The Biden-Blinken-Yellin Kowtow and Presidential Politics

China as Strategic Competition vs. Existential Threat

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The recently completed trips of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Communist China have drawn a sharp contrast for voters in the 2024 presidential election.  These trips have solidified the Biden doctrine of “strategic competition and derisking” with China, which is as far from the Republican view as Beijing is from Washington.

Yellin made clear that she, like Blinken, went to China at “President Biden’s directive to deepen bilateral communications after his meeting with President Xi last November.”   In other words, Biden owns this policy.

Yellin likewise made clear with an exaggerated bow and kowtow to Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng that the Biden regime would not directly challenge Communist Chinese economic or military aggression; its military aid to, and oil purchases from, Putin’s Russia; China’s enabling of Iran’s nuclear weapons program now threatening Israel; the provocative stationing of a spy base on Cuba; or its continued slaughter of Americans through the fentanyl trade.   On these omissions alone, Republicans vying for the presidential nomination will likely have a field day,

Yellin further stated that neither she nor Joe Biden viewed the relationship “through the frame of great power conflict.”  Implicitly, she and Biden thus reject the long-held view of strategists like Professor John Mearsheimer that war between the established power of the United States and the emerging power of China is as inevitable as war was between Sparta and Athens – unless, as the Republican position will be, China can be successfully decoupled from and contained.

Brushing such concerns aside, Yellin instead proclaimed “President Biden and I seek a future of healthy economic competition between our countries. We believe it is possible to achieve an economic relationship that is mutually beneficial in the long term – one that supports growth and innovation on both sides.” 

In support of this lofty aspiration, Yellin offered the oft-repeated globalist talking point “that China’s growth has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.”  Here, of course, Republicans will be quick to point out the well-documented cost of China’s rise – the shuttering of over 70,000 American factories and the destruction of more than 5 million manufacturing jobs.

What struck me most about both the Blinken and Yellin meetings was a sense of de ja vu.  During my four years in the White House, I faced the Communist China side across a negotiating table numerous times.  In all cases, the Chinese refused to acknowledge the Trump administration’s fair-trade concerns with an avowedly mercantilist China and remained intransigent in accepting any solutions that might indeed make the relationship “mutually beneficial.” 

Stripped of rhetoric, the only difference between the Biden-Blinken-Yellin meetings and the ones I participated in is that President Trump responded to Chinese intransigence with stiff tariffs and other tough actions while the Biden administration is simply conciliatory.  A key point here, however, and one that Republicans will surely make, is that further Biden negotiations without tangible actions will simply prolong a status quo that favors China.

Economically, China continues to run a massive trade surplus with the United States.  This means on net the US-China economic relationship creates far more jobs and factories in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen than it does in Akron, Detroit, and Scranton.

As a military side effect, America’s trade deficit with China roughly equals China’s military budget.  In essence, American consumers are financing a Chinese military buildup designed to take Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands, control the sea lines of the South and East China Seas, and drive America out of Asia.

The only “good news” the Biden-Blinken-Yellin negotiations provide is that of a clear choice for American voters.  If you believe as Biden does that we are simply in a strategic competition with Communist China and that China’s economic and military activities pose no existential threat, then you will agree that the prudent course is negotiations aimed at first stabilizing the relationship and then achieving incremental changes over time.  Of course, in this view, you must also believe the Chinese actually want a mutually beneficial relationship and come in peace.  Believe all that and Biden is clearly your man in 2024.

If, on the other hand, you believe China has no intention of ceasing its economic aggression, that its goal is hegemony in Asia, and that globally it seeks to control the world’s resources and markets, then any one of a number of Republican candidates – with Trump clearly in the lead now – will be America’s choice.  

You decide.