Wow. Joe Biden hasn’t even been elected yet and there are already people predicting power conflicts within a future Biden Administration. In this particular case in his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead notices a gap between “climate hawks” and “China hawks”:
As policy makers in Beijing weigh their options in the event of a Biden victory, one of the subjects that will most engage their attention is climate change. Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that he will put the goal of slowing climate change at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. Washington would rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and urge all countries to enact measures to keep Earth’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, as the Democratic Party platform states.
China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Does this mean a Biden administration would add another dimension to U.S.-China tensions? Beijing likely hopes it’ll ease them.
For Chinese officials, the goal would be to get the Biden administration to negotiate with itself—the climate hawks persuading the incoming president to squelch the China hawks to save the planet. Beijing is the key to climate change, climate warriors will say, and America can’t persuade China to help cool the Earth by harassing it on trade, imposing sanctions against its companies, arming Taiwan, and encouraging its neighbors to form alliances against Beijing.
This is an approach China can work with. Beijing wants to fight climate change, its diplomats will whisper to U.S. climate hawks, but Chinese hard-liners need to be convinced. Help us to help you: If America demonstrates a spirit of compromise and cooperation on issues important to the hard-liners, well, who can say? We might even give up our coal plants. Someday.
There are Democrats to whom this will seem like smart statecraft. Global governance, they will tell Americans, transcends the petty stakes of geopolitical competition. Our common interest in saving humanity outweighs ephemeral disputes over maritime boundaries. Can we really let a conflict over Taiwan, a small island that America already officially recognizes as part of China, stand in the way of a climate treaty that could halt extinction?
Not only is China the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, it has continued to increase its emissions despite lockdowns, and its emissions are expected to increase for the foreseeable future at a pace that means that nothing the United States can do will actually slow emission. It continues to build coal-fired power stations not only within China but around the world. Each additional dollar of GDP in China requires additional emissions. Worse yet there is no way to verify China’s compliance with any accord.
I believe the following exchange from Biden’s CNN town hall last week is conclusive on his mindset vis a vis Russia and China.
Note the terms he uses to label each country, his thinking on Belarus, WTO.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2009/17/se.01.html.
That’s a combination of naive and lacking in perception. The Soviet Union was an adversary. We threw away the possibility of a more friendly relationship with Russia during the Clinton Administration, largely because of the influence of people who clung bitterly to a Cold War view of relations. That continued through the Obama Administration. And for goodness sake what would you expect when you put our foreign policy with respect to Russia in the hands of Poles and Ukrainians?
I wish VP Biden would elaborate on what he means by “insist”. I don’t think that we have the ability to insist that China do anything regardless of how many allies we have on our side. When you add that China has suborned so many of the international institutions on which I presume he would rely it further weakens his case.
This is an approach China can work with.
And the easiest path for a caretaker President who would rather talk about feel good issues that the press and Hollywood will love him for.
Good old Joe!! Just a regular guy.
Expecting a ‘Biden’ administration to do anything to harm the country that has benefited that family so handsomely is a complete delusion.
Russia isn’t a trading partner. They dont have much we want. Not much of a competitor. Maybe they didn’t have to be an opponent but that seems about right for what they have become. China as competitor? Sounds about right. The current administration, by its own metric, the trade deficit, has failed in its trade policies. Not sure what we can realistically expect from 4 more years. (Ok, we actually do. Lots of big announcements about “best ever” while we leak jobs and our debt increases.)
Steve
Any country, treated as we have Russia over the last 25 years, will be an adversary. China is already an adversary. When we consider actual U. S. interests, we have almost no points of conflict with Russia. The same is not true of China.
I don’t care what the present administration has or has not accomplished. I’m more concerned about future directions than looking backwards.