Trying to mend fences with 68-year-old President Xi Jinping on Zoom yesterday, 78-year-old President Joe Biden was forced to walk back many of his complaints about China over the last 10 months. When Joe sent his 58-year-old Secretary of State Antony Blinken and 33-year-old National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to summit with high-ranking Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska March 18, it was an unmitigated failure. Blinken and Sullivan accused Beijing of committing genocide against Muslim Uygurs in Xinjiang Province, a brutal crackdown in Hong Kong and bullying its neighbors in the Pacific Rim. Biden had his finger prints all over the Anchorage summit, despite claiming yesterday’s Zoom meeting was the first summit with China. Biden tried but failed to convince Jinping to ease off its intimidation of Taiwan, flying war-planes over the Taiwan Strait.
Biden’s meeting with Xi was one of unilateral capitulation, realizing he had no influence on Chinese foreign policy. Xi wasn’t happy when Biden announced Sept. 16 a nuclear submarine deal with Australia, part of a pact to patrol the South China Sea where China continues to build out illegal military installations. Biden was forced in his Zoom meeting with Xi to eat crow, completely acquiescing to Xi’s demands to leave Taiwan alone. Beijing insists that Taiwan is part of China, despite Biden prattling on about the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. Former President Jimmy Carter agreed to recognize Beijing as one China, viewing Taiwan as a renegade Chinese territory. “If China-U.S. relations cannot return to the past, they should face the future,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. Lijian is the Chinese diplomat who insists the deadly novel coronavirus was made in America and planted in China.
Gone were all of Biden’s concerns about China’s human right abuses against Muslim Uyghurs and pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. Xi dominated Biden, forcing him into complete acquiescence to China’s aggressive foreign policy, including recent military flyovers in the Taiwan Strait. For the past month, Taiwan has been on a war footing, not knowing whether Beijing would try to seize the island nation. “As I’ve said before, it seems to me our responsibility as leaders of China and the United States is to ensure that the competition between our countries does not veer into conflict, whether intended or unintended,” Biden said, signaling to Xi that the U.S. lacks the will to confront China on any issue. Biden asked Xi to please get along with the U.S. because the country lacks the military strength or moral will to confront China on its lawlessness around the planet.
What happened to Blinken and Sullivans grave concerns about China’s human rights abuses, only a few months ago? What’s different now is that Biden’s conducting U.S. foreign policy, unable to hold his own with world leaders. Former President Donald Trump warned that Biden didn’t have the personal strength and diplomatic skills to put the U.S. on a level playing field with China. Yesterday’s Zoom summit showed that Biden has capitulated to China on wide range of issues. :”I see this dialogue as a stabilizer of the bilateral relations,” Biden said. “I don’t expect this one summit to bring us back to the good old days, but certainly it stops the downward spiral.” Biden s said. Biden’s been the one responsible for the “downward spiral,” focusing only on China’s human rights abuses, rather than trying to find common. Biden rambled on about the Taiwan Relations Act, annoying Xi and his advisers.
Beijing doesn’t care about the Taiwan Relations Act, the Jimmy Carter Act that recognized Beijing as the one-and-only China. Taiwan Relations Act also clarified the U.S. role in protecting the island nation from any conflict with Beijing. Taiwan Relations Act made clear that the U.S. would confine itself to supplying Taiwan with defense weapons with which to defend itself from a Chinese Communist invasion. This was really just an opportunity for the two leaders to make clear their intentions and priorities and concerns about their relationship and begin to really set the terms of what is a new era in U.S.-China relations,” said Paul Haenie, former U.S. officials and China expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Haenie knows that Biden’s approach surrendered to Beijing, essentially giving Beijing the green light to bully its neighbors and ignore U.S. demands.
When it came to any of the substantives issues that meant so much in Anchorage, Biden sucked it up and gave Xi free reign to continue beating up on his neighbors and dominating on the world stage. Biden’s weakness with Xi related to the fact that the U.S. is in no position to confront Bejing in the South China Sea or anywhere else. When Bejing agreed last week at the U.N.’s Climate Summit in Glasgow to work with the U.S. on climate change, it was a convenient distraction. Beijing has no intention of closing its coal-fired power plants anytime soon. Biden says that climate change is the world’s biggest existential threat. He and his like-minded friends at Glasgow failed to get China, Russia and India to buy into his Armageddon scenario. China agreed with one thing: Nuclear power is the way to go in the future. Biden tossed renewable energy under the bus at Glasgow, agreeing with China on nuclear energy.
