US President Biden Delivers Final Foreign Policy Speech Of His Administration At The State Department. [Photo/Agencies]
In his swan-song speech on foreign policy on Monday, US President Joe Biden's audience was actually his successor that will take office in less than a week.
The more the outgoing US president tries to brag about how the United States has become stronger thanks to his alliance-building policy, aimed at outcompeting China, the less confidence he is showing in his Republican successor carrying that baton onwards.
After Donald Trump's first term in office, anyone in Biden's position would be able to boast of enhancing relations with the US' allies, just by engaging with them as such. But Biden has done more than that. By remodeling and misleading the US alliance network, he has produced an unnecessary and unwelcome blast from the past by reviving bloc confrontation.
The Biden administration has tried to justify its antagonistic stance toward China and some other countries by attempting to resurrect the zero-sum Cold War mentality with talk of "shared values". Yet none of the US' allies truly shares its view that China is a threat, or its concern that some "evil forces" will fill the vacuum if the US loses its global leadership. In other words, Biden's either-or policy, which has in effect tried to divide the world, reshuffle the global industry and supply chains, and thwart joint efforts to respond to global challenges, has left the US allies in as awkward a position as that it has tried to create for China be it on security, trade or high technology.
The Biden administration's China-targeted policies in these fields have not left US allies or US companies unscathed, which is evidenced by the continuous outcries of affected entities criticizing these boomeranging US practices as shortsighted and irrational. Not to mention that such US bills as the CHIPS and Science Act have put the US' allies as well as China in the crosshairs at the same time, an actual desired effect Biden intended to consolidate the US' leadership.
Except for a pat on the back, Washington has not offered its allies any remedial solutions after pressuring them to weaken their rewarding and productive economic and trade ties with China, their major trading partner, under the excuse of "de-risking". The successive visits of leaders to Beijing since the Democrats lost the US presidential election in November show the extent to which Biden's foreign policy ignored the interests of the US' allies.
That the Biden administration has been taking the last few days before it leaves office to markedly intensify such blind economic bullying and coercion just exposes a worrying absence of a self-correction mechanism for US policymaking. The administration unveiled a basket of China-targeted harsh artificial intelligence semiconductor export restrictions on Monday, which ostensibly classify its allies into different ranks to treat accordingly, and it is mulling a probe into Chinese-made logistics, port and shipbuilding equipment that is expected to be announced soon before it leaves office.
President Biden claimed that he would deal with the US' complicated and consequential relations with China in a "responsible" way since his first day in office. But over the past four years he has stuck stubbornly to a highly irresponsible way.
When President Biden innovatively proposed his competition-cooperation-confrontation China policy four years ago, Beijing still believed that as long as cooperation was there the two countries could leverage it to continuously expand their common interests and deepen their mutual trust, and so avoid the other two. That understanding is behind Beijing's repeated reiterations that its US policy remains unchanged. But Beijing's policy is now more about showing its earnestness and good faith in responsibly handling US relations than outlining specific measures to that end, because Biden has used competition to kill cooperation and avoid confrontation.
It is to be hoped that the incoming US administration will fully heed the lessons of the Biden administration's China policy, and work together with the Chinese side to breathe life back into substantial Sino-US cooperation and exchanges on various fronts. By ending the talk for talk's sake, the two sides can refocus their attention from competition and confrontation to cooperation that is not only in line with their common interests, but also conducive to them better fulfilling their common global responsibilities.
