Why Biden's immigration plan may be risky for Democrats

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is confronting the political risk that comes with grand ambition. As one of his first acts, Biden offered a sweeping immigration overhaul last week that would provide a path to U.S. citizenship for the estimated 11 million people who are in the United States illegally. It would also codify provisions wiping out some of President Donald Trump's signature hard-line policies, including trying to end existing, protected legal status for many immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and crackdowns on asylum rules.

(1 of 6) President Joe Biden waits to sign his first executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. As one of his first acts, Biden offered a sweeping immigration overhaul that would provide a path to U.S. citizenship for the estimated 11 million people who are in the United States illegally. It would also codify provisions wiping out some of President Donald Trump's signature hard-line policies, including trying to end existing, protected legal status for many immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and crackdowns on asylum rules. 

January 24, 2021

It's precisely the type of measure that many Latino activists have longed for, particularly after the tough approach of the Trump era. But it must compete with Biden's other marquee legislative goals, including a $1.9 trillion plan to combat the coronavirus, an infrastructure package that promotes green energy initiatives and a “public option” to expand health insurance.

In the best of circumstances, enacting such a broad range of legislation would be difficult. But in a narrowly divided Congress, it could be impossible. And that has Latinos, the nation's fastest growing voting bloc, worried that Biden and congressional leaders could cut deals that weaken the finished product too much — or fail to pass anything at all.

“This cannot be a situation where simply a visionary bill — a message bill — gets sent to Congress and nothing happens with it,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for low-income immigrants. “There’s an expectation that they will deliver and that there is a mandate now for Biden to be unapologetically pro-immigrant and have a political imperative to do so, and the Democrats do as well.”

If Latinos ultimately feel betrayed, the political consequences for Democrats could be long-lasting. The 2020 election provided several warning signs that, despite Democratic efforts to build a multiracial coalition, Latino support could be at risk.

Biden already was viewed skeptically by some Latino activists for his association with former President Barack Obama, who was called the “deporter in chief” for the record number of immigrants who were removed from the country during his administration. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont defeated Biden in last year's Nevada caucuses and California primary, which served as early barometers of the Latino vote.

In his race against Trump, Biden won the support of 63% of Latino voters compared with Trump's 35%, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide. But Trump narrowed the margin somewhat in some swing states such as Nevada and also got a bump from Latino men, 39% of whom backed him compared with 33% of Latino women.

Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1996 to carry Arizona, in part because of strong grassroots backing from Mexican American groups opposed to strict GOP immigration policies going back decades. But he lost Florida by underperforming in its largest Hispanic county, Miami-Dade, where the Trump campaign's anti-socialism message resonated with Cuban- and some Venezuelan Americans.

Biden also fell short in Texas even though running mate Kamala Harris devoted valuable, late campaign time there. The ticket lost some sparsely populated but heavily Mexican American counties along the Mexican border, where law enforcement agencies are major employers and the GOP's zero-tolerance immigration policy resonated.

There were more warning signs for House Democrats, who lost four California seats and two in South Florida while failing to pick up any in Texas. Booming Hispanic populations reflected in new U.S. census figures may see Texas and Florida gain congressional districts before 2022's midterm elections, which could make correcting the problem all the more pressing for Democrats.

The urgency isn't lost on Biden. He privately spent months telling immigration advocates that major overhauls would be at the top of his to-do list. As vice president, he watched while the Obama administration used larger congressional majorities to speed passage of a financial crisis stimulus bill and its signature health care law while letting an immigration overhaul languish.

“It means so much to us to have a new president propose bold, visionary immigration reform on Day 1. Not Day 2. Not Day 3. Not a year later,” said New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, his chamber's lead sponsor of the Biden package.

Menendez was part of a bipartisan immigration plan championed by the “Gang of Eight” senators that collapsed in 2013. Obama then resorted to executive action to offer legal status to millions of young immigrants. President George W. Bush also pushed an immigration package — with an eye toward boosting Latino support for Republicans before the 2008 election — only to see it fail in Congress.

Menendez acknowledged that the latest bill will have to find at least 10 Republican senators' support to clear the 60-vote hurdle to reach the floor, and that he's “under no illusions" how difficult that will be.

Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a moderate Republican from Florida, said Biden may find some GOP support but probably will have to settle for far less than what’s in his original proposal. “Many Republicans are worried about primary challenges,” Curbelo said, adding that Trump and his supporters’ championing of immigration crackdowns means there's “political peril there for Republicans.”

But he also said Democrats could alienate some of their own base by appearing to prioritize the needs of people in the country illegally over those of struggling U.S. citizens and thus “appearing to overreach from the perspective of swing and independent voters.”

Indeed, Democrats haven't always universally lined up behind an immigration overhaul, arguing that it could lead to an influx of cheap labor that hurts U.S. workers. Some of the party's senators joined Republicans in sinking Bush's bill.

Still, Latinos haven't forgotten past immigration failures and have often to blamed Democrats more than Republicans. Chuck Roca, head of Nuestro PAC, which spent $4 million on ads boosting Biden in Arizona, said that while Hispanics have traditionally tended to support Democrats, he has begun to see trends in the past decade where more are registering as independent or without party affiliation. Those voters can still be won back, he said, but only if Latinos see real change on major issues such as immigration “even if it's piecemeal.”

“They have to get something done if they want to start to turn around the loss of Latino voters,” said Rocha, who headed Latino voter outreach for Sanders’ presidential campaign. “They have to do everything in their power now to get Latinos back.”

Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.

The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine

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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." ~ William Shakespeare

By Catherine Austin Fitts

I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. I am not a biotech engineer. I am not an attorney. However, I read, listen, appreciate, and try to understand those who are.

I was an investment banker until politics made it impossible to continue to practice my art. I was trained as a portfolio strategist—so I map my world by watching the financial flows and allocation of resources. I was also trained as a conspiracy generator and foot soldier—conspiracies being the fundamental organizing principle of how things get done in our world. It was not until I left the establishment that I learned that those not in the club had been trained to disparage and avoid conspiracies—a clever trick that sabotages their efforts to gather power.

My response to living at war with agencies of the U.S. government for a time was to answer the questions of people who were sufficiently courageous and curious to solicit my opinion. Over many years, that response transformed into two businesses. One was The Solari Report, which continues to grow as a global intelligence network—we seek to help each other understand and navigate what is happening and contribute to positive outcomes. The other was serving as an investment advisor to individuals and families through Solari Investment Advisory Services. After ten years, I converted that business to doing an ESG screen. What those who use it want—that is not otherwise readily available in the retail market—is a screen that reflects knowledge of financial and political corruption. Tracking the metastasizing corruption is an art, not a science.

When you help a family with their finances, it is imperative to understand all their risk issues. Their financial success depends on successful mitigation of all the risks—whether financial or non-financial—that they encounter in their daily lives. Non-financial risks can have a major impact on the allocation of family resources, including attention, time, assets, and money.

Many of my clients and their children had been devastated and drained by health care failures and corruption—and the most common catalyst for this devastation was vaccine death and injury. After their lengthy and horrendous experiences with the health care establishment, they would invariably ask, "If the corruption is this bad in medicine, food, and health, what is going on in the financial world?" Chilled by the thought, they would search out a financial professional who was schooled in U.S. government and financial corruption. And they would find me.

The result of this flow of bright, educated people blessed with the resources to pay for my time was that, for ten years, I got quite an education about the disabilities and death inflicted on our children by what I now call "the great poisoning." I had the opportunity to repeatedly price out the human damage to all concerned—not just the affected children but their parents, siblings, and future generations—mapping the financial costs of vaccine injury again and again and again. These cases were not as unusual as you might expect. Studies indicate that 54% of American children have one or more chronic diseases. Doctors who I trust tell me that number is actually much higher, as many children and their families cannot afford the care and testing necessary to properly diagnose what ails them.

One of the mothers featured in VAXXED—a must-watch documentary for any awake citizen, as is its sequel VAXXED II: The People's Truth—estimated that a heavily autistic child would cost present value $5MM to raise and care for over a lifetime. When my clients who were grandparents insisted that they would not interfere with their children's vaccine choices because it was "none of their business," I would say, "Really? Who has the $5MM? You or your kids? When your kids need the $5MM to raise their vaccine-injured child, are you going to refuse them? You are the banker, and it is your money that is at risk here, so it is your business. Do you want to spend that $5MM on growing a strong family through the generations or on managing a disabled child who did not have to be disabled?" Often, that $5MM in expenditures also translates into divorce, depression, and lost opportunities for siblings.

My clients helped me find the best resources—books, documentaries, articles—on vaccines. You will find many of them linked or reviewed at The Solari Report, including in our Library.

Of all the questions that I had, the one that I spent the most time researching and thinking about was why. Why was the medical establishment intentionally poisoning generations of children? Many of the writers who researched and wrote about vaccine injury and death assumed it was an aberration—resulting from the orthodoxy of a medical establishment that could not face or deal with its mistakes and liabilities. That never made sense to me. Writings by Forrest Maready, Jon Rappoport, Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Arthur Firstenberg have helped me understand the role of vaccines in the con man trick of saving money for insurance companies and the legally liable.

Here is one example of how the trick may play out. A toxin creates a disease. The toxin might be pesticides or industrial pollution or wireless technology radiation. The toxin damages millions of people and their communities. Companies or their insurance provider may be liable for civil or criminal violations. Then a virus is blamed. A "cure" is found in a "vaccine." The pesticide or other toxic exposure is halted just as the vaccine is introduced, and presto, the sickness goes away. The vaccine is declared a success, and the inventor is declared a hero. A potential financial catastrophe has been converted to a profit, including for investors and pension funds. As a portfolio strategist, I admit it has been a brilliant trick and likely has protected the insurance industry from the bankrupting losses it would experience if it had to fairly compensate the people and families destroyed.

Thanks to the work of Robert Kennedy and Mary Holland of Children's Health Defense, I now understand the enormous profits generated by so-called "vaccines" subsequent to the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program—a federal no-fault mechanism for compensating vaccine-related injuries or deaths by establishing a claim procedure involving the United States Court of Federal Claims and special masters. Call a drug or biotech cocktail a "vaccine," and pharmaceutical and biotech companies are free from any liabilities—the taxpayer pays. Unfortunately, this system has become an open invitation to make billions from "injectibles," particularly where government regulations and laws can be used to create a guaranteed market through mandates. As government agencies and legislators as well as the corporate media have developed various schemes to participate in the billions of profits, significant conflicts of interest have resulted.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA or the PREP Act) became law in 2005, adding to corporate freedoms from liability. The Act "is a controversial tort liability shield intended to protect vaccine manufacturers from financial risk in the event of a declared public health emergency. The act specifically affords to drug makers immunity from potential financial liability for clinical trials of . . . vaccine at the discretion of the Executive branch of government. PREPA strengthens and consolidates the oversight of litigation against pharmaceutical companies under the purview of the secretary of Health and Human Services." (~ Wikipedia)

Over time, this has evolved to the engineering of epidemics—the medical version of false flags. In theory, these can be "psyops" or events engineered with chemical warfare, biowarfare, or wireless technology. If this sounds strange, dive into all the writings of the "Targeted Individuals."

I learned about this first-hand when I was litigating with the Department of Justice and was experiencing significant physical harassment. I tried to hire several security firms; they would check my references and then decline the work, saying it was too dangerous. The last one took pity and warned me not to worry about electronic weaponry, letting me know that my main problem would be low-grade biowarfare. This biowarfare expert predicted that the opposing team would drill holes in the wall of my house and inject the "invisible enemy." Sure enough, that is exactly what happened. I sold my house and left town. That journey began a long process of learning how poisoning and nonlethal weapons are used—whether to move people out of rent-controlled apartments, sicken the elderly to move them to more expensive government-subsidized housing, gangstalk political or business targets, or weaken or kill litigants—and the list goes on. Poisoning turned out to be a much more common tactic in the game of political and economic warfare in America than I had previously understood.

After I finished my litigation, I spent several years detoxing from heavy metal toxicity—including from lead, arsenic, and aluminum. As I drove around America, I realized it was not just me. Americans increasingly looked like a people struggling with high loads of heavy metals toxicity. In the process of significantly decreasing my unusually high levels of heavy metals, I learned what a difference the toxic load had made to my outlook, my energy, and my ability to handle complex information.

This brings me to the question of what exactly a vaccine is and what exactly is in the concoctions being injected into people today as well as the witches' brews currently under development.

In 2017, Italian researchers reviewed the ingredients of 44 types of so-called "vaccines." They discovered heavy metal debris and biological contamination in every human vaccine they tested. The researchers stated, "The quantity of foreign bodies detected and, in some cases, their unusual chemical compositions baffled us." They then drew the obvious conclusion, namely, that because the micro- and nanocontaminants were "neither biocompatible nor biodegradable," they were "biopersistent" and could cause inflammatory effects right away—or later (http://medcraveonline.com/IJVV/IJVV-04-00072.pdf)

Aborted fetal tissue, animal tissue, aluminum, mercury, genetically altered materials—and what else?

Whatever the ingredients of vaccines have been to date, nothing is more bizarre and unsettling than the proposals of what might be included in them in the future. Strategies—already well-funded and well on the way—include brain-machine interface nanotechnology, digital identity tracking devices, and technology with an expiration date that can be managed and turned off remotely. One report indicates that the Danish government and U.S. Navy had been paying a tech company in Denmark to make an injectible chip that would be compatible with one of the leading cryptocurrencies.

I was recently reading Mary Holland's excellent 2012 review of U.S. vaccine court decisions ("Compulsory vaccination, the Constitution, and the hepatitis B mandate for infants and young children," Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics) and I froze and thought, "Why are we calling the injectibles that Bill Gates and his colleagues are promoting 'vaccines'? Are they really vaccines?"

Most people are familiar with how Bill Gates made and kept his fortune. He acquired an operating system that was loaded into your computer. It was widely rumored that the U.S. intelligence agencies had a back door. The simultaneous and sudden explosion of computer viruses then made it necessary to regularly update your operating system, allowing Gates and his associates to regularly add whatever they wanted into your software. One of my more knowledgeable software developers once said to me in the 1990s—when Microsoft really took off—"Microsoft makes really sh***y software." But of course, the software was not really their business. Their business was accessing and aggregating all of your data. Surveillance capitalism was underway.

The Department of Justice launched an antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998, just as the $21 trillion started to disappear from the U.S. government—no doubt with the help of specially designed software and IT systems. During the settlement negotiations that permitted Gates to keep his fortune, he started the Gates Foundation and his new philanthropy career. I laughed the other day when my tweet of one of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s articles from Children's Health Defense—describing the gruesome technology Gates is hoping to roll out through "injectibles"—inspired a response: "Well, I guess he is finally fulfilling his side of his antitrust settlement."

If you look at what is being created and proposed in the way of injectibles, it looks to me like these technological developments are organized around several potential goals.

The first and most important goal is the replacement of the existing U.S. dollar currency system used by the general population with a digital transaction system that can be combined with digital identification and tracking. The goal is to end currencies as we know them and replace them with an embedded credit card system that can be integrated with various forms of control, potentially including mind control. "De-dollarization" is threatening the dollar global reserve system. The M1 and M2 money supply have increased in the double digits over the last year as a result of a new round of quantitative easing by the Fed. The reason we have not entered into hyperinflation is because of the dramatic drop in money velocity occasioned by converting Covid-19 into an engineered shutdown of significant economic activity and the bankrupting of millions of small and medium-sized businesses. The managers of the dollar system are under urgent pressure to use new technology to centralize economic flows and preserve their control of the financial system.

Just as Gates installed an operating system in our computers, now the vision is to install an operating system in our bodies and use "viruses" to mandate an initial installation followed by regular updates.

Now I appreciate why Gates and his colleagues want to call these technologies "vaccines." If they can persuade the body politic that injectible credit cards or injectible surveillance trackers or injectable brain-machine interface nanotechnologies are "vaccines," then they can enjoy the protection of a century or more of legal decisions and laws that support their efforts to mandate what they want to do. As well, they can insist that U.S. taxpayers fund, through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the damages for which they would otherwise be liable as a result of their experiments—and violations of the Nuremberg Code and numerous civil and criminal laws—on the general population. The scheme is quite clever. Get the general population to go along with defining their new injectible high-tech concoctions as "vaccines," and they can slip them right into the vaccine pipeline. No need to worry about the disease and death that will result from something this unnatural delivered this quickly. The freedom from liability guaranteed by the PREP Act through the declaration of an emergency—and the ability to keep the emergency going through contact tracing—can protect them from liability for thousands if not millions of deaths and disabilities likely to follow such human experimentation. Ideally, they can just blame the deaths on a virus.

A colleague once told me how Webster's Dictionary came about. Webster said that the way the evildoers would change the Constitution was not by amending it but by changing the definitions—a legal sneak attack.

I believe that Gates and the pharma and biotech industries are literally reaching to create a global control grid by installing digital interface components and hooking us up to Microsoft's new $10 billion JEDI cloud at the Department of Defense as well as Amazon's multibillion cloud contract for the CIA that is shared with all U.S. intelligence agencies. Why do you think President Trump has the military organizing to stockpile syringes for vaccines? It is likely because the military is installing the roaming operating system for integration into their cloud. Remember—the winner in the AI superpower race is the AI system with access to the most data. Accessing your body and my body on a 24/7 basis generates a lot of data. If the Chinese do it, the Americans will want to do it, too. In fact, the rollout of human "operating systems" may be one of the reasons why the competition around Huawei and 5G telecommunications has become so fractious. As Frank Clegg, former President of Microsoft Canada has warned us, 5G was developed by the Israelis for crowd control.

In the face of global "de-dollarization," this is how the dollar syndicate can assert the central control it needs to maintain and extend its global reserve currency financial power. This includes protecting its leadership from the civil and criminal liability related to explosive levels of financial and health care fraud in recent decades.

Which brings me back to you and me. Why are we calling these formulations "vaccines"? If I understand the history of case law, vaccines, in legal terms, are medicine. Intentional heavy metal poisoning is not medicine. Injectible surveillance components are not medicine. Injectible credit cards are not medicine. An injectible brain-machine interface is not a medicine. Legal and financial immunity for insurance companies does not create human immunity from disease.

We need to stop allowing these concoctions to be referred to by a word that the courts and the general population define and treat as medicine and protect from legal and financial liability.

The perpetrators of this fraud are trying a very neat trick—one that will help them go much faster and cancel out a lot of risk—at our expense. I understand why they are doing it.

What I don't understand is why we are helping them. Why are we acquiescing in calling these bizarre and deeply dangerous concoctions "vaccines"? Whatever they are, they are not medicine.

So, what shall our naming convention be? What name shall we give to the relevant poisons, neurologically damaging metals, and digital shackles?

Whatever we call them, I know one thing. THEY ARE NOT MEDICINE, WHICH MEANS THEY SURE ARE NOT VACCINES.

View the French Translation: The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine (PDF).

View the German Translation: The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine (PDF).

Solari Report Interviews:
Central Bank Stimulus: Quantitative Easing 5.0 with John Titus
Deep State Tactics 101 Part III

Solari Special Reports:
VAXXED II: The People’s Truth with Polly Tommey
Special Solari Report: Vaccine Mandates with Mary Holland, J.D

View the French Translation: The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine (PDF).

French Translation The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine La fraude à l’injection : pourquoi ceci n’est pas un vaccin.

View the German Translation: The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine (PDF).

German Translation The Injection Fraud – It’s Not a Vaccine Die injizierte Täuschung: Es ist kein Vakzin!.

Why a new Asia policy is needed under Biden

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• 

  Asia is looking eagerly to President-elect Joe Biden to see what policies he employs regarding relations with the Asia-Pacific region. | DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

• BY YOICHI FUNABASHI

• SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES

• SHARE
• Jan 17, 2021

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden is likely to attach more importance to Asia as well as its allies when he is sworn in on Jan. 20, raising expectations from the region for a more engaged United States in the coming years.

Amid China’s increasing assertiveness, what Biden needs is a new rebalancing policy on Asia — to establish a multilateral trade policy in the wider Asia-Pacific region that will enable rule-based business standards.

“We’re a Pacific power, and we’ll stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values in the Asia-Pacific region,” Biden wrote in an op-ed in October. His remarks indicate his intention for the United States to maintain its presence in the region and not to weaken its forward deployment and power projection capabilities in the West Pacific.

“President Biden will show up and engage ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) on critical issues of common interest,” incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. The comment alludes to the fact that President Donald Trump never once attended the East Asia summit, led by ASEAN, during his term in office.

Reflecting Biden’s intention to focus on Asia, on Jan. 13 it was announced that Kurt Campbell, chairman and chief executive officer of the Asia Group, will be appointed deputy assistant to the President and coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council as part of the Biden administration.

While as Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs, Campbell reportedly will report directly to national security advisor Jake Sullivan, and the position will allow him to manage the NSC directorates covering issues related to Asia and China.

These are all encouraging signs. Furthermore, Campbell’s presence and voice at the top echelon of foreign policy making in the White House is particularly reassuring. He is deeply trusted and respected as the foremost strategic thinker and Asia specialist throughout the region.

Nonetheless, it will take enormous effort to restore the damaged US leadership and resulting image.

In his four years as U.S. president, Donald Trump did not once attend the annual East Asia summit. | REUTERS

During the four years of the Trump administration, the U.S. has been left behind in efforts to construct new regional architecture in the Asia-Pacific.

Immediately after Trump was sworn in, he declared his intention to unilaterally withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-member multilateral framework advocating free trade in the region.

Near the end of his term, the U.S. had to stand and watch as 15 Asian countries, including Japan, China and South Korea, signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement.

Some in Washington worry that regional partnerships in Asia will be led by China, without the participation of the U.S.

For its part, Asia does not intend to wait for the U.S. to engage in the region.

Asia has the world’s most dynamically developing economy, comprising nations with the world’s top, second and fourth largest populations — China, India and Indonesia, respectively — and ASEAN is expected to overtake Japan and become the world’s fourth economic power by 2030, after the EU, U.S. and China.

The region is shifting from being the world’s factory to being the world’s innovation center, nurturing a middle class with the most ambitious social climbers and the most abundant savings.

Furthermore, many East Asian countries and regions have been coping with the COVID-19 pandemic more promptly and effectively than anywhere else in the world.

The post-COVID-19 world is highly likely to shift its weight even more from the West to East Asia, and the global community will have to follow where Asia is heading.

East Asia has largely dealt with the novel coronavirus better than many Western states, with nations seeing lower death tolls and infection rates. | REUTERS

The Biden administration’s shift of focus to the region should be taken as yet another indication of its growing significance.

What is needed for the U.S. now is a new rebalancing strategy to respond to drastic changes in the strategic environment in Asia and to work with the region to build peace and stability.

Rebalancing to Asia

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has vigorously pursued strategic rebalancing toward Asia in line with drastic changes in the international environment, and has contributed to peace and stability in the region.

The first rebalancing came after the war, under President Harry Truman’s administration, and at the dawn of the Cold War.

It was formulated by George Kennan, director of policy planning at the State Department, who had advocated the containment strategy for the Soviet Union.

Kennan proposed that the U.S. fundamentally revise its Asia strategy, which had been implemented in the 1930s and 1940s from the Manchurian Incident up to the Pacific War, and drastically shift its focus from China to Japan.

Japan and the U.S., which fought on opposite sides in WWII, became allies little more than five years after its end.

Japan was then invited into the Bretton Woods monetary system, leading to the nation’s postwar economic miracle and bringing it closer to the economies of Western nations.

The next rebalancing was rapprochement with China in the early 1970s under President Richard Nixon’s administration.

Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger’s engagement policy with China was a strategic restructuring to partner with that country for the sake of balancing against the Soviet Union and withdrawing troops from Vietnam.

China effectively accepted the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region and Washington later established diplomatic relations with Beijing.

It also acknowledged the U.S.-led international order and turned toward reform and a policy of opening up, bringing about an economic miracle under then-leader Deng Xiaoping.

Friendly photo opportunities have done little to hide the growing hostility between the United States and China under the presidency of Donald Trump. | REUTERS

Through constructing a second rebalancing policy on top of its first rebalancing strategy, the U.S. managed to maintain peace in the Asia-Pacific region over a period of 70 years.

But the U.S. was faced with the need to rebalance its Asia strategy once again in the 2010s under President Barack Obama’s administration.

As China stepped up its moves for power and influence, the U.S. aimed to strengthen defense cooperation with its allies and partners, as well as expanding its naval capabilities in the region.

The Pentagon’s Defense Strategic Guidance issued in January 2012 stressed the need for a rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region, and was followed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s remarks later that year that the Navy would reposition its forces from a roughly 50-50 split between the Pacific and the Atlantic to a roughly 60-40 split by 2020, indicating a clear strategic pivot to Asia.

However, the Obama administration’s rebalancing ended in failure. During Obama’s eight-year term, U.S. armed forces in the Asia-Pacific region hardly increased, and the cut in military spending led to lower budgets for procurement and training.

Obama’s failure

Why didn’t Obama’s rebalancing strategy succeed?

Firstly, the administration had been focusing too much on establishing a framework for U.S.-China relations before creating a strategy for the whole of Asia, and tried to form its Asia policy within the scope of its China policy.

A month after the U.S. announced the new strategic guidance, China proposed that the two countries establish a “new type of great power relations.”

The approach was apparently intended to create an environment more conducive to China’s rise — by promoting a notion that there was room in Asia for two superpowers to coexist — and the Obama administration at one time had been almost taken in, welcoming China playing a greater role in regional and global affairs.

Secondly, regarding the territorial dispute between China and the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, the U.S. ended up allowing China to maintain a constant presence there.

The administration also failed to stop China’s revisionist actions of building artificial islands and military facilities in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, leading to increased doubts over the United States’ deterrence ability and credibility.

Moreover, the administration was slow in recognizing the spread of the notion of America’s decline in China following the 2008 global financial crisis; the geopolitical risk of China’s hegemonic ambitions known as the “China dream”; the major advance of the country through high-tech cyberpower backed by artificial intelligence and 5G telecommunications networks and the geoeconomic threats of China weaponizing its economic power.

It also responded insufficiently in terms of coping with the impacts of globalization and the fourth industrial revolution burdening domestic industries and society, as well as with the rise of populism and the political divide that came as a result.

Despite former President Barack Obama’s work toward the deal, the United States pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement — pleasing a number of politicians and members of the public who stood against the pact. | REUTERS

Although the Obama administration managed to conclude TPP negotiations, it failed to ratify the deal.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, not only Trump but also all the other major potential candidates including Hillary Clinton were opposed to the United States joining the TPP.

The Biden administration must assess the reasons for the failure of the Obama administration’s policy and come up with a new rebalancing strategy based on that assessment.

What is most needed now is the establishment of a comprehensive and multilateral trade policy in the Asia-Pacific region.

American interests lay not in tariffs but in rules of law and the establishment of rule-based business standards.

Trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region are the areas in which China has the greatest competitive advantage. The slower the U.S. is in getting engaged in multilateral policies, the more China will benefit.

In the summer of 2013, Biden met Japan’s then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Singapore, reiterated the central importance of enhancing the U.S.-Japan alliance for regional peace and stability — the key to successful rebalancing — and stressed the need to move forward in negotiations toward the TPP agreement.

Regarding trade policy, the Biden administration must prepare a narrative different from both labor unions’ protectionism and Trump’s “America First” policy.

The new administration should also establish a China policy centered on competitive coexistence.

Competitive coexistence means you cannot coexist unless you compete. And if the U.S. fails to compete, it will be dominated by China. The U.S. needs to fight against China’s geoeconomic threats, as well, along with its allies.

Allies, not dependents

Before anything else, Biden’s top priority is likely to be building back the nation after the COVID-19 pandemic. That means participation by the United States in global affairs will become more selective than ever.

At the same time, the country’s allies also need to break away from being dependent on the U.S.

In order to make the U.S. rebalancing to Asia strategy in the 21st century work, cooperation with more independent and reliable allies is crucial.

The Biden administration should empower its allies, including Japan, to move in that direction and work to bring out their power.

The time is ripe. When the Obama administration came up with its policy to rebalance to Asia, countries in the region reacted cautiously, as they thought it meant a strategy of containment regarding China.

Now Japan and other U.S. partners in Asia are waiting for a full-fledged rebalancing policy from the Biden administration.

Yoichi Funabashi is chairman of the Asia Pacific Initiative, an independent think tank based in Tokyo. API Geoeconomic Briefing, provided by API, is a series that looks into geopolitical and economic trends in the post-COVID-19 world, with a particular focus on technology and innovation, global supply chains, international rule-making and climate change.