Unanswered phones, missed signals: fear of accidental US-China crisis grows SCMP

“The escalation risk is significantly higher than it was 2001,” said Amanda Hsiao, an analyst with the International Crisis Group and author of Risky Competition: Strengthening US-China Crisis Management, which was released this month. “We saw then a period of political stalemate and tension, about 11 days before a breakthrough emerged. Were something like that to happen today, it would take much more than 11 days to resolve.”

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And while the odds of an unintended war remain small, the risk is growing, as communication and crisis management falter, guardrails disappear and more ships, planes and submarines crowd China’s periphery. Adding to the mix, the two nuclear powers increasingly frame their competitive struggle as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, making it far tougher to compromise.

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Badly frayed relations mean that existing machinery designed to prevent the two giants from sliding into crisis, or helping them defuse one once under way – including hotlines, maritime guidelines, formal and informal diplomatic channels and military protocols – are increasingly ineffective or non-existent.

And while the US side sees China as a rule-breaker bent on upending the global “rules-based” order, Beijing views the US as a washed-up superpower intent on humiliating China and preventing its rise.

“People are worried about an accident because everyone’s on such a hair trigger,” said Susan Thornton, a senior fellow at Yale Law School and former senior State Department official. “It’s kind of amazing we’ve gone since 2001 without one.”

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Contact between the PLA and the Pentagon has been on a steady decline. The high-level Security and Diplomatic Dialogue, established in 2017 by president Donald Trump’s administration before relations deteriorated, was abandoned in 2019.

Last year, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin tried and failed three times to organise military talks with General Xu Qiliang, vice-chairman of China’s Central Military Commission. Chinese state-run media accused Austin of ignoring diplomatic protocol by failing to request a meeting with his civilian counterpart, Defence Minister Wei Fenghe.

Combine this with the news that Russia and the US are pulling out most of their diplomats and aren't returning each other's calls and that there aren't really any methods of reliable contact anymore between them, and it starts becoming very worrying for if a serious emergency hits. I have always assumed that if there really was a serious situation that could evolve into nuclear armageddon, that cooler heads would prevail and go "Wait, wait, we're not gonna sacrifice everything just for this temporary thing." I thought that was the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But our politicians and diplomats are incompetent failchildren who are getting increasingly unable to even run the empire efficiently, and they're pissing off their adversaries with deliberate sore spots, like US politicians going to Taiwan, so that they don't want to talk to them. Very dangerous stuff.