At the meeting, Mr. Xi conveyed a veiled threat of war against Taiwan and leveraged U.S. fentanyl deaths. His long-overdue promise at the talks to President Biden to stop fentanyl-related exports from China can be trusted about as much as his 2016 promises to former President Barack Obama to stop cyber intrusions and not militarize artificial islands in the South China Sea. Mr. Xi violated both promises within a few years.
President Biden’s comment after the meeting that he would “trust but verify” Mr. Xi’s latest promise and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader was, indeed, a “dictator,” as he had said before, were fitting. The two met for hours of “blunt” discussion and a garden walk, which started with the obligatory warm Biden handshake and proceeded before the cameras and their policy teams as frosty, formal, and somber.
Two more long overdue “agreements” that should have been given were presented by the White House as progress after the meeting, namely a presidential hotline between the two countries and the grant of a meeting between defense chiefs.
Beijing’s past refusal to engage in such basic communication, along with its fighter jet and nuclear-capable bomber flights around Taiwan, were likely failed attempts to intimidate the United States.
At the meeting, Mr. Xi hinted at the possibility of military action against the island democracy if it did not “peacefully reunify” with the mainland within a few years.
Mr. Xi “underscored that this [Taiwan] was the biggest, most potentially dangerous issue in U.S.-China relations, laid out clearly that, you know, their preference was for peaceful reunification but then moved immediately to conditions that the potential use of force could be utilized,” a senior U.S. official said, as reported by Reuters.
Unification of a democracy with a dictatorship under threat of nuclear war should never be considered “peaceful” and would not be “reunification” in any case, as communists never controlled the island. The Biden administration should have said this publicly afterward.
What we do not know is what President Biden agreed to behind closed doors in exchange for more fentanyl cooperation.
Rather than stand on principle—that Beijing ought to engage in effective counternarcotics cooperation as a matter of course, and that the United States should strengthen its 2020 sanctions on China’s Insitute of Forensic Science until the CCP demonstrably ends its genocidal abuse of Uyghurs—the Biden administration apparently allowed Beijing to try and link the two, giving into two of the CCP’s genocidal actions, and thus incentivizing it to reuse the strategy in the future.
Beijing’s additional demands on U.S. acceptance of its communist dictatorship as somehow equal to a true democracy, and an end to China tariffs against Beijing’s unfair trade practices that destroyed American industry, are essentially demands for America’s ideological and material surrender, for which Mr. Xi has demonstrated he is prepared to pave the way with tens of thousands of U.S. fentanyl deaths.
This is war by another name, and by not admitting as much to the public, the Biden administration capitulates through appeasement after appeasement that, if allowed to continue, will lead to the surrender of all that makes America and by extension, democracy, strong. Our values, economy, military—and ultimately, our sovereignty—are on the line.
