President Joe Biden’s effort to build U.S. security alliances in China’s backyard is likely to reinforce the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s view that the United States is leading an all-out campaign of “containment, encirclement and suppression” of his country. And there is not much Xi can do about it.
To China, Biden’s campaign looks nothing short of a reprise of the Cold War, when the world was split into opposing blocs. In this view, China is being hemmed in by U.S. allies and partners, in a cordon stretching over the seas on China’s eastern coast from Japan to the Philippines, along its disputed Himalayan border with India, and even across the vast Pacific Ocean to a string of tiny, but strategic, island nations.
That pressure on China expanded Thursday when Biden hosted the leaders of Japan and the Philippines at the White House, marking the first trilateral summit among the countries. U.S. officials said the meeting was aimed at projecting a united front against China’s increasingly aggressive behavior against the Philippines in the South China Sea and against Japan in the East China Sea. Biden described the United States’ commitment to defense agreements with Japan and the Philippines as “ironclad.”