During U.S. Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry’s April 15 visit to China, Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng actually turned defense into offense, asking the United States to “assume its responsibilities” and calling on Washington to “explain how to fill the gap left by the past four years, especially in terms of funding the Green Climate Fund. “. The result was a major surprise to the United States. While the Wall Street Journal earlier discussed in “Biden’s China Policy Conundrum: How to Respond to China’s Judgment of U.S. Decline” that the U.S.-China relationship is a minefield today, the biggest risk is a subtle one: the danger that China will overestimate the extent of U.S. declining power and act accordingly.
Declining U.S. Power
The U.S. dynasty and the public have so far been reluctant to face the consequences of a serious setback in soft power as a result of the 2020 elections. China does not actually believe that U.S. power is declining, but rather that the United States will decline rapidly after its self-color revolution, a decline that refers primarily to soft power rather than hard power.
The U.S. military has become increasingly assertive and eager toward China. In addition to the USS Roosevelt aircraft carrier’s third entry into the South China Sea in 2021, demonstrating the U.S. military’s concern and action for Indo-Pacific security, lobbying at home has not let up, eventually forcing Biden to abandon his military spending cuts. The Chinese Communist Party is of course aware that on April 14, during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security Robert Salesses said that “dealing with China is our top priority …… China is becoming more capable in every area and poses a significant long-term security threat to the United States” and that “winning the competition is the only way to avoid war and counter China influence in the Western Hemisphere.”
The U.S. intelligence community shares the military’s position. on April 13, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its Annual Threat Assessment 2021, which identified China’s efforts to expand its growing influence as one of the greatest threats to the United States and said that China is an increasingly powerful competitor that can match U.S. strength.
But Beijing is well aware that the U.S. military is stepping up its ideological education and purges on the orders of the Biden administration, with one element of that education being that the United States is a racist, homophobic and immigrant-hating country, and that military personnel who support Trump are being transferred out or forced out of the military one by one. The particularly offensive far-left forces in the Democratic Party had proposed a bill to drastically cut military spending, not believing that the Chinese threat exists. Beijing is even more aware that U.S. foreign policy is at the president’s discretion. For example, while the aforementioned National Intelligence threat assessment ranks “Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang,” Biden announced further U.S. sanctions against Russia and declared that “we will not allow foreign interference in U.S. elections to go unpunished. This is a diversionary move in the eyes of China, which really interfered in the U.S. election.
Is China overestimating the speed of America’s decline? It is not difficult to conclude, provided one abandons politically correct considerations.
In Biden’s first 100 days in office, Democrats proposed six radical initiatives and put them into practice: stuffing the courts, Biden formally proposed revamping the Supreme Court to make it more “progressive”; amnesty for illegal immigrants, quietly resuming construction of a border wall after facing a tidal wave of pressure not to move, and considering paying Central and South American countries The main elements of federalized elections, in addition to eliminating the right of states to be in charge of elections, are to strengthen the 2020 Democratic electoral model by implementing the HR1 program, which would eliminate ID checks for voter registration and allow voters over the age of 16; elevating Washington, D.C., to statehood (increasing the number of Democratic votes in the Senate); and banning the Electoral College. — these six priorities are basically subverting the original U.S. constitutional structure and triggering sharp political conflicts in the country.
Not only that, but on April 12, Secretary of State Blinken announced Ambassador Winstanley as the State Department’s chief officer for diversity and inclusion, asserting that the U.S. will support racial equality abroad and at home, and has now created positions to safeguard diversity and inclusion in the diplomatic corps. Blinken also highlighted a Biden statement that “a focus on diversity, equality, inclusion and accessibility is also relevant to national security” – effectively forcing U.S. concerns about racist issues like BLM on the international community.
I fear that few countries other than the Democratic Party will believe that these “six priorities” will strengthen, not weaken, the United States. Beijing’s problem, therefore, is not that it has overestimated the extent to which U.S. power is declining, but that it has overestimated its own ability to take control of the discourse in its relations with the United States.
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