In his first one-on-one interview since assuming his post in Washington, D.C., last July, Qin Gang accused Taiwan of “walking down the road toward independence,” and added, “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict.”

It was an unusually direct statement about the U.S. and Taiwan. Observers say China usually speaks in more general terms, such as saying that the U.S. is “playing with fire.”

Though American eyes may be focused thousands of miles away toward a threatened war in Ukraine, U.S. officials and analysts have voiced increasing concern about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. This week, 39 Chinese military aircraft flew near Taiwan, the latest of several such demonstrations. It’s widely believed that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of war, though no formal treaty requires it to do so.

Ambassador Qin spoke of Taiwan at his official residence Thursday, where he welcomed NPR’s team to discuss U.S. relations with China and the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing. He is a veteran diplomat who previously served as the chief of foreign affairs protocol for China’s President Xi Jinping.

Qin arrived in Washington last year at a time of bipartisan disappointment with China. It’s widely conceded in Washington that a decades-long policy of engagement with China produced great wealth for many companies but failed to spark democratic reform. Qin told us that any ideas of “changing China” were always “an illusion.”

He spoke of the upcoming Olympics with pride: “Beijing is ready.” These are the second Olympic Games hosted by Beijing, with athletes and others largely living inside a secure “bubble” to protect against coronavirus infection.

A “diplomatic boycott” of the Games by U.S. officials has added tension, though only a few U.S. allies have followed suit, and U.S. athletes will compete. The U.S. announced the boycott in protest of what it terms the “ongoing genocide” of Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority in western China. Qin rejected such accusations as “fabrications, lies and disinformation.”

He nonetheless asserted that some Uyghurs were terrorists.

“The destination for them is prisons,” he said, while asserting that others had inappropriate thoughts that they were being taught to change in “vocational schools.”

NPR correspondents have documented widespread imprisonment of Uyghurs, as well as efforts to turn them away from their language and culture. NPR has also reported a security architecture in the western province of Xinjiang that is even more intense than in other regions of China, with cameras and police stations that are nearly ubiquitous.

The U.S. has become more vocal in defense of Uyghurs as overall relations have soured. If either side hoped for a reset in relations after the departure of President Donald Trump, it hasn’t quite happened. President Biden has yet to remove Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, and U.S. diplomats have traded contentious statements with their Chinese counterparts.

Of the many irritants in the relationship, the ambassador described Taiwan as “the biggest tinderbox.” The region has governed itself separately for generations. Unlike the rest of China, Taiwan was not conquered by Communist forces in the civil war that led to the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The former government took refuge there and, with U.S. support, eventually developed a democratic system.

Beijing has long sought unification with Taiwan and has not renounced the use of force to meet that goal. The U.S. has said it expects the matter to be settled peacefully.

“People on both sides of the Taiwan Straits are Chinese,” Qin said, arguing that his government has no desire for war. However, in a sharp rebuff of any effort by Taiwan’s government to formally declare independence, he said, “China will not commit to giving up the un-peaceful means for reunification because this is a deterrent.”

Even so, Qin said China’s “most important relationship” is with the United States, and he gave a straightforward description of his mission in Washington: “Don’t mess it up.”

Interview highlights

On whether Americans should be concerned about a Chinese attack on Taiwan:
“The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States. If, you know the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, you know, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”

On the prospect of military conflict:
“People on both sides of Taiwan Straits are Chinese, so we are compatriots. So the last thing we should do is to fight with compatriots. And we will do our utmost in the greatest sincerity to achieve a peaceful reunification. … But … that Taiwanese authority is working down the road towards independence, emboldened by the United States. So China will not commit to giving up the un-peaceful means for reunification because this is a deterrence.”

On policies and human rights abuses against mostly Muslim Uyghur populations in western China that prompted the U.S. diplomatic boycott of the Olympics in Beijing:
“The actual condition is that Uyghur people as other ethnic groups of people, they enjoy happy life. They enjoy the rights and the freedom guaranteed by the constitution of China. They are a member of the big family of Chinese nation. This co-called genocide or forced labor — these are big lies of the century. There’s no genocide at all.”

On whether Chinese President Xi Jinping believes America’s global status is in decline:
“Nobody in China bet(s) against the United States. Everybody in China, including the Chinese leadership, believe(s) that the United States is one of the most important countries. And the relationship between China and United States is the most important relationship. We must work well at ‘don’t mess it up.’ ”

Correction
Jan. 29, 2022
In this interview, we incorrectly say the U.S. agrees that Taiwan is part of China. In fact, U.S. policy is to simply acknowledge the Chinese government’s assertion that it has sovereignty over Taiwan.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/28/1076246311/chinas-ambassador-to-the-u-s-warns-of-military-conflict-over-taiwan

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They see the pivot as a geopolitical project and one that could mean trouble for Europe.

Known as Power of Siberia 2, the mega-pipeline traversing Mongolia will be able to deliver 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China annually. It was given the go-ahead in March by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and when finished it will complement another massive pipeline, Power of Siberia 1, that transports gas from Russia’s Chayandinskoye field to northern China.

Power of Siberia 2 will supply gas from Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, the source of the gas exported to Europe. Western officials worry that the project could have serious geopolitical implications for energy-hungry European nations before they embark in earnest on a long transition to renewables and away from fossil fuels.

For months Western leaders and officials have been accusing Russia of worsening an energy crunch that’s hit Europe this year and threatens to deepen during the northern hemisphere winter. Gazprom has shrugged off urgent European requests for more natural gas. In the past few weeks Gazprom has at times even reduced exports, say industry monitors.

The energy giant maintains it has been meeting the volumes of gas it agreed to in contracts, but Gazprom has been accused by the International Energy Agency and European lawmakers of deliberately not doing enough to boost supplies to Europe as the continent struggles with unprecedented price hikes and the increasing risk of power rationing and plant stoppages.

The new Sino-Russian energy project, which Putin discussed with his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, during a December 18 video conference, will give Moscow even more leverage when price bargaining with Europe and boost China as an alternative market for gas, according to Filip Medunic, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Russia remains Europe’s main gas supplier, but Europeans urgently need to understand the changes it is currently making to its energy transport infrastructure—as these changes could leave Europe even more at Moscow’s mercy,” he outlined in a study earlier this year.

Speaking after his conference call with Xi Jinping, the Russian president told reporters that the pipeline’s route, length and other parameters have been agreed to, and a feasibility study will be completed in the next several weeks.

The Kremlin has been eager to expand its energy market in China, which will need more gas in coming years to substitute for an eventual phasing down of coal, according to Vita Spivak, an energy analyst at Control Risks, a global consulting firm. Spivak told a discussion forum earlier this month that Kremlin officials are anxious to “exploit the opportunity” especially “considering there is a good working relationship between the two capitals.”

The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline has been championed by Putin, she said.

McKinsey, the strategic management consulting firm, estimates Chinese demand for gas will double by 2035. That will be a godsend for Russia. European governments are already setting out plans on how to transform their energy markets—how they will generate, import and distribute energy and shift to renewables and, in some cases, nuclear power. Russia needs to diversify into Asia to prolong its profits from its vast natural gas resources as Europe slowly weans itself off Gazprom supplies.

But Europe will remain dependent on Russian gas in the near future and Moscow has been busy re-ordering its complex network of pipelines, shaping them for wider economic and political purposes, say energy and national security analysts. Currently it supplies Europe through several pipelines—Nord Stream I, TurkStream and another from Yamal that terminates in Germany after transiting Belarus and Poland.

And it has just completed the controversial Nord Stream 2 underwater pipeline, which connects Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, circumventing older land routes through Ukraine. Nord Stream 2 has yet to receive final approval by German authorities.

Washington has long warned of the risk of Nord Stream 2 making the EU in the short term even more dependent for its energy needs on Russia and potentially vulnerable to economic coercion by the Kremlin. The planned Power of Siberia 2 pipeline will be able to pump into China around the same amount that Nord Stream 2 would be able to transport to Europe, giving the Kremlin more options about who gets the gas and at what price.

A senior European diplomat told VOA that Gazprom’s refusal to come up with additional supplies during the current energy crunch already “demonstrates Russia’s questionable motives about how ready it is to use the energy market for purely political purposes.” He added, “As it diversifies to China, it will give the Kremlin more opportunities to turn off and on supplies to Europe but reduce considerably any financial risks for Russia.”

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-gas-pivot-to-china-poses-challenge-for-europe/6375859.html

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President Biden sent a warning to the presidents of China and Russia during his Memorial Day address on Sunday.

“I had a long conversation for two hours recently with [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping], making it clear to him we could do nothing but speak out for human rights around the world because that’s who we are,” Biden said. “I’ll be meeting with [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin in a couple weeks in Geneva making it clear that we will not stand by and let him abuse those rights.”

CHINA TOYING WITH BIDEN ADMINISTRATION AT EVERY TURN

Biden spoke at a Memorial Day service in Delaware on Sunday morning, where he offered comfort to the families of fallen service members and paid tribute to his late son Beau Biden, who served in the Iraq War.

“It’s also an important tradition in our family. As many of you know, this is a hard day for us. Six years ago today … I lost my son. In the first year of his passing back in 2016, Gen. [Frank] Vavala did a great honor in inviting us to a ceremony renaming the Delaware National Guard headquarters in Beau’s honor.”

President Joe Biden speaks with priests as he departs after attending Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church, Sunday, May 30, 2021, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

“We’re honored, but it’s a tough day, brings back everything,” Biden continued. “So I can’t thank you enough for your continued service to the country and your sons, your daughters, they live on in your hearts and in their children as well. And we have to carry on without them. But I know how hard it is for you. Beau didn’t die in the line of duty, but he was serving in Delaware National Guard unit in Iraq for a year. That was one of the proudest things he did in his life. So thank you for allowing us to grieve together today.”

Beau Biden, the former attorney general of Delaware, died in 2015 from cancer. The president has previously suggested that Beau Biden’s cancer could have been linked to toxins he was exposed to through military burn pits while serving in the Iraq War.

This is President Biden’s first Memorial Day weekend as commander-in-chief.

JOHN CENA ISSUES APOLOGY TO CHINA IN MANDARIN AFTER CALLING TAIWAN ITS OWN COUNTRY IN ‘F9’ INTERVIEW

He brought up his issues with Chinese leaders as his administration refuses to commit to punishing China should the coronavirus lab leak theory be proven true.

“We haven’t ruled out anything yet,” principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters during Wednesday’s press briefing when asked whether the virus had emerged in a manner that was “deliberate or not an accident.”

“Would the president seek to punish China?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Jean-Pierre.

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“We’re not going to go there just yet,” Jean-Pierre replied, “We have to go through the 90-day review. And once we have the 90-day review, will we be able to reassess.”

Biden previously said he had asked the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” and get back to him within 90 days.

Fox News’ Lucas Y. Tomlinson, Morgan Phillips, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-xi-jinping-putin-memorial-day-warning

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The president portrayed his overall foreign policy agenda as one that “benefits the middle class.” Biden explained: “That means making sure every nation plays by the same rules in the global economy, including China.”

The president cited his own conversations with President Xi Jinping, with whom he has “spent a lot of time” during his travels abroad. “We welcome the competition,” Biden says he told Xi. “We’re not looking for conflict.” However, Biden was quick to add that he made it “absolutely clear that we will defend America’s interests across the board,” standing up “to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and American industries, like subsidies to state-owned operations and enterprises and the theft of American technology and intellectual property.” In addition, the president explained, the U.S. will “maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific, just as we do with NATO in Europe—not to start a conflict, but to prevent one.”

In broad strokes, President Biden’s summary of the Chinese challenge is not all that different from his predecessor’s. President Trump often blasted the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) trade practices, intellectual property theft, and other malign actions. The CCP’s defensive rhetoric remains largely the same as well.

The day after Biden’s speech, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, responded at a press conference. Wang’s talking points were taken straight from the CCP’s playbook, so it’s worth a brief examination of them.

First, Wang asserted that China is following a “path of peaceful development and has been a promoter of world peace,” as well as a “contributor to global development and a defender of international order.” He insisted that Beijing wants only “peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation” with the U.S. Xi has repeatedly stated the same in public. I’d bet Xi said this to Biden during their travels together as well. Of course, the U.S. government, across three administrations now, has taken a different view of the CCP’s intentions. A significant body of evidence indicates the CCP’s designs are not that peaceful, nor is it a “defender” of the international order, which it looks to undermine and transform.

Second, Wang feigned support for democracy. Wang claimed that “democracy is the common value of all mankind, not a ‘patented product’ of one single country.” He went on to assert that no country should be in the business of “imposing” its democratic values on others. This “is nothing but an insult on and a travesty of democratic values, and will only create division, intensify tension and disrupt stability,” Wang said.

Obviously, the CCP has no interest in promoting real democracy. The CCP monopolizes China’s politics as an autocracy. What Wang was really getting at is that the CCP doesn’t want the U.S. or other Western countries to promote their form of democracy first and foremost inside China, but also likely elsewhere.

In contrast, President Biden framed the American rivalry in precisely these ideological terms—as one of autocracies versus democracies. Xi is “deadly earnest about becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world,” Biden said during his speech before Congress. “He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies because it takes too long to get consensus.” The president then quickly pivoted to an argument in favor of his American Families Plan, portraying it as a way to bolster democracy in the long-term “competition for the future” with the CCP.

Third, Wang allowed that the U.S. and China should cooperate in some fields, but he hastily turned his remarks into a broadside attack on America. Wang claimed that the U.S.—not China—“has repeatedly violated international rules and market principle of fair competition.” He charged the U.S. with pursuing policies that “politicized and ideologized economic and scientific issues, abused state power to hamstring the development of China and other countries, and undermined the interests of many, provoking outrage from the international community.”

With respect to China, close to the exact opposite of what Wang said is true. The U.S. helped build China’s economy under the theory that economic prosperity would necessarily lead to greater political liberalization. Four decades later, that still hasn’t come true. But make no mistake about it: This was the exact argument that was used to justify China’s ascent to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other policies that integrated the Chinese economy into a worldwide network.

Consider what President Bill Clinton said during a speech in 2000, when he was advocating for China’s admission into the WTO:

By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people—their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.

Twenty-one years later, the U.S. government is no longer counting on democracy sprouting inside China anytime soon. The CCP has taken steps to extinguish Hong Kong’s democratic autonomy and has its eyes on Taiwan, all while clamping down on other forms of dissent across the mainland. China’s admission into the WTO had clear benefits, but it came with downsides as well—including allowing an authoritarian regime to compromise various industries across the West.

Speaking of the struggle between autocracy and democracy, there was a conspicuous omission from President Biden’s speech: Taiwan. Everyone knows that the upstart democracy could become a military flashpoint in the rivalry between Beijing and Washington. It’s still not clear how far President Biden is willing to go in America’s defense of Taiwan, should Xi decide it is time to end the island nation’s autonomy once and for all. As I’ve written previously, there is likely a limit on the American public’s will to expend much blood in defense of Taiwan. And it’s not clear if the U.S. military could even prevent a takeover, should the president decide it’s worth the risk. Still, it is curious that President Biden didn’t mention Taiwan in a speech devoted in no small part to the ideological battle between China’s autocracy and Western democracies.

The omission of any reference to Taiwan is even more noteworthy when one considers what President Biden said he told Xi. “I told him what I’ve said to many world leaders: that America will not back away from our commitments—our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms and to our alliances,” Biden claimed. The president continued:

And I pointed out to him: No responsible American president could remain silent when basic human rights are being so blatantly violated. An American president has to represent the essence of what our country stands for. America is an idea—the most unique idea in history: We are created, all of us, equal. It’s who we are, and we cannot walk away from that principle and, in fact, say we’re dealing with the American idea.

That idea is being challenged at home by actors across the political spectrum. And the CCP is all too happy to challenge it abroad.

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Recent confrontational action by China toward regional rivals Taiwan and India are examples of the Communist regime in Beijing challenging the new American president, according to China expert Gordon Chang.

Chang told “Your World” on Wednesday that President Xi Jinping is trying to size up how Joe Biden compares to his recent predecessors.

The author of “The Coming Collapse of China” noted such militaristic exercises did not take place in 2017, when Donald Trump took office as president.

GORDON CHANG: I think what they’re trying to do is find out how tough Biden is. These aerial exercises in Taiwan Saturday and Sunday are interpreted in the region as a challenge to Biden. Many people in the U.S. are saying the same thing. 

CHINESE WARPLANES ENTER TAIWAN AIRSPACE DAYS AFTER BIDEN TAKES OFFICE

China challenges new U.S. Presidents. They did that with George Bush and Barack Obama with military provocations that were dangerous. They didn’t do it with Donald Trump, because I think they were afraid of him. 

We know from comments from members of the Chinese elite that they’re not afraid of Biden. This is a very dangerous time because you have leaders in China that are arrogant and they think they can push us around.

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Within the week, China has basically [launched] a new invasion of India-controlled territory; in Sikkim. So China is pushing out around its borders all over its place. This is really one of those points that could be consequential because Beijing is seeing who will push back.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/gordon-chang-china-testing-biden-not-afraid-of-him

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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said he wanted to bring an end to a slogan that had come to define a United States that built walls and made working with allies an afterthought.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. makes no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury “America First” as a guiding principle of the nation’s foreign policy.

He says he will re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, assuming the Iranians are willing to reverse course and observe its limits.

He would sign up for another five years of the only surviving nuclear arms treaty with Russia and double down on American commitments to NATO after four years of threats from President Trump to withdraw from the alliance, which guided the West through the Cold War.

At the same time, Mr. Biden says he will make Russia “pay a price” for what he says have been disruptions and attempts to influence elections — including his own.

But mostly, Mr. Biden said in a statement to The New York Times, he wants to bring an end to a slogan that came to define a United States that built walls and made working with allies an afterthought — and, in Mr. Biden’s view, undermined any chance of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has cost more than 1.2 million lives.

“Tragically, the one place Donald Trump has made ‘America First’ is his failed response to the coronavirus: We’re 4 percent of the world’s population, yet have had 20 percent of the deaths,” Mr. Biden said days before the election. “On top of Trump embracing the world’s autocrats and poking his finger in the eye of our democratic allies, that’s another reason respect for American leadership is in free fall.”

But it is far easier to promise to return to the largely internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than it is to execute that shift after four years of global withdrawal and during a pandemic that has reinforced nationalist instincts. The world does not look remotely as it did when Mr. Biden last engaged it from the White House four years ago. Power vacuums have been created, and filled, often by China. Democracies have retreated. The race for a vaccine has created new rivalries.

So while foreign allies may find Mr. Biden reassuring — and smiled when they heard him say in a town-hall meeting that “‘America First’ has made America alone” — they also concede that they may never fully trust that the United States will not lurch back to building walls.

In interviews in the past several weeks, Mr. Biden’s top advisers began to outline a restoration that might be called the Great Undoing, an effort to reverse course on Mr. Trump’s aggressive attempt to withdraw to American borders.

“Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself,” said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s longtime national security adviser. “Until the Trump administration, in Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States did a lot of that organizing, and we made some mistakes along the way, for sure.” Now, however, the United States has discovered what happens “when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events.”

Mr. Blinken acknowledged that for those allies — or opponents of Mr. Trump — looking to reset the clock to noon on Jan. 20, 2017, “it’s not going to happen.”

Those who have known Mr. Biden for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts, starting with a return to the Paris climate accord in the first days of his administration. But substantive rebuilding of U.S. power will proceed far more slowly.

“He’ll inherit a situation which both gives him enormous latitude and, oddly, constrains him,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime friend of Mr. Biden’s. “Clearly, what Trump did by executive order can be undone by executive order.”

But “any act that requires Senate approach or any new use of force, absent a clear provocation, will be pretty much off the table,” he added.

At 77, Mr. Biden has his own back-to-the-future vision of how to dispense with “America First”: “This is the time to tap the strength and audacity that took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in March.

President Trump met with leaders of NATO countries in Herfordshire, England, last year. Mr. Biden would like to double down on American commitments to NATO.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

Yet in a campaign in which foreign policy was rarely mentioned, Mr. Biden was never pressed on how the current iteration of superpower competition differs from what he remembers from early in his political career.

He never stated what kind of “price” he had in mind for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to pay, though one of his longtime foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, offered a bit of detail. Just before Election Day, he said that Mr. Biden was willing to impose “substantial and lasting costs on perpetrators of the Russian interference,” which could include financial sanctions, asset freezes, counter cyberattacks, and, “potentially, the exposure of corruption by the leaders of foreign countries.”

That would signify a hardening in U.S. policy. But it would also involve steps that the Obama administration considered taking in its last six months when Mr. Biden was vice president, and never carried out.

The sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of the detailed planning that Mr. Biden’s transition team, organized late last spring, has engaged in to reverse Mr. Trump’s approach to the world. It has built a foreign policy team of formal and informal advisers, largely drawn from midlevel and senior Obama administration officials who are poised to return. There are timelines for opening negotiations, re-entering treaties, and early summit meetings.

But their plans show some notable breaks from the Obama administration’s strategy. Mr. Biden is clearly rethinking positions he took in the Senate and in the White House.

The most vivid example, officials say, will come in rethinking China strategy. His own advisers concede that in the Obama years, Mr. Biden and his national security team underestimated the speed with which President Xi Jinping of China would crackdown on dissent at home and use the combination of its 5G networks and its Belt and Road Initiative to challenge U.S. influence.

“Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted,” Kurt Campbell, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Ely Ratner, one of Mr. Biden’s deputy national security advisers, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article in 2018 that reflected this shift. “Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system.”

American soldiers at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan last year. Mr. Biden argued during the early days of the Obama administration for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission in the country.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times.

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That assessment included Mr. Biden’s view on Afghanistan — where he argued, in the early days of the Obama administration in 2009, for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission. Mr. Gates later recalled in his memoir that Mr. Biden was convinced that the military was trying to put the squeeze on the president to send more troops for a war the vice president thought was politically unsustainable.

Mr. Biden was overruled — by Mr. Obama, who nearly doubled the force size in Afghanistan in 2009 before moving to a drawdown.

But what was once a setback for Mr. Biden has now become something of a political asset: Mr. Trump’s effort to cast him as an advocate of “endless wars” fell flat. Mr. Biden, according to Mr. Sullivan, “wants to convert our presence to a counterterrorism capability” aimed at protecting the United States by keeping Qaeda forces or the Islamic State from establishing a base in Afghanistan.

“It would be limited and targeted,” Mr. Sullivan said. “That’s where he was in 2009, and that is where he is today.”

Confronting Russia

In the Cold War, Democrats were often portrayed as the party of appeasement to Moscow. Mr. Biden is the first Democrat to turn the tables: He is neither dismissive of the Russian threat as Mr. Obama was when he debated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, nor is he eager to bring a big red “reset” button to Moscow, as Hillary Clinton did in her opening days as secretary of state.

In the campaign, Mr. Biden seized on the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia preferred Mr. Trump, telling reporters in Nevada that “Putin knows me, and I know him, and he doesn’t want me to be president.” He is probably right: After details of the extent of Russian interference in 2016 became clear, followed by Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to confront Mr. Putin, Democrats have become the party of Russia hawks.

For most of the campaign, Mr. Biden assailed Mr. Trump for “cozying up to dictators” and describing how, if elected, he was prepared to punish Russia. As president, Mr. Biden will have to deal with a Russia whose arsenal includes 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and a raft of tactical nuclear weapons that it has been deploying freely, even before Mr. Trump exited the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

How would Mr. Biden end the downward spiral? He would start with a five-year extension of New START, Mr. Blinken said in an interview, since the treaty lapses 16 days after inauguration. Then he would seek to expand the treaty to other types of weapons and perhaps more countries. And he would play on Mr. Putin’s growing economic fragility.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, right, in St. Petersburg this week. Mr. Biden’s sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of his transition team’s planning to reverse Mr. Trump’s approach to the world.Credit…Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

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“We will deter, and impose costs for, Mr. Putin’s meddling and aggression,” Mr. Blinken said. “But there’s a flip side” to dealing with Moscow, he added. Mr. Putin is “looking to relieve Russia’s growing dependence on China,” Mr. Blinken said, which has left him in “not a very comfortable position.”

That suggests the Biden administration could try to use the suspicions that Moscow and Beijing have of each other to split the two superpowers — just as President Richard M. Nixon used it, in reverse, to win his opening with China nearly 50 years ago.

On Iran, a Resurgent Crisis

“Oh, goddamn,” Mr. Biden fumed in the Situation Room in the summer of 2010, according to participants in the meeting, as news began to leak that a highly classified effort by the United States and Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear program with a cyberweapon — later called “Stuxnet” — was about to be exposed because the computer code was being replicated around the world. “It’s got to be the Israelis. They went too far.”

A decade later, that effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear effort appears to be the birth of a new age of conflict, one in which Mr. Biden was a key player. He favored the covert effort because he was looking for any way to slow Iran’s progress without risking war in the Middle East. He later told colleagues that he believed the covert program helped bring the country to the negotiating table for what became the Iran nuclear deal five years later.

Now Mr. Biden says the first step with Iran is to restore the status quo — which means re-entering the deal if Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is willing to return to production limits announced in 2015. But it won’t be that simple. The Iranians have indicated there will be a higher price to pay for Mr. Trump’s breach. And some of the key restrictions on Iran begin to lift soon: The first phase of an arms embargo expired in October, clearing the way for the Russians and the Chinese to begin resuming sales. And there will soon be a new Iranian president, with unknown effects on potential talks.

Mr. Biden’s aides say that returning to the deal that Mr. Trump left “shifts the burden” back on Tehran.

“If Iran decides it’s not going to come back into compliance,” Mr. Blinken said, “we’re in a much stronger position to elicit support from allies and partners” who are now blaming Mr. Trump for starting the crisis by rejecting an agreement the United States had already made.

The China Challenge

In 2012, Mr. Biden was the host when Mr. Xi came to Washington. The vice president praised the guest from Beijing as a rising reformer who was “prepared to show another side of the Chinese leadership.” Mr. Biden was among those to celebrate China’s inevitable but “peaceful rise,” followed by assurance that trying to contain its power was a fool’s errand.

By this year, he had revised his view. “This is a guy who is a thug,” Mr. Biden said.

“This is a guy who is a thug,” Mr. Biden has said about President Xi Jinping of China.Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

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So during the campaign, he went after Mr. Trump for “fake toughness” and argued that “Trump lost a trade war that he started.” What he meant was that the Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods were ultimately underwritten by American taxpayers in the form of government subsidies to compensate farmers and others who lost sales.

Mr. Biden has said little about how he would push back. And even if he settles the long-running arguments over agricultural goods and the theft of intellectual property by Beijing, Mr. Biden will face challenges never discussed when Mr. Xi was visiting eight years ago: managing technological inroads by companies like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and TikTok, the app that has seized the imaginations and phones of 100 million Americans.

Mr. Biden has suggested that the Trump crackdowns may continue — though surrounded by more skillful diplomacy to bring European and other allies on board.

“God only knows what they’re doing with information they’re picking up off of here,” he said of the Chinese. “So as president, I will go into it very deeply. I’ll get the cyber experts in with me to give me what is the best solution to deal with it.”

Complicating the issue is Mr. Biden’s insistence that, unlike Mr. Trump, he will put values back at the center of foreign policy, including how to approach the United States’ relationship with China, a milder echo of Bill Clinton’s pledge in the 1992 presidential race to take on “the butchers of Beijing.”

Presumably, that means making China pay a price for Mr. Xi’s controls on dissent, including the national security laws that led to detention camps in Xinjiang, arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong, and the ouster of foreign journalists who were the last bastion of independent reporting in China.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/politics/biden-foreign-policy.html

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The post The End of ‘America First’: How Biden Says He Will Re-engage With the World first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is inheriting a landscape of challenges and ill will toward the United States in many countries.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

U.S. relations with China are the worst since the countries normalized ties four decades ago. America’s allies in Europe are alienated. The most important nuclear anti-proliferation treaty is about to expire with Russia. Iran is amassing enriched nuclear fuel again, and North Korea is brandishing its atomic arsenal.

Not to mention global warming, refugee crises, and looming famines in some of the poorest places on earth, all amplified by the pandemic.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is inheriting a landscape of challenges and ill-will toward the United States in countries hostile to President Trump’s “America First” mantra, his unpredictability, embrace of autocratic leaders, and resistance to international cooperation. Mr. Biden also could face difficulties in dealing with governments that had hoped for Mr. Trump’s re-election — particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia, which share the president’s deep antipathy toward Iran.

Outside the United States Consulate in Chengdu in July, after China ordered the United States to close the consulate there.Credit…Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

The Middle East: Shifts on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran?

Mr. Biden has vowed to reverse what he called the “dangerous failure” of Mr. Trump’s Iran policy, which repudiated the 2015 nuclear agreement and replaced it with tightening sanctions that have caused deep economic damage in Iran and left the United States largely isolated on this issue.

Mr. Biden has offered to rejoin the agreement, which constricts Iran’s nuclear capabilities if Tehran adheres to its provisions and commits to further negotiations. He also has pledged to immediately nullify Mr. Trump’s travel ban affecting Iran and several other Muslim-majority countries.

Whether Iran’s hierarchy will accept Mr. Biden’s approach is unclear. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has said the United States is untrustworthy regardless who is in the White House. At the same time, “Iran is desperate for a deal,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Still, Mr. Kupchan said, Mr. Biden will face enormous difficulties in any negotiations with Iran aimed at strengthening restrictions on its nuclear activities — weaknesses Mr. Trump had cited to justify renouncing the nuclear agreement.

“The substance will be tough — we’ve seen this movie and it’s not easy,” Mr. Kupchan said. “I think Biden’s challenge is that it will not end up blowing up in his face.”

Mr. Biden’s Iran policy could alienate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who leveraged Mr. Trump’s confrontational approach to help strengthen Israel’s relations with Gulf Arab countries, punctuated by normalization of diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. How Mr. Biden manages relations with Saudi Arabia, which considers Iran an enemy, will also be a challenge.

“There’s a very hard square to circle here,” Mr. Kupchan said.

Mr. Trump’s extremely favorable treatment of Israel in the protracted conflict with the Palestinians also could prove nettlesome as Mr. Biden navigates a different path in the Middle East. He has criticized Israeli settlement construction in occupied lands the Palestinians want for a future state. And he is likely to restore contacts with the Palestinian leadership.

“Benjamin Netanyahu can expect an uncomfortable period of adjustment,” an Israeli columnist, Yossi Verter, wrote Friday in the Haaretz newspaper.

At the same time, Mr. Biden also has a history of cordial relations with Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Biden has said he would not reverse Mr. Trump’s transfer of the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv — a relocation that deeply angered the Palestinians.

“We had differences, but there was never a basic mistrust about having common views of the world,” Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, told The New York Times last month. Over the past four years, she said, European leaders had learned they could “no longer take for granted that they can trust the U.S., even on basic things.”

A photo released by the official North Korean government news service shows a test launch of a Hwasong-14, one of North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missiles.Credit…Korean Central News Agency

Confronting North Korea’s nuclear threat

Mr. Trump has described his friendship and three meetings with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, as a success that averted war with the nuclear-armed hermetic country. But critics say Mr. Trump’s approach not only failed to persuade Mr. Kim to relinquish his arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles, it bought Mr. Kim time to strengthen them. Last month the North unveiled what appeared to be its largest-ever intercontinental ballistic missile.

“On Trump’s watch, the North’s nuclear weapons program has grown apace, its missile capabilities have expanded, and Pyongyang can now target the United States with an ICBM,” said Evans J.R. Revere, a former State Department official and expert on North Korea. “That is the legacy that Trump will soon pass on to Biden, and it will be an enormous burden.”

Mr. Biden, who has been described by North Korea’s official news agency as a rabid dog that “must be beaten to death with a stick,” has criticized Mr. Trump’s approach as appeasement of a dictator. Mr. Biden has said he would press for denuclearization and “stand with South Korea,” but has not specified how he would deal with North Korean belligerence.

As vice president, Mr. Biden pushed for sanctions against Russia over President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea.Credit…Pool photo by Mikhail Klimentyev

A likely tougher approach to Russia and Putin

Mr. Biden has long asserted that he would take a much harder line with Russia than Mr. Trump, who questioned NATO’s usefulness, doubted intelligence warnings on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections, admired President Vladimir V. Putin, and said that improving American relations with the Kremlin would benefit all. Mr. Biden, who as vice president pushed for sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 — the biggest illegal land seizure in Europe since World War II — might seek to extend those sanctions and take other punitive steps.

While tensions with Russia would likely rise, arms control is one area where Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin share a desire for progress. Mr. Biden is set to be sworn in just a few weeks before the scheduled expiration of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. He has said he wants to negotiate an extension of the treaty without preconditions.

A migrant from Honduras, near the border in Juárez, Mexico, seeking asylum in the United States.Credit…Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

A return to the Paris Agreement and international commitments

Mr. Biden has said one of his first acts as president will be to rejoin the Paris Climate accord to limit global warming, which the United States officially left under Mr. Trump on Wednesday. Mr. Biden also has said he would restore U.S. membership in the World Health Organization, which Mr. Trump repudiated in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, describing the W.H.O. as a lackey of China.

More broadly, Mr. Biden is expected to reverse many of the isolationist and anti-immigrant steps taken during the Trump administration, which are widely seen by Mr. Trump’s critics as shameful stains on American standing in the world. Mr. Biden has said he would disband Mr. Trump’s immigration restrictions, stop construction of his border wall with Mexico, expand resources for immigrants and provide a path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally.

Nonetheless, many of Mr. Trump’s policies had considerable support in the United States, and it remains to be seen how quickly or effectively Mr. Biden can change them. The convulsions that roiled American democracy and the divisive election have also sown doubts about Mr. Biden’s ability to deliver on his pledges.

“There is relief at a return to some kind of normalcy, but at the same time, history cannot be erased,” said Jean-Marie Guehenno, a French diplomat who is a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program and a former under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations at the United Nations. “The kind of soft power that the United States has enjoyed in the past has largely evaporated.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/world/americas/Biden-foreign-policy.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

The post Biden to Face Long List of Foreign Challenges, With China No. 1 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army continued to enter Taiwan’s declared air defense identification throughout the weekend, even as the self-ruling island celebrated “National Day”—an occasion commemorating the end of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China, which Taiwan officially calls itself.

But as the rival People’s Republic of China made its presence known, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen delivered a military message as well.

“As commander-in-chief,” Tsai said, “I always have the future of our military and our military of the future in my heart.”

The Taiwanese leader vowed to buy and build more powerful military equipment during Saturday’s festivities.

“We will continue to modernize defensive combat capabilities and accelerate the upgrading of our asymmetrical capabilities to deal with military expansion and provocation from the other side of the Taiwan Strait,” Tsai said. “As we procure military hardware, we still remain dedicated to promoting our national self-defense capabilities.”

She also appealed for cross-strait stability and dialogue, but her words appeared lost on Beijing, where President Xi Jinping has vowed to assert control over Taiwan with military action if a peaceful path did not pan out.

Taiwan’s military reported on Sunday that Chinese Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft continued a daily streak of sorties along the disputed strait that represents the de facto divide between the mainland People’s Republic of China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, and Taiwan, a democracy that officially calls itself the Republic of China.

With Chinese media outlets such as the Communist Party-run Global Times hyping up the chances of all-out war, Andrew Yang, spokesperson of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, affirmed that Taiwan would double down on both indigenous and acquired military strength to deter an ever-looming Chinese incursion.

“Taiwan will continue to increase investments in its defense commensurate with the security challenges it faces,” Yang told Newsweek. “Taiwan will also seek security cooperation with the United States to build its defense systems that are cost-effective but lethal enough to make any invasions painful.”

Two U.S.-made F-16V fighter aircraft release flares after dropping bombs during the annual Han Kuang military drills in Taichung on July 16. The five-day “Han Kuang” (Han Glory) military drills starting on July 14 aimed to test how the armed forces would repel an invasion from China, which has vowed to bring Taiwan back into the fold—by force if necessary. SAM YEH/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The case of Taiwan’s sovereignty is among the most serious challenges to U.S.-China relations, which have approached historic lows during the past year.

For more than four decades, the U.S. has adhered to the “One China” policy that acknowledges Beijing’s claims to Taiwan. But it has also maintained informal diplomatic and defense ties with Taipei, whose international links have dwindled to 14 nations since losing a 1949 civil war. China has refused relations with any country recognizing Taiwan, prompting much of the international community to shift relations as China opened up economically to the West over the past half a century.

The Trump administration has expanded upon the unofficial U.S. relationship with Taiwan, which has become a bone of contention as the two powers increasingly compete economically and geopolitically.

Last month’s annual Pentagon report on Chinese military power noted that “China continues to view the Taiwan issue as the most important and sensitive issue between the United States and China.”

Chinese forces have staged large displays of military might in protest to recent visits by senior U.S. officials to the island. One such series of exercises last month was rejected as “aggressive and destabilizing” in remarks sent to Newsweek by Pentagon spokesperson John Supple.

As Chinese fury toward the U.S. Taiwan policy mounts, some observers have warned the likelihood of a conflict has grown.

“The situation is escalating, mostly because of power competition and maritime disputes,” the Beijing-based South China Sea Probing Initiative told Newsweek in a statement.

The think tank deemed “unlikely” a possible military conflict between China and nearby members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that challenge some of Beijing’s territorial claims, but said “the risk of China-U.S. conflict is rising.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed this scenario in an interview Friday with radio host Hugh Hewitt. At the same time, he emphasized that the Trump administration would continue to work with Taiwan against China’s wishes.

“These are the obligations that the United States should undertake and is undertaking,” Pompeo said. “We recognize that this is a point of conflict with the Chinese Communist Party. We don’t want that. We want peace. But we are going to make sure that we live up to all of the obligations we have to Taiwan.”

Regional tensions remain high as the U.S. stepped up military activities near Taiwan and across the Asia-Pacific, including in the nearby East and South China Seas, where the Pentagon has challenged sweeping Chinese maritime claims.

A Chinese Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft of the People’s Liberation Army is seen in this image shared October 11 by the Taiwan National Defense Ministry. Taiwan’s armed forces said radio warnings were issued and missile systems put on alert as the aircraft entered the island’s declared air defense identification zone. MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA

After the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS John McCain sailed near the Paracel Islands, which are controlled by China but also claimed by ASEAN member Vietnam, Chinese Southern Military Command spokesperson Senior Colonel Zhang Nandong called Friday on the U.S. to “immediately stop such kind of provocative actions, strictly manage and control its maritime and air military operations so as not to cause any eventuality.”

The U.S. has sought to court regional countries to pressure China as a part of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” plan. Also on board are fellow Quadrilateral Security Dialogue members Australia, India, and Japan, whose representatives met last week with Pompeo in Tokyo.

The top U.S. diplomat rallied the three countries against the Chinese Communist Party by asserting that it “is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the CCP’s exploitation, corruption, and coercion.”

China’s embassy in Washington rejected Pompeo’s remarks in a reaction sent to Newsweek.

“China is committed to the path of peaceful development and firmly safeguards its sovereignty, security and development interests,” an embassy spokesperson said.

“At the same time, it is committed to resolving differences with other countries through dialogue and consultation,” the spokesperson added. “This is what we say and also what we do. We do not accept reckless smearing and groundless accusations against China.”

A map shows a selected series of China’s territorial disputes in the region as of January 1.U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/taiwan-wants-strong-us-defense-make-invasion-painful-china-conflict-fears-grow-1538404

The post Taiwan Wants Strong U.S. Defense to Make Invasion ‘Painful’ As China Conflict Fears Grow first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Trump voiced his desire for a three-way arms control agreement months ago, but that effort is still in the starting blocks.

Marshall Billingslea, who was appointed last month as the president’s special envoy for arms control, said Thursday that he had his first secure phone call with his counterpart in Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. Billingslea said they agreed to meet, talk about their objectives and find a way to begin negotiations.

“Suffice to say, this won’t be easy. It is new,” Billingslea said, adding that the U.S. fully expects Russia to help bring China to the table.

Russia’s Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone is test-launched somewhere in Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

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Russian officials and many arms control experts agree that China, as a rising power, should be part of a nuclear arms accord, but they are eyeing the calendar.

“It’s really hard to see how, in the midst of a pandemic that would make actual in-person negotiations quite difficult, you’re going to get something done and ratified and in force before the New START treaty expires on Feb. 5, 2021,” said Alexandra Bell at the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation.

They note how Trump’s reelection campaign, the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic problems it has created are consuming a lot of time. Negotiating complex nuclear accords can take years, and even the president, who has blamed Beijing for not stopping the spread of the virus, has said he’s doesn’t want to talk to President Xi Jinping right now.

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, said in January that China has “no intention to participate” in trilateral arms control negotiations. Billingslea, however, is optimistic that Beijing will want to join in and be seen as a world power.

New START imposes limits on the number of U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads and launchers. If it were to collapse, it would be the first time in 50 years that the U.S. does not have the ability to inspect Russian nuclear forces, said Rose Gottemoeller, a former undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

“Every time they (the Russians) take a missile out of a silo and take it to a maintenance facility, they have to notify us that that missile’s going to move. … The intelligence community is simply going to have a much harder time knowing what’s going on,” she said.

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But Trump has accused Russia of not living up to agreements. He cited Russian violations in his announcement Thursday that the U.S. would withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty. While the U.S. has officially given its required six-month notice of withdrawal, Trump hinted that he may reconsider and stay in the pact.

Trump also blamed Russian violations for his decision last year to pull out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that banned production, testing, and deployment of intermediate-range land-based cruise and ballistic missiles.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday accused the U.S. of aiming to dismantle security pacts. Withdrawing from the Opens Skies Treaty “fully fits into (the U.S.) line on the destruction of the entire complex of agreements in the field of arms control and confidence-building in the military field,” the ministry said.

Senior U.S. administration officials say Trump’s willingness to withdraw from treaties shows he is serious about compliance and is evidence of how prominently arms control verification and compliance will feature in New START talks.

“We are not in the business of negotiating new agreements, or extending old ones if we cannot be assured that the other parties will hold up their end of the bargain,” Billingslea said. “When it comes to Russia, we have little reason to be confident. Russia’s track record is, to be frank, abysmal.”

The U.S. and Russia have about 91 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists. The U.S. has 3,800 in its stockpile and Russia has 4,310. China has 320 nuclear warheads, although the Defense Intelligence Agency predicted last year that China was likely to at least double the size of its stockpile during the next 10 years.

With the U.S. presidential election just five months away, the question is whether Trump has enough time to negotiate a grand, three-way deal, especially given China’s reticence to participate.

Timothy Morrison, an arms control expert and former adviser to Trump on Russia and Europe at the National Security Council, said at a nuclear weapons forum in January that as the months go by, Trump may be “left with a binary question of extend or not extend” New START.

“Time is not on the president’s side,” he said.

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Source: https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nuclear-arsenal/2020/05/24/time-running-out-on-the-last-us-russia-nuclear-arms-treaty/

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left), the director-general of the World Health Organization, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Jan. 28. NAOHIKO HATTA – POOL/GETTY IMAGES

hile the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new field—health.

After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.

Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.

After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership, and the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread globally weeks before.

[Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak: Get daily updates on the pandemic and learn how it’s affecting countries around the world.]

WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China. The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an “all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international spread.”

China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However, while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human rights costs.

It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective, said Richard Neher, virologist at the University of Basel. “The big lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine “as scientifically justified.”

While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not recognized by WHO or other bodies.

One reason is that official data from China is often highly dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other countries, since studies based on information from China are the first used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.

“I thought the greatest success of the Chinese party-state was in getting the WHO to focus on the positive sides of China’s responses and ignore the negative sides of the responses,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the SOAS University of London. “With the WHO presenting China’s responses in a positive light, the Chinese government is able to make its propaganda campaign to ignore its earlier mistakes appear credible and to ignore the human, societal, and economic costs of its responses.”

Indeed, WHO closes its eyes to such problems. “China reported and isolated ALL individuals with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19,” Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesperson, said in mid-March. However, Chinese authorities only in the beginning of April started to make current numbers of asymptomatic cases with lab-confirmed infections public—which also are included in the WHO case definition for COVID-19. “Every country has its own self-reporting processes”, Lindmeier said. WHO epidemiologist Bruce Aylward, who headed the visit, said in an interview that China was not hiding anything. When asked how many people have been put in quarantine, isolation, or residential restriction, Lindmeier referred to numbers from China’s National Health Commission—which are much smaller than the numbers calculated by the New York Times. “WHO works with these data,” he said.

Yet it is unclear whether the WHO experts who traveled to China sufficiently understood the situation on the ground. For example, based on numbers from the South China province of Guangdong, WHO argued that undetected cases are rare. However, a screening program for COVID-19 only included patients seen at fever clinics; most of them probably showed at least a fever. In Germany, most of the people who tested positive did not show a fever. It is easily possible that there has been a substantial number of undetected cases, Neher said, which is the “big unknown” in calculations of the death rate.

WHO also left many questions open about how exactly public engagement was managed in its report. Chinese people have reacted “with courage and conviction,” it says; they have “accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures.” While this is probably true for many, others were likely motivated by a statement of the Supreme People’s Court: People carrying the virus who don’t follow quarantine restrictions “face jail terms ranging from three to 10 years if the consequence is not serious,” it says. Otherwise, they could face a life sentence or death.

“The community has largely accepted the prevention and control measures and is fully participating in the management of self-isolation and enhancement of public compliance,” the WHO report says. In China, no measures have been implemented that could not also be used elsewhere, Aylward claimed in an interview. Apparently, the WHO mission didn’t have the chance to speak with people with opposing views. Many Chinese people told him that they all have been attacked together and need to react in a united fashion, Aylward said.

The very uniformity of this narrative should have been a wake-up call, said Mareike Ohlberg from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies. Indeed, the whole trip of both foreign and national experts seems to have been organized along Potemkin-esque lines for a team where most of its international members lacked linguistic skills and familiarity with China. “We really didn’t have much interaction until after all the site visits,” said Clifford Lane, a deputy director at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the delegation. It was his first trip to China, he told Science. “I was really surprised with how modern the cities were.”

Ohlberg said the statements of the WHO have clearly been heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. She says she was surprised that, from the start, many experts uncritically repeated information from Beijing and “preached confidence in the WHO and the Chinese government.” The WHO report rightly emphasized the heroic commitment of the population of Wuhan. “But it’s important that the WHO does not degrade itself to an instrument of the Chinese government—which does not want to make transparent how the population suffered,” she said.

Osman Dar, global health expert at Public Health England and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that China is no different from other countries that seek to exert influence. WHO had evolved out of colonial-era international sanitary conferences convened by the European powers and expansionist U.S. policy, he said. Since WHO was controlled and largely influenced by the national interests of Western powers before, in the past 20 years, countries like China “have started to have more influence in the global health space.”

Beijing’s say is growing not only at WHO, but also in the health policies of more and more countries. This also is an important area in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its activities in African countries. It may be doubted whether Beijing always acts in the best interests of its partners. “Chinese health aid allocation is poorly related to direct health needs of African countries,” French researchers last year concluded.

The same is true for the current outbreak, which is politically important, said Tankred Stöbe, former president of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) Germany and a former member of the International Board of MSF International. In February, he traveled to Southeast Asia (SEA) as a COVID-19 emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. Countries like Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand “cannot escape the influence of China,” he said. “I know about meetings where representatives of China have said: Dear friends in Southeast Asia, we’re interested in continuing good cooperation. It is clear for us that you must let your borders open—otherwise we would have to rethink our friendship.” The countries “cannot refuse,” Stöbe said. Countries like Cambodia and Pakistan  kept accepting flights from China during the outbreak.

For political reasons, “Vietnam can’t close its border with China,” physician Rafi Kot told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He founded several medical centers in the country. “The Chinese have put immense pressure on everyone: the Koreans, Vietnam, everyone,” he told the newspaper. “Asian countries cannot act as they want vis-a-vis China because it’s the big power in the neighborhood.” While Cambodia closed its borders to several Western countries in mid-March, it started military drills together with hundreds of Chinese soldiers, which concluded this Monday.

The post How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.