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WASHINGTON DC – The US president, Joe Biden, is heading on a four-day trip to Asia, first to Seoul, then to Tokyo.
Looming behind his visits to both South Korea and Japan is, of course, China. In his first address to both houses of Congress in 2021, Biden established that he considered China to be America’s main adversary, and that he would try to rally the world’s democracies to take on Chinese autocracy. In his State of the Union speech earlier this year, however, China was hardly mentioned. A bungled US-led withdrawal from Afghanistan and Russia’s war in Ukraine had pushed China from centre stage in the grand production that is American foreign policy.