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(CNN) – The Trump administration is formulating a long-term plan to punish China on multiple fronts for the coronavirus pandemic, injecting a new spiteful element into a critical relationship that is already in a steep decline.
The effort coincides, but goes far beyond an election campaign strategy of blaming Beijing for distracting itself from President Donald Trump’s mistakes in predicting and managing the crisis, which has now killed more than 60,000 Americans.
Multiple sources within the administration say there is an appetite to use various tools, including sanctions, canceling America’s debt obligations and crafting new trade policies, to make China and everyone else clear where they feel the responsibility relapses.
“We have to make the economy work again, we have to be careful how we do this,” said an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“But we will find ways to show the Chinese that their actions are completely reprehensible.”
Meanwhile, the intelligence community is under enormous pressure from the administration, with senior officials pressing to find out if the virus escaped the public from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, two sources familiar with the frustrations said.
In an unprecedented move, the intelligence community released a statement saying it was increasing resources on the matter as it would in any crisis.
“The IC will continue to rigorously examine the emerging information and intelligence to determine if the outbreak started through contact with infected animals or was the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan,” the statement said.
CNN reported earlier this month that the government was investigating the theory that the virus originated in the laboratory but had not yet been able to corroborate it. Earlier this month, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the weight of evidence suggests that the virus was of natural origin.
The New York Times reported Thursday that officials were pressuring intelligence analysts to find information to support the idea.
“I think we will solve it,” said an administration official, when asked if the origin of the virus could ever be established.
The clash between the United States and China is brewing amid growing suspicions within the administration about China’s growing strategic challenge and fury that the virus destroyed an economy seen as Trump’s passport to a second term.
“I am very sure that the Chinese Communist Party will pay a price for what they did here, certainly from the United States,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week.
The construction confrontation occurs when both sides seek to exploit a geopolitical environment already fragmented and shaken by their rivalry that has been completely fragmented by the pandemic.
In the long run, it threatens to cause awkward decisions for America’s Asian allies. USA Who also wish not to antagonize the giant in their backyard. And the growing tension could have significant repercussions for the global economy as the US grows. USA It seeks to move away from supply chains dominated by China.
There are serious questions to be addressed about China’s transparency in the early days of the Wuhan outbreak and whether its autocratic system fostered an attempt to cover it up. The United States is not the only nation that wants answers in the midst of a pandemic that has devastated the global economy and has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
In response to mounting pressure, China has launched a propaganda effort to distract itself from its own guilt, including blaming US soldiers for importing the pathogen in comments that angered Trump.
Management size options
Officials say finding ways to punish China will be a delicate matter.
“We will have the right time,” Pompeo said Wednesday. In the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, China has the ability to counterattack the United States, making it “irresponsible” to drive too hard too soon, authorities say.
With the United States affected by a shortage of Chinese-made personal protective equipment, medical devices, biological medicines, and pharmaceuticals, it is vulnerable to short-term disruption to established supply chains amid a pandemic that has infected more than a million Americans.
Pompeo seemed to demonstrate this restriction last week when asked about new Chinese export controls that have prevented US medical supplies. USA Privately, United States officials are furious, but in public Pompeo used delicate language.
“The good news is that we have seen China provide those resources. Sometimes they are from American companies that are there in China, but we have been successful,” Pompeo said.
“We are counting on China to continue to fulfill its contractual and international obligations to provide us with that assistance and sell us those goods,” Pompeo said.
In the long run, especially if Trump wins reelection, the U.S. effort will likely treat offshore supply chains as national security priorities rather than simply economic issues.
“If we do not deal with this crisis, we will have failed this country and all future generations of Americans. It is clear,” Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro told CNN.
A tense turn in relations between the United States and China
The hardened stance towards China is consistent with Trump’s rejection of the principles of Sino-American ties that date back to the courtship of President Richard Nixon of the then-closed communist state in the early 1970s.
Trump says the process of introducing Beijing to the world economy in an effort to avoid a clash between the ruling power, the United States and China, the nascent, known as the Thucydides trap, has been a disaster.
He has argued that Washington has emboldened and enriched an enemy with nearly three times its population and that it has “raped” the American industry by fleeing manual labor abroad.
It was a message that electrified Trump supporters in the decaying US oxide belt. USA In 2016 and in which he trusts to describe his alleged Democratic opponent as a tool of the elite of foreign policy that appeases China in November.
“This is the natural way to go. It is the only way to go. It is practically the main theme of the campaign,” said an official familiar with the campaign’s China-focused messaging efforts.
The administration’s national security strategy, which was unveiled in 2017, also presents China as a competitor and revisionist power.
But, as is often the case, the administration’s hard line is undermined or tempered by the President’s personality and unorthodox approach to his work.
Trump’s overly personalized approach to world leaders and his fixation on preserving his friendship with Xi also directly contradict his diplomatic and political strategy.
“We are not happy with China,” Trump said Tuesday, but his remarks were undermined by multiple times he praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the pandemic earlier this year, apparently motivated in part by the desire to keep a trade between the United States and China. Okay, one of the few limited victories his administration is on the way.
A downside to Trump’s insistence on forging friendships with strong leaders is that he leaves national relations more susceptible to any fracture in personal ties.
Both Trump and Xi are the most aggressive nationalist leaders of their two nations in decades, and they are eager to flex personal power in a way that can cause volatile foreign relations.
And the President of the United States is not alone in facing internal incentives to initiate the confrontation. While the leaders of the Communist Party of China enjoy absolute power, they are susceptible to internal political pressure, especially when they try, like Trump, to deviate from their own virus mistakes.
In its own disinformation offensive, Beijing blamed US troops for bringing the new coronavirus to China. On Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang accused “American politicians” of telling blatant lies about the pandemic.
“They have only one goal: to try to shirk responsibility for their own epidemic and prevent and control measures and divert public attention,” Geng said.
Heated rhetoric about the virus threatens to trigger a chain reaction of mistrust and tension that worsens tensions between the United States and China exacerbated by Trump’s trade war, territorial hot spots, including the South China Sea and the global campaign of the United States against the communications giant of Huawei.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned CNN last week that the building’s heat was dangerous.
“Frankly, each side is pressing the hypernationalism buttons of the other and we are not getting anywhere,” he said.
The United States / China freezes
Relations with China have plummeted in recent years, amid mounting tensions over trade, Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, and its emergence to strategically challenge the United States.
Trump’s decision to freeze funding for the World Health Organization, based on claims that it was too solicitous on the part of China, could also further undermine the influence of the United States, especially in Asia, where the U.S. withdrawal of the Trans-Pacific Association was a great victory for Beijing.
China has a history of exaggerating its hand and propelling regional powers back into the US orbit. The Obama administration exploited such a misstep with its Asia pivot.
Recent flaws, such as faulty personal protective equipment shipped to Europe, have tarnished Beijing’s coronavirus diplomacy. The racist treatment of Africans in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has had a similar effect. And despite its efforts to change history, China can never escape the notoriety of being the incubator for the disease, and claims that its autocratic system was responsible for critical delays in fighting the virus.
So there is fertile ground for the Trump administration to exploit in its effort to punish China. But his own overbearing attitude in the Trump years and a poorly managed effort to combat Covid-19 challenge the credibility of his efforts.
“There really is no one who does not want to see China blamed for the attempted political cover-up, which slowed down international consciousness and allowed the virus to spread. There is resentment across the world,” said Danny Russel, an Obama era. State Department official in charge of Asia Pacific policy. “But I think it would be difficult to find a political leader in Asia or Europe who does not believe that this push against China by the Trump administration is an entirely political move. They are trying to deflect the blame for the administration’s catastrophic incompetence.”
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