Blinken: US to leverage Russia-Ukraine bloc against China
By: MATTHEW LEE (AP NEWS)
Biden is forcing us to relive the 20th century. So far Biden has taken us back to the 1975 fall of Saigon, the 1962 Cuba missile crisis, the 1950s Korean War, and now the 1930s Japanese expansion in Asia. Yes, the names have changed and the countries are different. But it's still like deja vu all over again.
When do we finally acknowledge that the fear mongers are wearing no clothes? The Russian bogeyman has been revealed as much, much less than a military threat to Europe or the United States. So Biden has cranked up the wayback machine to find another bogeyman. Biden and Blinken are pasting the same rhetoric about Japanese expansion in the 1930s onto China. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Despite Blinken's doublespeak, the only reason China is a threat is because the United States has left the playing field. Addressing the claimed threat by China is really straightforward; open mines and factories, improve logistics within the United States, and begin playing China's game by competing in the export market. We can wag our finger at China until the finger falls off and it won't make the United States competitive with China.
Biden's Asian policy (?) is not making the United States stronger or more resilient. The United States can't counter the expansion of China with a war of words. And the Chinese economy is large enough and robust enough that isolating China would likely cause more harm to the United States than to China. The United States can't fight a conventional war with China because we don't have the resources or manufacturing capacity to support that kind of war. Conventional wars are won with manufacturing and logistics and China has an overwhelming advantage. Biden would be forced into making nuclear threats to defend the United States.
Biden is trying to sound tough with fear mongering rhetoric. But the reality is that Biden is acting stupidly. The United States won't fight a war with China because the United States can't win that war without nuclear weapons. China knows that. And China has nuclear weapons, too. So, all of Biden's rhetoric is really about lying to the American people to score empty political points.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday the Biden administration aims to lead the international bloc opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine into a broader coalition to counter what it sees as a more serious, long-term threat to global order from China.
In a speech outlining the administration's China policy, Blinken laid out a three-pillar approach to competing with Beijing in a race to define the 21st century's economic and military balance.
While the U.S. sees Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine as the most acute and immediate threat to international stability, Blinken said the administration believes China poses a greater danger.
"Even as President Putin's war continues, we will remain focused on the most serious long-term challenge to the international order — and that is the one posed by the People's Republic of China," Blinken said.
"China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order — and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it," he said. "Beijing's vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world's progress over the past 75 years."
Thus, Blinken laid out principles for the administration to marshal its resources, friends and allies to push back on increasing Chinese assertiveness around the world. Although he made clear that the U.S. does not seek to change China's political system, rather it wants to offer a tested alternative.
"This is not about forcing countries to choose, it's about giving them a choice," he said.
However, he also acknowledged that the U.S. has limited ability to directly influence China's intentions and ambitions and will instead focus on shaping the strategic environment around China.
"We can't rely on Beijing to change its trajectory," Blinken said in the speech, delivered at George Washington University. "So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system."
Blinken's address was delivered overnight in China, and there was no immediate reaction to the speech from the Chinese embassy in Washington.
The speech followed President Joe Biden's just-concluded visits to South Korea and Japan, where China loomed large in discussions. Biden raised eyebrows during that trip when he said that the United States would act militarily to help Taiwan defend itself in the event of an invasion by China, which regards the island as a renegade province.
The administration scrambled to insist that Biden was not changing American policy, and Blinken restated that the U.S. has not changed its position. Blinken said Washington still holds to its "One China" policy, which recognizes Beijing but allows for unofficial links with and arms sales to Taipei.
"Our approach has been consistent across decades and administrations. The United States remains committed to our 'One China' policy. We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side," he said, adding that "we do not support Taiwan independence."
Blinken said that while U.S. policy on Taiwan has remained consistent, China's had become increasingly belligerent.
He made the case that the global response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine can serve as a template for dealing with China's efforts to mold a new and unpredictable world order to replace the rules and institutions that have guided relations between states since the end of World War II.
China, Blinken said, has benefited greatly from that international order but is now trying to subvert it under the leadership of President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
"Rather than using its power to reinforce and revitalize the laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that enabled its success, so other countries can benefit from them, too, Beijing is undermining it," Blinken said. "Under President Xi, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad."
Yet, Blinken also decried the rise in anti-Chinese and anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States, saying Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans have the same claim to the U.S. as any other immigrants or their descendants.
Investment in domestic U.S. infrastructure and technology along with stepping up diplomatic outreach to potentially vulnerable countries are other elements of the policy and are key to the U.S. approach, Blinken said.
In the latest manifestation of China's push to expand its reach that has drawn concern from the U.S. and other democracies, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Thursday began an eight-nation tour of Pacific islands during which Beijing hopes to strike a sweeping agreement that covers everything from security to fisheries.
Wang opened his tour in the Solomon Islands, which last month signed a security cooperation pact with China that some fear could lead to a Chinese military presence there. The agreement was finalized shortly after the Biden administration announced it would open a U.S. embassy in the Solomons as part of its efforts to engage in the greater Indo-Pacific region.
The Biden administration has largely kept in place confrontational policies toward China adopted by its predecessor in response to Chinese actions in its western Xinjiang region, Hong Kong, Tibet and the South China Sea.
And, while the administration sees areas for working with Beijing, such as combatting climate change, it will not trade cooperation for compromising on its principles regarding human rights and rule of law, Blinken said.
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Biden's Asian policy (?) is to kick-the-can and try to scare the American people. When do we acknowledge the fear mongers are wearing no clothes?
When I read what Blinken said I almost burst out laughing. He shouldn't have so exposed the desperation of the US administration on seeing themselves losing the peace. To deflect from the many disasters in America and what it's created, and creating elsewhere in the world, the US administration has to create an enemy in the hopes of both not only unifying a deeply divided America but also deflecting the attention of the electorate from the administration's failures for the purpose of the midterm elections. But unfortunately for the American administration, Americans are not as stupid as it considers them, because the enemy is NOT China...
What are you talking about? Do you imagine XI and his "friend with no limits" Putin are winning?
To deflect
What is China doing to deflect form this?
Maybe this?
China may not be an "enemy" although they try hard as hell to make themselves one, but they are definitely not a friend. They are like a drug dealer, yeah you have to work with them to a degree, but you sure as shit aren't inviting them over for dinner.
Tell me what China is doing to make itself an enemy of the USA, if it be greater than what the USA is doing to make itself an enemy of China. Is China pressuring other nations and forming organizations like Quad and Aukus for the purpose of containing the USA? Is China passing legislation condemning American gun violence and racism, and banning doing any business with American corporations? Look in a fucking mirror.
Exactly, China is a friend to us and the world.
I thought this response to Blinken's speech, published in the China Daily, should be posted in full in order to provide what critics have to say about what he said.
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Scholars cast doubt on US' China policy
'Rule-based' world order backed by Washington aims to protect its clique
Leading scholars in both China and the United States voiced strong disappointment following US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's latest speech outlining the overall China policy of President Joe Biden's administration, saying Blinken's words were neither constructive nor meaningful for improving bilateral ties.
In his long-delayed, delicately worded speech made on Thursday in Washington, Blinken tried to justify Washington's unchanged plan to further contain China by overstating China's strength in various areas including cutting-edge technologies, observers said.
During the 45-minute address at George Washington University, Blinken outlined the Biden administration's strategy for relations with the world's second-largest economy with three words－"invest, align, compete".
"China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it," he said.
He added that the US would "shape the strategic environment around Beijing" to advance what he called a "vision for an open, inclusive international system".
Beijing on Friday responded to the speech with "strong dissatisfaction", saying that the text goes to great lengths in wording but actually "spreads disinformation, hypes China's threat, interferes in China's domestic affairs and smears China's policy at home and abroad".
While Blinken said China is a challenge to the "international order", Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin rebuked such a notion, saying the "rule-based international order" advocated by Washington is actually rules for its own clique and protects the order dominated by the US.
At a time when the world needs joint efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and revitalize the global economy, "the US hyping the China threat won't solve its own problems but will lead the world to a dangerous abyss", Wang told reporters on Friday in Beijing.
The poor record of the US in human rights and democracy nullifies its right to lecture other nations, and its ganging up with countries in the region under the pretext of the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain China is "doomed to fail", Wang said.
Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies, said "the fundamental underlying precept of his characterization of China was wrong".
Blinken's speech would not help clarify policy because "there wasn't anything terribly new or consequential", and "the only saving grace of his speech is that it was no more hawkish than it was", he said.
"China is not the most serious long-term challenge to the international order. China, rather, is the most serious long-term challenge to the United States' dominance within the international order," Gupta told China Daily. "Washington erroneously conflates the challenge to its own dominance as a challenge to the larger system."
Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, said Blinken's speech is not constructive as Washington has not made changes on three fronts.
"The US has not stopped defining China as the top strategic competitor; it continues its China strategy of suppressing and containing the country in the name of competition; and its attitude toward China is still full of arrogance, prejudice, and even a lot of lies," Wu said.
The speech also signaled that Washington intends to increase direct contacts with Beijing, and it pays great attention to crisis communication and minimizing risks, Wu said.
"And it named more specific areas of cooperation with China than it did before, but it remains to be seen if it will translate its rhetoric into action," Wu added.
In his speech, Blinken listed areas where the US and China could cooperate including the climate, the COVID-19 pandemic, nonproliferation and arms control, illicit narcotics, the worldwide food crisis and the recovery of the global economy.
Su Xiaohui, deputy director of the China Institute of International Studies' Department of American Studies, said Blinken's latest gesture for collaboration lacks sincerity "because Washington courts Beijing's cooperation in areas in its need while it refuses to stop suppressing China".
There is no major difference between Washington's new approach to China of "invest, align, compete" and its previous definition, as it still seeks to exclude China from production and supply chains it works on building and it continues introducing barriers to coerce China in high-tech sectors, Su said.
"Washington's hostile China policy led to the current difficulties in bilateral ties, and there is a lot for the US side to do if it is really willing to put relations back on track," Su said.
Originally scheduled for May 5, Blinken's major policy speech was postponed after he tested positive for the novel coronavirus one day earlier.
Blinken's speech followed Biden's Asia trip from May 20 to Tuesday. Biden said "yes" in Japan when asked whether the US would defend Taiwan "militarily", spurring strong opposition from China. The White House and Biden later said that there was no change to US policy on Taiwan.