In his column at the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead outlines some of the incoming Biden Administration’s earliest steps:
Initiating his China policy with the most aggressive concatenation of moves against a foreign power that any peacetime U.S. administration has ever launched so early on, President Biden has thrown down a gauntlet that Beijing is unlikely to ignore. Besides issuing a formal invitation to Taiwan’s top Washington representative to attend the inauguration (the first such invitation since the U.S. established formal relations with Beijing in 1979), the incoming team has pledged to continue arms sales to Taiwan and indicated that it wants to delay high-level U.S.-China talks until it consults with close allies—a stand that China will interpret as a rebuff. As if this weren’t enough, Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken announced that he concurs with his predecessor Mike Pompeo’s finding that China is engaged in a genocide against its mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang province. Taken with the previously planned dispatch of a naval strike group to the South China Sea, it all amounts to a stern message to Beijing.
concluding:
All this may well be inevitable, and the U.S. cannot abandon either its strategic interests or its core values. But weaving those sometimes conflicting elements into a coherent foreign policy is never an easy task. The dramatic first steps of the Biden administration demonstrate how challenging American statecraft can be.
He missed a few including President Biden’s “Buy American” executive order. Maybe all of these steps are a prelude to a new round of engagement with China but it’s a bit hard to see how that will materialize. Alternatively, it may be that President Biden will share the experience of most of his predecessors in which foreign policy made them rather than the other way around.
Either stumbling into war or he’s offered Beijing assurances on back channels that this is theater.
The new progressives he seeks to please show no interest in human rights or Taiwan’s security so it’s not that.
Could be bluff.
Anyway, all the generic meds we rely on are made in the gulags so we’d better stock up.
The US is badly and very visibly losing the competitions in the diplomatic, economic, and military spheres.
Rather than decoupling, nearly all of our allies are intensifying their economic integration with China: (1) Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and (2) EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI). The US is pointedly excluded from both agreements. This is a slap in the face to the US by our long-standing allies, and a certification that China is replacing the US as world hegemon. The US now joins India as an irrelevancy.
Combine this humiliation with the fact that the Biden administration has hired on many aggressive interventionists from Obama’s administration, and the likelihood of a major war becomes uncomfortably high. We are reprising the tragic role of a declining state trying to thwart the rise of its replacement. God, help us.
China is emboldened by success in Hong Kong. So now they ratchet up the pressure on Taiwan. Reunification is inevitable in their plans, long term. That’s the key, and Biden’s gamble.
As long as Xi feels well, time is his friend. US Saber rattling may buy time , as China now sees our decline as inevitable.
Why go toe to toe with the wounded, corrupt, dying Western hegemonic war machine at. this juncture?
We now have, to our credit, according to CBS news, 15,500 transgender troops in the US military. Over 12 Battalions .Efforts are underway to increase these numbers to make the military representative of who we are .
The US , beyond standoff missilery and our nuclear shield does not impress adversaries or allies with our inclusive trendy climate.