As China forges global trade ties, U.S. risks falling behind despite early Biden wins
The biggest hole in the Biden administration’s otherwise encouraging efforts to better compete with China — a void that could undermine all the other pieces — is the lack of an international trade strategy.
While President Xi Jinping’s China accelerates his efforts to negotiate multilateral and bilateral trade and investment agreements around the world, both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. have grown allergic to such arrangements.
“The Chinese believe deeply in the significance of the correlation of forces, and they believe that correlation at the moment is in their favor,” says Stephen Hadley, former national security advisor to President George W. Bush. If the U.S. fails to alter that Chinese conviction, it won’t regain the leverage needed to deal with Beijing.