Pentagon holds talks with Chinese military for first time under Biden, official says
A senior Pentagon official held talks with the Chinese military for the first time since President Joe Biden took office in January to focus on managing risk between the two countries, a U.S. official told Reuters on Friday. …
Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, spoke last week with Chinese Major General Huang Xueping, deputy director for the People’s Liberation Army Office for International Military Cooperation.
“(They) utilized the U.S.-PRC Defense Telephone Link to conduct a secure video conference,” the U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“Both sides agreed on the importance of maintaining open channels of communication between the two militaries,” the official added.
Officials said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has yet to speak with his Chinese counterpart, in part because there was a debate about which Chinese official was Austin’s counterpart.
Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that the United States welcomes competition and does not seek conflict with Beijing, but will speak up on issues such as maritime disputes in the South China Sea.
“China is going to eat our lunch? C’mon man,” Joe Biden said while he was campaigning for America’s presidency, ridiculing statements from Donald Trump. “They’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”
Particularly since the national election on Nov. 3, 2o2o, reports exposing the dangerous naivety of this statement have been descending in a deluge. And many of them suggest not only that Joe Biden knew better, but that his blindness to the threat from China is willful, rooted not in compassion but in compromise and corruption.
“All warfare is based on deception,” wrote famed Chinese general Sun Tzu. “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” It seems Sun’s modern Chinese disciples are carrying out his war stratagems with stunning success. Emerging facts are exposing realities that sound like conspiracy theories—realities about the deceptive activities of Communist China aimed at breaking its enemies’ resistance without fighting.
China’s ambition to dominate the globe is becoming clearer all the time. In many ways this has hardly been a secret. Its Belt and Road Initiative and its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank are designed to challenge and replace America’s central role in the world economy. Its “debt-trap diplomacy” has given it leverage over a string of nations across continents. Beijing is militarizing the South China Sea and seizing strategic choke points worldwide. Nations across Asia are nervously working to accommodate China as they recognize that it has supplanted the U.S. as the region’s dominant power.
Recent reports, however, expose China’s achievements in matching these overt actions with covert operations. They expose how members of the Chinese Communist Party have surreptitiously infiltrated foreign entities, working in academia, major corporations and governments around the world. They reveal Chinese spies seducing high-placed government officials with money and sex. They show American federal representatives using their entrusted power for political, personal and financial benefit. They show election interference and literal election hacking. And all this against the backdrop of a world-changing virus unleashed on the world from China.
That this nation would aggressively target the world’s dominant superpower should not surprise us. But the extent of its success, and the fact that America has not only allowed it but seems unconcerned, is appalling. In fact, viewed in the context of biblical prophecy, it is a potent symbol of nothing less than a historic global shift occurring before our eyes: the end of the Anglo-American era, and the beginning of a short, dark period that will mark the final years of the age of man.
