Obama Visits Australia To Blame Trump For China Threat
Barack Obama once again participated in one of his favorite post-presidency pastimes — blaming America’s ills on his successor — during a speaking tour on the other side of the planet.
The 44th president reportedly raked in roughly $1 million for delivering remarks in Australia that were defined by his effort to whitewash the failures of the Biden administration while piling accusations onto former President Donald Trump.
One notable example involved the growing international threat posed by China’s communist government, which critics of the current administration say President Joe Biden has exacerbated through his policies of appeasement.
Instead of addressing that glaring factor, however, Obama attempted to link Trump to the provocations of recent years. He began by discounting any personal culpability by suggesting that China’s behavior only started to become more problematic “after [he] left office.”
The crux of Obama’s argument was that Trump’s China policies were too weak and allowed Beijing to amass power that it is now wielding on a global scale.
“With my successor coming in, I think [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama claimed. “ And so as a consequence, I think China’s attitude as [was] we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.”
While he acknowledged that the strained relationship between the U.S. and China is not “going to go away anytime soon,” he stopped short of suggesting that his vice president played any role in the deteriorating situation since becoming president in 2021.
Instead, Obama cited “some fundamental differences in terms of how we operate,” which was also true under the previous administration but did not prevent Obama from placing much of the blame on Trump.
Military leaders like retired Navy Adm. Harry Harris, the former head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, believe Obama’s view of things is inherently flawed.
In the wake of the Biden administration’s decision to allow a suspected Chinese spy balloon to fly across the continental U.S., Harris called on the White House to take decisive action and asserted that Trump’s “tougher approach is right.”
