torsdag 24. juni 2021

In Responding to the China Challenge, Biden Should Take a Lesson From JFK

At the G-7’s June summit, U.S. President Joe Biden persuaded members to begin countering China’s rising influence. The summit’s communique laid the framework to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, retaliate against China’s “non-market economic policies,” and study COVID-19’s origins. These initiatives substantiate the bipartisan (and increasingly global) assessment that China is the foremost strategic challenge the United States and its allies will face this century.

For more than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has intimidated and aggressed in the South China Sea to obstruct the “freedom of the seas” and undermine Taiwanese sovereignty. It has sanctioned illegaland unfair economic practices and abused political and humanrights. These actions encapsulate the CCP’s “Hundred-Year Marathon” to replace the United States as Asia’s primary power, re-establish control over “greater China” (i.e. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet), force its neighbors to conform to China’s geopolitical desires, and reform the international order in its image. The late Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and also a pre-eminent China watcher, stated that China intends to “be[come] the greatest power in the world” not only via military force, but also through technological, economic, and political means.