As intense fighting in Ukraine continues as a result of Russia’s invasion, a new report offers some shocking details about how inept Joe Biden’s strategy was in trying to prevent the current carnage.
Per The New York Times, the Biden administration actually gave classified intelligence to the Chinese communists in an effort to gain their support against Vladimir Putin. Predictably, that completely backfired and only helped Russia in its march toward war.
Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans presented intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade, according to U.S. officials.
Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works. After one diplomatic exchange in December, U.S. officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord — and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said.
There are two parts to this, in my view.
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The first is how silly it was to think that sharing intelligence with China would lead to anything but it ending up in the hands of the Russians. By going to the Chinese, one of Russia’s most trustworthy allies, the United States telegraphed that we were already playing defense. Begging Xi Jinping to stop Putin, making it known to our adversaries that we had no grander counter in the works? No doubt, both men enjoyed a good laugh over that one. As a matter of strategy, the move was asinine and counter-productive, likely only emboldening Russia.
After all, if optics and perceptions matter, and we’ve been assured that they do by those now demanding a “rally around the flag” moment for Biden, then they mattered when the administration signaled to China (and ultimately Russia) that the United States was operating from a position of weakness. Besides, I’m old enough to remember when Trump sharing a sliver of intelligence about terrorist attacks on airplanes with the Russians was considered treasonous. Now, we learn that Biden shared classified intelligence with the Chinese, who then passed it to the Russians in an effort to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There’s no question which action was worse.
But then there’s the second part of this, which requires taking a more macro view of things. Have those serving in the Biden administration, including Joe Biden himself, learned absolutely nothing about the Chinese over the last several years? Or are they just so arrogant that they thought they could get Xi Jinping to do their bidding despite his aggression?
This is the danger of making every decision based on partisan politics. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming to be non-partisan by any means, but I also don’t dismiss objectively right positions simply because a Democrat may also hold them. US posture toward the Chinese should have been an area of overlap where Biden came into office and acknowledged Trump was right to take an aggressive stance against them. Instead, the current president apparently believed he could sweet-talk the communists because if they opposed the orange man, how bad could they really be, right?
Such a move is further evidence of the shallow inaneness emanating from the Biden administration. Hashtags and lofty speeches do not counter tyrants, and “smart power” is just code for genuflection. We shouldn’t even be attempting to work with China on major geopolitical questions. That we are shows no lessons have been learned, and that’s disturbing.
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