US President Donald Trump at a White House press briefing on November 14. Photo / AP
OPINION:
It was February 2012 in the clapboard Naval Observatory residence that houses the US Vice President, and Joe Biden was tucked up in the library with a special guest.
His companion was the soon-to-be president of China, Xi Jinping, paying a special visit to the US before taking over in Beijing, and he was asking all sorts of questions.
He wanted to know, Biden recounted, why particular US congressmen had acted the way they did.
The US Vice President was impressed. He saw nothing to contradict his optimistic vision, expressed a few months before, that the US and China "have incentives to work together".
It took time, but eventually, the scales fell from our eyes. US policy under President Barack Obama drifted from the smug assumption China would become democratic to what Biden called "honest and direct" discussions with Beijing over tensions, backed up by no action whatsoever.
It took the iconoclasm of Donald Trump, the Sinophobe, the protectionist, the brute who had never believed a word of this pleasantness, to shake Washington DC out of its stupor.
Xi might talk about "win-win co-operation", but it was pure sophistry. Behind the rhetoric, Beijing was simply shifting from a tactic of currency manipulation and product dumping to one of mass technology theft and the complete politicisation of trade.
Or, as Trump put it: "We keep losing."
Of all the strategic calls Biden has to make, how to handle China is the biggest. He could slink softly back to the old ways, paying lip service to the sanctity of broken bodies like the UN and claiming hollow victories based on promises, like Beijing's carbon neutrality pledge.
Or he could build on Trump's most important foreign policy contribution and try to turn the US's China scepticism into a genuine, functioning alliance of the free world.
The greatest failure of Trump's foreign policy, after all, was not that his insights were all wrong. Many of them were correct, despite the chaotic terms in which he expressed them.
His main failing was the contempt he showed towards recruiting international allies to his cause.
Fighting back against China's trade war, for example, is an extremely expensive business. The US economy accounts for a quarter of global GDP, but the US plus the rest of the democratic world accounts for half. That's an alliance worth building.
Instead, as the former Foreign Office China expert Matthew Henderson puts it, Beijing is "picking us off one by one".
Last week, China announced a complete trade embargo of Australia. This was not just a ban on Australian beef, or a tax on its wine. It was a total ban on any Aussie product. Overnight, a market buying one third of the country's export base was closed.
What had Canberra done to merit this treatment? After excessive political meddling by Beijing, it had introduced laws banning foreign interference and, in April, had the temerity to suggest the World Health Organisation conduct an investigation into the causes of the Covid-19 outbreak. For such insolence, it had to be punished.
In Europe, the Chinese Communist Party continues to find pressure points to keep policy soft.
In the UK, it inserts censorship and military researchers into our universities, while prodding its many British establishment allies to welcome risky investments by Chinese tech and nuclear energy giants.
In Germany, it is still fighting the 5G battle and pushing local corporates like Volkswagen to lobby for business in Xinjiang, the province where slave labour and detention camps are widespread.
In east and southern Europe, it continues to finance critical infrastructure that will become conduits for the party's political goals.
The post-World War II international order, meanwhile, has been neutralised. The UN's Human Rights Council, the body we rely upon to tell us "officially" when a genocide is occurring, will from January count China as one of its members.
This is the same government that has incarcerated more than one million Uighurs in hellish "re-education" camps, where it tortures, abuses and sterilises them.
The WHO has damaged its credibility irreparably by prevaricating over China's Covid cover-up and the World Trade Organisation, founded to promote free trade, is no longer fully functioning after presiding over two decades of fundamental rule-breaking by the world's second biggest economy.
For all that Trump could diagnose the problem, however, he was not able to sell the solution.
Instead of wresting back control of the UN and WHO, he cut off funding or pulled out in a huff. Instead of establishing new forums for US allies, he courted no one and fought everyone at once.
He made it seem as if there was little to gain from backing the US on China. He did not point out that both American and German companies have suffered from Beijing's plundering of intellectual property and could respond in concert.
Only recently did he indicate that the US is a reliable partner militarily, by expanding arms sales to Taiwan and including Australia in the Malabar military exercises.
If Biden really believes in the tougher rhetoric he wheeled out on China during the election – and assuming the allegations about his son's Chinese business interests fail to sway his policy – he will build on Trump's legacy rather than undo it.
He will pull every lever to get back the UN, the WHO and the WTO, or set up alternatives. He will make the case, alongside Canberra, for legislation to protect democracies from the CCP's dizzying array of foreign interference operations.
He will expand US investigators' remit so they regularly send intelligence on the CCP's global academic corruption, IP theft and censorship activities to America's allies, embarrassing our governments into action.
He will make clear the US's commitment to protecting Taiwan. He will further build up the US's technological edge where it still exists, like in semiconductors, and offer strong backing for initiatives such as the UK's democratic alliance to build 5G capacity.
He will offer not just rhetoric on human rights and climate change, but meaningful sticks and carrots.
We will soon know, from the kinds of appointments a Biden administration makes, whether we can finally welcome back an era of US leadership, following the Obama era of empty talk and the Trump regime of angry talk.
We don't need rage or promises. We need moral force and consequences. If the US can't stand for both, the American era is over.
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