Two senior State Department officials gave a background briefing yesterday on U.S. expectations and planning for the two-day high-level meeting of the U.S.-EU dialogue on China taking place today and tomorrow, the second such meeting since this format was relaunched last March. The unnamed officials went through the familiar provocative litany of how Europe and the U.S. together will jointly enforce the rules-based international order and what they call “Western values,” and thus win “the geopolitical test of the 21st century … from a position of strength,” countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the process. The officials announced that they expect the joint statement to be released at the meeting’s conclusion to be “robust,” and cover a broader range of topics, in more detail, than the (very general) statement released after the first meeting in May.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Secretary General of the European External Action Service Stefano Sannino are leading the show, and they will both speak at a Brookings Institution event at 2:30 pm on Friday to lay out the conclusions of this confab. This includes “Indo-Pacific strategy,” which will be the focus of Friday’s discussion, with Sannino briefing Sherman on implementation of the EU’s recently released Indo-Pacific strategy and Sherman “preview[ing] the United States’ forthcoming Indo-Pacific strategy,”
