GOP lawmakers say allowing China’s Xi to extend Beijing’s global reach is a ‘strategic failure’ for Biden
Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to be positioning himself to replace President Biden as the world’s power broker — setting up meetings with both Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelesnky on the heels of China’s success in brokering a diplomatic deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
And some Republicans believe the Xi power-play points to “America’s decline” under Biden.
“The US was once the indispensable nation but [Biden’s] often incompetent management of [international] affairs is undoing that,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) wrote in a recent tweet, lamenting the outsized role in global affairs the communist power has been taking on since Biden took office.
“Biden let Communist China become the Middle East’s new power broker. This is what American decline under Biden looks like,” Hagerty added.
Fresh off its wheeling and dealing in the Middle East, Xi told Chinese lawmakers Monday that the Asian nation should “actively participate in the reform and construction of the global governance system” and promote “global security initiatives.”
That will add “positive energy to world peace and development,” he claimed.
And in a blend of statecraft and blunt force, Xi spoke of turning the People’s Liberation Army into a “great wall of steel.”
“We should comprehensively promote the modernization of national defense and military construction, and build the People’s Army into a great wall of steel that effectively safeguards national sovereignty, security and development interests,” the Chinese leader said.
Xi’s emphasis on expansion comes as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that he plans to visit Russia as soon as next week to meet with his counterpart Putin as Russia continues its more than yearlong invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
His trip to Moscow follows US intelligence concerns that Beijing is considering providing lethal arms to Russia.
The report said Xi also intends to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky, possibly after his visit to Moscow, and reflects China’s objective to play a peacemaking role between the two countries.
Iran and Saudi Arabia announced last Friday that they had reached an agreement, negotiated during four days of secret talks in Beijing, to re-establish diplomatic relations and reopen embassies.
Xi, 69, who has sidelined potential rivals to cement his dominance in the Communist Party, was named to a third five-year term as China’s president last week, which puts him on track to remain in power for the rest of his life.
In the US, there’s growing anxiety over China’s global ambition — and criticism of the Biden administration that it’s taking a too lenient position with Beijing.
“The Obama admin let Russia back into the Middle East after a 40-year absence,” Hagerty said. “Now the Biden admin has let Communist China into the Gulf. This is strategic failure.”
Hagerty also doubted how effective the “Xi Jinping accords” will be at actually cooling hostilities between Tehran and Riyadh, and argued that the deal won’t be as significant as former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords.
“Whereas Trump’s historic Abraham Accords transformed relations among Israel & 4 Arab nations, this China-brokered deal likely won’t end Iran-Saudi hostility,” Hagerty argued.
“But if Obama claimed to lead from behind, the ‘Xi Jinping accords’ show Biden isn’t even leading,” he said.
Hagerty told The Post on Monday that Biden “squandered the opportunity that he inherited” to strengthen the US’s position in the Middle East, leaving a “power vacuum” that Xi was all too willing to step in and fill.
“He relaxed pressure on Iran’s terrorist regime in the hopes of reviving a fatally flawed nuclear deal. He dithered on embracing and expanding the Abraham Accords to include new Arab nations like the Saudi kingdom. He created a power vacuum in the Middle East that China happily filled. The recent China-brokered agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a regrettable yet unsurprising consequence of the Biden Administration’s foreign policy malpractice in the Middle East,” Hagerty told The Post.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, on Sunday accused Biden of being afraid to “provoke” Beijing.
“I think what we heard clearly from the intelligence community is the emergence of China as a threat, both militarily and through espionage, and as the senator was just saying, through technology, quantum technology computing, also certainly the ability for them to insert themselves through TikTok into our data systems,” Turner told ABC’s “This Week.”
Turner was referring to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who appeared earlier on the news show and agreed that China poses a threat to the US because of its aim to extend influence globally.
John Bolton, the former national security adviser in the Trump administration, warned that the US is “sitting still” while China makes gains, referring to the diplomatic breakthrough Beijing negotiated between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
“It’s an indication that the Saudis and others are trying to hedge their bets with China and Russia, because they don’t think the United States has the resolve and the fortitude necessary to do what they need to do to protect the world against Iran and its intentions,” Bolton told John Catsimatidis on his WABC 770 AM radio show on Sunday.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he was “very concerned” with the alliances China seems to be building under Biden’s weak leadership.
“Speaker, how worried are you that China becomes the power broker, bringing Saudi Arabia together with Iran? What is the significance of that?” Maria Bartiromo, host of “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox Business, asked McCarthy on Sunday.
To which the California Republican responded: “The time for worrying has passed.”
“It is on the stage right now. We’ve watched China enter the Middle East, where they are now brokering a deal with Iran, putting them back on the world stage,” McCarthy said.
“I’m very concerned that it looks a lot like 1936 all over again,” he added. “An axis of power of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran bounding together against the freedom and values of what America represents.”
“We’ve watched Saudi Arabia try to build a better relationship with China. That’s because the lack of strength of our leadership in America, and that becomes from an economic and also from our energy policy and others,” McCarthy argued.
With Post wires
