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Here’s why China has gone on the offensive against Biden
A giant screen shows Chinese President Xi Jinping attending the opening session of the National People s Congress at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, on March 5, 2021. Photo via Tingshu Wang/Reuters.
Top US government officials are studying China’s increased diplomatic bravado and growing military assertiveness with all the intensity of elite athletes poring over game films of their most resourceful rival.
From the CIA to the White House, and from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, what these officials are reporting is a far greater willingness by China to go on the offensive in the first 100 days of the Biden administration. The Chinese are more ready to push back against real and imagined slights from the United States and its allies, even as they escalate warnings and military activities around Taiwan.
Without a trade strategy, Biden can’t win the contest with China
China s president, Xi Jinping, gives an online speech at the Boao Forum for Asia on April 20, 2021. Photo via Kyodo and Reuters.
The biggest hole in the Biden administration’s otherwise encouraging efforts to better compete with China a void that could undermine all the other pieces is the lack of an international trade strategy.
While President Xi Jinping’s China accelerates his efforts to negotiate multilateral and bilateral trade and investment agreements around the world, both Republicans and Democrats in the United States have grown allergic to such arrangements.
Russia s President Vladimir Putin and China s Xi Jinping walk down the stairs as they arrive for a BRICS summit in Brasilia, Brazil November 14, 2019. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino/File Photo
President Joe Biden faces a nightmare scenario of global consequence: increasing Sino-Russian strategic cooperation aimed at undermining US influence and at upending Biden’s efforts to rally democratic allies.
It is the most significant and underrecognized test of Biden’s leadership yet: It could be the defining challenge of his presidency.
This past week, Russia and China simultaneously escalated their separate military activities and threats to the sovereignty of Ukraine and Taiwan respectively countries whose vibrant independence is an affront to Moscow and Beijing but lies at the heart of US and allies’ interests in their regions.
Biden’s start reflects audacious domestic and global ambitions
US President Joe Biden speaks about jobs and the economy at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 7, 2021. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
It is hard to overstate the audaciousness of US President Joe Biden’s first one hundred days in office, which will be marked April 30. Behind it lies a presidential ambition to recharge America while at the same time improving the United States’ odds in its escalating contest with China.
Biden’s boldness can be measured most graphically by the numbers: the four trillion dollars and counting that he hopes to generate to finance an American pandemic rebound, a surge in US jobs and growth, and a mountain of national infrastructure investments (defining “infrastructure” liberally).