Last Tuesday, former President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he alleged that the current rise of aggressive and antagonistic behavior by the People’s Republic of China was thanks to 45th President Donald J. Trump.

In his speech, Obama argued that China changed its behavior after he left office as if, under his administration, the United States had been respected or a leader on the world stage. As Obama argued, “With my successor coming in, I think [Xi Jinping] saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system.”

As usual with President Obama, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, he just knows much that isn’t so. The roots of China’s rise are older than either Presidents Obama or Trump. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has planned its rise for decades, as Michael Pillsbury has argued in his book, The Hundred-Year Marathon. But, as the historian and expert on Chinese history, Frank Dikötter, has argued, the behavior of Communist China’s regime has never been reliable.

The perceived rapprochement with China was based on the mistaken belief that the communist regime was interested in political liberalization when it never was. As Dikötter explains, even under improved relations between the United States and China (which dates back to President Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing), the Chinese state imposed birth control and abortion, crushed freedom of assembly and speech, stole intellectual property and always sought to avenge, in the long run, China’s “century of humiliation.” 

Even before Trump, China had threatened the United Kingdom and Portugal over Hong Kong; it also threatened Taiwan in 1996, prompting President Clinton to send two aircraft carriers to deter China. In recent years, even during the Obama administration, China has engaged in a policy of military buildup, nuclear forces modernization, and the building of artificial islands to lay territorial claims on the South China Sea while also using its Belt and Road Initiative, social media such as TikTok, and increasingly bellicose language. As if that were not enough, China has also increasingly sought to become the leader of a revisionist bloc of powers that seeks to destroy the American world order. A new Axis of Evil indeed. Nonetheless, all these trends above predated the Trump presidency and continued both during the Trump and now the Biden administrations.

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Many of these problems result from President Obama and the left’s general weakness in foreign affairs. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) explained in his recent book, Only the Strong, the United States made a mistake after the end of the Cold War in not shifting its strategic focus to Communist China. One mistake was granting China permanent normal trade status. Moreover, Cotton explains that the Obama administration tried a new “lead from behind approach” for America.

The Obama foreign policy was an absolute failure. As Cotton and others explain, merely the abandonment of traditional American allies such as Israel in favor of a nuclear deal with Iran, the toppling of regimes all over the Middle East without any apparent strategic interests or plans, the invitation to Russia to intervene in Syria and return to geopolitics, the appeasement of Communist Cuba, the rise of ISIS, etc. 

Regarding China, Cotton reminds us that Obama never took action against China for unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, cyberattacks against American companies and government, human rights failures, or its military buildup and expansion and militarization in the South China Sea. In short, as Cotton says of the Obama years, “after eight years of being led by the Citizen of the World, America was in retreat around the globe. It’s hard to think of a single place where our strategic position had improved, our allies respected and appreciated us more, or our enemies feared us more.” Unfortunately, there is little hope of improvement under the Biden administration. However, there is a blueprint for an improved strategy to counter China thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s new report, which offers a different direction than the Obama-Biden policies.