Biden Gets China

[babylonsister]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/biden-gets-china/250747/

Biden Gets China
By Steve Clemons

Jan 2 2012
Biden's Next Big Project: Recognizing that Chinese Vice Premier Xi Jinping will be China's president-in-waiting through much of 2012, the White House will move Vice President Joe Biden to the helm of the Obama administration's US-China policy.


Joe Biden and Xi Jinping August 2011
Reuters


A senior White House official has confirmed that Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administration's next phase China policy.

snip//

However, Joe Biden quietly took on national security tasks that were key to President Obama and that needed more off the newspaper front page handling. These included laying the groundwork for the major nuclear materials summit that the Obama administration hosted in April 2010 as well as lining up the continuity of thinking and policy deployment tying together this nuclear materials and WMD summit with President Obama's Nuclear Posture Review and the Senate passage of the New START treaty. Biden also played a leading role -- along with Defense Secretary Bob Gates -- in the "Russia reset."

And whether Iraq's democratic-appearing government survives or not, the person who did more than any other behind the scenes to broker the deals and to play communications envoy between factions of Iraq's fractured political order was Joe Biden. Biden has worked nearly every day -- and definitely every week of his tenure in the vice-presidency trying to seduce former, bitter enemies to realize that they had more ultimately to gain for their constituents, their nation, and themselves personally if they held together the semblance of a constitutional arrangement rather than ripping it up and devolving into civil war once again.

Biden has checked off the boxes of Iraq, Russia, and nuclear materials -- and his foreign policy slate is largely clear.

While this writer thinks he should be the person who does for US-Afghanistan policy what he did in the US-Iraq case, a topic for another day, Biden's next big task will be the next phase evolution of US-China policy.

[PatSeg]

1. Most people have no idea

how much our Vice President has done the past three years. This is yet another reason why talk of replacing him is utterly ridiculous.

[Responder3]

2. Biden "gets" many things

Like how we don't need massive footprints in Afghanistan, just counterintelligence backed up by Special Ops. He is the most underrated member of the Obama Administration.