The Perils of President Biden’s Meeting With Xi Jinping

Commentary Beware of the impending summit between President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. Neither China’s current trajectory nor President Biden’s long record of woefully underestimating the Chinese threat inspires confidence that the meeting will have a positive outcome. On the contrary, President Biden and his administration appear eager to resume some version of engaging the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—a policy that reached its ignominious apotheosis during the Obama administration in which President Biden enthusiastically served, failing dismally to tame Chinese ambitious while tranquilizing foreign policy elites from responding vigilantly to the gathering danger. Indeed, the war in Ukraine has catalyzed the emergence of a virulently anti-American Chinese, Russian, Iranian axis of tyranny, with China as the most formidable of these implacable adversaries. Sino-Russian collaboration aimed at displacing the United States as the world’s preeminent power has flourished since Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed a comprehensive economic and security pact in 2022. China and Russia have also coordinated their anti-American policies in the Middle East, enabling Iran and condemning Israel more severely than Hamas’s genocidal attack against Israel on Oct. 7....