The much ballyhooed meeting in Bali between the American president and the Chinese dictator was striking — for what wasn’t discussed.
Among the unmentionables were fentanyl, Uyghur, and — the big one — COVID.
It’s almost like Joe Biden was sitting in the Confucius Institute classroom at Stanford University, where certain topics are forbidden. Chief among these are Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen — the “three T’s” as they are called.
(I will spare you an abbreviation for fentanyl, Uyghur, and COVID.)
Fentanyl should be high on any list of agenda items to be discussed with the Chinese side. More than 100,000 young Americans die every year because of the collaboration between Chinese drug manufacturers and the Mexican cartels in the production of the deadly drug.
Xi Jinping could stop the flow of opioid precursors to Mexico overnight if he chose to. But of course he doesn’t, because it’s a triple win for him. By running drugs, China makes money, weakens its chief adversary, and exacts revenge on the West for the Opium Wars — one fentanyl death at a time, all at the same time.
So why didn’t Biden protest the deadly chemical warfare — the Third Opium War — that China is waging by proxy against the United States?
One reason might be that discussing fentanyl would call attention to the broken border, which the Biden administration continues to claim is “secure.” Mention opioids and the obvious riposte by Xi would be, “if you controlled your border, that wouldn’t be a problem.”
Oops.
Another topic that went unmentioned by Biden is the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs. The incarceration of the men, the sterilization of the women, and the enslavement of the young is an ongoing crime against humanity. The previous administration declared it to be genocide, and it still is.
But it wasn’t only the Uyghurs who got short shrift. Biden didn’t get tough with Xi about China’s forced assimilation of Tibetans, Mongols and other minorities, the persecution of Christians and other believers, or the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong.
Instead, after some brief hand-waving about human rights, he simply moved on.
But the biggest unmentionable in the room was a tiny virus. Over the past three years, the disease it caused has resulted in millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic damage.
Biden, however, passed over the entire COVID pandemic in silence. He neither demanded an investigation into the Wuhan lab, nor insisted on reparations for the havoc its engineered virus has wreaked all over the world. Instead — even as he was extending the COVID Health Emergency in the US into next year — he simply let China off the hook.
What we got instead was a blast from the past, as Biden reverted to his 2016 talking points.
Biden came before Xi as a supplicant, once again begging China to rein in its tributary state, North Korea, and urging it to cooperate with us on the issue of climate change.
Expect billion-dollar-aid packages to be on their way to Pyongyang shortly, as we take China’s “advice” and try to bribe Little Rocket Man into good behavior.
As far as the “climate crisis” is concerned, the world’s largest polluter needs little encouragement to play the game. A projected 1 degree rise in the Earth’s temperature over the next century does not keep Xi up at night.
Rather, he’s dreaming about de-industrializing America by encouraging us to shut down energy production and pay for the sin of ever using fossil fuels by shoveling money at the rest of the world.
Of course, while America self-destructs, China will continue to bring a coal-fired power plant online every two weeks or so.
Xi Jinping is working towards a world in which China is dominant — economically, politically and militarily. Everything he does is directed towards this end. Biden, on the other hand, is eager to return to business as usual with China.
Take his position on Taiwan. Over the course of the past year, the President has on four different occasions told American audiences that he would defend the island democracy if it were attacked.
Facing Xi, however, he quailed. When the topic of defending Taiwan against an attack from China came up, he reverted to “strategic ambiguity.” This is a “maybe we will and maybe we won’t” policy that can only embolden China.
The only assurance that he carried away from the meeting was that an attack on Taiwan is not “imminent.”
As in, next week?
Biden talks tough before the home team, but when he’s facing Emperor Xi, he kowtows as low to the ground as his creaky old bones will allow.
Apparently he doesn’t know that he can never kowtow low enough.
Xi Jinping wants America as we know it to be dead and buried.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics.”
