Russian AND CHINA…..
Complex chess boards….
President Biden declared on Wednesday that the overwhelming challenge for the United States in the coming years would be “outcompeting China and restraining Russia” while focusing on restoring a damaged democracy at home.
In his 48-page national security strategy, which every new administration is required to issue, Mr. Biden made clear that over the long term he was more worried about China’s moves to “layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy” than he was about a declining, battered Russia. More than six months after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military appears less fearsome than it did when the first drafts of the document circulated in the White House in December.
“Russia and the P.R.C. pose different challenges,” Mr. Biden wrote, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China. “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.”
China “is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective,” the president wrote.
Mr. Biden took some unusual positions, especially for a Democrat. He urged a speedier modernization of the military, though critics say his budget does not reflect his ambitions. And he took a darker view of the benefits of globalization than Presidents Bill Clinton or Barack Obama did, describing at length how it has fueled pandemics and disinformation and contributed to supply chain shortages.
And Mr. Biden returned to a theme he has established since his second month in office, describing a coming struggle as one of autocracies versus democracies. He said the United States must invest with allies and private industry as part of a Western effort to reduce dependence on adversaries.
The strategy document was held up last winter, as it became clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent and that the U.S. relationship with its European allies was about to undergo a tremendous test. The revised document celebrates a new coherence among NATO countries but also includes warnings to Moscow that were clearly inserted to refect a new era of containment, the word used during the Cold War to restrain the biggest challenge at the time: Soviet expansionism….
image…EWN