deliverables of that meeting, although it took weeks to consummate the promised reconnection (with the US trying to reach Chinese officials but failing on several occasions).