Biden‘s first call with Xi after taking office not only failed to get things together, but actually highlighted the rift, with no flavor of congratulations.
Biden said “to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific region” and “expressed fundamental concern about Beijing‘s coercive and unfair economic practices …… and increasingly assertive actions (in the Indo-Pacific region), including toward Taiwan. “
Xi said that “China and the United States, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, have special international responsibilities and obligations. Both sides should follow the world trend and work together to maintain peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.” Instead of softening his stance, Xi Jinping continues to compete with the U.S. in the Pacific, but instead he wants to go hand in hand with Biden, effectively asking him to step back from the Western Pacific and repeating that “cooperation is mutually beneficial, but fighting is mutually harmful.
Once again, one of the real reasons for the deterioration of U.S.-China relations has surfaced. As long as the Chinese Communist Party‘s top brass does not abandon its ocean-going military expansion strategy, the U.S. and China will sooner or later come into military conflict in the Western Pacific. If the U.S. were to show some degree of weakness, it would likely cause a serious miscalculation and desperation at the top of the Communist Party.
The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of anti-Americanism and hegemony
The Chinese Communist Party has not been fighting for hegemony with the United States since Xi Jinping. After violently seizing power in 1949, the Communist Party rejected an olive branch from the United States, ousted U.S. ambassador to China, and joined the Cold War against the United States and the West. Later, in the Vietnam War, the Chinese Communist Party sent large numbers of troops to support Vietnam against the U.S. forces.
The relationship between the U.S. and China improved because the U.S. saw a Time when China and the Soviet Union were at war, Mao was very afraid of the invasion of the former Soviet Union and needed the U.S. as a backer, and the U.S. took advantage of the situation to turn the Communist Party from the Communist camp, and both sides took what they needed.
After Deng Xiaoping came to power, he knew that the previous route would not work, so he pretended to make amends with the United States, and taught Vietnam a lesson for the United States, sending a gift to the United States, and also consolidating military power. Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of “biding one’s time” worked and paralyzed the United States, after which Jiang and Hu both continued a similar strategy. When Jiang was in power, he first withdrew from the Taiwan Strait crisis, and returned the forced landing of a U.S. reconnaissance plane. The Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia was attacked by U.S. forces, but Jiang tolerated it, and of course his children and grandchildren went to the United States to seek Gold. Hu would have been reluctant to fold and continued to mend fences with the U.S. on the surface, but secretly also supported the military’s offensive weapons development.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) is ostensibly mending fences with the United States externally, but it needs the U.S. market, capital, and technology, while internally, the CPC’s anti-American propaganda never stops, and the new type of Cold War of infiltration intensifies. Despite the widening U.S.-China trade deficit and the rampant CCP spying and grand foreign propaganda, the U.S. has never really realized the anti-American ambition in the bones of the CCP.
After Xi Jinping came to power, believing that the time had come for this to disappear, the CCP’s strategy to fight for hegemony quickly became fully publicized, and then Vice President Joe Biden, who had the most interaction with Xi Jinping, did not really see Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party militarized the South China Sea islands, completely deceiving Obama, while also making big moves in the East China Sea to provoke Japan, with an increasingly high tone of force to attack Taiwan, rapid growth in military spending, and increasing offensive weapons. The CCP is posturing that it is bound to break through the first island chain and expand into the Pacific Ocean.
Repeated U.S. Strategies
Only after Obama found out that he was cheated in the South China Sea, he woke up and proposed an Asian rebalancing strategy, but the progress was not fast enough. Moreover, during the Obama and Biden administrations, the U.S. military power was actually weakened, the defense of the first island chain was basically no longer mentioned, the nuclear issue of North Korea was at a loss, and it was also difficult to pull itself out of the Middle East and Afghanistan, all of which made the Chinese Communist Party feel that an opportunity had come.
Obama has not implemented effective ways to weaken the economic power of the CCP, while sending more and more dollars to the CCP every year. This is one of the reasons why Trump was able to get elected. When Trump ran for office in 2016, he proposed “America First” and explicitly wanted to narrow the U.S.-China trade deficit, rebuild the military, and return to the Reagan-era military deterrence strategy of exchanging power for peace.
After taking office, Trump immediately proposed the Indo-Pacific strategy, quickly restoring military power and soon tilted to the Western Pacific. White House documents uncovered recently show that Trump positioned the Chinese Communist Party as his greatest enemy at the end of 2017, identifying three guidelines for the defense of the first island chain. Trump not only implemented a high-pressure strategy militarily, but also surprisingly set aside the Chinese Communist Party, directly mitigated the North Korean nuclear issue, and launched a trade war to take the bottom out of the Chinese Communist Party. After fully authorizing the U.S. military to quickly defeat ISIS, Trump also resolutely withdrew troops from the Middle East and Afghanistan to focus on the Chinese Communist Party in the Indo-Pacific. Trump also resolutely withdrew from the INF Treaty and prepared to patch up land-based medium-range missile deployments against the Chinese Communist Party. Trump’s strategy worked, and Xi was forced to return to strategic defense.
Around the time Biden took office, the CCP top brass again misjudged Biden as weak, so they quickly struck a tough expansionist tone and returned to a strategic offensive, directly demanding that Biden pull back from the Western Pacific. Biden positioned the CCP as “the most serious competitor” but not the biggest enemy, actually backing away from Trump’s all-out confrontation and decoupling strategy. Although Biden did not meet the highest expectations of the Chinese Communist Party, it is still a sign of weakness in the eyes of the Communist Party, which believes that Biden is unlikely to be tougher than Obama, and even less comparable to Trump.
Judging from current U.S. military actions, Biden should at least want to hold the bottom line of military confrontation, but Biden’s overall strategy is far from being truly tough enough to dispel the CCP’s ambitions for hegemony, and may instead lead to further misjudgments by the CCP’s top brass. In the call between Xi and Biden just now, it is clear that Xi has not abandoned his aggressive posture and directly asked Biden to give way to the CCP in the Western Pacific.
Fear of military conflict is inevitable
It is no coincidence that U.S. Democratic presidents have been involved in more wars than Republican presidents. When Roosevelt was in office, the Pacific War broke out; when Truman was in office, the Korean War broke out; when Kennedy was in office, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out; when Johnson was in office, the Vietnam War broke out. These are all Democratic presidents basically because of appeasement, indecision, resulting in the other side misjudged, continuous provocation, and finally hit the bottom line, had to fight.
The Bush father and son were Republican presidents who went to war against Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly to stop Iraq from invading Kuwait and to retaliate for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which were different in nature, but the U.S. military was also pulled away from fully responding to the Chinese Communist Party and could only continue to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party after the Cold War.
Democratic presidents are no more afraid of war than Republican presidents, but the Democratic Party’s tendency to seek peace by avoiding war is seen as weakness in the eyes of their opponents, and their approach can easily fall into the strategy of appeasement, which will cause their opponents to misjudge, repeatedly provoke, and eventually take risks. The situation between the U.S. and China today seems to be going back to some of the laws of Democratic presidents. Biden publicly said, “I’ve been telling Chinese President Xi Jinping that we don’t need to have a conflict,” which, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, amounts to a show of weakness, which is why Xi Jinping was very high-profile in his call.
Republican presidents tend to deter with strength in exchange for peace, or put up a tough strategy of stopping a war with a war, so that their opponents are afraid and dare not take risks easily. Trump has implemented such a strategy, and it has indeed worked for the CCP.
Biden may have tried to maintain Trump’s Indo-Pacific strategy militarily and hold the bottom line, but stepped back from Trump’s strategy of full confrontation with the CCP, indicating both competition and cooperation. In addition, Biden said he wants to return to the Middle East, and if he divides his forces there again, he will fall into the CCP’s trap, including the North Korean nuclear issue, and may be played by the CCP again. If that were to happen, Biden would have a hard time actually stopping the CCP’s constant provocations, with Xi Jinping opening the year by saying internally, “Time and momentum are on our side.” The CCP will still hit Biden’s bottom line from time to time in the East China Sea, Taiwan Sea, and South China Sea, and even more areas, and once Biden fails to counter strongly, the bottom line may be broken and military conflict may be unavoidable.
The current U.S. Secretary of Defense is a person who has experienced actual war, and when he was the military chief in Iraq, he had advocated a significant increase in troops, which shows that he does not mind expanding the war in order to ensure that the war goes smoothly and without incident, and once the war starts, it must be completely won. Biden’s current treatment of the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy, the potential risk of war is much greater than the Trump era.
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