WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Sunday, Ron DeSantis said one of his first priorities as president is to revoke China’s trade relations status.
Blasting Biden’s weak stance towards the Beijing regime, DeSantis said the U.S. needs to send a clear message to China.
“I favor doing that,” DeSantis told Maria Bartiromo in an interview on Fox News. “We probably need Congress, but I would take executive action as appropriate to be able to move us in that direction.”
According to DeSantis, the “experiment” with the CCP to grant them most favored nation status and allow them to join the World Trade Organization was a complete failure.
“We need independence from China,” DeSantis said. “We cannot subcontract out key aspects of our industrial base to a country that does not have our interests at heart.”
TENSE FOREIGN RELATIONS
U.S.-China relations have become even more tense the past few years over trade tariffs, Taiwan, human rights issues and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After a four-day visit to Beijing over the weekend in an attempt to repair the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said meetings with Chinese officials were “direct and “productive.”
But DeSantis said the “happy talk” from Yellen and Biden’s idea of “healthy competition” between China and the U.S. is dangerous.
“I would recognize that China is a threat,” DeSantis told Bartiromo. “They’re the number one geopolitical threat this country faces.”
A SHOW OF STRENGTH
DeSantis says Biden’s failure to handle the situation has caused China to become more aggressive – not just in the far east but in our own hemisphere – asserting that a “new commitment to hard power in the Indo-Pacific” is necessary.
“At the end of the day, what China respects is strength,” DeSantis explained. “And if you’re showing strength and we have hard power to back it up, they’re going to be much less aggressive.”
In 2000, the U.S. Senate voted to grant normal trade relations with China as it sought to join the World Trade Organization. The status provides a legal designation for free trade with a foreign nation in the U.S. and an attempt to remove it would likely require congressional approval.
