President Joe Biden wanted to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping after the communist nation's spy balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina, but was advised against it by his top national security advisers, senior officials familiar with the matter told NBC News.
If given the opportunity to speak directly, Biden thought he could use his relationship with Xi to minimize the friction with Beijing, the officials said. Biden's advisers, however, convinced him that a one-on-one conversation was not the best course of action.
Instead, Biden's advisers told him that outreach to Beijing should begin with lower or midlevel officials and proceed upward, the officials said.
According to the officials, Biden's advisers claimed that China was too angry over by Biden's decision to take down the balloon for a call with Xi to be productive.
"The goal is not to get Biden and Xi on the phone," a senior administration official told NBC. The goal is to get the U.S.-China "relationship back on track."
China maintains that the balloon was an unmanned civilian airship that drifted off course and blasted the Biden administration for its response. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's trip to Beijing was postponed and the White House publicly accused China of considering supplying Russia with lethal military aid to use in Ukraine.
In the time since, conversations and meetings between the U.S. and China have taken place below the presidential level in an effort to reset relations. The White House had a breakthrough shortly after the balloon was shot down when Blinken met with China's top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, in February on the sidelines of a conference in Munich.
Communications between Washington and Beijing mostly stopped in the following months, however, and the White House has been struggling to secure conversations between key officials.
Still, there are signs that relations are beginning to thaw.
In May, national security adviser Jake Sullivan landed a meeting with senior Chinese officials in Vienna and CIA Director William Burns quietly traveled to Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials.
A former senior U.S. official told NBC that White House officials "want to calm the waters with China, so they are trying to get visits by Cabinet officials in place." Part of the strategy in advising Biden not to call Xi is "so it doesn't look like Biden is pleading for talks," the official said.
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