Opinion | US-China relations: A Biden presidency must start healing bilateral ties and alliances battered by Trump

Name: US-China relations: Joe Biden would approach China with more ‘regularity and normality’
Uploaded: 2020-11-02T19:30:06.000Z
Duration: 6 min 4 s
Description: US-China relations: Joe Biden would approach China with more ‘regularity and normality’

Years of living outrageously under Donald Trump have grated on almost everyone’s nerves as he has launched a losing trade war and blamed China for internal problems

Any US president who cannot understand China’s perspective and the importance of good US-China relations is not fit to lead the country

Reading Time:3 minutes

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President Xi Jinping and then-US vice-president Joe Biden hold T-shirts given to them by students during their visit to the International Studies Learning Centre in South Gate, California, on February 17, 2012. Improving the bilateral relationship is essential to ensuring prosperity for both countries and the wider world. Photo: AP

Tom Plate

Published: 3:30am, 3 Nov 2020Updated: 3:30am, 3 Nov 2020

A re-released photo of Joe Biden, then US vice-president, on the border between North and South Korea is being touted by some as evidence of embedded American complacency. Yet it’s almost a required photo stop for American politicians who, as if some mountain-climbing Edmund Hillary, can never be happy except at the top.

This career politician is pictured peering northwesterly, like some General George Patton through all-seeing binoculars. Some in Asia might joke that he looks like he is scouting locations for a summer home. American complacency means never having to say you’ve gone too far.

It’s true Biden has enough foreign policy experience for two candidates for the US presidency. As vice-president, his views were not always a perfect reflection of those of President Barack Obama, his boss for eight years. What he would do for Asia if he is inaugurated in January as the 46th president is no mystery – he would play nicer with allies without kowtowing to others.

He has shown characteristic empathy and rightly decried Washington’s blackmail practice of threatening US troop withdrawals whenever South Korea hints at deviating from US policy. This is not, he has suggested, the way allies should relate.

He is right. The way Washington has treated its key allies has been less than exemplary. It is more likely that current US President Donald Trump would start wearing medical masks than US troops would ever actually be withdrawn, barring a peace breakthrough with China.

06:04

US-China relations: Joe Biden would approach China with more ‘regularity and normality’

It should be obvious that the US is gracing South Korea with its constant military presence not solely for the Koreans but to afford a flexible military option against the Chinese and Russians. The US military almost always plays to stay.

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