Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The Shangri-La Dialogue, hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is Asia's premier annual security conference, often said to be the equivalent of Europe's Munich Security Conference, and meetings of U.S. and Chinese defense ministers have become customary.

China was reported to have refused an invitation to Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu to meet his U.S. counterpart at the Shangri-La Dialogue. But in fact, they shook hands and spoke briefly at the opening dinner on Friday.

When delivering a speech themed "A Shared Vision for the Indo-Pacific," U.S. Defense Minister Lloyd Austin said that "The region's growing openness and prosperity show the importance of working together, and not allowing ourselves to be split apart."

The Pentagon complains that China is not keeping "open lines of communication." The usual chorus of defense and security experts from both sides of the North Atlantic sing from the same songbook: while the U.S. strives to keep the dialogue open, China is being "intransigent."

Undoubtedly, great-power communication is critically important to keep tensions low and to ensure that accidental crises do not spin out of control into a war, small or large. With Sino-U.S. relations having nose-dived so low, undoubtedly communication is critically important.

However, who has brought the matter to this nadir? The record shows that the U.S. is pretty well single-handedly responsible.

The U.S. ensnared Defense Minister Li in its sanctions already in 2018. While this is far from the sole reason for China's refusal of the defense ministers' meeting, the U.S. is quite aware that its sanctions constitute a sufficiently serious obstacle for U.S. President Joe Biden to make noises about lifting them on Defense Minister Li at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima. However, on his return to the embrace of the hawks who seem to run foreign and defense policy these days, the White House sought to argue that the sanctions did not prevent U.S. officials from meeting with sanctioned counterparts in a "third country." Nice try, no cookie.

Such diplomatic contortion is not unusual for the U.S., however, the fact is that the U.S. wants to have its diplomatic cake and eat it too. The hopes that the Biden administration would give up on the Trump administration's aggressive stance towards China and adopt a more cooperative and constructive one, recognizing the still intimate economic relationship if nothing else, now seem a distant memory. Biden's U.S. has sought to allegedly "balance" the conflictual elements of its China policy with cooperative ones. Hence the diplomatic contortions.

However, even that is not quite what it seems. It is a no-brainer that U.S. governments serve corporate interests. Once upon a time, this fact made the life of U.S. presidents easy. More recently, however, things have changed. The U.S. corporate ruling class is split between the hawks, who have never seen a war they did not like and could not profit from and others. Their identity and inclinations are not easily characterized. They are definitely not "doves." While they do represent the hundreds of U.S. corporations that still profit from the intricate economic ties that once, a decade and a half ago, led to talk of "Chimerica," they still fear China's technological prowess.

So, while they push against the anti-China hawks, they do so only uncertainly and ambiguously. Their greed for profits from their Chinese operations is tempered by their fear that their fantasy of a subordinated China is exactly that, a fantasy, and that China might do better than them. This leaves the U.S. hard "hawkish" and a mixed-up place.

It is no wonder then that the record of Sino-U.S. relations since the Biden administration took power has been so bad. The U.S. issued unfounded allegations about a "genocide" in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, declared many Chinese companies "security threats" and proclaimed a policy of confrontation as well as "cooperation" with China in the first month of the Biden administration.

Moreover, U.S. actions since the last Shangri-La Dialogue, when Lloyd Austin did meet his then-Chinese counterpart, read like a litany of crimes and misdemeanors. Already at the meeting, the U.S. branded China's purely defensive one-China principle "provocative" and "destabilizing."

Last August, Nancy Pelosi made her provocative trip to China's Taiwan region. In October, the U.S. placed restrictions on exports of U.S.-made advanced chips and other high-technology products to China. Finally, to this already burning fire, the U.S. added jet fuel when it reacted hysterically to a Chinese weather balloon going astray by claiming it was a spy balloon. Coming from the world's master spy, spying on enemies and allies alike, this was certainly rich.

Thus, if China does eventually relent and agree to a defense ministers' meeting at the Shangri-La Dialogue, it will be in the interests of world security, peace and, dare one say, prosperity, a cause the U.S. can never be accused of serving, and not because the U.S. deserved such mercy.

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