I think that the views expressed in Walter Russell Mead’s most recent Wall Street Journal on how China, Russia, and others view President Biden’s foreign policy:
Last week Russian troops fanned out across Kazakhstan; the Myanmar junta sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi to four more years in prison; and China transferred a senior official from Xinjiang to lead the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Hong Kong. Two things are clear. First, America’s geopolitical adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration. Second, the administration’s attempts to make a priority of human rights and democracy have so far failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.
The Biden administration’s political fragility at home is partly to blame. But adversaries are watching more than American domestic politics; they see incoherence in American policy. The administration has signaled that balancing China in the Indo-Pacific, the promotion of democracy and climate policy are its overriding foreign-policy priorities. Our adversaries—and some of our friends—think that these goals can’t be pursued successfully at the same time. They conclude that American policy focused on incompatible objectives will ultimately fail.
miss something fundamental.
U. S. military power and diplomatic policy are both downstream from American economic strength. They are dependent on it. For us to have a “coherent” diplomatic policy as he puts it or for us to maintain and renew our military strength we must reindustrialize. Regardless of what some Americans seem to think people in other countries don’t aspire to American values. They want prosperity.
That’s the reason that people from practically every country in the world but particularly from Central and South America are willing to pay human smugglers enormous sums (by their standards) to bring them here. Note that’s not a problem that Russia, China, or Iran has.
For us to maintain the caliber of military we need to defend ourselves or have a foreign policy that anybody pays any attention to, we must rebuild our economic strength. We can’t maintain either of those as China’s biggest customer.
