CHINA TASK FORCE: U.S. APPROACH TO BEIJING

President Biden visited the Pentagon for the first time last week. Following his visit, President Biden announced a task force that will form a policy to counter China during his term in the White House after he called Beijing “our most serious competitor,” a report said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the team will be comprised of over a dozen members and led by Ely Ratner, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s top assistant on China.
Biden told workers at the Pentagon that the U.S. will “meet the China challenge” by taking a “whole-of-government effort, bipartisan cooperation in Congress, and strong alliances and partnerships.”
Biden had his first phone call with China’s President Xi Jinping last week. Reuters reported the two “appeared at odds on most issues.” Xi reportedly went so far as to say that a conflict would mean “disaster” for both countries.
“We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home, working with our allies and partners, renewing our role in international institutions, and reclaiming our credibility and moral authority, much of which has been lost,” Biden said, according to the Journal.
Xi, who was called a “thug” by Biden during the 2020 campaign, took a “hardline” approach to sensitive issues like Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong during the call. 
The two reportedly spoke for two hours last Wednesday. Biden told a bipartisan group of senators that the U.S. needs to upgrade its infrastructure or the Chinese are “going to eat our lunch.” 
The Journal reported that the task force hopes to present its findings to Austin by the early summer, and its results promise to be a blueprint in how he approaches the relationship. The report said that Austin’s expertise is more focused on the Middle East.
Military-Industrial Complex in Full Charge
Austin spent three years under President Barack Obama in charge of U.S. military operations in the Middle East. He oversaw the U.S. backing of Saudi Arabia during the military campaign against Yemen, according to the Huffington Post. Austin also sat on several corporate boards including Raytheon Technologies, one of America’s largest military contractors, and he is a partner in an investment firm that buys military supplies.
Rear Admiral James Kirk, the commander of the USS Nimitz carrier group, told the Financial Times that Chinese military activity in the disputed South China Sea has been on the uptick in the past few months.
“We’re seeing a larger number of aircraft, a larger number of ships available to the Chinese military being utilized on a daily basis,” he said, according to the paper. “So the capacity has clearly increased.” 
Kirk relayed the message to reporters as the carrier made its way back to the U.S.’s West Coast. The carrier had been taking part in a joint exercise with the USS Theodore Roosevelt. 
The USS John McCain, a destroyer, transited the Taiwan Strait earlier this month, and it was eyed by Chinese guided-missile destroyers, according to USNI News.
The Chinese foreign ministry responded to the McCain voyage by saying it will “continue to stay on high alert and is ready to respond to all threats and provocations at any time and will resolutely safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
TREND FORECAST: We maintain our forecast that the U.S. will not confront China militarily. Should China aggressively confront Taiwan, the U.S. and its NATO allies’ words will speak louder than their actions.
As we have noted, being that the U.S. has not won a war since World War II (and did so in part with the assistance of Russia), the Pentagon is well aware that war with China would be catastrophic, considering the size and power of China’s military.
If war did break out between the two nations, considering the depth and range of 21st-century weaponry of each nation, it will not only be the war that ends all wars, it will also be the end of life on Earth. 
Indeed, when Albert Einstein was asked what weaponry would be used to fight World War III, he replied. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
TREND FORECAST: President Biden’s quote that the U.S. needs to upgrade its infrastructure or the Chinese are “going to eat our lunch” is meaningless. 
It is more than America’s third-world infrastructure that is rotting. As we have reported over the decades, Mr. Biden, along with bipartisan Congressional support, sold out American manufacturing to China and other cheap-labor nations with the restructuring of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), whose purpose was the “substantial reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers and the elimination of preferences, on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis.”
Between the time GATT was formed in 1947 to the end of the Bill Clinton administration, which also brought China into the World Trade Organization, both of which Biden supported, the average tariff levels for GATT participants fell from 22 percent in 1947 to 5 percent in 1999.
Thus, the off-shoring of manufacturing to cheap-labor nations has resulted in not only the loss of higher-paying manufacturing jobs as the nation devolved into a service sector economy, but wages have also stagnated. 
According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 2001 and 2018, as a result of the China deal alone, 3.7 million American jobs have been lost. As for wages, in real terms, average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago, and what wage gains there have been mostly have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers, according to Pew Research.
Top Trend for 2021: “THE RISE OF CHINA”: As we have forecast, the 20th century was the American century – the 21st century will be the Chinese century. The business of China is business; the business of America is war. 
While America spent countless trillions waging and losing endless wars and enriching its military-industrial complex, China has spent its trillions advancing the nation’s businesses and building its 21st-century infrastructure.