Biden’s Legacy Is a New Cold War

The outgoing president cemented a bipartisan consensus that China is enemy number one.

In 2015, President Obama stood next to Chinese leader Xi Jinping and declared that US-China cooperation would lead to “greater prosperity and greater security.” Today, it seems you can’t even get a bill through Congress unless it’s framed as a way to stick it to Beijing. In the past few months, bipartisan majorities in the House have passed bills that would, among other things, restrict the ability of American scientists to work with their Chinese counterparts, prevent Chinese nationals from buying American farmland, and fund activities to counter the "malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party." In just the first three months of 2023, congressional bills mentioned the word "China" as much as they did in 2017 and 2018 put together.

Who is responsible for this shift? Donald Trump played an early role by launching a trade war in his first term and engaging in anti-China policies and rhetoric that grew especially intense after the breakout of covid in 2020. Xi Jinping, who has coupled grandiose rhetoric about China’s rise with authoritarian crackdowns from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, has also helped. But too little credit has gone to the person who ensured that already bad US-China relations would be locked into something much worse. That would be President Joe Biden, who doubled down on Trump’s approach and cemented a bipartisan consensus that China is enemy number one. Critics of Biden’s foreign policy tend to point to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza taking place across the Atlantic. But, in overlooking Biden’s moves on China, they underestimate Biden’s bungling across the Pacific. A closer look at Biden’s approach to East Asia reveals that no single American has done more to ensure a new cold war.

After winning election in 2020, Biden could have deescalated tensions with China and sought a modus vivendi with the rising power. Instead, in his first call with Xi, Biden slammed China’s “coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and increasingly assertive actions” in East Asia. A month later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken used his first summit with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, to argue that China’s actions—including alleged rights abuses at home—“threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.” The comments sparked an hour-long war of words, all captured by a stunned gaggle of international media.

The Biden administration followed up on these early moves with a series of policy initiatives aimed at slowing China’s rise and deterring a possible invasion of Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province. Biden expanded weapons sales to Taiwan and, breaking with a longstanding US policy of “strategic ambiguity,” repeatedly said America would come to the island’s defense in case of an invasion. Biden also rolled out export controls to prevent Beijing from accessing powerful computer chips. Trade tariffs, first put in place by Trump, were retained and even expanded.

In August of 2022, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on an official trip. Chinese leaders viewed the visit as a signal of US support for Taiwanese independence and responded by drastically cutting back communications with the US government, preventing cooperation on issues from drug interdiction to climate change. Biden, who had initially suggested the trip was “not a good idea,” wound up defending Pelosi’s decision and arguing that China had “chosen to overreact” to the trip.

Naturally, a cold war requires rival blocs, and on this front, Biden has far outperformed Trump. From the start, the Biden administration framed the world as one divided between a democratic, US-led bloc and an autocratic, China-led axis. The White House held major summits to gather democratic leaders and form plans for countering Beijing. Blinken later bragged that, under Biden’s watch, America’s European allies had finally become “intensely focused on the challenge China posed to transatlantic security and values.” Blinken didn’t mention that US actions had in turn prompted Chinese leaders to strengthen ties with America’s adversaries, in particular Russia and Iran.

Given this aggressive posture, it’s easy to forget that Biden was one of the most China-friendly candidates running for office in the election of 2020. As late as May 2019, Biden dismissed the idea that Beijing posed a serious threat to US interests. “They’re not bad folks,” he said. “They’re not competition for us.” After such comments sparked criticism from his own side, however, Biden decided that the era of good feelings was over. At a June 2019 campaign rally, Biden told the public, “We need to get tough with China.” By the time the general election campaign got underway, Biden was cutting attack ads aimed at out-hawking Trump, with one ominous clip claiming the Republican president “rolled over for the Chinese” in the early days of the covid pandemic. Many observers viewed this hawkish turn as an electoral ploy, but the shift proved to be durable.

Biden’s defenders argue that there was really no choice. China had changed, and so had American opinion, as suggested by polls showing that the vast majority of Americans, and a majority of Democrats, now have an unfavorable view of China. But such evidence is misleading. In reality, 47 percent of Democrats still say the US should “undertake friendly cooperation and engagement with China,” even in the face of hawkishness being espoused by party leaders. Independents are similarly split, with 44 percent backing cooperation and 50 percent advocating a more hardline approach. Yet only a few progressives in Congress, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, still argue strongly in favor of cooperating with China. Had Biden resolved to take a more conciliatory line toward Beijing, he could have brought much of his party along with him by tapping into shared Democratic hatred of Trump. Instead, he chose to follow Trump’s playbook.

To his credit, Biden did recognize the importance of reopening lines of communication with Chinese leaders. In late 2023, he sat down with Xi and hammered out deals to restart military communications and counternarcotics cooperation. Yet these limited forms of cooperation have done little to bring down tensions in the overall relationship. Meanwhile, most Democratic leaders have followed Biden and even surpassed him in hawkishness toward China. In this year’s election, Democratic candidates and donors ran more tough-on-China ads than did their Republican opponents—a major reversal from 2020, in which Republicans funded 82 percent of China-related ads. In one case, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey slammed his Republican opponent Dave McCormick for having worked “with a company that managed money for communist China” and accused him of backing “China’s biggest maker of fentanyl.” (McCormick invested in a Chinese company that makes legal fentanyl for medical uses; see this recent essay from Andrew Day of NZN for more on China’s role in the fentanyl crisis.)

Trump will now return to the Oval Office with a consensus on China that’s far more hawkish than what greeted him in his first term. The incoming president seems ready to use this anti-China enthusiasm to great effect. Marco Rubio, who Trump has tapped to be his secretary of state, has described Beijing as “the gravest threat facing America today” and argued that a Chinese victory in the growing cold war would bring about “a new dark age of exploitation, conquest, and totalitarianism and all the worst aspects of human nature.” Trump, for his part, has promised to slap a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports and to revive a “China Initiative” that, in an echo of the first Cold War, seeks to root out potential spies by monitoring Chinese academics and researchers in the United States. Biden once hoped to be seen as the wise statesman who banished Trump from American politics. Instead, he’ll be remembered as the man who set the table for Trump’s return—and locked in a new cold war.

Header image by Clark McGillis.