Biden defines his fundamental challenge to China: “Prove that democracy works”

At the end of a curvy Thursday answer about competing with China and his relationship with Xi Jinping, a man he said did not have a Democratic “bone in his body,” President Joe Biden gave an insightful assessment of one of America’s most pressing needs ab challenges.

“This is a battle between the benefits of 21st century democracies and autocracies,” he told reporters at his first press conference as president. “We have to prove that democracy works.”

China’s President Xi, Biden bluntly said, was “a smart, smart guy” who shared the conviction with Russian President Vladimir Putin that “autocracy is the wave of the future and democracy cannot work in the complexity of the modern world.”

One of the greatest tasks of his presidency, Biden seemed to argue, was to prove once again to a skeptical world that both American democracy and its model of democratic citalism still work – and that it is superior to the vastly different system it is Xi ruthlessly asserts himself at home as he tries to expand China’s influence around the world.

To a president barely ten weeks in office, there are some clear political advantages to viewing the United States as a confrontation with a global struggle with the Chinese model. One of the few problems that connects Democrats and Republicans is the need to compete directly with Beijing. Senator Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said Monday that the Chinese had already taken note of this.

“You recognize in many ways that we are finally awakened to the challenge,” he said at the Atlantic Council this week. “And I would call it a bipartisan awakening.”

Biden’s aides say his view of the Chinese challenge is not just a foreign policy one. He plans to take full advantage of the fear of Beijing’s ambitions when he unveils his infrastructure initiative next week.

There will be hundreds of billions of dollars in technology and projects that the Chinese are investing too, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence and 5G networks, as well as major breakthroughs in electric cars and synthetic biotechnology.

On Friday, Biden said he had proposed to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the major Western democracies work together to counter China’s ambitious efforts to build better trade routes around the world, a project called the Belt and Road Initiative. The project is one of China’s primary tools for influencing nations in its economic orbit by investing in ports, railroad lines, roads and other infrastructures in Asia, Africa and Europe.

“We talked about China and the competition they are participating in as part of the Belt and Road Initiative,” said Biden. “And I suggested that we should essentially have a similar initiative by the democratic states to help these communities around the world.”

There is a remarkable similarity between Biden’s list and Xi’s “Made in China 2025” initiative, which was first announced six years ago to make China largely independent of Western suppliers for critical technologies.

At the heart of Biden’s infrastructure and supply chain initiatives is a drive to ensure the West does not depend on Chinese technology. It’s a battle that blossomed over Huawei, the maker of next-generation communications networks, but has since expanded to fears that Chinese Ps like TikTok could be a way of attacking American infrastructure.

“China is investing us far,” said Biden, previewing his argument, “because their plan is to own this future.”

It’s a proven approach: President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, to instigate a military and civilian space race, and President John F. Kennedy took up the subject to set the target for one man land on the moon.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address to call for a “sputnik moment” of public investment, also using China as an incentive, but the effort fell flat.

With all unanimity on the China challenge, it is far from clear whether Biden’s political strategy will work.

Republicans reject both the huge government spending in the Biden plan and the debt overhang that goes with it. And there seems to be a reiteration of the arguments from the 1980s as to whether federal “industrial policy” – where taxpayers’ money goes straight into technologies that the US believes must stay ahead – creates a competitive advantage. Because America makes sense or just suppress the innovations of Silicon Valley.

No matter how that goes, Biden occupies current competition in the United States very differently than his predecessors. “Look, I predict,” he said, “your children or grandchildren will do their doctoral thesis on who was successful: autocracy or democracy? Because that’s what it’s all about, not just China. “

Most notable was what was missing. There was no talk of an American “state of emergency”, only a short-term assurance that “on my watch” China would not achieve its ultimate goal of becoming “the leading country in the world, the richest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. “

Biden was also careful not to make any analogies with the Cold War; In fact, he noticed that what was missing now was a great ideological competition. (“Russia no longer talks about communism,” he noted.) He always said he would work with adversaries, and on Friday he invited Xi and Putin to a virtual climate summit that he is hosting in Ril. He speaks of competition, not containment.

“I see tough competition with China,” Biden said of everything from chips to national values. This was the key to his two-hour conversation with Xi. And that, he said, meant backing down China’s disenfranchisement in Hong Kong or its tough repression of Muslim minorities.

“The moment a president deviates from the last,” he said, digging at former President Donald Trump, “is the moment we begin to lose our legitimacy around the world.”

Still, Biden’s discussion of open competition between two similarly sized superpowers was a significant change for US presidents.

A quarter of a century ago, President Bill Clinton argued – often on visits to Beijing – that the arrival of the Internet would force China to join an American-style democracy. Of course, that didn’t work.

President George W. Bush highlighted areas where Chinese and American interests intersected – counterterrorism and North Korea were the two most frequently mentioned – but never viewed China as technologically equivalent. Obama would always say that the United States “welcomes the rise of China” realizing that it couldn’t contain the country if it wanted to, so it would be foolish to try.

And Trump spent three years imposing tariffs and insisting that he cut the century’s deal with China and castigated it as an exporter of the coronavirus for a year, while his then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo over time insisted that The Communist Party would unite.

Now Biden’s team says they are developing a strategy that is based more on competition than containment.

“I don’t think China’s mission is to export its model abroad and undermine democracy abroad,” said Thomas J. Christensen, a professor in Colombia and a former State Department official who dealt with China during the Bush administration concerned. “But I think you are on a mission to protect your model from criticism and to defend authoritarian one-party rule.”

Christensen published an essay in Foreign Affairs this week entitled “There Will Not Be a New Cold War,” arguing that American allies are “too economically dependent on China to pursue entirely hostile policies,” and that the The advantage of the United States is that it has allies and partners who are among the greatest technological powers in the world.

State Secretary Antony Blinken seemed to acknowledge that while visiting Brussels this week he assured Europeans that he would not force them to “make a choice between us or them”.

The reckoning of Biden’s camp seems to be that keeping allies together is more important than making sure everyone reduces their reliance on Chinese technology or investment.

The problem will come, Blinken noted, when China takes action against those who criticize its actions at home, in the South China Sea or against Taiwan. “If either of us is forced,” he said, “we should act as allies and work together to reduce our vulnerability by making sure our economies are more integrated.” That sounds a lot like creating opposing camps.