Michael Bloomberg blew it on China at Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate. The former mayor of New York City praised China, our greatest global adversary, and attacked India, our most valuable rising strategic partner.
It really wasn’t good.
Warning that the United States must retain close links with Beijing, Bloomberg quickly set himself up as China’s favored candidate. The Chinese Communist Party, after all, is desperate for America’s next president to give them what they want: the political and economic space to steal our intellectual property and subjugate our prosperity in service to the party’s own.
The problem here is that Bloomberg’s billions are already heavily invested in China. He has little credibility on this issue in the first place.
But, when the discussion shifted to climate change, Bloomberg really lost the plot.
Asked how far he would go to persuade China to commit to binding carbon emission reductions, Bloomberg responded with a silly joke. We’re not going to go to war with them, he said.
Phew! Thanks for clarifying that we’re not going to go to war with China over climate change, Mike.
Bloomberg then made himself the joke. He claimed very wrongly that China is actually making good progress in reducing its carbon emissions. This is a falsity measured by China’s increasing reliance on heavily polluting coal plants. Unfortunately, Bloomberg’s pro-China bias here fits perfectly with the global climate movement, which seems totally unwilling to call out Xi Jinping’s regime for the great chasm between what it says about carbon emissions and what it does.
But that’s what we need from our next president. We need a commander in chief willing to see China through a clear prism.
Then, Bloomberg made it even worse. He said that India, not China, is the real challenge.
This is bad. While it’s true that India’s carbon footprint is very large, India is also a partner to the U.S. Where China undermines the U.S. democratic international order at every step, India is working to strengthen that order and build a trading relationship built on the rule of law rather than rapacious theft. No one who wants to be president should ignore that dichotomy.
If nothing else, India deserved more careful language from Bloomberg, and China deserved much harsher.
