Biden's Hollow Warnings to China Are Leading to War
by Gordon G. Chang • October 21, 2024 at 5:00 am
The world's two most dangerous states, Xi Jinping's People's Republic of China and Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation, have been growing closer in part, it seems, because they see there is no cost to ignoring the warnings of the Biden administration.
"Mr. Biden can either enforce his red line through sanctions or other means, or he can signal a collapse of American resolve by applying merely symbolic penalties. Beijing and its strategic partners in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Caracas would surely interpret half-hearted enforcement as a green light to deepen their campaign of global chaos. Mr. Xi sees a historic opportunity here to undermine the West." – Matt Pottinger, wsj.com, April 30, 2024
Since then, the Biden administration has done little but impose meaningless sanctions on Chinese parties, such as the ones announced on October 17 on two companies.
The American inaction today brings to mind President Obama's infamous red-line failure in Syria in 2013. We should not be surprised: Biden, then vice president, was Obama's foreign policy advisor.
Britain and France [last century] issued a series of threatening words to Berlin. German leaders, from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 to the eve of the invasion of Poland in late summer 1939, ignored them.
"Warnings were crafted in such a way so they could not be enforced and understood as not intended to be enforced." — Arthur Waldron, retired Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, to Gatestone Institute, October 17, 2024.
China's aggressive leader apparently believes he can with impunity do just about anything.
Hollow warnings lead to war.
"These are not dual-use capabilities," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told reporters in Brussels on September 10, describing China's aid to Russia for use against Ukraine. "These are component pieces of a very substantial effort on the part of China to help sustain, build, and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine."
The Beijing-Moscow cooperation, Campbell argued, is "not a tactical alliance." It is, instead, "a fundamental alignment." The Chinese-Russian hook-up was "orchestrated at the highest levels" in the two capitals, he said.
With Campbell's words, the Biden administration for the first time accused China of providing Moscow with direct support for its war. At the same time, U.S. officials detailed Russia's technical assistance to China's submarine and missile programs.
