By Jim Geraghty
Monday, October
11, 2021
Through most of 2020, Joe Biden insisted
that he was the tough one on China and that the Trump administration only
offered “a colossal gap
between tough talk and weak action.” Never mind that back in May
2019, Biden declared:
China is
going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal
with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the
mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they are
going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you
know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not
competition for us.” [Emphasis added.]
Ten months into the Biden administration,
we’re still looking for that tough action.
·
If the administration is still
investigating the origins of COVID-19, it’s hiding its interest very well.
·
In April, Biden’s special presidential
envoy on climate change, John Kerry, contended that
a climate agreement with China outweighs differences on all other issues: “We have other differences on human rights, geostrategic interests,
but those differences do not have to get in the way of something that is as
critical as dealing with climate.”
·
Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall
Street Journal that she
thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential
tensions” with China.
·
President Biden did not
mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his
address to the United Nations.
·
Speaking off-the-cuff to reporters last week, Biden referred
to a nonexistent “Taiwan agreement” with China.
·
When Anderson Cooper asked about China’s
genocide of the Uyghurs during a CNN town hall in February, Biden gave a long,
meandering answer that ended with, “Culturally, there are different norms that each country and their
leaders are expected to follow.”
·
Biden more or less insulted everyone’s
intelligence when he insisted the
U.S.-U.K.-Australia submarine deal was not meant as a move to counter China.
·
Secretary of State Antony Blinken congratulated
China on the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the state controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Separately, Blinken
reportedly deleted a tweet accusing
Chinese leaders of weakening Hong Kong’s long-term political and social
stability and affirming the United States’ commitment to “stand with the people
of Hong Kong.”
·
In late
August, Qin Gang, China’s new ambassador to the United States, summarized his message to the Biden administration during a private
Zoom meeting hosted by the National Committee on United States–China Relations,
as, “If we cannot resolve our differences, please shut up.”
·
As our Jimmy Quinn
laid out, “Chinese officials rebuffed Defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s requests for a call to discuss
limiting the potential military fallout of bilateral tensions, declined to send
an appropriately high-level official to meet Deputy Secretary of State Wendy
Sherman during a visit to China in June before relenting and sending Wang, and
refused to meet Kerry in person (meetings with higher-level officials took place on Zoom) during his
second trip there last week.”
·
Boycotting the Winter Olympics in Beijing
over ongoing genocide is apparently unthinkable.
I lay all this out to point out that
currently, the U.S.-China dynamic looks an awful lot like what Biden and his
team diagnosed in the Trump administration: a White House trying to find ways
to appear tough on China, while desperately fearing conflict
and making moves to placate and accommodate Beijing. It is extremely difficult
to emerge victorious in a conflict when you are afraid of the conflict and your
opponent is not.
And now one former official who would seem
to be in a position to know is declaring that China has gained a
seemingly permanent upper hand:
China has
won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading
towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon’s
former software chief told the Financial Times.
China, the
world’s second largest economy, is likely to dominate many of the key emerging
technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and
genetics within a decade or so, according to Western intelligence assessments.
Nicolas
Chaillan, the Pentagon’s first chief software officer who resigned in protest
against the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military,
said the failure to respond was putting the United States at risk.
“We have
no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s
already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” he told the newspaper.
“Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal.”
China was
set to dominate the future of the world, controlling everything from media
narratives to geopolitics, he said.
Chaillan was in that high-level position
from August 2018 to last month. In his farewell message, posted to LinkedIn,
Chaillan wrote: “I realize more
clearly than ever before that, in 20 years from now, our children, both in the
United States’ and our Allies’, will have no chance competing in a world where China has the drastic
advantage of population over the US. If the US can’t match the booming,
hardworking population in China, then we have to win by being smarter, more
efficient, and forward-leaning through agility, rapid prototyping and
innovation. We have to be ahead and lead. We can’t afford to be behind.”
Today, Jay Nordlinger
offers a grim but not unreasonable prediction: “My guess is, the United States and other countries would not lift a
finger if China grabbed Taiwan. We would grumble for a few days and then clink
glasses with China, someday, somehow.”
Meanwhile, over in Afghanistan . . .
A U.S. “interagency delegation” met with
representatives of the Taliban this weekend, with U.S. State
Department spokesman Ned Price declaring, “The discussions were candid and professional with the U.S. delegation
reiterating that the Taliban will be judged on its actions, not only its
words.” Those actions include persecution of
religious minorities; barring women
from education, work, and public life; and maintaining an
alliance with al-Qaeda after promising to break it off.
“Candid and professional.” Do you notice
that Joe Biden and his administration speak much more harshly about
unvaccinated Americans than about the Taliban?
Hey, you diplomats noticed that just about
everybody in the Taliban probably isn’t vaccinated, right? No masks, either!
Meanwhile, Back Home at the Nation’s
Airports . . .
Just what the heck is
happening with Southwest Airlines?
The long
weekend got a bit longer for Southwest customers after the airline canceled
more than 2,000 flights Friday through Sunday.
The
world’s largest low-cost carrier canceled three of every 10 departures it had
scheduled on Sunday and the disruption continued into Monday, a federal
holiday, with 337 flights — or about one in 10 — canceled so far, according to
the aviation tracking website FlightAware.
The
company blamed the cancellations on air traffic control problems and limited
staffing in Florida as well as bad weather.
Conspiracy theories flourish when someone
in authority puts out a false explanation that is quickly contradicted or
debunked. Why is Southwest Airlines saying this is partially an
air-traffic-control issue, when the Federal Aviation Administration declared
that, “No FAA air
traffic staffing shortages have been reported since Friday”?
The popular theory is that this is the
result of the Biden administration’s employee-vaccination mandate kicking in —
that some vital workers have either quit or are choosing to stay home sick, and
the airlines that insisted that enforcing an employee mandate would not disrupt
operations are now running into brutal reality.
If it’s weather, why are other
airlines not being affected as much? On Sunday, Southwest canceled 1,124 flights,
while American canceled 167, Spirit canceled 34, Mesa canceled 31, United
canceled ten, Alaska canceled four, and Delta canceled three.
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