Six days before the presidential elections in the United States, key advisers from Joe Biden’s team tried to show at the official level that there would be no end to the Cold War unleashed by Donald Trump against China – but there would be a reformatting of it aimed at increasing efficiency
A year or two ago, the main complaint against the anti-globalist president was the deep state’s dissatisfaction with the collapse of Trump’s inherited system of managing the global economy and politics. Now the main complaint is that he could not properly “crush” China.
This important (and starting back in February) change in political and economic discourse indicates a significant change in the assessment of China’s place in the modern world. If earlier the American “deep state”, judging by the statements of experts, considered China to be just a planetary assembly shop serving America and not posing any danger, now they actually admit that Trump was right in his opinion about Beijing as an existential threat to the United States. However, they insist that the current owner of the White House did not correct it.
In this sense, expectations, including some Beijing publications that argue that Biden will be “easier to deal with” than Trump, may not be met in the most radical way.
By and large, the strategy, which Biden’s leading advisers are (now officially!) talking about, boils down to the fact that China will be “strangled” by all Pax Americana. They are even trying to appeal to the Sinophobic majority of the American electorate with a simple but convincing message: Trump was selfish, having quarreled with all America’s vassals and friends and tried to liquidate China on its own, and the Biden administration would be able to assemble an effective anti-Chinese coalition.
Reuters quoted one of the Obama administration strategists, who will work on the anti-Chinese measures of the Democratic president, verbatim.
“The failure of the Trump administration has been to go it alone. And that gave China an escape hatch”, – said Jeffrey Prescott, a former senior foreign policy official in the Obama administration.
Biden’s advisers declined to say if the Democratic presidential candidate, if elected, would lean toward lifting the huge tariffs on China that Trump has used to fuel a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
“He (Biden) is not going to fix any position until we see what exactly we inherit”, – said Prescott, adding that “consultations with allies will become a central part of decision-making”.
Of course, the position of Biden himself in this case does not matter: if he is president, then he will play the role of a “nominal living political mummy”, which symbolizes a kind of attempt to return to the “golden age” of the American empire of the era of Barack Obama. The potential democrat president himself already demonstrates all the signs of senile marasmus and can be used only as a visual advertisement of the achievements of advanced pharmacological technologies in the field of neurostimulants. The country will be run by the same faceless “experts” from the American special services, the state apparatus, the army and numerous “think tanks” who are on the salary of the conventional George Soros.
If President Biden is replaced by “Madame President Kamala Harris”, the result will be identical, because she has always belonged to the category of politicians who were promoted up not for intelligence and independence, but for complaisance in relations with the “deep state” and correct skin color. This does not imply the ability or even the desire to lead and formulate an independent strategy.
These clarifications are necessary to understand that the position outlined in the interview to Reuters by Biden’s advisers is not the point of view of advisers with which a particular US president from the Democratic Party may agree or disagree. In fact, this is the position of people who express a real consensus of that amorphous, but tough, consistent and very influential group (or even a social stratum) uniting the highest ranks of the American special services, state bureaucracy and the expert community. Moreover, this group intends (again) to bypass any democratic institutions and official procedures to govern the country.
The main moment of truth for the Biden administration will be the day when American diplomats from the “Obama cage”, who will return to leading positions in the US State Department in the event of Trump’s elimination, will go to Europe and begin to form the very anti-Chinese coalition, the necessity and desirability of which were actually formulated by Biden’s advisers.
Judging by their statements, the expectations look something like the following. State Department representatives arrive in Europe. Local politicians shout “the master is back!” Tears of joy prevent them from speaking, but they are already ready to sign all documents on anti-Chinese tariffs, bans on working with Chinese banks and development institutions (under the pretext of “Hong Kong repression” or something like that). And in record time, a friendly American-European team is blocking the “escape hatch” with which China “escaped” from Trump’s economic blows.
This is undoubtedly a very pleasant image of the future for the American “deep state”, but its implementation will require a serious violation of the laws of physics: the election of Biden, despite the colossal role of the American president in the world political situation, can hardly turn back the clock and make it so that 2013 was again on the calendar.
Europe has already acquired some political subjectivity and, for example, is trying to slightly stifle American IT companies with taxes, creating its own army and (so far successfully) fighting off attempts to ban the construction of Nord Stream-2. And the leading European leaders, despite all the difficulties in relations with the PRC, declare their unwillingness to work as “geopolitical infantry” in the American war against Beijing. Perhaps the American “deep state” will be able to assemble a large anti-Chinese and anti-Russian coalition, but this will be very, very difficult, and these successes do not guarantee a triumphant return of Pax Americana to the world arena.
Ivan Danilov, RIA