When millions of Americans pulled the lever on former President Donald Trump on Nov. 3, 2020, many shared a well-founded concern that a deviation from his policies regarding China would empower the rising global superpower in its quest for dominance.
The Biden administration has done little to quell these fears.
While Secretary of State Antony Blinken has managed to muster up some firm rhetoric for China, including criticism of its human rights abuses in the Xinjiang province, this has only been met with a public tongue-lashing from Beijing’s diplomats.
It’s not controversial to imply that China is bent on global domination — the nation is quite open about it. And one of the clearest manners in which the Chinese Communist Party has laid out its plan to surpass the U.S. on the world stage is through its “Belt and Road Initiative.”
The BRI is an infrastructure plan which has, since its inception in 2013, invested trillions of dollars into projects in Asia, Africa and Europe in an effort to create the “new Silk Road” of global trade. China is also expanding its interests in a similar fashion in Latin America.
Over 100 countries have signed agreements with China to cooperate with some 2,600 BRI infrastructure projects to the tune of $3.7 trillion, according to Reuters. Many of these nations, however, are financially unstable, as an Op-Ed in The Washington Post noted in 2018.
In short, the BRI involves lending money to nations that can’t necessarily afford to pay the funds back.
This is the CCP we’re talking about, so you can certainly use your imagination as to what kind of power this thuggish regime gains for itself over the nations that have found themselves now heavily indebted to China.
While the Trump administration engaged in a trade war with China, the BRI was kicked into high gear and Beijing set about buying up ports with the hope of stationing its already massive navy in more international ports to gain influence.
Now, you’d think that whoever was in charge of the current biggest global superpower and the nation China openly aspires to surpass — the United States — would be seriously examining how to best curb an agenda for economic influence the likes of which has never before been seen in world history … right?
Trump was quite vocal about his intentions to hold China accountable for the trade practices that were giving the nation an unfair advantage over U.S. markets at the very least.
Yet in a stunning U-turn on our nation’s quest to protect its own interests and check China’s gangster diplomacy, President Joe Biden wants not to combat the BRI … but to emulate it.
Yes, seriously.
The president told reporters this week that, when speaking with the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he shared his vision for democratic nations to just go ahead and develop their own economic plan to compete with the BRI, Reuters reported.
“I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative, pulling from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world that, in fact, need help,” Biden said.
So, he’s essentially planning on fighting communist globalism with neoliberal nation-building as China continues to ruthlessly and openly expand its tendrils around the globe, something which has contributed toward the realization of its naval ambitions to the point of providing it a foothold in our own backyard.
The scary thing is, it’s not even clear if American rival ventures to BRI projects could compete.
Reuters noted that while Washington has vocalized concerns and sought investments in the private sector to counter China’s, the U.S. “has yet to be able to convince countries that it can offer an alternative to the state-backed economic vision put forward by Beijing under BRI.”
Beijing is undeniably seeking to topple us on the world stage, something which Biden himself recently admitted in no unclear terms.
“They have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not gonna happen on my watch,” the president said during his first solo news conference on Thursday.
Easy enough to say, yet the best his administration can come up with to address China’s goal is to attempt its own weak imitation of the infrastructure blueprint for global domination.