Biden vs. Trump on handling China and Russia

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It has only taken 60 days to see the difference in the Biden Administration's relations with China and Russia versus the Trump Administration's relations.

For four years, we heard that President Trump was too nice to dictators, referring in particular to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.  When Trump met the leaders he was cordial and friendly and did nothing to embarrass them publicly.  This was met with great criticism and, on at least one occasion, it was justified such as President Trump's fumbling of a question about Russia's interference in the 2016 election.  

On the other hand, while President Trump was cordial to these leaders, the Trump Administration did things the Obama Administration didn't to curtail Russian expansionism.  The Obama Administration refused to provide military weapons to the Ukraine to help them fight the Russians invading their country, the Trump Administration delivered that aid.  Where President Obama drew a line in the sand when asked whether the US would respond if Syria used chemical weapons on their rebel forces and then backed down, President Trump let US cruise missiles do the talking when the Russia's allies in Syria used chemical weapons.

Now we can compare Trump's approach of hard discussions in private while not challenging or embarrassing his counterparts in public to Biden's opposite approach of smearing the Chinese and Russians publicly and giving those countries and opportunity to smear the US right back.  We know there are people around the world, and in the US, who will agree with the Chinese and the Russians and question what right the US has to say those things about other countries.  It undermines our credibility in the court of public opinion.

The outcome of Trump's approach - speak nicely and apply a big tariff - resulted in some trade agreements that, were it not for the Coronavirus, could have had some very positive results for the US.  Being generous, we'll have to say the final outcome of President Biden's approach remains to be seen but the results of the Alaska meeting was a big zero. 

As for Russia, that exchange ended with Vladimir Putin mocking President Biden.  The rest of that story will be written over time, but it is a less than inspiring beginning to the process.

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