President-elect Joe Biden tours the Plymouth Area Renewable Energy Initiative in Plymouth, NH in 2019. Credit: Christopher Dilts/Biden for President, Creative Commons
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA — Can U.S. President-elect Joe Biden walk and chew gum at the same time? If walking is managing domestic pressures, and chewing gum is pursuing a balanced foreign policy, the answer is far from clear. The tension between bipartisan calls to contain China and the imperative of cooperating with Chinese President Xi Jinping on climate change is a case in point.
Biden plans to marshal a broad alliance of democratically-minded Pacific and European countries to check China’s expansionism. In Xi’s view, however, China may be able to use the promise to cooperate on climate change as a source of leverage with which to thwart Biden’s containment strategy, especially in light of Republican opposition to climate action and hostility toward China.
The stakes could not be higher. Humanity faces a truly calamitous future if the world’s two largest economies — and largest CO2 emitters — don’t commit to cooperating to address climate change. And yet the grim
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In public, Chinese diplomats and climate negotiators deny that they see any link between climate change and geopolitics. But there is a deeply cynical consensus within China’s academic and policy communities that climate change creates geopolitical opportunities that China can exploit — and must exploit before its rivals do. Greenland was the proof of concept for this strategy. And it caught the U.S. flat-footed.
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