Biden Assumes Russia Feels ‘Squeezed’ by China

June 17, 2021 (EIRNS)—In comments yesterday to reporters before departing aboard Air Force One to return to Washington, President Joe Biden made the geopolitical assertion that Russia, President Putin, is likely feeling “squeezed” by China right now. Completely ignoring the fact that Russia is a great power, which maintains a strong, cooperative, and strategic relationship with China, Biden asserted that Russia is in a “very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China. They want desperately to remain a major power. ... They desperately want to be relevant.” But the problem is, he said in his earlier press conference,

“You got a multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is moving ahead, hell-bent on election, as they say, seeking to be the most powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful military in the world. You’re in a situation where your economy is struggling, you need to move it in a more aggressive way, in terms of growing it.”

So, from Putin’s standpoint, “I don’t think he’s looking for a Cold War with the United States.”

China’s semi-official Global Times responded to Biden with some choice editorial words today, accusing him of humiliating the Russian people and treating one of the world’s most important powers “as an idiot.” Biden argued that Russia doesn’t “want to be known, as some critics have pointed ... the ‘Upper Volta with nuclear weapons.’ It matters. And I found it matters to almost every world leader—no matter where they’re from—how they’re perceived, their standing in the world. It matters to them. It matters to them in terms of their support at home as well.”

Then Biden projected,

“I’m of the view that, in the last three to five years, the world has reached a fundamental inflection point about what it’s going to look like 10 years from now. ... And so each of the countries in—around the world, particularly those who had real power at one time or still do, are wondering: How do I maintain and sustain our leadership in the world? That’s what the United States is going through right now. How do we sustain us being the leading, the most powerful, and most democratic country in the world?”