OPINION:
It has recently been revealed that China has embedded an anti-U.S. espionage facility in the nearby island nation of Cuba. From that post, China can monitor and potentially hack some of our most sensitive military bases, our sophisticated space efforts in the Southeast, and monitor U.S. shipping — commercial and military — in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
As usual, President Biden’s disinformation crew went into hyperdrive to deny this. When confronted with reality, the administration blamed former President Donald Trump.
Why is it that Democrats always screw up foreign policy? From Mr. Biden’s approval of Iran’s reinvigoration of its nuclear program to the embarrassing botched retreat from Afghanistan to our growing intervention in the war in Ukraine, Mr. Biden has failed to protect U.S. national interests.
But the president gets an A-plus from China’s dictator for life, Xi Jinping, for his feckless approach to the ever-growing Chinese threat to the United States.
It isn’t enough that he has removed Mr. Trump’s tariffs and sanctions. He is allowing China to get a surveillance foothold 100 miles off the U.S. coast.
Increased bellicosity and aggressive maneuvers from Mr. Xi include the recent slow-moving balloon espionage activity that the administration “monitored” as it took more than a week to traverse from Alaska to South Carolina. The balloon was finally shot down, and we have not recovered any of the equipment on the balloon that was spying on America.
China has also opened police substations in North America and Europe to surveil Chinese citizens living there. One of those stations was in New York City. China has more than 50 foreign police stations in 30 different nations.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has facilitated the nation’s growing influence in developing nations all over the world. Sri Lanka is controlled by Beijing after having been bought through the creation of a huge port infrastructure project.
China is aggressively taking control of the world’s critical minerals, focusing on Africa.
China continues to expand its naval and military presence in the South China Sea, where it will have control of the strategic lines of communication and shipping that fuel U.S. allies such as South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Control of the South China Sea will also allow China access to the minerals and resources that are abundant there.
In the meantime, because of the persistent demonstration of weakness and incoherence in the Biden administration’s foreign policy, the bad guys around the world have been able to step up their game. Mr. Xi poked and prodded early in Mr. Biden’s presidency to see just how weak he would be.
Pretty weak, it turns out.
The Afghan debacle proved to the world that Mr. Biden and the current Pentagon leadership are rudderless.
Without the embarrassment of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, there would have been no Russian invasion of Ukraine. When Mr. Trump was in office, he forcefully warned Vladimir Putin to back away from his irredentist intentions toward Ukraine. Mr. Biden’s weakness, demonstrated in Afghanistan, emboldened Mr. Putin.
The Russia-Ukraine war has driven a big wedge between the West and Russia. It has also driven Russia into the arms of China. And that relationship is dangerous to the stability of the world.
While the administration is wringing its hands over the growth of China and the aggressive acts of Russia, the Biden team further demonstrates its lack of gravitas by sending billions of U.S. dollars to both of those adversarial nations for gender equality, cat experiments and more Wuhan lab research.
This leads us back to the problem of China bailing out Cuba with a couple of billion dollars to buy a spot on that island from which to spy on the United States.
Some claim that initial Chinese espionage on the U.S. from Cuba originated in 2019, but the extent of that operation has not been reported. Further, the milieu of 2019 was vastly different from the situation today.
In 2019, our president was strong and practiced a policy of strategic confusion that kept our adversaries off balance. The Biden White House’s policy is nonexistent and has allowed a new boldness in our enemies.
And unlike the Kennedy administration that aggressively and successfully confronted the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, we cannot rely on the feckless Biden administration to deter Chinese espionage a mere 90 miles from our shores.
• Congressman Andy Biggs represents Arizona’s 5th Congressional District and serves on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.
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