Walter Lohman On Taiwan: Climate change, Taiwan and US foreign policy
Two weeks ago, according to the
New York Times, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) told a virtual audience convened by the Council on Foreign Relations that cooperation with the US on climate change depends on the US approach to several hot-button Chinese interests.
For anyone following the way Beijing conducts diplomacy, this is no surprise. Connor Swank, an analyst at the Center for Advanced China Research, which systematically examines official Chinese statements, puts it this way: “Unfortunately, the notion that Beijing continues to seek concessions from the United States in return for China’s cooperation on climate change is very well-supported.”
In Chaos Under Heaven, the Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin reminds us that under Xi Jinping, China halted the export of personal protective equipment made by US companies, sent defective PPE to the Netherlands and barred Australian beef exports after Canberra called for an inquiry into the genesis of Covid-19. In Rogin’s telling, China’s “mask diplomacy” was a blunt instrument, designed to still criticism abroad and sow fear at home.
Rogin delivers a needed modicum of clarity. Under the subtitle Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, he lays out what the US and its allies got wrong about China over decades, strife within the Trump administration and personal financial conflicts that affected US policy. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump feature heavily. But Hunter and James Biden bear watching too.
On Tuesday's New Day show, CNN finally admitted that the Donald Trump administration might have been on to something in claiming that the COVID-19 virus likely originated in a lab in China rather than at a wet market.
When I was labor secretary welfare ended but now it’s back and three-quarters of Americans – and many Republicans – approve Joe Biden signs the American Rescue Plan in the Oval Office. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP A quarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his re-election. That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.” Until Thursday, that is. Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80% per child. As Biden put it in his address to t
Book Review: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century
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March 13, 2021
Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century | Josh Rogin | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | March 2021.
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ccording to reports, President Joe Biden may convene the first-ever quadrilateral U.S. summit with leaders from Australia, India, and Japan as part of the administration’s push to counter China. The summit would revive the quadrilateral relationship known in policy circles as “the Quad” that emerged after the 2007 Indonesia tsunami. It had lain dormant out of fears from Delhi and Canberra about antagonizing Beijing. However, with India and China fighting across the border at Ladakh, and Australia’s growing concern about China’s expansionist foreign policy, both countries are reconsidering the value of such a partnership with Washington and Tokyo.