Posted on 10/21/2022 5:13:17 AM PDT by FarCenter
Within days of each other, revealing portraits of the United States and China have been unveiled.
In Washington, the Biden administration released its national security strategy. It says much about American psychology at a critical juncture. And Beijing witnessed the opening of the 20th Party Congress on October 16 and now ongoing that will see Xi Jinping confirmed as president for a record third term.
It comes as the White House launches arguably its biggest move to compete with, and restrain, China in its technology war, curbing the ability of world and US chip makers to sell semiconductors and chip-making equipment to Chinese customers. As Bloomberg notes, it strikes at the foundation of China’s efforts to build its own chip industry.
This represents a dramatic escalation in technology decoupling and has been met with a forceful Chinese response. Furious officials in Beijing already threaten economic retaliation.
With Trump’s trade tariffs still in place, Beijing has no doubt that the US is out to cripple its capacity to compete on equal terms. On top of its property crash, strains arising from Xi’s zero-Covid policy and slowing economic growth, it is not the atmosphere Xi desired to shadow the Congress.
Biden’s national security strategy is, like those of his predecessors, sonorous in style and pronouncement. It puts America on a footing for what the president calls a moment of “inflection” for the world, a “decisive decade” for the United States.
Crucially, it projects humility about past failures. Washington stresses it has learned from mistakes, delivering a relieved farewell to the post-Cold War era. Even more remarkably, it appears to have relinquished the goal of democracy promotion.
“We will not use our military to change regimes”, it says, “or remake societies.” This is the sharpest break of all. Largely missing is Biden’s pre-election stress on a “foreign policy for the middle class.” The shackles, it seems, are once more off.
Biden wants to bring key technology industries back to the US. Photo: AFP / Olivier Douliery This remains an America that will not easily — if ever — embrace the prospect of being a “normal” nation, or even just a conventional great power. To do so would be to deny the very essence of what makes them Americans.
The enterprise sketched by US policymakers in this strategy remains vast and all-embracing. It touches all corners of the globe and embraces a panoply of policies. The community of nations, it assumes, in a statement that could have been uttered by Woodrow Wilson in Paris in 1919, “shares our vision for the future of international order.”
The mental map of the old Cold War with all its obvious contradictions still has a powerful hold. Though divine providence is not openly summoned, its pulse quickens the American system, fuels its self-belief. “Primacy”, appearing only once in the document, is no longer the beating heart of US grand strategy.
But its replacement, namely “out-competing” Russia and China, carries the same meaning, even as it commits to avoiding the “temptation to see the world solely through the prism of strategic competition.”
Indeed, in looking to eschew the notion of a new Cold War and resist a world of “rigid blocs”, the document remains a manifesto for the very binary Biden declared at the outset of his presidency — that between democracies and autocracies.
In doing so, the strategy is in some ways reminiscent of former US diplomat George Kennan’s Long Telegram from Moscow in 1946 — which essentially established the intellectual basis for containment of the Soviet Union.
This article was first published by East Asia Forum, which is based out of the Crawford School of Public Policy within the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.
National Security Strategy
October 12, 2022
From the earliest days of my Presidency, I have argued that our world is at an inflection point. How we respond to the tremendous challenges and the unprecedented opportunities we face today will determine the direction of our world and impact the security and prosperity of the American people for generations to come. The 2022 National Security Strategy outlines how my Administration will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors, tackle shared challenges, and set our world firmly on a path toward a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow.
Yes. We have successfully turned back the clock and are once again threatening nuclear war with Russia. What a relief.
Communist China is the real enemy with foreign agents running amok in our country, under the guise of “immigrants” and “diversity”, yet the globalists want to overthrow Putin because he is not going along with their plans for the Great Reset.
“tackle shared challenges”
I wonder if this includes making climate change the most important concept underlying every decision. End use of fossil fuels, destroy the economy, especially for the private sector middle class, etc. all in the name of combating climate change.
Add to that making “equity” more important than competence and the downward spiral will occur even faster.
It isn’t Biden’s policy, it is just called that. Grampa Sniffer barely knows what day it is.
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