Joe Biden tried Wednesday night to calm things down with China. While tensions are high with Beijing after the United States shot down a Chinese balloon which they accused of spying, the American president assured that his country would “fully compete with China, but we are not looking for conflict “, during an interview broadcast on the PBS channel. The tenant of the White House especially considered that the affair of the ball had not suffered a blow to relations between the two superpowers.
Earlier in the day, its spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, had however accused China of having deployed throughout the world in recent years a “fleet of balloons intended for espionage operations”. These aircraft, “observed over countries on five continents”, “violated their sovereignty”, which prompted the United States to engage in “discussions with (their) allies and partners”.
A tackle against Xi Jinping
While playing appeasement, Joe Biden did not fail to tackle, on PBS, Xi Jinping. “Find me a single world leader ready to swap places with Xi Jinping… I can’t find one,” asserted the tenant of the White House. “This man has huge problems”, in particular “an economy that does not work very well”, he judged, noting however that the Chinese leader “also had a lot of potential”.
Noting also that Chinese support for Russia had been relatively muted, Joe Biden pointed out that, contrary to what “everyone assumed” at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing was not “fully” engaged. behind Moscow. A reservation, according to him, linked to Xi Jinping’s desire not to suffer the same fate as Russia, which has in particular been subject to harsh economic sanctions imposed by the West. “I called him this summer to tell him, ‘It’s not a threat, just an observation: look at what happened to Russia'”, also told the tenant of the White House. We now have to wait for Beijing’s reaction.