Anthony Blinken didn’t even make it back to Washington from Beijing (stopping by London on the way) before his boss – President Biden – multiplied the results of his Secretary of State’s visit by zero
If on Monday, shortly after Blinken’s meeting with Xi Jinping, Biden told the press that the Secretary of State had “done a hell of a job” and they were “on the right track”, the very next day, speaking at his campaign fundraising meeting in San Francisco, he decided to take things further and show everyone confidence in his own, American, strength.
In a statement that “China is not America’s problem”, Biden said, “we don’t have to worry about it,” and “China’s economic difficulties are real: “We are now in a situation where he (Xi Jinping) wants to have a relationship again.” If the US president had confined himself to these words, things could still be written off as a habit of empty bluster, but Biden chose to recall the reasons for the cancellation of Blinken’s visit in February this year. Back then, the Americans shot down a Chinese balloon over their territory – a meteorological balloon, as they say in Beijing, and a reconnaissance balloon, as they claim in Washington. The story is now a thing of the past, but the US president could not stop the flow of his eloquence: “The reason Xi Jinping was very upset when I shot down this balloon with spy equipment on two freight cars was because he didn’t know the balloon was there… I mean it. Dictators get very confused when they find themselves unaware of what happened. It shouldn’t have happened where it did… And he didn’t know about it. When it was shot down, he was very confused and denied that the balloon was even there.”
So Biden managed to insult Xi twice by calling him a dictator, and incompetent (he didn’t know what his subordinates were doing), and also made him look embarrassed and in denial about reality. Just an ingenious summation of the Secretary of State’s visit.
Beijing immediately expressed its displeasure and strongly protested: the Foreign Ministry said the statements by the American side were “highly absurd, highly irresponsible, contrary to facts, a serious violation of diplomatic etiquette, a serious attack on China’s political dignity and an open political provocation”.
It is understandable that one would expect anything from a politician who first called Vladimir Putin a “murderer” and then a “bloody dictator”, but in this case one is surprised at the completely illogical timing of the personal insults. Why would Biden make such a speech now? Theories immediately emerged that he did it deliberately. Supposedly, in Beijing Blinken proposed something to the Chinese, they responded, in Washington they thought and thought about it and found it unacceptable, so Biden let his tongue loose. The assumption is bizarre, to say the least, and contrary to everything we know about the state of Sino-US relations and the personality of the US President.
That is the problem: Biden did not put any meaning into his statements; he simply chose to say what he thought without bothering to think about how this would be received in Beijing. And that is much worse – not just for Sino-US relations.
Biden is a very experienced politician – he has indeed been in international relations for half a century. But his view of the world order does not coincide disastrously with reality: he believes America will continue to lead humanity and rule the world. Yes, it is now being challenged by revisionist powers like China and Russia, but the US will be able to unite the democracies of the world and fight back against authoritarian regimes and personally dictator Putin and Xi. This conviction is at the heart of Biden’s worldview, and so he says what he wants and what he thinks on the basis that US dominance is unshakable and the only thing that truly threatens it is internal division (and the rise to power of anti-globalists like Trump, whom Biden already calls simply “semi-fascists”).
He believes that America has a huge number of allies and only needs to organise them properly, building alliances to contain China (as has already been done with NATO in relation to Russia). Not coincidentally, in the same speech in San Francisco, Biden said: “It really upset Xi that I insisted that we bring together the QUAD four, countries that work hand in hand in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.”
That is, the US, Japan, Australia and India are “working together” in the South China Sea, which contains the Spratly Archipelago, whose Chinese ownership is disputed by several Southeast Asian states at once. Not a single country has anything to do with the sea, but the US not only sees itself free to meddle in territorial disputes, but also to forge anti-Chinese alliances (not military as yet, because India is not about to form a military alliance with America, and Japan and Australia are already dependent on the US). Biden’s statement alone shows what the assurances Blinken gave in Beijing that “American alliances are not directed against China” were worth. And after all, the South China Sea is just one point of contention between China and the US, to say nothing of Taiwan?
And it is certainly not possible to assure Xi Jinping that the US sincerely wants to negotiate a controlled rivalry, to build a normal dialogue. Every year China becomes more and more convinced: the entire American strategy towards it comes down to a combination of two techniques – provocation and encirclement (called containment). The residual trust that once existed between Beijing and Washington is fast disappearing, and no one in the US, including Kissinger, who has warned of the dangers of demonising China, can stop the process. And without a modicum of trust there can be no dialogue – leaving only room for Biden’s monologues.
Peter Akopov, RIA
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