OPINION:
China poses the greatest challenge to American global leadership and liberty but judging by key appointments, President-elect Biden appears clueless to Beijing’s strategies.
China is building cyberwar capabilities that could cripple U.S. electric utilities and satellite navigation systems and render ineffective and quickly defeat the U.S. fleet in the Pacific. And Beijing has recruited Wall Street banks as witless allies with the jingle of the guinea.
Domestic economic strength and a just society are preconditions for the military and diplomatic resources needed to counter China, but Mr. Biden’s ‘wokeism’ and nostalgia for bygone multilateralism, manufacturing and strong unions are delusional.
Global economics has become three-dimensional chess. China and the United States compete in artificial intelligence, microprocessors and the like to create wealth, weapons and jobs. Overlaying all that, the sheer size and influence that globalization, economies of scale and network effects offer high tech behemoths, like Ant and Facebook, challenge the sovereign authority of both Beijing and Washington.
Emerging digital empires are not employing a lot of factory workers for unions to organize or creating glass tower bureaucracies that could offer more opportunities for women and minorities without STEM degrees or equivalent technical training.
Through Machiavellian design, President Xi Jinping is at once subsidizing and subordinating Chinese high tech to support its surveillance state and assist Beijing’s ambitions to replace the liberal political and economic international order with a soft adherence to its autocratic, state-directed capitalism.
By contrast, American politicians and regulators appear bent on neutering American power by breaking up Big Tech. That would leave America helpless to match Chinese global hardware manufactures like Huawei and software wonders like WeChat, and reduce America to a technological vassal state in an emerging Chinese Empire.
If Mr. Biden really wants to help women and minorities, fire up growth so that new opportunities for them don’t displace white males and fan an even more virulent Trumpian populism and meet the challenge China, he should aim to double the number of capable students enrolled in university STEM disciplines and technology apprenticeships. And support incubators for new high-tech competitors to challenge Facebook and Google instead of breaking them up.
The pledge of 30 CEOs from big companies, including IBM and Merck, to create one million jobs for Black Americans is laudable but naïve without recognition that many high school graduates are poorly prepared for the jobs the digital economy is creating.
President Trump fell victim to the same trap as his predecessors. He let Beijing lure him into three years of negotiations instead of acting quickly with harsh measures that would disrupt the Chinese economy and force results.
Ultimately, his tariffs were not enough and Beijing undercut U.S. domestic support by promising Wall Street financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Blackrock better treatment in the Middle Kingdom. The Phase One Trade Deal to open Chinese markets for American products is a failure, other than for farm goods and acquisitive U.S. banks.
All the insidious tools of Chinese mercantilism — forced technology transfer and patent theft, export subsidies and markets closed to U.S. exports outside of agriculture — remain in place. Mr. Biden can hardly expect to combat those by embracing multilateralism in the WTO with European cooperation.
National Security Adviser John Ratcliffe reports Beijing is cultivating members of Congress, whose constituents’ employment may be dependent on Chinese investments, just as it bribed Wall Street financiers during Mr. Trump’s trade war. And former Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying is preaching to American intellectuals and media that cooperative competition is now possible between the United States and China.
Neither Mr. Biden nor his key economic and defense appointments appear to have a sophisticated sensitivity to all this.
To head the National Economic Council, Mr. Biden has chosen an executive from an institution at the center of Wall Street’s sellout — Blackrock’s head of sustainable investing Brian Deese. For U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai is an outstanding trade lawyer but has not held a high-level policy position or demonstrated much systemic vision.
At Treasury, Janet Yellen, a labor economist who proved singularly uninventive at the Fed, will reflexively support free trade and focus on Keynesian solutions in a post-Keynesian world. At Defense, Gen. Lloyd Austin offers great experience fighting land wars in the Middle East, but the paramount security challenges are cyber and naval in the Pacific.
Each is highly accomplished and in combination address Mr. Biden’s obsession with race and gender balance, but every one is the wrong peg in the wrong hole.
• Peter Morici, @pmorici1,is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
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