Considering how shabbily China has been treating us for quite a while now, it’s somewhat amazing that we’ve seen a parade of Biden administration officials flying off to Beijing and prostrating themselves before members of Xi Jinping’s administration. The crowd included people such as the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary, among others. So should we assume that Joe Biden has grown tired of this and is ready to read China the riot act? Of course not! Instead, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal this week, Biden is considering lifting some sanctions on China in the hopes of getting them to agree to help fight the flow of fentanyl into our country. This was apparently Antony Blinken’s idea originally, but Biden is reportedly considering it seriously. (Subscription required)
The Biden administration is discussing lifting sanctions on a Chinese police forensics institute suspected of participating in human-rights abuses, people familiar with the matter said, in a bid to secure Beijing’s renewed cooperation in fighting the fentanyl crisis.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken during meetings in Beijing last month proposed setting up a new working group with China to try to resuscitate stalled talks on combating fentanyl. Chinese officials, however, stuck to their long-held position that the U.S. must first remove the sanctions on the police institute as a precondition for restarting joint counternarcotics work, the people familiar said.
Stopping the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. is a Biden administration priority, with the opioid scourge unleashing a wave of deaths across America. U.S. officials see China as having a critical role in that effort. Chinese companies produce chemicals, known as precursors, that are shipped to cartels in Mexico, which use them to produce fentanyl and smuggle it into the U.S.
So let’s see if we have this straight. We know that China is shipping (or at least allowing to be shipped) loads of fentanyl precursors to the drug cartels in Mexico. There is absolutely no other reason for those shipments other than to facilitate the production of the drug which is then smuggled into the United States through Biden’s porous southern border. All of this is known.
In response, our only option is to go to the Chinese Communist Party with our hat in our hands and beg them to “help” stop the flow? We’re talking about China. The Chinese government does whatever the heck it wants to its citizens with impunity. They could send someone to the companies producing these chemicals tomorrow and tell the management that the shipments to Mexico will stop immediately or their families’ social credit scores will plummet so far that they will wind up living in forced labor camps for the rest of their lives. And the process would end just like that.
But China isn’t doing that because they don’t want to. I’m sure somebody is making plenty of money off of those chemicals and that’s how Xi likes it. But maybe… just maybe… if we lift our sanctions on a Chinese police institute that is credibly suspected of significant human rights violations, they might engage in some sort of counternarcotics work. So we’ll be passively endorsing human rights abuses while kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s difficult to imagine how all of this must look to our allies or, increasingly, former allies. At this point, are we really going to try to ignore the massive elephant in the room? What did Joe Biden and his family do in return for all of the money that was funneled to them through a network of LLCs from China? Perhaps one of the last things that was “understood” was that the Chinese government would stay quiet about the arrangement provided Biden didn’t cause any trouble. If they started releasing records of what was behind all of those transactions “in the interest of international transparency,” it could cause an awful lot of trouble for Uncle Joe back on the home front, assuming you could ever get anyone besides Fox News to report on it.
Joe Biden is compromised. China sends spy balloons over our country, constantly threatens to invade Taiwan, and sucks up all of our data. And in return, we do nothing. A strong leader would cut off the flow of the chemicals before they reach Mexico and tell China the sanctions stay in place. But we have what we have, at least for another 17 months. God help us all.
