Miranda Devine: Joe Biden set to make all the same Chinese errors
Under Joe Biden’s rule we can anticipate the US government to sign back onto Paris and slip back into the comfortable routine of appeasing China and Iran. And on China, Biden is worryingly compromised, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Although he gets little credit for it, Donald Trump was right about China, as he was about much of his foreign policy.
Unlike his predecessors, he understood the threat of the Chinese Communist party and its predatory expansionism.
And was quick to ban flights from Hubei province on January 31 when the coronavirus hit.
He forced China and Europe into trade negotiations.
He negotiated historic peace treaties between Israel, the United Arab Emirates. Bahrain and Sudan.
He moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.
He pulled out of the Paris climate treaty and Iran nuclear agreement. But we can now expect a future Biden-Harris administration to repeat the gross geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency.
We can anticipate the US government under Biden’s rule to sign back onto Paris and slip back into the comfortable routine of appeasing China and Iran.
On China, Biden is worryingly compromised.
We saw in evidence of his complicity in his family’s influence peddling schemes overseas which appeared on his wayward son Hunter’s abandoned laptop.
Last May, Biden declared China was “not competition” for the US, a farcical statement. Throughout his vice-presidency, Biden, as the Obama administration’s point man for the region, missed the strategic threat China posed to American interests.
And, very importantly, the threat posed to allies such as Australia.
He has boasted of his access to the Chinese leadership.
“I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
“I have 25 hours of private dinners with him, just he and I, and one interpreter.”
But all he seemed to achieve was a position of sycophancy for the US.
In 2013, for instance, Biden took Hunter, a crack user with an appetite for prostitutes, who was thrown out of the navy for cocaine use, with him on Air Force 2 to China for two weeks.
The trip was meant to stop President Xi militarising islands in the South China Sea and stealing intellectual property.
Biden came away empty-handed on behalf of America, but somehow Hunter scored a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the bank of China.
On Saturday night, when Biden declared victory, he was joined on stage by Hunter, who had been in hiding throughout the campaign.
His presence would not have been missed by Xi.
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