US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he still believes Chinese President Xi Jinping is a dictator, even as the two leaders made progress in their relationship during a meeting outside San Francisco.
“Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden told CNN’s MJ Lee. “Anyway, we made progress.”
When asked about Biden’s latest comment at a Chinese Foreign Ministry briefing on Thursday, a spokesperson called it “extremely erroneous” and an “irresponsible political maneuver, which China firmly opposes.”
Do we really need a news article for every sentence uttered?
This headline, while accurate, puts Biden’s statement in a way most likely to undermine current cooperations with China. The goal is to offend Xi and scuttle any deals reached, and if that doesn’t work, at least it paints Biden as a hypocrite for working with a dictator.
It’s scortched earth politics. It’s not meant to be news.
The United States has generally had no problem working with anyone, including Dictators. We’ve only every refused to do so when their crimes grow so obscenely large that they literally cannot be overlooked.