President Biden participated in a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping that reportedly lasted for hours and while we don't know much about what they discussed, Biden's comments on the matter tell us how his administration sees China's rise and our own stagnation.
The Trump regime treated China as a hostile adversary that is actively trying to push us down through unfair trade practices, among other things, but when he spoke to a bipartisan group of senators about China, Biden strongly implied that the real threat is ourselves and our own inaction.
On Thursday, Biden told a bipartisan group of U.S. senators at a meeting on the need to upgrade U.S. infrastructure the United States must raise its game in the face of the Chinese challenge.
Biden said he spoke to Xi for two hours on Wednesday night and warned the senators: “If we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.”
“They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”
The real threat of China is that they're actually doing things. They're actually investing in their own economy and they've been doing it for decades.
The real threat, in other words, is Republicans and conservatives in our own government who've blocked efforts to pass progressing spending proposals for as long as I can remember at this point. We have sat on our asses and done nothing because Republicans believe the status quo should be good enough.
The Republican solution to China is to build bigger and more deadly weapons and use the threat of military and economic force to suppress their economy. The Democratic solution will be to invest in our own economy the way they do.
We've been doing the former for as long as I've been alive so maybe we should try the latter.
I'm not extraordinarily optimistic that that Democrats will be able to use their razor-thin majority to do as many things as we need to do, but at least the Biden administration has a clear view of what the real problem is. The problem is us.