The national embarrassment of President Joe Biden’s administration is going from bad to worse.
While the establishment media tried to paint Biden’s showing at last week’s summit in San Francisco as a tough-talking leader of the free world — thanks to Biden labeling Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping a “dictator” during a news conference — House Republican Speaker Mike Johnson had a more realistic view.
Biden, Johnson said, is “projecting weakness,” and it wasn’t just Biden’s lowlights at the summit that proved it.
Any American who caught coverage of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit should be familiar with Biden’s stumblings by now — bumbling painfully at times while speaking, appearing to lose his place during a photo op that preceded his speech, as the New York Post reported.
It wasn’t a performance to make Americans proud. In an interview Friday on the New York radio show “Cats and Cosby,” Johnson said he hadn’t followed the San Francisco summit closely because he’d been tied up in negotiating a deal to avoid a government shutdown in D.C., but said Biden’s problem was more fundamental than a passing meeting of international leaders.
“In general, I would say … anyone who looks at this objectively has to agree that President Biden is projecting weakness on the world stage,” he said. “I am from the [President] Reagan school. He always said we maintain peace through strength. He was exactly right.”
“Because if you project weakness, you invite aggression. It’s a dangerous time right now to be inviting aggression on our country,” he continued. “That’s why you see China, Iran, Russia, all of our adversaries around the world doing what they’re doing, being very provocative.”
And it isn’t just the increasingly evident physical and mental weakness of the president, who turns 81 on Monday. Americans — especially liberal Americans — have gotten almost inured to Biden’s incessant verbal gaffes and physical pratfalls.
It’s the policies being implemented by an administration in thrall to the Democratic Party’s far-left wing that are projecting weakness for the country as a whole.
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The examples abound, from the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 to effectively inviting the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to telegraphing impotence to the world in 2023 while a Chinese spy balloon spent a leisurely week overflying the continental United States. (Not to mention the ongoing appeasement of Islamist supremacists in Tehran or surrendering to an invasion of illegal immigration from across the southern border.)
The latest of these came last week, when Biden and Xi discussed issues ranging from deadly fentanyl in the U.S. drug market with Chinese origins to the use of artificial intelligence in the military. Biden received little concrete from Xi, as conservative commentator Helen Raleigh noted on The Federalist on Friday, but racked up losses.
He had leverage over China because of the different economic conditions of the two countries, Raleigh wrote, and squandered that. An agreement aimed at limiting the use of AI in the military is worth little, Raleigh wrote.
“China promised nothing. Xi has made enhancing the People’s Liberation Army’s capabilities through AI a national priority and has already committed plenty of resources for AI research and development. Xi will not change his course because of some experts’ exchanges on AI with Americans,” she wrote. “If such a discussion occurs, China will exploit it to identify which American AI expert to poach and what latest AI technology China should steal.”
And then there was the pact announced last week — on the eve of the San Francisco summit — in which, as The Associated Press reported — the United States and China agreed “to pursue efforts to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030.” The words “triple global renewable energy” might send a thrill up liberal legs everywhere, but the deal should dismay Americans who care about the security of their country (not to mention their own pocketbooks).
Both countries agreed to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation” with alternative energy sources like solar panel farms and wind turbines, according to Fox News.
Energy sector specialists quoted by Fox noted that that not only hurts the U.S., with its production and reliance on fossil fuels, but it helps China, because of the country’s domination of the “green” energy market.
For example, China produces 75 percent of the global supply of the lithium-ion batteries used in the kind of electric vehicles the Biden administration is trying to force on American consumers, according to Fox, which cited International Energy Agency data.
Daniel Turner, founder and chief executive officer of Power the Future — which promotes the use of fossil fuels produced in the U.S. — called it a recipe for disaster for American consumers. The energy deal, he said, gave away the store.
“So, you’re basically writing an agreement that guarantees China a customer and guarantees their manufacturing sector decades of purchasing. Of course, China would love this agreement. And their obligations — they’ll just ignore that. They’ve ignored every other obligation,” Turner told Fox.
“It is basically guaranteeing China decades of wealth, guaranteeing America is going to buy their products.”
Jason Isaac, founder and CEO of The American Energy Institute, which represents energy producers in the U.S. called the deal an example of “China first, America last.”
“Xi knows that the grid in America is getting crushed under the weight of a so-called energy transition. Over 80% of our reliable thermal generation from natural gas and coal will age-out in the next two decades,” he told Fox News Digital. “Instead of aging out, we need to build new generation more than ever.”
“Yet, the current administration is making new, reliable electric generation construction nearly impossible.
Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, said the agreement is another step toward a government takeover in the economy as well as a national security hazard.
“The cooperative initiatives outlined by State Department will create make-work for bureaucrats, subsidies for rent-seekers, photo ops for local politicians, and new opportunities for Chinese agents of influence and industrial spies,” he told Fox News Digital.
“The effect on climate change, if any, will be negative, as the ‘cooperation’ will nudge the United States closer to Beijing-style central planning, production quotas, and groupthink.”
Even a glancing look at history post-World War II should show where that road leads.
“Central planning, production quotas and groupthink” were the hallmarks of the Soviet Union — the leader of the communist world in the Cold War days — and the ultimate loser of the Cold War.
Since coming into office, Biden has been behind a series of military and diplomatic decisions that have weakened the U.S. abroad.
His economic policies — the “Bidenomics” he’s so proud of — are weakening the country’s industrial base and the power of the dollar to buy the goods and services Americans want and need.
He’s not just projecting weakness to the world — he’s projecting it into the country itself.
And unless the voters change course in 2024 — he’s going to be projecting it far into the future, too.
