Bad News For Beijing

America comes roaring back. President Biden has picked up the gauntlet China threw down

- Narain Batra

With Joe Biden in the White House, the narrative of America’s decline has suddenly come to an end. Americans have begun to sprint – to embrace full-blooded life as the virus retreats. Referring to the Fourth of July President Biden said, “After a long, hard year, that will make this Independence Day truly special – where we not only mark our independence as a nation but we begin to mark our independence from this virus.”

Not only the virus. He is ready to meet any threat on the horizon. For John F Kennedy it was the Soviet Union, the Cuban missile crisis, the race to the Moon. For Biden it is China which, however, is much stronger than the Soviet Union and has opened multiple new aggressive fronts including cyberattacks, technological poaching, intellectual property theft, and unfair trade practices.

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Mao Zedong admonished his countrymen. Today, however, it grows on the new frontiers of technology. America can out-gun China but can it outcompete it in the ever-expanding field of technology? America has no choice on this.

A broad bipartisan consensus has developed that the United States must remain politically and technologically supreme, must outcompete any nation, most of all China. This is a major departure from the policies of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who bent over backwards to accommodate China.