McConnell urges Biden to keep Trump’s tough stance on China, Iran
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday urged President Biden to take a tough approach toward China’s authoritarian government and to avoid “racing to rejoin” the Iran nuclear deal.
McConnell (R-Ky.) said the Biden administration should keep former President Donald Trump’s posture after some Biden nominees indicated they intended to do so — most notably newly confirmed Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
“The Trump administration helped bring about a long-overdue American awakening to the reality that we are in strategic competition with the PRC: that Beijing will not magically conform itself to the so-called international community and that these challenges demand fast and serious action from the US and from our friends,” McConnell said in a Senate floor speech.
McConnell also urged Biden to avoid rapidly rejoining, without winning concessions, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump abandoned, and noted he opposed Trump’s moves to withdraw from the Mideast.
“Our new president must be ready to respond to violence with force, as the Trump administration did when they removed Soleimani from the battlefield. Iran is the biggest threat the US and its partners face in the region. Confronting this multifaceted challenge will take bipartisanship at home and solidarity with Israel and our Arab partners abroad. Those things need to exist before making major changes or racing to rejoin a deal,” he said.
McConnell added: “I’ve consistently and vocally stood up during administration to both parties against withdrawing our limited forces in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria too rapidly or without a smart plan.”
On China, McConnell outlined his vision for a “whole of government” policy offensive.
As president, Trump waged a trade war against China in an effort to reform Chinese economic practices and sanctioned officials for eliminating Hong Kong’s autonomy and persecuting Uighur Muslims. He led a global campaign against Chinese telecom giant Huawei, warning of surveillance if it was allowed to build 5G infrastructure, and he vowed, if re-elected, to “decouple” the US and Chinese economies in part to respond to Chinese concealment of early data on COVID-19 before it spread abroad.
“We need [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin to keep focused on modernizing our forces, deterring Chinese threats from the Indo-Pacific to space and cyberspace, sustaining robust defense funding and investing in defense partnerships across the world,” McConnell said.
“We need [Treasury] Secretary [Janet] Yellen to keep focused on the coercive manipulation the PRC uses to ensnare the developing world in its orbit. We need Secretary [of State Tony] Blinken to keep clarifying the China threat to our allies and European partners to focus on contesting their growing influence in Africa and the Middle East, and to hold Beijing accountable for its unacceptable repression in places like Tibet and Hong Kong and hostility toward Taiwan.”
Shortly after McConnell spoke, Biden’s White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, gave skeptical remarks about China at a press briefing. She slammed “misinformation” from “some sources in China” on COVID-19’s origins and said “telecommunications equipment made by untrusted vendors including Huawei is a threat to the security of the US and our allies.”
During his confirmation hearing, Blinken told senators, “President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China.”