Biden Is Weak on China
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/biden-weak-china-153971
Joe Biden was a driving force behind giving China “permanent normal trading status” in 2000, which helped Beijing win admission to the World Trade Organization. It is from this privileged vantage that China has pursued fundamentally unfair trade practices while hypocritically parroting language about free trade and inducing our elite to do the same.
President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, wrote what could ultimately form the perfect epitaph for former Vice President Biden: “Joe is simply impossible not to like. . . . Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
This Cal Ripken-like streak of unbroken erroneousness is remarkable:
Biden thought the removal of the Shah of Iran amid the 1979 Islamic revolution was a step in the right direction for human rights.
He opposed the Reagan defense buildup that helped the free world win the Cold War.
He voted against the Gulf War, which was a great success.
He voted for the Iraq War, which was not.
Biden also opposed the raid in which U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden—arguably the only solid foreign policy accomplishment of the eight-year administration of which he was nominally second in command.
However, some of Biden’s greatest strides toward being in the wrong center around China. This is topical, because his aides and supporters are eager to reconstruct him as tough on China given strong voter sentiment against the Chinese government amid the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.