The host country wants the West to be nicer to Russia…
THAT is NOT gonna happen….
President Biden , ever who he is, is gonna try to establish a ‘dialog’ with Chinese President Xi Jinping…..
This while Bide’s admin wants to withdraw some of America’s reliance on Chinese tech and manufacturing….
The rest of the world isn’t going along….
And?
China’s economy is shrinking due to Covid…..
And?
China isn’t excited about fellow Communists Putin’s Ukraine war…..
But the Chienes leader has consolidated his control over the country….
Russian President Putin isn’t making the trip…
He’s sent his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov…
The American President maybe tired due to his globe trotting week of travel to Egypt, Cambodia ending up in Indonesia …
But he’s a happy camper due to a continued US Senate Majority continuing and maybe even a US House one could sqeuk out…
In the end?
And American President is traveling the planet to insure that America has cast aside the Donald Trump ‘thing’….
America IS back as the Western Leader and listening….
Don’t get your hopes up for a breakthrough between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at their landmark meeting Monday. After months of needling and outright threats on both sides, there’s little middle ground for them to find.
Biden has said he plans to press Xi on Taiwan, trade and China’s growing nuclear stockpile when they meet on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Indonesia, and he stressed that he’s “not willing to make any fundamental concessions.” The Chinese government is equally unyielding. “We will firmly defend our sovereignty, security and development interests,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Friday.
White House officials have downplayed expectations for the meeting, one that is not expected to produce many deliverables. There are no plans for the two leaders to appear at a customary news conference after the summit, per officials, and even a post-meeting joint statement is unlikely.
The administration’s stated objective of using the meeting to “build a floor for the relationship” is a candid admission of how dire that relationship is.
“It’s two governments which are equally aggrieved with each other and in a contest to see which side is more self-righteous,” said Chas Freeman, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing….
…
Still, the administration says it has a secret weapon to defang bilateral tensions: a personal relationship with Xi that Biden fostered while he was vice president. Biden boasted last week that he had spent upwards of 78 hours with Xi and repeated his much-debunked assertion that the two leaders had traveled a total of “17,000 miles” together.
The administration is putting a lot of faith in that personal history. Biden has insisted that the face-to-face meeting with Xi — his first as president — can help them tackle “red lines” issues….
image…Financal Times