Quote:
Originally Posted by detbuch
Well, then, you can assure the bitter clingers that they needn't be concerned with the "Biden China angle."
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Apparently you haven't been paying attention for the last 4 years
As national security officials and some trade advisers in the Trump administration tried crafting get-tough-on-China policies to address what they viewed as America’s greatest foreign policy challenge, they ran into opposition from an unexpected quarter.
President Trump himself was undermining their work.
That has been the underlying tension of the last three and a half years, laid out in blunt language in the new memoir by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser. The book supports what administration officials have said in interviews and private discussions since 2017, and what, in many ways, had been out in the open in Mr. Trump’s fawning statements about China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, many made on Twitter.
Taken together, the accounts reveal that there has been no coherent China policy, despite efforts early in the administration by senior aides to frame foreign policy around what they labeled “great power competition,” outlined in their own national security strategy document.
Administration players on China have been divided by factional feuding and irreconcilable policy goals, with security hawks and religious freedom crusaders butting heads with Wall Street advocates and free traders.
Overseeing it all has been a president whose main aim with China has been to secure a trade deal — using overt pleas to Chinese leaders — that would help him get re-elected, according to the accounts.
Mr. Trump, who has shown little interest in human rights and has an affinity for dictators, had no qualms about negotiating openly on those terms with Mr. Xi and ignoring other issues. He even told Mr. Xi repeatedly to continue building internment camps that Chinese officials have used to detain more than one million Muslims — “which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Mr. Bolton wrote.
Although Mr. Trump is known to be a transactional president, Mr. Bolton’s unsparing account reveals transgressions that not only break norms, but also could increase the risks to U.S. national security: Mr. Trump intervening to end sanctions against a Chinese technology company as a favor to Mr. Xi; offering to end a Justice Department case against a Huawei executive in exchange for trade concessions; and “pleading with Xi to ensure” China would make American farm product purchases to help Mr. Trump win re-election, as Mr. Bolton put it.
“Make sure I win,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Xi, according to unredacted pages seen by Vanity Fair.