The Australian flag is seen during a welcome ceremony for Australia's former Prime Minister Julia Gillard outside the Great Hall of the People on April 9, 2013 in Beijing, China. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

The Biden administration maintains that America's global standing is strengthened by a renewed focus on domestic priorities. Yet the administration's tax-and-spend approach carries economic risks that will leave the U.S. more vulnerable to trouble at home and abroad. In the Wall Street Journal this week, Hudson’s Chris DeMuth critiques President Biden’s "borrowed-benefits" federal spending model, while Thomas Duesterberg sounds the alarm on Secretary Yellen’s plan to cede U.S. corporate taxation authority to international technocrats.

Meanwhile, Australia is setting an example for the rest of the world in standing up to China. Australian Ambassador to the U.S. Arthur Sinodinos joined Walter Russell Mead for a candid discussion on Australia-China trade tensions and Canberra's decision to cancel its Belt and Road Initiative agreements with China. 

See key takeaways from the event below and join us next week for a discussion on the U.S. military and electromagnetic spectrum warfare with Congressmen Jim Langevin and Don Bacon.

Key Takeaways

Featured quotes from Australian Ambassador to the U.S. Arthur Sinodinos' interview with Walter Russell Mead. 

1. China is using trade restrictions as a form of diplomatic pressure against Australia:

[China's actions] began incrementally. Suddenly wine is not getting ticked to go into China. Approvals are being held up. Then it might have been barley. Then it might have been coal starting to, for some reason, be held up at the ports. But over time, a pattern developed.

At first, we didn’t want to call out this pattern as a pattern. We wanted to deal with each issue on its merits in a trade dispute context. But in more recent times, we’ve said publicly that look, there is a pattern here and it’s clear what the pattern is that we are being isolated because of some of the things we’ve done. One of the most recent being of course, calling out origins of the virus and seeking to have the World Health Organization do an independent objective examination of the origins so we can learn what happened and why and how we can do better in the future. 

2. Australia has taken a more assertive approach to China's state-subsidized efforts at 5G technological dominance:

As China has become more powerful and more assertive, particularly with Xi Jinping, the ground rules have changed. Issues around technological dominance have started to have real geostrategic implications.

In Australia's case, Huawei, ZTE, and the role they would play in Australia's 5G rollout became an issue because of concerns that were expressed to us by our advisors, particularly in the information and intelligence fields about the capacity for information garnered in Australia, through those networks, to find its way back to governments in other places that may have an interest in exploiting that information for their own purposes.

3. China's demand that Canberra crack down on criticism of China in the press marked a turning point for the Australian public: 

The Chinese at one stage put out 14 demands they had of Australia, one of which was of course, the press’ treatment of China. And of course this immediately went to the point that, as a democracy, we're not going to muzzle the press. There are rules and regulations, but there's also free speech and everything else.

I think that registered with the public that we're being asked to do things which infringe on our national security and on our fundamental values. And that I think has meant that the public as a whole has taken a dim view of what China has done and essentially supported the Australian government in taking the stance that it has.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

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