China outflanking US in the wake of Biden’s Afghan debacle

Great-power competition is back — just when America happens to be an overstretched, and now-humiliated, empire. Events in the wake of President Joe Biden’s botched exit from Afghanistan punctuate the point.

China wasted little time seizing on the debacle to make geopolitical inroads and assert a growing hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. The Beijing regime moved to develop relations with the new Taliban regime in Kabul and held assault exercises near Taiwan island on Tuesday.

Biden’s slapdash withdrawal came on the heels of months of failed intelligence assessments and years of naïve assurances from US military brass that the Afghan army was prepared to stand up on its own. They were all wrong. The result: images that sear the American conscience. Kabul is now the millennial Saigon.

Even those of us who have long urged getting out of the hopeless Afghan morass are apoplectic at the self-defeating way this was done.

Xi Jinping, however, has no time for either remorse or apoplexy. He and his Communist henchmen saw an opportunity to add salt to the wounds of the reeling American tiger — and they acted upon it.

Within hours of the Taliban takeover, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman indicated that Beijing was ready for “friendly cooperation with Afghanistan.” This followed a July meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and a Taliban delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

Xi’s endgame here is simple: He envisions Afghanistan fitting neatly into his regime’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative, a multi-continent infrastructure plan that offers smaller nations from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa to Eastern Europe development in exchange for Chinese domination.