The Patriot Post® · A Diplomatic Debacle in Anchorage

No wonder the ChiComs were rooting for Joe Biden on November 3. They’d long since taken his measure, and they knew he’d be an easy mark. Don’t say we weren’t warned.

A month before the election, we noted that the Biden family had already enriched itself from its business dealings with China during Joe’s eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. Furthermore, as China expert Ben Weingarten noted, “The Obama-Biden administration was remarkably soft on China over its most grievous provocations, whether in terms of the catastrophic Office of Personnel Management hack, the militarization of the South China Sea, or its flouting of U.S. capital market regulations with impunity, gaining the imprimatur of the administration after lobbying Biden to ink a memorandum of understanding effectively normalizing its cheating.”

Against this backdrop, then, we had remarkably low expectations going into the weekend — and Team Biden didn’t disappoint. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, “That was some tongue lashing a senior Chinese official delivered last week in Anchorage to top Biden Administration officials in their first meeting. This is the new reality in U.S.-China relations, as adversaries look to see if they can exploit President Biden as they did Barack Obama.”

If just one thing has become painfully clear to even the most casual of China observers over the years, it’s that the ChiComs don’t play by the rules. Instead, they flout them — whether militarily, economically, or geopolitically. Secretary of State Antony Blinken learned this the hard way when he offered an agreed-upon two minutes of opening remarks, which his counterpart, Yang Jiechi, China’s director of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, promptly repaid with a 20-minute anti-American diatribe.

Blinken noted our “deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies,” actions that threaten the “rules-based order that maintains global stability.” Fair enough.

Yang, though, clearly emboldened by not having Donald Trump’s far more formidable secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, sitting across from him, then went on a 20-minute tear about the superiority of “Chinese-style democracy” and America’s sins. He even went woke with the Left’s own language, referencing Black Lives Matter and scolding, “We believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world. Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.”

Yang saved his best mockery for last, though: “Let me say here that in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

“One of the Biden administration’s most contemptible themes,” writes Power Line’s John Hinderaker, “is its declaration that ‘America is back.’ … The only thing that is ‘back’ under Joe Biden, or whoever is running U.S. foreign policy these days, is weakness. And the Chinese know it.”

Predictably, the Biden administration’s Praetorian Guard leaped into action, with The Washington Post spinning furiously to commend the administration for its “dust-up diplomacy.”

These, of course, are the same scribes who would’ve been appalled had Donald Trump tried the same approach. As Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff noted, “Trump was willing to take action against China that entailed risks to the U.S. economy, even with an election on the horizon. I’m pretty sure Biden will never do that. He’s all talk and has been for 50 years. The most we can hope for is that his team won’t be out-talked as badly in the future as it was in Anchorage.”

It turns out that stumbling up the stairs of Air Force One was the least of Biden’s failures this weekend.