Joe Biden may have already privately reset the world's defining bilateral relationship via undisclosed phone conversations with his old friend Xi Jinping. However, this reset will take months to become evident - and probably a year or two to actually take effect.
Both Xi and Biden are veteran statesmen who, unlike Biden's predecessor Trump, deeply understand the nature of power, governance, and diplomacy. If nothing else, Biden's mere presence in the White House has brought a fundamental sense of maturity and sanity back to US dealings - and more importantly, attitudes - towards the PRC. The big question is how quickly and effectively Biden will be able to translate this into a coherent and workable national strategy for America to deal with its greatest foreign challenge since it won independence from Great Britain.
First and foremost, there will be nothing like a new Cold War pitting China and America against one another in an existential ideological conflict spilling over into every aspect of international economic and political activity. To put it mildly, this archaic thinking belongs in the last century - and completely ignores or denies just how radically changed, overwhelmingly for the better, is the world of the early 2020s. The real threat to America - which Biden deeply recognizes - is that she will be left in the dust by an ascendant China because she'd rather mope over past glory lost than rise to the occasion to confront the predicaments of today and tomorrow.
Biden privately understands that challenging China straight to its face is precisely why Trump failed to execute his "America First" agenda, bumbled the US response to the Covid pandemic, and ultimately lost power. While ultimately this failure was rooted in Trump's own wounded pride, it was also buoyed by a broader malaise cutting across both political parties and a huge swathe of the general American public, which simply would not acknowledge that the world's formerly undisputed superpower has no laurels to rest on when it comes to competing with the Asian behemoth.
Thus, Biden recognizes that his first critical obstacle to contend with on China policy is the sheer hangover Trump has left in his wake: a residual bitterness and vindictiveness towards the rising superpower that's rooted in denial and victimhood - both of which are already weighing down America's chances of resounding recovery from the pandemic and its economic effects. Instead of getting their own house in order, most Americans - even across party lines - would prefer to continue taking cheap shots at Beijing whose principal effect is to merely accelerate the latter's displacement of US global prestige and leadership.
It follows that the new US administration's priority for the first 60 to 100 days is to simply prevent tensions with China from getting even worse - not by conceding any ground, but by refusing to indulge in further provocative escalations that play well with a Sinophobic public and especially Sinophobic domestic Right.
For this, Biden is already braced for much hay from conservatives and Republicans for being a "panda hugger" or "CCP sellout" - even the moniker "Beijing Biden" - for the simple fact that this mudslinging won't bear on his pressing Stateside agenda. After all, Trump bore accusations of being Putin's pawn from the very moment he took office over four years ago, yet all this "Russiagate" noise turned out in the end to be merely a distraction from his central mission - to restore American economic vitality and competitiveness. All the way up to the Covid pandemic, he still had a fighting chance to be resoundingly successful in that regard.
It should here be recalled, then, that Trump's greatest miscalculation was none other than his substituting the stock market's performance for actual progress in rebuilding the real US industrial economy; this was already evident by mid-2019, well before the "phase one" trade deal was signed with China in January 2020 - just as the novel Coronavirus ravaging the city of Wuhan was spilling into the headlines.
With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight (no pun on the calamitous year 2020), it should now be apparent to the Biden team that a US industrial renaissance can only take place in conjunction with an overall political and economic reset with the PRC and its ruling Communist regime. The Trump administration's attempt to deny China its further development - particularly sanctions on its technology industry - have been nothing short of catastrophic: they have essentially given the CCP the cover to aggressively restructure the entire international commercial architecture around Chinese prerogatives, leaving the US and its allies increasingly on the margins of shifting global supply chains. They have - in conjunction with Covid - greatly fueled and accelerated the massive capital concentration in a mere handful of Big Tech companies and closely affiliated Fortune 500 firms; and more recently - with a Chinese tech counterattack in the form of export restrictions on critical rare earth minerals - they have created an unprecedented squeeze in the global supply of semiconductors which threatens to even further bind global industries and supply chains to the Covid-resurgent PRC.
If anyone understands that the trade and tech wars with China must be ended at the earliest opportunity, it's Biden; but if there's anyone who also understands that the US must first be humbled even more by Beijing in order to see the necessity of this reversal, it's Biden, as well.
It's not merely Trump's Republican base that needs a deeper and more enduring lesson in the realities of Chinese power - it's also Washington's own national security bureaucracy, which conveniently jumped onto Trump's bandwagon of suppressing China so long as it looked like the sheer magnitude of US strength could break Beijing's resistance. An unequivocal reaffirmation of the "One China" policy with respect to Hong Kong and Taiwan - not to mention a confirmation of Uighur Xinjiang province as inviolable Chinese territory - would go a very long way to rolling back the march of the CCP's authoritarian shadow over those peripheries of the Sinosphere. But such reaffirmation will only come when the US national security state - even more so than Republican politicians and voters - recognize that Trump bamboozled them into vastly overplaying their hand with a cunning rival which deliberately and furtively construed to maximize their misjudgments.
On the basis of nothing more, nothing less than just that - a return to recognition and respect of plain reality - the US-China relationship will get back on a positive track before too long and too much more drama.
Where the risk may truly lie is that too much rides on Biden's personal authority - which he knows must be exercised only negatively and passively with respect to an increasingly ascendant Communist-ruled China - and that he will be unable to restrain the worse China-bashing instincts of the general American public. This will multiply already steep US strategic losses to Beijing heading into 2022 - a midterm election year, in which unresolved and unhealed fractures within the American Republic could truly pose an existential risk to the integrity of the 235-year-old Constitutional Union. If it finally turns out that Biden can only put something of a cap on US malaise and dysfunction in the immediate post-Trump period, then even he can only do so much to mitigate the further damage that America must sustain from its absolutely bungled attempt to redefine relations with China to its own benefit.
Because only that much is sure: America still has the Devil to pay for Trump's China mistakes. Biden is the grandfather figure whose jovial avuncularity will serve only to limit the pain of this butcher's bill; but he will not forestall its final inevitable outlay. And if he fails to make this intrinsically excruciating process for America and for Americans any less traumatic than it may already be ordained to be, then the only fallback left is for Big Tech itself to restructure and reorganize US relations with the prospective 21st-century hegemon.
A loathsome Biden reconciliation with Beijing and the Communists is really the least of nightmares now in store for Trump supporters, the Republican party, and the US national security state. If they don't repent - and repent deeply - of the mistakes they've committed and redoubled down on since 2018-19, then the only logical outcome is the sum of all their worst fears.
