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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden’s mission at the G7 summit: to recruit allies for the next cold war | Rafael Behr

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      Joe Biden crosses the Atlantic this week on a tide of goodwill. After four years of Donald Trump, European leaders are grateful for the mere fact of a US president who believes in democracy and understands diplomacy.Trump had no concept of historical alliance, strategic partnership or mutual interest. He saw multilateral institutions as conspiracies against US power, which he could not distinguish from his own ego. He heard European talk of a rules-based international order as the contemptible bleating of weakling nations.Biden’s stated purpose is bolstering that order. In an article published in the Washington Post on the eve of his trip, the president talks about “renewed” and “unwavering” commitment to a transatlantic relationship based on “shared democratic values”.The itinerary starts in Cornwall with a gathering of G7 leaders. Then comes Brussels for a Nato summit, plus meetings with presidents of the European Council and Commission. Biden intends to orchestrate a surge of western solidarity as mood music ahead of a final stop in Geneva, where he sits down with Vladimir Putin. On that front, a stable chilling of relations will count as progress after the downright weirdness of Trump’s willing bamboozlement by the Kremlin strongman.A re-enactment of cold war choreography would suit Putin by flattering his pretence that Russia is still a superpower. In reality, Washington sees Moscow as a declining force that compensates for its shrunken influence by lashing out where it can, causing mischief and sowing discord. Putin is seen as an irritant, not a rival.That is in marked contrast to the view of China – an actual superpower and the eastern pole that Biden has in mind when he talks about reviving an alliance of western democracies. In that respect, the repudiation of Trumpian wrecking-ball rhetoric can be misleading. It sounds to European ears as if the new White House administration is hoping to set the clock back to a calmer, less combative epoch. In reality, Biden is coming to tell Europe to get its act together in the coming race for global supremacy with Beijing.By Europe, in this context, the president also means Britain. Boris Johnson might imagine himself a world leader of continental stature, but a US president is not required to indulge that fantasy.Biden takes a dim view of Brexit, seeing it as a pointless sabotage of European unity. The White House preferred Britain as a pro-US voice wielding influence inside the EU. Since that function is lost, Brexit’s only utility is in making it easier for the UK to embrace economic and strategic vassalage to the US. That means toeing a hawkish line on China.European nations should not really have to pause for long if the choice is alignment with Washington or Beijing. It is easy to muster resentment of US global swagger and point out hypocrisies in its claim to be a beacon of political freedom. But the alternative is an expansionist totalitarian state that militates against democracy and is currently engaged in a genocide against the Uyghurs.If China were a poorer country, Biden’s mission would be easier. But the economic gap between the established superpower and the challenger is closing. Per capita, Americans are still much better off, but China could overtake the US in gross domestic product by the end of this decade. With that heft comes world-leading technological capability with crossover military application that keeps the Pentagon up at night.During the cold war, the Kremlin maintained a credible military rivalry with the west but was not an economic competitor for long. The collapse of the Soviet model seemed to prove that political freedom and prosperity came as a package. There could be no enterprise without markets, no markets without fair rules, and no enforceable rules without democracy. The Chinese Communist party’s hybrid model of authoritarian capitalism appears to have disproved that theory.When the G7 was conceived in the 1970s, its combined membership – the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – comfortably represented a commanding share of global wealth. There was a natural association of liberal democratic institutions and economic success. Today, those seven nations’ combined GDP is down to 40% of the world total. The west is still rich, but it is no longer the world’s envied super league.Chinese money gives Europe commercial incentives that compete with its high-minded rhetoric on democratic values. China is Germany’s biggest export market. Smaller EU members have welcomed Chinese investment in infrastructure and businesses, although qualms are steadily growing about built-in political strings and security trapdoors. A huge Brussels-Beijing trade deal, signed last year (much to Washington’s dismay), is currently frozen as part of a tit-for-tat dispute over European criticism of Chinese human rights abuses.But EU governments simply don’t feel US levels of urgency to contain China. Geography is a factor – the US has a Pacific coast and strategic commitments to Taiwan, where Britain and France, for all their naval bravado, are little more than spectators. There is a conceptual difference too. As one diplomat puts it, Europe doesn’t like what China does, but the US doesn’t like what China is. The idea of the US being superseded as the paramount global power within the current century is existentially appalling for Washington.The Trump phenomenon compounds that anxiety for the current White House administration. It was a near-death experience for America’s constitutional order; an intimation of mortality for a political and economic model that looked insuperable at the dawn of the 21st century. The US president urges fellow western leaders to show strength in solidarity because the prospect of division, decline and the discrediting of democracy is more real than at any time in his five-decade Washington career.During that time, Biden has succeeded by patience, diplomacy and soft-spoken understatement. That style earns him a grateful audience in Europe, but the president’s manners should not be mistaken for mildness of purpose; the modest style is deployed in service of a tough message. He is not flying across the Atlantic to wallow in nostalgia for the alliances that won the first cold war. He is drumming up recruits for the second one. More

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      in World Politics

      What Planet Will Our Children and Grandchildren Inherit?

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      Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in COVID-stricken but improving America.

      As it happens, she’s slightly younger than me, but still getting up there, and we were chatting on the phone about our world, about the all-too-early first wildfire near Los Angeles, the intensifying mega-drought across the West and Southwest, the increasing nightmare of hurricane season in the Atlantic and so on. We were talking about the way in which we humans — and we Americans, in particular (though you could toss in the Chinese without a blink) — have been wreaking fossil-fuelized havoc on this planet and what was to come.

      Could This Have Been a Zoom Call?

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      And, oh yes, we were talking about our own deaths, also to come at some unknown future moment but one not as far away as either of us might wish. My friend then said to me abashedly, “I sometimes think it’s lucky I won’t be here to see what’s going to happen to the world.” And even as she began stumbling all over herself apologizing for saying such a thing, I understood exactly what she meant. I had had the very same thought and sense of shame and horror at even thinking it — at even thinking I would, in some strange sense, get off easy and leave a world from hell to my children and grandchildren. Nothing, in fact, could make me sadder.

      And you know what’s the worst thing? Whether I’m thinking about that “destroyer” in the Strait of Taiwan or the destruction of planet Earth, one thing is clear enough: It wouldn’t have to be this way.

      China on the Brain

      Now, let’s focus on the Curtis Wilbur for a moment. And in case you hadn’t noticed, US President Joe Biden and his foreign-policy team have China on the brain. No surprise there, though, only history. Don’t you remember how, when Biden was still vice-president, President Barack Obama announced that, in foreign and especially military policy, the US was planning a “pivot to Asia”? His administration was, in other words, planning on leaving this country’s war-on-terror disasters in the greater Middle East behind (not that he would actually prove capable of doing so) and refocusing on this planet’s true rising power. Donald Trump would prove similarly eager to dump America’s greater Middle Eastern wars (though he, too, failed to do so) and refocus on Beijing — tariffs first, but warships not far behind.

      Now, as the US withdraws its last troops from Afghanistan, the Biden team finds itself deep in its own version of a pivot-to-Asia strategy, with its collective foreign-policy brain remarkably focused on challenging China (at least until Israel briefly got in the way).

      Embed from Getty Images

      Think of it as a kind of pandemic of anxiety, a fear that, without a major refocus, the US might indeed be heading for the imperial scrapheap of history. In a sense, this may prove to be the true Achilles’ heel of the Biden era. Or put another way, the president’s foreign-policy crew seems, at some visceral level, to fear deeply for the America they’ve known and valued so, the one that was expected to loom invincibly over the rest of the planet once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; the imperial power our politicians (until Trump) had long hailed as the greatest, most “exceptional” nation on the planet; the one with “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (Obama), aka “the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world” (George W. Bush).

      We’re talking, of course, about the same great power that, after almost 20 years of disastrous wars, drone strikes, and counterterror operations across vast stretches of the planet, looks like it is sinking fast, a country whose political parties can no longer agree on anything that matters. In such a context, let’s consider for a moment that flu-like China obsession, the one that leaves Washington’s politicians and military leaders with strikingly high temperatures and an irrational urge to send American warships into distant waters near the coast of China, while regularly upping the ante, militarily and politically.

      In that context, here’s an obsessional fact of our moment: These days, it seems as if President Biden can hardly appear anywhere or talk to anyone without mentioning China or that sinking country he now heads and that sinking feeling he has about it. He did it the other week in an interview with David Brooks when, with an obvious on-the-page shudder, he told The New York Times columnist, “We’re kind of at a place where the rest of the world is beginning to look to China.” Brrr… it’s cold in here (or maybe too hot to handle?) in an increasingly chaotic, still partly Trumpian, deeply divided Washington and in a country where, from suppressing the vote to suppressing the teaching of history to encouraging the carrying of unlicensed weapons, democracy is looking ill indeed.

      Oh, and that very same week when the president talked to Brooks, he went to the Coast Guard Academy to address its graduating class and promptly began discussing — yes! — that crucial, central subject for Washingtonians these days: freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. (“When nations try to game the system or tip the rules in their favor, it throws everything off balance,” Biden said. “That’s why we are so adamant that these areas of the world that are the arteries of trade and shipping remain peaceful — whether that’s the South China Sea, the Arabian Gulf, and, increasingly, the Arctic.”) You didn’t know, did you, that a guided-missile destroyer, not to speak of aircraft carrier battle groups, and other naval vessels had been anointed with the job of keeping “freedom of navigation” alive halfway across the planet or that the US Coast Guard simply guards our coastlines.

      These days, it should really be called the Coasts Guard. After all, you can find its members “guarding” coasts ranging from Iran’s in the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. Evidently, even the coast of the island of Taiwan, which, since 1949, China has always claimed as its own and where a subtle dance between Beijing and Washington has long played out, has become just another coast for guarding in nothing less than a new “partnership.” (“Our new agreement for the Coast Guard to partner with Taiwan,” said the president, “will help ensure that we’re positioned to better respond to shared threats in the region and to conduct coordinated humanitarian and environmental missions.”) Consider that a clear challenge to the globe’s rising power in what’s become ever more of a showdown at the naval equivalent of the OK Corral, part of an emerging new cold war between the US and China.

      And none of this is out of the ordinary. In his late April address to Congress, for instance, President Biden anxiously told the assembled senators and congressional representatives that “we’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century. … China and other countries are closing in fast.” In his own strange way, Trump exhibited similar worries.

      What Aren’t We Guarding?

      Now, here’s the one thing that doesn’t seem to strike anyone in Congress, at the Coast Guard Academy or at The New York Times as particularly strange: that American ships should be protecting “maritime freedom” on the other side of the globe, or that the Coast Guard should be partnering for the same. Imagine, just for a second, that Chinese naval vessels and their Coast Guard equivalent were patrolling our coasts, or parts of the Caribbean, while edging ever closer to Florida. You know just what an uproar of shock and outrage, what cries of horror would result. But it’s assumed that the equivalent on the other side of the globe is a role too obvious even to bother to explain and that our leaders should indeed be crying out in horror at China’s challenges to it.

      It’s increasingly clear that, from Japan to the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, Washington is pushing China hard, challenging its positions big time and often in a military fashion. And no, China itself, whether in the South China Sea or elsewhere, is no angel. Still, the US military, while trying to leave its failed terror wars in the dust, is visibly facing off against that economically rising power in an ever more threatening manner, one that already seems too close to a possible military conflict of some sort. And you don’t even want to know what sort of warfare this country’s military leaders are now imagining there as, in fact, they did so long ago. (Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame only recently revealed that, according to a still-classified document, in response to the Chinese shelling of Taiwan in 1958, US military leaders seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against mainland China.)

      Indeed, as US Navy ships are eternally sent to challenge China, challenging words in Washington only escalate as well. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks put it in March, while plugging for an ever-larger Pentagon budget, “Beijing is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system… Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin and I believe that the [People’s Republic of China] is the pacing challenge for the United States military.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      And in that context, the US Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard are all “pacing” away. The latest proposed version of an always-rising Pentagon budget, for instance, now includes $5.1 billion for what’s called the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, “a fund created by Congress to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.” In fact, the US Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in extra spending between 2022 and 2027 for “new missiles and air defenses, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges throughout the region.” And so it goes in the pandemic world of 2021.

      Though seldom asked, the real question, the saddest one I think, the one that brings us back to my conversation with my friend about the world we may leave behind us, is: What aren’t we guarding on this planet of ours?

      A New Cold War on a Melting Planet?

      Let’s start with this. The old pattern of rising and falling empires should be seen as a thing of the past. It’s true that, in a traditional sense, China is now rising and the US seemingly falling, at least economically speaking. But something else is rising and something else is falling, too. I’m thinking, of course, about rising global temperatures that, sometime in the next five years, have a reasonable chance of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius limit (above the pre-industrial era) set by the 2015 Paris climate accords and what that future heat may do to the very idea of a habitable planet.

      Meanwhile, when it comes to the US, the Atlantic hurricane season is only expected to worsen, the mega-drought in the Southwest to intensify — as fires burn ever higher in previously wetter mountainous elevations in that region — and so on. Within this century, major coastal cities in the US and China like New Orleans, Miami, Shanghai and Hong Kong could find themselves flooded out by rising sea levels, thanks in part to the melting of Antarctica and Greenland. As for a rising China, that supposedly ultimate power of the future, even its leadership must know that parts of the north China plain, now home to 400 million people, could become quite literally uninhabitable by century’s end due to heat waves capable of killing the healthy within hours.

      In such a context, on such a planet, ask yourself: Is there really a future for us in which the essential relationship between the US and China — the two largest greenhouse gas emitters of this moment — is a warlike one? Whether a literal war results or not, one thing should be clear enough: If the two greatest carbon emitters can’t figure out how to cooperate instead of picking endless fights with each other, the human future is likely to prove grim and dim indeed. “Containing” China is the foreign-policy focus of the moment, a throwback to another age in Washington. And yet this is the very time when what truly needs to be contained is the overheating of this planet. And in truth, given human ingenuity, climate change should indeed be containable.

      And yet the foreign-policy wing of the Biden administration and Congress — where Democrats are successfully infusing money into the economy under the rubric of a struggle with China, a rare subject the Republicans can go all in on — seems focused on creating a future of eternal Sino-American hostility and endless armed competition. In the already overheated world we inhabit, who could honestly claim that this is a formula for “national security”?

      Returning to the conversation with my friend, I wonder why this approach to our planet doesn’t seem to more people like an obvious formula for disaster. Why aren’t more of us screaming at the top of our lungs about the dangers of Washington’s urge to return to a world in which a “cold war” is a formula for success? It leaves me ever more fearful for the planet that, one of these days, I will indeed be leaving to others who deserved so much better.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden trumpets democracy abroad in Post op-ed – as threats spread at home

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      Joe Biden will use his visit to Europe this week to “rally the world’s democracies” in a reset of US foreign policy after four turbulent years under Donald Trump – all while threats to American democracy, stoked by Trump, proliferate at home.The president’s plan for the trip was set out in a column for the Washington Post on Saturday night, as Trump spoke to Republicans in North Carolina.Previewing meetings with “many of our closest democratic partners” and Vladimir Putin, Biden promised to “demonstrate the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age”.Critics may point out that the president would do well to face up to attacks on democracy at home. He has put Vice-President Kamala Harris in charge of the matter but there are many fronts to the battle.In the states, Republicans have passed laws to restrict ballot access and to make it possible to overturn election results.On the stump, Trump continues to peddle his lie that Biden’s victory in November was the result of fraud. In Greenville on Saturday, the former president called his defeat “the crime of the century”.In Washington last month, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in his cause.In Biden’s own party, centrist senators stand in the way of voting rights protections.In his column for the Post, Biden tied another domestic priority – infrastructure spending, currently tied up in seemingly doomed negotiations with Republicans – to a chief foreign policy aim.“Just as it does at home,” he wrote, “honing the ability of democracies to compete and protecting our people against unforeseen threats requires us to invest in infrastructure. The world’s major democracies will be offering a high-standard alternative to China for upgrading physical, digital and health infrastructure that is more resilient and supports global development.”In North Carolina, Trump said China should pay the US and the world $10tn in reparations for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, while nations should cancel debt to Beijing.Biden touted domestic successes – progress against the coronavirus and the passage of his relief and stimulus package (without a single Republican vote) – and said: “The United States must lead the world from a position of strength.”He saluted the announcement on Saturday by G7 finance ministers of a global minimum corporate tax rate. Further distancing himself from Trump, who withdrew from the Paris climate deal, he said: “We have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress that curbs the climate crisis and creates jobs by driving a global clean-energy transition.”In office, Trump attacked Nato. Biden saluted the “shared democratic values” of “the most successful alliance in world history. In Brussels, at the Nato summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to … ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.”Amid proliferating such attacks, he said, it was important that “when I meet with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, it will be after high-level discussions with friends, partners and allies who see the world through the same lens as the United States”.Trump famously caused consternation among the US press corps in Helsinki in 2018, meeting Putin without aides and seeming cowed in his presence.Biden said the US and its allies were “standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security … and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests.”Some have asked what Biden hopes to gain from meeting Putin – former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Guardian this week, “You meet when you have a strategy in place of how to deal with Russia and I don’t think he has one.”In the Post, Biden heralded his extension of the New Start nuclear arms treaty and responses to cyberattacks.“I will again underscore the commitment of the United States, Europe and like-minded democracies to stand up for human rights and dignity,” he wrote.“This is a defining question of our time: can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world? Will the democratic alliances and institutions that shaped so much of the last century prove their capacity against modern-day threats and adversaries?“I believe the answer is yes. And this week in Europe, we have the chance to prove it.” More

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      in US Politics

      Biden bans US investment in Chinese military and tech surveillance sectors

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      Joe Biden has signed an executive order that bans American entities from investing in dozens of Chinese companies with alleged ties to defense or surveillance technology sectors.In a move that his administration says will expand the scope of a legally flawed Trump-era order, the US treasury will enforce and update on a “rolling basis” the new ban list of about 59 companies.It also bars buying or selling publicly traded securities in target companies, and replaces an earlier list from the defense department, senior administration officials told reporters.The order prevents US investment from supporting the Chinese military-industrial complex, as well as military, intelligence, and security research and development programs, Biden said in the order.“In addition, I find that the use of Chinese surveillance technology outside [China] and the development or use of Chinese surveillance technology to facilitate repression or serious human rights abuse constitute unusual and extraordinary threats,” Biden said.A White House fact sheet on the order said the policy would take effect for those companies listed on 2 August.Major Chinese firms included on the previous defense department list were also placed on the updated list, including Aviation Industry Corp of China (AVIC), China Mobile Communications Group, China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Huawei Technologies and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC).SMIC is key to China’s national drive to boost its domestic chip sector.“We fully expect that in the months ahead … we’ll be adding additional companies to the new executive order’s restrictions,” one of the senior officials said.A second official told reporters that the inclusion of Chinese surveillance technology companies expanded the scope of the Trump administration’s initial order last year, which the White House argues was carelessly drafted, leaving it open to court challenges.The president has been reviewing a number of aspects of US policy toward China, and his administration had extended a deadline for implementation set by Donald Trump’s order while it crafted its new policy framework.The move is part of Biden’s broader series of steps to counter China, including reinforcing US alliances and pursuing large domestic investments to bolster American economic competitiveness, amid increasingly sour relations between the world’s two most powerful countries.Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, Kurt Campbell, said last month that a period of engagement with China had come to an end and that the dominant paradigm in bilateral ties going forward would be one of competition.Senior officials said the treasury would give guidance later on what the scope of surveillance technology means, including whether companies are facilitating “repression or serious human rights abuses”.“We really want to make sure that any future prohibitions are on legally solid ground. So, our first listings really reflect that,” a second senior administration official said.Investors would have time to “unwind” investments, a third official said.The new list provided few surprises for investors looking to see if they need to unload even more Chinese stocks and bonds.But some previously identified companies, such as Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (COMAC), which is spearheading Chinese efforts to compete with Boeing and Airbus, as well as two companies that had challenged the ban in court, Gowin Semiconductor Corp and Luokung Technology Corp, were not included.In May, a judge signed an order removing the designation on Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi, which was among the more high-profile Chinese technology companies that the Trump administration targeted for alleged ties to China’s military. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump allies herald Biden investigation of Covid origins in China

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      Allies of Donald Trump took the unusual step of speaking out on Sunday in support of Joe Biden, regarding efforts to pinpoint the source of Covid-19 and find out if China knows more about the origins of the pandemic than it is letting on.Biden said on Thursday he was expanding an investigation into the outbreak, following a departure from previous thinking by at least one US intelligence agency now leaning towards the theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas, and Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser who persuaded him to start using the controversial term “Wuhan virus”, both welcomed the development.“It’s absolutely essential to find out what the origin of this thing is, it’s essential for us to head off the next pandemic, it’s essential for us to better understand the variants of the current pandemic that are emerging,” Pottinger told NBC’s Meet the Press.“Both of these hypotheses that President Biden spoke of are valid, it could have emerged from a laboratory, it could have emerged from nature. Neither is supported by concrete evidence but there’s a growing amount of circumstantial evidence supporting the idea that this may have leaked from a laboratory.”The Wuhan lab theory was dismissed by many scientists and the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Trump’s advisers was that the weight of evidence supported natural origins. The World Health Organization said in February it was “extremely unlikely” Covid-19 began in a laboratory.But the theory has gained traction. On Thursday, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The US intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how the Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident.“While two elements of the IC lean toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements within the IC do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.“The IC continues to examine all available evidence, consider different perspectives, and aggressively collect and analyze new information to identify the virus’s origins.”On Sunday, a WHO-affiliated health expert speaking to the BBC said the lab theory was “not off the table” and called on the US to share any intelligence.Pottinger said he believed researchers in China had more to say. “If this thing came out of a lab, there are people in China who probably know that,” he said. “China has incredible and ethical scientists, many of whom in the early stages of the pandemic suspected that this was a lab leak. [A researcher at] the Wuhan Institute of Virology said her first thought was, ‘Was this a leak from my lab?’“These people have been systematically silenced by their government. Now that the world knows how important this is, that might also provide moral courage to many of these ethical scientists for whom I think this is weighing on their consciences. I think that we’re going to see more information come out as a result of this inquiry.”The Wall Street Journal reported last week that three members of staff at a laboratory in Wuhan became sick with Covid-like symptoms before the first Covid patient was recorded in December 2019.McCaul, a former chair of the House homeland security committee, told CNN’s State of the Union he believed Biden’s 90-day intelligence review would likely be inconclusive because Chinese authorities “have destroyed everything in the lab”. But he said he welcomed the new investigation.“It more likely than not emerged out of the lab, most likely accidentally,” said McCaul, who has long argued that China and the WHO are culpable. More

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      South Korea’s balancing act will test Biden’s plan to get tough with China

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      When the South Korean president goes to Washington DC on Friday, his discussions with Joe Biden about China will test the limits of the US president’s rhetoric to “work with [its] allies to hold China accountable”. It will also exhibit the dilemma faced by middle-sized powers such as South Korea.The White House spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said last month that Moon Jae-in’s visit “will highlight the ironclad alliance between the United States and [South Korea], and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people and economies”.But observers of the relationship think that, despite the talk of a strong alliance, it is unlikely South Korea will even go as far as its neighbouring Japan in showing a united front with Washington on the approach to China.Shortly after the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, visited Biden in the US capital last month, a joint statement issued by the two leaders underscored “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan strait” and encouraged “the peaceful resolution of cross-strait issues”.It was the first time since 1969 that Washington and Tokyo had referred to Taiwan in a written statement, a move that some saw as a manifestation of the US’s unity with one of its most significant allies in the region.Analysts said such a public position on an extremely sensitive subject was unlikely to be found in Moon’s discussion with Biden this week, even though a recent Pew poll showed that 75% of South Koreans feel “somewhat” or “very unfavourable” towards China.Japan and South Korea confront a common dilemma when it comes to China. They are both key US allies, but both trade heavily with China, said Haruko Satoh of the Osaka School of International Public Policy in Japan, who studies Korea and Japan in the evolving China-US relations.“[But] if the US-China competition is a given, Japan is more of a balancing power in these new dynamics because of its size of population and economy. By contrast, Korea is a much more vulnerable player, especially considering how dependent South Korea is on China’s vast market,” she said.For South Korea and Japan, China and then the US are the top two export markets. But Seoul’s economy is even more heavily dependent on Beijing, accounting for nearly 26% of South Korea’s exports last year, followed by the US at 14.5%. Japan exported 22% of its goods to China last year, with 18.5% to the US.“When it comes to China, South Korea takes a two-pronged approach that pleases both Beijing and Washington,” said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, the KF-VUB Korea chair at the Brussels School of Governance.“But the bottom line of Moon’s approach is that he is not going to criticise China so publicly as other US allies have done,” said Pacheco Pardo. “In some ways it shows Biden the limits to how much his allies are willing to be openly critical of China on things such as human rights.”Ahead of Moon’s visit, his government announced that South Korea would “partially” join the US-led quadrilateral security dialogue (Quad) by cooperating with the forum on coronavirus vaccines, climate change and new technologies. It is noticeable that the security aspect of this involvement is missing.Beijing has repeatedly accused Quad of a US-led clique that reflects Washington’s “cold war mentality”. It has also urged Seoul to clarify its position on it. A ruling party official told Korean press that the US had been asking Seoul to join, “but we think we can cooperate with the Quad countries on a case-by-case basis in fields where we have a contribution to make”.This half-in, half-out approach has so far proved less direct and confrontational to China – and to some extent more effective, according to Pacheco Pardo. It also reflects old lessons from the past that still cast a shadow over South Korea’s China policy.Five years ago, when Seoul agreed to host the US anti-missile system Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (Thaad), China came up with a host of measures in what analysts believed was economic retaliation. Beijing saw the ultimate target of Thaad as China itself.One of South Korea’s biggest companies, Lotte, had several of its stores in China shut down overnight for agreeing a land swap deal with the South Korean government for the deployment of Thaad. Online and offline boycotts ensued by Chinese consumers. Chinese tourists – who once flooded the streets of Seoul and Jeju Island – disappeared.Tellingly, Washington provided little support to Seoul on this matter. “South Korean policymakers felt abandoned at the time. They will now think that if previous US administrations didn’t support South Korea under such circumstances, why would the current Biden administration do so when it happens again?” said Pacheco Pardo.John Nilsson-Wright, a Korea Foundation Korea fellow at the London-based thinktank Chatham House, said: “That is precisely why it’s harder for Seoul to push a security line against China if Beijing holds the bigger sway in market access.”Shortly after the Thaad saga, South Korea’s then foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, laid out three “noes” in parliament. Two of them were no additional deployment of Thaad, and no forming a military alliance with the US and Japan.Of course, the issue of North Korea and China’s role in it also sways Moon’s thinking. But there is another reason that could explain his approach to the US and China, according to Nilsson-Wright.“Like many countries, South Korea has also been asking itself: what if a ‘Trump 2.0’ turns up in the next few years? This would then put South Korea in an even more awkward position having been caught in the middle.” More

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      China labels Nancy Pelosi ‘full of lies’ after call for Winter Olympics boycott

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      China has labelled the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, “full of lies and disinformation” after her calls for a diplomatic boycott of next year’s Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics on human rights grounds.“Some US individuals’ remarks are full of lies and disinformation,” a foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said on Wednesday. “US politicians should stop using the Olympic movement to play despicable political games” or using “the so-called human rights issue as a pretext to smear and slander China”, he added.Zhao hit out at the US’s human rights record, citing “the continuing spread of xenophobia, white supremacy and discrimination against people of African and Asian descent and Islamophobia”.On Tuesday Pelosi criticised China’s human rights record and urged global leaders not to attend the Winter Olympics scheduled to be held in Beijing in February.“What I propose – and join those who are proposing – is a diplomatic boycott,” Pelosi said at a bipartisan congressional hearing, adding that leading countries should “withhold their attendance at the Olympics”.“Let’s not honour the Chinese government by having heads of state go to China,” she added. “For heads of state to go to China in light of a genocide that is ongoing – while you’re sitting there in your seat – really begs the question: what moral authority do you have to speak again about human rights any place in the world?”Joe Biden’s administration has called China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority “genocide”, a charge Beijing has vehemently denied. The US president has said his administration hopes to develop a joint approach with allies on participation in Beijing’s Olympics.US legislators have been increasingly critical of China’s human rights record of late, and talk of shunning the Beijing Winter Olympics has been growing among some US allies and human rights activists since last year.The Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern has proposed relocating the Winter Olympics. “If we can postpone an Olympics by a year for a pandemic, we can surely postpone the Olympics for a year for a genocide … This would give the IOC time to relocate to a country whose government is not committing atrocities.”The Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey said corporate sponsors should be called to testify before Congress and be “held to account … big business wants to make lots of money, and it doesn’t seem to matter what cruelty – even genocide – that the host nation commits.”In Britain, several MPs have joined the calls for a boycott. However, a separate online petition in February calling for the UK parliament to debate a motion that would lead to a boycott from Team GB was rejected.Washington led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In retaliation, the Soviet bloc snubbed the 1984 Los Angeles summer Games.The recent calls for a boycott are reminiscent of the international response to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But Sarah Hirshland, the chief executive of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said past Olympic boycotts had failed to achieve their political ends.She said her organisation was concerned about the “oppression of the Uyghur population” but barring US athletes from the Games was “certainly not the answer”. More