The U.S. domestic politics and the Asia-Pacific nations' unwillingness to take sides between China and the United States were the main factors behind U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's long-awaited but "prudent" anti-China policy speech, according to experts.

In a 45-minute speech on Thursday, Blinken accused China of posing "the most serious long-term challenge to the international order," and criticized its policies in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and the Taiwan region, issues concerning Beijing's core interests.

The top U.S. diplomat also devoted quite some time to talking about America's domestic affairs in a speech supposed to be about its diplomacy towards China, said Sun Chenghao, fellow at the Center for the International Security and Strategy (CISS), Tsinghua University.

With primaries in some states already under way, the U.S. has now entered the election season for the November 8 midterm elections.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden's public approval rating hit the lowest level of his presidency, falling to 36 percent, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll completed on Tuesday, raising alarms that his party could lose seats at least one chamber of Congress in the November votes.

In telling the audience at the George Washington University what Biden has done recently, including his first trip to South Korea and Japan and the launch of the so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) for the region, Blinken was exploiting the stage to tout what the Democratic administration has achieved, Sun told CGTN on Friday.

"In a sense, the speech is more about U.S. politics, less about China," he said, adding that American voters were actually the targeted audience for the high-profile speech.

Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University of China, said the U.S. has long wanted to use the China issue to bridge the partisan divisions between Democrats and Republicans, but that fails to work because of the depth of the U.S. domestic problems.

In the first quarter of 2022, the U.S. economy shrank by 1.5 percent year on year, said the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis on Wednesday. At the same time, seven-in-ten Americans view inflation as the top problem facing the country, according to a survey by Pew Research Center in May.

It costs real money to push one's diplomatic agendas, especially when it comes to the so-called re-construction of the global supply chains, Wang told CGTN when commenting on America's limitations in pursuing the IPEF widely believed to exclude China from the supply chains.

Region taking no side behind Blinken's prudence

Despite all the hardline rhetorics when the U.S. secretary of state unleashed a list of accusations against China, both experts believe that Blinken was also treading "prudently" in making the speech.

The United States is "not looking for conflict or a new Cold War" with China, and does not "seek to transform China's political system," Blinken said.

"There is nothing surprising there," said Sun, adding that the nearly 7,000-word speech was not a sudden or radical change of Washington's China policy.

It appeared Blinken was just finishing what he should have done by officially publicizing his president's policy framework towards China, said Sun.

"He said what he was expected to say," the CISS researcher said. "He did not say what he should not say," referring to Blinken's refraining from further provoking China.

Wang, an international affairs expert, also believes the speech was a watered-down version compared with the U.S. trumpeting of its so-called competition with China and containment of it.

He attributed the subtle change to the attitude of countries around China.

In an example of how the U.S. tires to form coalitions with other nations to constrain China, Blinken said Washington will "shape the strategic environment around Beijing" to advance their vision for "an open and inclusive international system."

Many countries, like the Southeast Asian countries, and even Washington's allies in the region were reluctant to join its anti-China strategy, Wang explained.

The 10-member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which boasts robust economic relations with China, have long made it clear that taking a side between China and the United States does not serve its interests.

By ignoring these countries' concerns, the United States acts selfishly and patronizingly and wants to copy in the region what it has done in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Wang said.

"It simply doesn't work," he concluded.  

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(Cover: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks while outlining U.S. strategy toward China at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 26, 2022. /CFP)