21-Months after Biden: How the American Public Has Learned from the Xi-Chinese Successes and Failures

While Mr. Xi’s China undoubtedly presents the most serious challenge to U.S. global leadership in my lifetime, it also gives Americans a chance to learn from the successes and failures of a radically different system. I asked several Chinese scholars how the American people could learn from Mr. Xi’s tenure so far. Here is a summary of what they had to say.

The document, required by Congress, comes 21 months into Biden’s term. The broad contours of the strategy have been in evidence over the course of the President’s tenure, including a focus on rebuilding global partnerships and countering China and Russia.

Speaking to reporters, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the strategy made clear the White House wasn’t viewing the world “solely through the prism of strategic competition.”

The president also renewed his call for national unity that he delivered in his inaugural address in front of a still violence-scarred Capitol in 2021. He explained that American democracy was primarily under attack because “the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election.”

“Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown,” the document reads. “(China), by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”

He said that this decade is very important in determining the terms of competition with the people’s republic of China, and in getting ahead of massive challenges that we won’t be able to keep pace with.

In the absence of elections, the Communist Party in China raises the ranks based on their performance, at least in theory. For years, the top priority was economic growth. Local officials plowed money into the highways, ports and power plants that manufacturers needed, turning China into the world’s factory. Under Mr. Xi, government priorities have shifted toward self-sufficiency and the use of industrial robots, something that Chinese leaders believe is critical to escaping the middle-income trap, in which a country can no longer compete in low-wage manufacturing because of rising wages but has not yet made the leap to the value-added products of high-income countries.

During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.

As we climbed a restored but almost deserted section of the ancient landmark, a few local families on their way down walked past us. One of their kids exclaimed that they were amazed by foreigners. With Covid? Let’s get away from them…” The adults were silent while the group quicklyened their pace.

The Great Wall and the Xi-Bao Economy: Where are we coming from? Where do we stand? Why do we need to go? How much do we care about the country?

Sun said that part of the reason for Xi to focus onSecuring his third term was to convince the party to remove the term limit and break with tradition. His political agenda is likely to change from domestic to global.

The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction in China that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, was almost empty when we went because of the policy of zero tolerance of Covid infections that was put in place by Xi three years into the global pandemic.

China’s borders have remained shut for most international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners who once called the country home have chosen to leave.

With the highly contagious Omicron variant raging through parts of the country, authorities had discouraged domestic travel ahead of National Day holiday. They are sticking to their usual approach of strictQuarantine, mass testing and contact tracing, locking down cities of millions over a few cases.

Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

The amount of power he has amassed is what led to the costly zero-covid intransigence. For many Chinese officials, this policy is less about science and more about political loyalty to the country’s most powerful leader in decades.

Health workers are filmed taking samples of fruits, animals and shoes for Covid testing despite the lack of a sound scientific basis. China’s only Covid-related deaths in September were 27 people who were killed when their bus crashed on its way to a quarantine facility. Still, officials nationwide have doubled down on enforcing draconian rules, especially ahead of the party congress, helped by the world’s most sophisticated surveillance technologies.

Whether physical lockdowns or digital manipulation, these measures born out of “zero-Covid” have proven such effective means of control in a system obsessed with social stability that many worry Xi and his underlings will never ditch the policy.

The local child spoke on the Great Wall. But the true danger of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of mounting pressure on the domestic front.

A history paper recently released by a government-run institute has gone viral and upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.

Xi Jinping defended his hard-line reign on Sunday, presenting himself to a congress of China’s ruling elite as the leader whose tough policies had saved the nation from the ravages of the pandemic and was now focused on securing China’s rise amid multiplying global threats.

He warned the nation that it had to stand united behind the party to cope with a new world he depicted as hostile. And though he did not mention the United States by name, his distrust of the world’s other great power was an unmistakable backdrop to that exhortation.

“Be mindful of dangers in the midst of peace,” Mr. Xi said. “Get the house in good repair before rain comes, and prepare to undergo the major tests of high winds and waves, and even perilous, stormy seas.”

Given the deep distrust on both sides, coordinated, unilateral steps back from the brink — voluntary bounds on behavior rather than limits on new capabilities — could give both the United States and China breathing room to get through acute domestic challenges and navigate a particularly perilous period.

The long-term risk is that a lack of focus on achieving positives will make it hard to keep up with the competition. Domestic divisions can be worsened by competition in the United States. Increased violence and anti-Asian rhetoric in America have caused more than 60 percent of Chinese-born scientists working in the US to consider leaving the country.

Under the “One China” policy, Washington acknowledges Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China, but has never accepted its claim of sovereignty over the island. If China attacks Taiwan, the US provides defensive weapons, but has remained vague on how it would respond.

Xi Jinping, the Fourth Amendment, and the China-U.S. Cooperation in the 20th Century: State of the Art and the Status of China

No other leader has had a third term since Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China. The break from historical norms would symbolize a new era in China according to the senior fellow and co-director of the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center.

“This is actually one of the areas — compared to, for example, domestic reform and domestic economic policy — this is an area that Xi Jinping is going to prevail,” Sun said. “These people are going to work on his vision and his strategy with more gusto and more precision.”

Sun said she expects the “political confidants” and “political loyalists” of Xi to be appointed to key positions involving national security and foreign policy to help enact his vision.

There are people within the government who do not believe that China’s policies toward the U.S. are the best, Sun said, but she predicts that those voices will be “eliminated from within the bureaucracy,” leaving China without a system of checks and balances.

“With China, whether it’s on Taiwan or interdependence in technology or our views of the international order — those have all been there. What divides us, has divided us for a while,” Kennedy says. “But the lack of travel, the lack of direct communication, makes solving those problems almost impossible.”

But that perception — and the resulting actions from the U.S., such as high-level congressional visits from the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — has led to something of a catch-22 situation, Li said.

There’s a back and forth between the US and China over who is better off, the US or China.

China’s top priority is the tech industry because it is important to the country as it moves toward the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation by the year 2049.

With this response from Washington, and China’s desire to increase its self-reliance, it’s likely that “this sort of strategic competition between technological capabilities, between supply chains, that’s going to accelerate,” Li said.

Li said that the situation is essentially an impasse. But that doesn’t mean progress can’t happen, only that achieving it will test both countries in the years to come.

Biden’s sharpened message, after all, has been delivered in Washington – not standing on stage next to Democratic candidates in the midst of the most heated races across the country.

But it’s also a window into a view Biden and his top aides hold that there is a path to buck decades of electoral routs for a first-term president’s party – if only a few things can break Democrats’ way.

There are people in Biden’s own party that are questioning the party’s message and are warning that the Republicans are regaining the upper hand.

Biden said last week that it had been back and forth with them. “I think that we’re going to see one more shift back to our side in the closing days.”

It was a candid acknowledgment of a moment that finds Democrats once again scrambling to zero in on a message to blunt GOP momentum, a reality exacerbated by divergent views inside the party of where that message should actually land.

Whether that optimism is misplaced will be clear in 14 days. It’s the basis for Biden’s view as voters look at two years of Democratic power in Washington.

Whether that will hold, particularly in a home stretch in which the small universe of undecided voters historically breaks toward the party out of power, is the definitive outstanding question.

“We’ve managed to suck ourselves back into our own circular firing squad,” one Democratic campaign official said. At the end of the summer, people seemed to think it was pretty darn good, but it wasn’t, and some actors are acting bad now. But it could be if we don’t pull it together.”

The weight of that history, not to mention the acute headwinds created by economic unease that continues to rank first among voter concerns in poll after poll, aren’t lost on Biden or his advisers.

Even as the White House points out that the approval ratings for Biden are slightly ahead of when Obama and Trump were in their first term, his standing is not.

Joe Biden’s Road to the Capitol: What the Future Holds for the House of Representatives and the Senate Judiciary Elections

That will start to change in the days ahead, advisers say, with continued insistence that he will hit the road for bigger campaign events after weeks of intentionally smaller scale official events designed to highlight legislative accomplishments.

They point to two factors, gas prices which have been falling for the last two weeks, and the third quarter GDP report which will show robust growth after two quarters of contraction.

Officials acknowledge their deficit on the economy, despite cornerstone legislative achievements and a historically fast recovery from the pandemic-era downturn, isn’t going to flip over the course of 14 days.

But given the close correlation between gas prices and Democratic electoral prospects over the course of the last several months, they see an opportunity to at least make some gains – or fight to a draw – with undecided voters or those weighing whether to vote at all in the closing days.

It’s a point that officials say has been laid bare in recent weeks by Republicans, whether on abortion, popular programs like Social Secuirty and Medicare, or proposals to undermine many of the individual provisions enacted by Biden that consistently poll in the favor of Democrats.

Biden has also spent the last several weeks attempting to highlight individual issues officials see as key motivators to base voters they need to turn out in a big way to counter clear Republican enthusiasm, whether on abortion rights or Biden’s actions to cancel student loans for some borrowers.

The Supreme Court striking down a key part of the Wade law caused a burst of optimism among Democrats, but was viewed by some in the West Wing as overly optimistic.

Holding onto an already narrow majority in the House has been made more difficult due to structural dynamics. Republicans have grown increasingly aggressive in their spending targets in recent days, indicating they view an expanding map – and an environment that is growing more favorable by the day.

In the senate races, Democratic candidates have polls that show slim leads or in close proximity. Even if a break away from the Democrats would endanger some of the biggest new stars in the party, the pathway to the Senate still exists.

Do voters view this election as a choice or a referendum? If it’s the latter, Biden is staring at the next two years in office with Republicans in control of the House and Senate.

Joe Biden’s eloquent defense of democracy was a message Americans needed to hear. But it was not the one voters most want now from their president – that relief is at hand from the soaring cost of living.

Biden’s speech Wednesday, delivered blocks from the US Capitol that was ransacked by ex-President Donald Trump’s mob on January 6, 2021, was a strong election-closing argument. Next week an election will take place.

That is not to say that the warning was incorrect. The fact that Biden felt the need to say, “We can’t take democracy for granted any longer,” underscores the grave threat posed to America’s core values by political violence and election denialism. If a president does not safeguard this historic legacy, who will? The chaos and violence Trump instigated in the wake of the 2020 election show how a president can ruin democracy for personal gain.

“You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies, as it always does, with the people,” Biden told voters.

Elections ought to be more than one thing. Voters can chew gum at the same time. In Washington, where seeing the Capitol dome reminds politicians of the January 6 horror, the threat to democracy feels very real.

But in the heartlands of Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Arizona and cities everywhere, the gut check issue is less the somewhat abstract and age-old concept of self-government. It is the cheapest way to provide sustenance to a family. The price of groceries or the price of a gallon of gas is more important than the founding truths of America.

The Price of Everything was Good During Trump, and We Need Your Help to Educate the Future of our Democracy, Not Yours to Win or Lose

As Scottsdale, Arizona, retiree Patricia Strong told CNN’s Tami Luhby: “The price of everything was better during Trump,” adding, “We were looking forward to retirement because everything was good.”

Declining stock markets have hurt retirement accounts and Americans with credit card debt took another blow Wednesday when the Federal Reserve raised its short-term borrowing rate by another 0.75%. One of the best aspects of the Biden economy is the low unemployment rate, and there are fears the Fed’s strategy could ruin that.

The current election is a cause of political damage that is beyond mending because it will cause inflation and economic damage.

It is difficult to make a case to the Democrats in a doom-laden political environment. The millions of Republicans who believe Trump’s falsehoods about the last election don’t listen to Biden and his call for national unity anyway. His low approval ratings don’t help. And in a new CNN/SSRS survey published on Wednesday, for instance, 51% of Americans said inflation and the economy was most driving their vote in the midterms. Abortion – the issue Democrats hoped would save them next Tuesday after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer – was the only other concern in double figures, polling at 15% of likely voters. The president said that voting rights and election integrity are the focus of his speech.

“This year, I hope you’ll make the future of our democracy an important part of your decision to vote, and how you vote,” he said. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” he added, at the end of a campaign in which several GOP nominees have not guaranteed they would accept voters’ will.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/joe-biden-plea-for-democracy-analysis/index.html

The Real Reason President Biden has Bought the Deal: How Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans have fought (the Real Reason) for the Phenomenological Truth

It’s not that Biden hasn’t been also talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars spent in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.

Throughout history, inflation has often been a pernicious political force that breeds desperation in an electorate and seeds extremism as a potential response. That’s why politicians fear it so acutely and why it is so curious that the Biden White House initially didn’t take the surge of prices that seriously, repeatedly insisting that this was a “transitory” problem caused by Covid-19.

He has used his power to put loyalty to himself ahead of loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made the Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party – a minority of that party,” Biden said, being careful not to insult every GOP voter as he did when referring to “semi-fascism” earlier this year.

The president said Trump’s threat was much bigger now than in the 2020 election. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America: for governor, Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit – who will not commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re running in,” the president warned.

Biden also hinted at a lack of understanding of Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have embraced his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal to mainly White voters, which grew out of a backlash to the first Black presidency of Barack Obama. The 44th president made his own defense of democracy and repudiation of Trump in recent days.

One day before a high-stakes, one-on-one meeting for Biden with China’s leader, his first in-person encounter since he took office, the trilateral took place. There will be a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

The last time a U.S. president shook hands with the leader of China was more than three years ago. With Donald Trump in the White House, the COVID-19 pandemic was soon to start and relations between Beijing and Washington were strained, it was a good time to be in Washington.

What are the United States and Where Do We Stand? The Two-Party Problem of Beijing and China Revisited at a Meeting of the White House

Today, trust is running low, the rhetoric is increasingly antagonistic and disputes continue to fester in areas including trade, technology, security and ideology.

The lack of a common ground between the two countries is what the White House sees as the reason why they don’t expect any agreements or statements from the meeting.

The two leaders have talked by phone several times since Biden took office last year, but they have been unable to reverse — or even slow — the downward slide in ties between the world’s two largest economies.

“Hopefully the meeting can be used for more than just airing mutual grievances,” said Patricia Kim, a China expert at the Brookings Institution. A nod to restarting working-level exchanges on areas of common interest like climate change and counter-narcotics would be a promising sign, as is a joint declaration by Biden andXi that they oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine and on the Korean Peninsula.

Biden said on Wednesday his goal for the meeting is to get a deeper understanding of Xi’s priorities and concerns, and “lay out what each of our red lines are.”

“Those who play with fire will perish by it. It is hoped that the U.S. will be clear-eyed about this,” Xi warned Biden over the summer, when the two leaders met virtually.

In October, the Communist Party chief repeated that China’s preference is for a peaceful reunification and that the use of force remains an option.

China has repeatedly accused the US of “playing with fire” and hollowing out the “one China” policy. In August, Beijing was annoyed when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan for a high-profile visit.

Biden will likely seek to reassure Xi that Washington’s long-standing policy regarding Taiwan has not changed, and that the United States does not support Taiwan independence. The Republican Party is likely to take control of the US House of Representatives following the elections, and analysts sayXi is likely to be skeptical.

“I think the Biden administration will be less flexible or maneuverable” on China, says Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University.

The Case for a U.S. Export Control of High-Dimensional Microchips: Insights from an Expert on International Relations

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said he would like to visit Taiwan if he becomes majority leader. A Chinese expert on international relations warns of the consequences of such a move.

When Pelosi left, the Chinese were no longer with her. Next time, maybe they will just take action,” says a Chinese expert on international affairs, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized by his university to speak to the media.

“Throughout the Cold War, there were a series of really tough export controls imposed on the Soviet Union by the U.S.,” says Chris Miller, author of the recently published Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. There’s really a lot of similarities, to be honest.

According to the US, the latest export controls are designed to keep key technologies out of the hands of China’s military and security agencies.

In China’s case, enforcing the restrictions could be difficult, though. Microchips are small and easy to smuggle across borders. In order to achieve complete enforcement, other countries in the complex supply chain need to be on board, and that is a work in progress.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/12/1135287047/biden-xi-jinping-g20-meeting

The current moment of cooperation between the U.S. and China is dangerous, and he’s coming to Bali, Indonesia for a summit of the G-20 summit

In the wake of the Pelosi visit, Beijing cut three channels of dialogue and suspended cooperation in five other areas. The contact between China and the United States was already cut off.

Experts think that the meeting between Biden and XI in Indonesia could make an effort to open more channels of communication.

“The problem with China is they don’t like to meet and exchange views – they just repeat talking points. Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University, said that there’s not a lot of creativity in the way that he interacts with his counterparts.

He believes that there is a chance to take a little bit of a gamble, since the China’s Party Congress and the U.S. midterm elections are over.

But Zhu warns that nobody should expect too much from this summit. He said that a discussion may help better understand the two leaders, but that’s all.

Medeiros, the former U.S. official, says the current moment is dangerous — and in some ways, similar to the 1950s and early 1960s, when mistrust grew between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and they each “tested and probed” each others’ boundaries.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides believed in strategic restraint, which often came in the form of arms control agreements.

Biden had a series of meetings with the leaders of Japan, South Korea and Australia on his final day in Cambodia, with all of them focused on China.

The two leaders agreed to sit down together in Bali, Indonesia just ahead of the G-20 summit. Their meeting was set to begin at 4:30 a.m. Eastern time (5:30 p.m. local time) and the White House said it was expected to last a couple of hours. Afterwards, Biden is going to give a speech and take questions. ET (9:30 p.m. local).

Biden, meanwhile, arrived in Asia following a better-than-expected performance by his party in the US midterm elections – with the Democrats projected to keep the Senate in a major victory. Biden expressed confidence that he could go into Monday with a stronger hand. He told the reporters that he was coming in stronger.

One conversation on the sidelines of a summit isn’t adequate to fully discuss all the issues that the countries face. And so hopefully, the two sides will facilitate a greater discussion on these issues by many parts of the two governments.”

The White House has insisted going into the Xi-Biden meeting that president Biden’s focus was not about finding common ground, but rather ensuring lines of communication remained open in the future.

Jake Sullivan, a national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One that the meeting will not lead to specific deliverables, but that they would discuss threats from North Korea and broader security issues.

Kennedy recently returned from a visit to China where he said that both sides blamed the other for the state of the relationship, and they believed that they were better off than the other.

The Americans and the Chinese are willing to pay for these costs because the Chinese think they are winning. And they think the other side is very unlikely to make any significant changes,” Kennedy said. All of that makes it less likely that changes will happen.

It’s a positive development that the two leaders are having a face-to-face conversation. Keeping dialogue open is crucial for reducing risks of misunderstanding and miscalculations, especially when suspicions run deep and tensions run high.

“I would love to be a fly on the wall to see that conversation because I don’t think that the US or China has been very precise about what its red lines are. And I also don’t think either has been very clear about what positive rewards the other side would reap from staying within those red lines,” said Kennedy, of CSIS.

Now the two leaders are sitting down in the same room – a result of weeks of intensive discussions between the two sides – Taiwan is widely expected to top their agenda. In a sign of the issue being contentious, barbs have already been traded.

“On the issue of Ukraine, China has already made its position clear many times. It will not change simply because of the talks with the US President. He said that China stopped treating the denuclearization of North Korea as a fundamental element of its Korean Peninsular policy.

He isn’t giving an assessment of climate cooperation in a rosier way. “China and the US can find many common interests on this, but when it comes to how to deal with climate change specifically, it always leads to antagonism on policies and rivalry over ideology and global influence,” Shi said.

There are some experts in the US and China who think that there will be a positive result from the progress on greater communication and access between their countries.

South Korea and Myanmar during the epoch of engagement for the United States: President Joe Biden, the presidency and the summit of the East Asia Summit

President Joe Biden landed in Cambodia on Saturday still reveling in midterm election results that have produced an unexpected boost at home for his second two years in office.

After arriving in Asia, he found out from CNN and other outlets that his party would retain control of the Senate, which would lift him for the rest of his international trip.

Yet the scale of the challenges abroad, and the effort to translate 21 months of intensive engagement into tangible results for US alliances, will put the value of that political capital on the international stage to the test even as votes are still being counted.

On the sidelines of the NATO Summit, Biden met with both of the Koreas, and pledged to improve cooperation, a complicated task for US allies that have a historically fraught relationship.

North Korea’s recent aggression will be top of mind for the leaders on Sunday. CNN counted the number of missile launches by North Korea so far this year and it shows that they have done it for 32 days. By contrast, it conducted only four tests in 2020, and eight in 2021.

The East Asia Summit was attended by Biden on Sunday, after his appearance on Saturday at the ASEAN Summit aimed at boosting US-Indo-Pacific relations. Biden raised North Korea, China and Myanmar during his meeting with Asian leaders, the White House said in a readout.

The Biden presidency has focused on alliances in strategic competition with China, and the official said Biden would discuss his vision for keeping up a pace of enhanced engagement and trying to address concerns of importance to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

There is an ongoing conflict inMyanmar where the military seized power in a coup last year, which is one of the main topics of discussion this weekend in Cambodia.

World leaders will talk about how to promote respect for human rights, rule of law and good governance, and the rules based international order.

On Friday, Biden traveled to Egypt, where he met with Egyptian President Abdelfattatar El- Sisi after attending the climate summit.

“He’ll have that opportunity to sit, to be totally straightforward and direct and to hear President Xi be totally straightforward and direct in return,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters traveling on Air Force One to Bali.

The White House hopes the leaders “come out of that meeting with a better understanding and a way to responsibly manage this relationship and the competition,” Sullivan said.

Xi has indicated he is looking to appease an otherwise-fraught relationship with the U.S. He said during the dinner that China was ready to work with the United States to find a way to get along.

A list of three demands was presented to American diplomats by Wang Yi in the Chinese port city of Tianjin last year. Among them: not to interfere with China’s political system, to not hinder China’s development, and to respect Beijing’s claims over territories like Hong Kong or the democratic island of Taiwan.

“I think we can find a way to communicate about those issues where we have deep fundamental differences of perspective, but we need to be having continued and ongoing conversation,” said the senior administration official before Biden met with his Chinese counterpart.

Thirty-seven minutes after wrapping up a late-night gala dinner with Asian leaders – punctuated by plates of wild Mekong lobster and beef saraman – an aide handed President Joe Biden the phone.

On the other end of the line was David Trone, the millionaire Maryland wine retailer who was thousands of miles and a time zone 12 hours away and had just clinched another term in the House.

A person familiar with the call said that it was a long one and that Biden had made dozens of calls over the last week to winning candidates.

But on the other side of the world, Biden’s advisers say there has been a tangible effect tied to election results that, had they matched historical trends, threatened to undermine his standing ahead of the most consequential meeting of his first two years.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan provided a glimpse into dynamics of the moment, pointing to the fact “that many leaders took note of the results of the midterms, came up to the president to engage him and to say that they were following them closely.”

“I would say one theme that emerged over the course of the two days was the theme about the strength of American democracy and what this election said about American democracy,” Sullivan told reporters aboard Air Force One as Biden traveled from Phnom Penh to Bali, Indonesia, for the Group of 20 Summit.

What did Biden say during his first meeting with China in July 2009? What did the US learn from the G-20 sit-down? Why the United is stronger, why we are stronger

The White House officials who were prepared for losses in the weeks leading up to election day have moved beyond their reluctance to speak out about pundits and politicians who predicted otherwise.

It’s a reflection – abroad and back in Washington – of a team that officials acknowledge feels constantly underestimated and has long coveted unambiguous success after a relentless and crisis-infused first 21 months in office.

White House officials had been circling the G-20 as the likely sit-down with Xi for months. There were intensive preparations between the two sides in the lead up to announcing the engagement publicly. The tenuous state of the relationship necessitated a sit down, regardless of domestic politics.

The election results show that Biden has been right about the American political landscape being a constant source of tension between allies and foes.

There was a feeling that the US president might be in a situation where his party was about to lose its political strength, at the same time that China was about to have its Community Party Congress.

“Perception matters and so does political standing,” one US official said. The election was not only watched around the world, but it was never seen as a central focus or driver of the dynamics.

The calls of encouragement to the president back home are not necessarily a liability, as they show that the president entered the meeting with China determined to get the best deal for his country.

“I know I’m stronger,” Biden said, before noting that given his long-standing relationship with Xi formed during their times as their nations’ vice president that the results weren’t a necessity for the meeting to achieve its goals. US officials are careful not to overstate the effect on a trip in a region, where the layers of complexity and challenges far exceed what voters decide in a congressional district or swing state.

Yet Biden isn’t subtle about his sweeping view of the geopolitical stakes of a moment he’s repeatedly framed as a generational “inflection point,” centered on the battle between democracy and autocracy.

I found that they want to know if the United States is stable. Do we know what we’re about? Are we the same democracy we’ve always been?” Biden said at his post-election news conference as he described his conversations with world leaders.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/politics/midterms-joe-biden-xi-jinping-meeting/index.html

Introducing Biden to the global stage: validation in his 20th year at the presidency and the G20 summit in Bali. A message from Biden and Titus

Former President Donald Trump, whose election lies had driven the assault on the US Capitol, hadn’t faded away and he remained the most powerful figure inside the Republican Party.

Biden took the narrowest of congressional majorities to pass a sweeping domestic agenda. He still had an approval rating of only 40, which was weighed down by four-decade high inflation and a population exhausted by years of crisis.

Biden could face the same harsh judgement in his first two years in office as most of his predecessors did. It was expected.

Biden’s own political vindication served as a reason for his approach on the world stage: validation.

Biden “feels that it does establish a strong position for him on the international stage and we saw that I think play out in living color today,” Sullivan told reporters after Biden departed the ASEAN-US Summit, as the Xi meeting loomed. I think we will see it equally when we go into the G20 and his bilateral engagements inBali.

Nevada Rep. Dina Titus, who faced a tough reelection battle in a redrawn district, had secured another term in office. Biden needed to pass along his congratulations.