Sometimes the truth leaks out even in a CNN report.
That’s what happened on Monday when CNN anchor Jim Sciutto acknowledged just how weak the Biden administration appeared with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China.
And it doesn’t bode well for a United States dealing with the ever-more-aggressive Asian power — no matter how Biden and his allies try to spin it.
Blinken’s two-day trip that ended Monday has gotten some positive headlines: NPR claimed it “clears a diplomatic path.” Reuters reported the two countries agreed to “stabilize their intense rivalry.”
But CNN anchor Jim Sciutto noted that China had made it clear it intended to show Biden who was really the boss.
CNN’s @jimsciutto: “There was an almost scolding tone” to how Chinese officials treated @SecBlinken pic.twitter.com/5HZiplynXj
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 19, 2023
“There was an almost scolding tone from the Chinese president to Secretary Blinken in advance of their meeting, in which he said something along the lines of, ‘I hope you, Secretary Blinken, and America, will do more to improve the relationship.’
“Clearly, putting the onus on the U.S., and therefore implying that it’s the U.S. that has been the problem here.”
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Sciutto didn’t come out and say it, but that “onus” doesn’t happen in international relations unless one country knows it can steamroll its rival without fear of repercussion. It doesn’t happen unless one country perceives the other as too weak to stand up for itself.
And the brutal truth is, that’s what the world’s only superpower, under a president disgracefully unfit to be in the White House, has become.
That moment of honesty was quickly papered over when Sciutto went on the call the meeting “progress, compared to where we were just a few weeks ago, when a similar visit was canceled in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon, so they’re talking. And talking, considering how serious the divisions are right now, that is something.”
“It provides channels to discuss these issues and hopefully don’t allow them to escalate. But those issues … still exist.”
Yes, those issues still exist — like, say, rampant Chinese spying on the United States (it isn’t just surveillance balloons arrogantly flown over the continental United States or the occasional Fang Fang fling), China threatening Taiwan, not to mention supporting — both tacitly and actively — the Russian war in Ukraine.
China is also becoming increasingly belligerent in its more direct challenges to the U.S., moving forward with plans to station its own military personnel only 100 miles from the U.S. mainland, as The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
This has been the tone of contacts between the two countries since Biden came into office.
The president had been sworn in barely two months when a bellicose Chinese delegation humiliated Blinken and his diplomatic team during a high-level meeting in Alaska in 2021.
In short, China is dominating the Biden administration and the relationship between Washington and Beijing in a way it couldn’t even dream of when former President Donald Trump was in the White House.
Conservative commentator Tom Elliott summed up the situation nicely in a painfully accurate Twitter post:
To summarize:
— Blinken canceled a trip to China after Chinese spying on U.S. bases
— China does nothing to thaw relations
— Blinken nonetheless goes to China & kowtows, knifing Taiwan in the back
— China berates Blinken
— U.S. leaves looking weak, having accomplished nothing https://t.co/sPZv7dJ4JT— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 19, 2023
Plenty of social media users agreed:
If you need more proof of how ridiculously fragile America is now:
China has learned how to perfectly mimic the “Do better!” complaining from the Left and is now using it against the Biden administration.
For which Biden and Blinken will be only too happy to bend the knee.
— And Don’t Call Me Shirley. (@Meme_Behavior) June 19, 2023
The Biden administration has accomplished this kind of thing all over the world. It’s part of their “War through Incompetence” initiative.
— JohnOU81 (@Stopthemadns) June 19, 2023
Biden admin in a nutshell
— Wombat65 (@Wombat652) June 19, 2023
And since leftists the world over — but particularly Democrats in Congress — were so happy to draw Nazi analogies to the White House during the Trump years, there was this one, which was particularly appropriate:
Eerily similar to how Hitler treated the Allied ambassadors and even Chamberlain…minus the “eerily” part. This is the totalitarian playbook.
— gwhizkids (@gwhizkids) June 19, 2023
“Eerily similar to how Hitler treated the Allied ambassadors and even Chamberlain…minus the ‘eerily’ part,” the user wrote. “This is the totalitarian playbook.”
The reference, of course, is to the Munich Agreement of 1938, where then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to German dictator Adolph Hitler’s homeland to receive a tongue-lashing and sign a humiliating document he claimed would guarantee “peace for our time.”
It didn’t, of course, because appeasing dictatorships guarantees nothing more than further aggression — of the kind China is engaging in now.
Dealing with bullies requires the strength and determination to do it — something Biden should remember from his “Corn Pop” days.
Unfortunately for the country, the man in the White House has neither.
Whether it’s because the president is compromised by his own corruption or whether it’s because he’s inculcated too much of the “blame America first” ethos of his Democratic Party, it’s all too clear that China has taken the upper hand in its relationship with the United States, and the people of its targeted countries — starting with Taiwan — who are going to pay the price.
If CNN is seeing weakness, it’s a rock-solid bet that the rest of the world is seeing it, too.
