Former US army chief of staff urges Biden to build allies against China
蘋果日報 2020/11/26 17:04
General Jack Keane, former Chief of Staff of the U.S. army, worried that the Biden administration will only pay lip service to human rights but fail to lead its allies to push back on China. Likewise, Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai expressed concerns on Thursday that China welcomes the next leadership under Biden, who is perceived as a weaker president.
Currently the chairperson of the American think tank, Institute for the Study of War, Keane noted that the president-elect has by and large selected people who have served the Obama administration for his national security and foreign policy team. During the eight years as vice president, Biden’s policies of appeasement with China and disengagement with the Middle East have raised major concerns and, if applied today, will fail miserably, said the general in Lai’s weekly Twitter live chat.
While the professionals may not agree with the Trump administration, they certainly have awareness of what has happened in the last four years as well as the change in international situation. The most important bilateral relationship the U.S. will have in the 20th century is with China, said Keane.
“President Xi is the most aggressive, ambitious and maligned leader, his global ambition exceeds anything Mao Zedong had in mind,” he stressed, adding that Xi wants domination over the region and the world. “That makes him not only a threat to the region but a threat to the global security of American allies and people.”
Keane applauded the Trump administration for identifying China as a long-term strategic threat to the U.S. He hoped that Biden and his family’s association with China will eventually be “out in the public because we will not want that causing a political liability for an elected president of the United States.”
The fact that American people now see China as a threat, which also has bipartisan support in the Congress, will force the Biden administration to make choices. “They have to deal with that reality even though they had policies that were very supportive of the Chinese Communist Party in the past,” the general continued.
He predicted that the Biden administration will take a more conciliatory tone towards China to defuse the current confrontation and look for room to cooperate with the CCP, such as the pandemic and climate change.
Keane also hoped the incoming administration will realize that competitions with China, in terms of tech, artificial intelligence, 5G and quantum computing, are inevitable. “Any cooperative agreement on these lines will mean nothing and exist only in words as China has a massive campaign to steal technology and it has been very successful.”
He noted that Trump has confronted China in terms of its economy, its military expansion, and its coercion campaigns of American allies. He predicted the new administration will not be anywhere near as aggressive and may back away when they can. They talk a good game, but it remains to be seen whether they will truly fashion a strategy, he added.
That said, Keane believed that the American people will hold the government accountable as they have seen the CCP’s human rights abuse in Hong Kong, intimidation and coercion of Taiwan, as well as crackdown and mass detention of the Uighurs.
Lai expressed concerns about Biden’s multilateralism approach to China, which will allow each country to have its own agenda, watering down the aggressive policy towards China. Such an approach would also leave Taiwan more vulnerable, Keane added.
Biden will make a strong case that the U.S. needs to work in concert with its allies to deal with adversaries such as Russia, Iran and China, the general noted, adding they should build on the work of the Trump administration in terms of forming foreign allies.