Republicans raised concerns about President Joe Biden’s reset meeting with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping on Wednesday to restore communications and cooperation amid heightened tensions between the two nations.
The fears are predicated on Biden’s age and family business ties, concessions Biden could give Xi, and if China will renege on potential concessions while the U.S. maintains compromises.
Biden and Xi will meet at an undisclosed location outside San Francisco to speak about finalizing agreements to curtail fentanyl trafficking and restore communications between militaries, along with boosting Boeing aircraft purchases since the latest sales in 2017.
Biden said on Tuesday his goal is to try and strengthen his relationship with Xi, an individual Biden says he met alone with 68 times as vice president. “We’re not trying to decouple from China. What we’re trying to do is change the relationship for the better,” he claimed.
Republican critics of Biden soured on the president’s framing of the summit. “We don’t have a relationship with China,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) told Fox News Tuesday morning. “It’s not like these are two teenagers dating. China is our number one adversary in the world.”
“I worry a little bit about what concessions he might grant or just the way he framed this summit meeting is that we want to improve our relationship,” he added, noting China’s history of not keeping promises:
What we should be doing is focusing on ways that we can get the better of China to stop them from cheating on their trade deals or hacking into U.S. government computers or floating spy balloons over America. None of which, I’m sure, Joe Biden is going to raise with Xi Jinping today.
Xi Jinping promised Barack Obama he would stop hacking into U.S. computers. They keep doing that. Xi Jinping promised they wouldn’t build islands in the South China Sea and arm them with missile systems. And they are doing that as well. You cannot trust Chinese communists to keep their word.
Republican presidential hopeful and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley raised similar concerns about China’s history of not keeping its commitments.
“The reason why I pulled us out of the Paris Climate Agreement is not because we don’t care about the agreement — everybody cares about the environment. It is because we put so many regulations on our companies — our own administration did,” she told Fox News.
“You know what China’s Paris Climate Agreement was?” Haley asked. “‘We’ll deal with it in ten years.’ I dealt with China before. Ten years never comes.”
Liz Peek, a Fox News contributor and former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim & Company, took a different approach by highlighting Biden’s “mental impairment” and questioning if the president is compromised.
“Biden’s mental impairment is one reason to dread his upcoming meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco,” she wrote Monday. “Another is mounting evidence that the president is compromised”:
If indeed the president and his family took in millions of dollars from government-affiliated entities in China, as it appears they did, we can be certain the details of those transactions are known to Xi and can be used to ‘persuade’ Biden to adopt the party line — the Communist Party line, that is.
Follow Wendell Husebø on “X” @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
