Amid inflation, the migrant crisis and Ukraine and Israel’s fights for survival, it’s all too easy to overlook what Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida last week rightly called “the greatest strategic challenge” to world peace: China.
Just two days earlier, FBI Director Christopher Wray called Beijing “the defining threat of our generation.”
The Chinese Communist Party is “throwing its whole government at undermining the security and economy of the rule-of-law world,” he warned, citing China’s hacking program, in particular, as “larger than that of every other major nation combined.”
That’s on top of its “traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference and transnational repression.”
China’s still shipping fentanyl precursors to Mexico, aiding Russia’s war on Ukraine and bullying its neighbors.
That includes harassing Philippine ships, building islands in international waters to assert its baseless claims to the South China Sea — and ceaselessly provoking Taiwan, with a vow to take it over in a few years.
All amid a frightening military build-up.
Japan is right to fear China, which Beijing views it as its top enemy through history.
If China gains control of Taiwan and the region’s ocean routes, it could block Japanese trade.
In a recent call with Chinese Prez-for-Life Xi Jinping, President Biden was defensive and conciliatory; Xi issued threats.
Chinese officials similarly dismissed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s pleas on her just-completed trip to the Middle Kingdom, particularly her begging for an end to China’s dumping cheap exports on world markets.
Team Biden diplomacy is clearly failing; Xi & Co. see America as weak.
After all, they see Team Biden slapping Israel amid its war with Hamas, still appeasing Iran, urging Ukraine not to target Russia’s oil industry (while Republicans block aid to Kyiv) and failing to even ramp up arms production to to keep pace with the China’s (and Russia’s, and Iran’s) growing military threat.
If Biden and Washington don’t up their game — fast — brace for some major China-sparked catastrophe in the not too distant future.