Pressed by a reporter yesterday at the State Department briefing as to whether the Biden administration intends to “impose a cost” on China for the (non-existent) genocide it alleges the Chinese government has carried out against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, spokesman Ned Price turned the question around, saying that the State Department is asking “our likeminded allies and partners around the world” what “collectively” can be done.
Price asserted that the U.S. still has two “core sources of strength” with which to confront China: “our values,” and a “system of alliances that in many ways is the envy of countries.” The latter, he claims, gives us “what the Department of Defense might call force multipliers, and that is precisely the tool that we seek to leverage going forward in imposing costs on China for this behavior and making clear that these sorts of atrocities must not continue going forward.” He went so far as to propose later in the briefing that “our allies and partners” are going to have to work with us to confront the China challenge, not just “in tandem,” but “in lockstep, in fact.”
