Joe Biden seems to have concluded that China has become America’s sworn enemy. In April he ran on ad that depicted Donald Trump as a stooge who had “rolled over for the Chinese” in the midst of a pandemic for which the Chinese themselves may well have been responsible. In his one-on-one debate with Bernie Sanders, Biden claimed that China’s communist regime had made only “marginal” improvements in national well-being over the previous 40 years, cutting short any further comment with a curt, “China is an authoritarian dictatorship.”
Biden sounds a lot like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who in a speech earlier this mocked what he called “the old paradigm of blind engagement” with China, accusing President Xi Jinping of seeking “global hegemony of Chinese communism.” I wrote earlier that a President Biden would rally the world’s democracies against a rising authoritarian threat. Does he, like Pompeo, foresee a new Cold War with China?
