Republican presidential contender Ron DeSantis outlined the need for the United States to adopt a more aggressive approach to combatting China’s global influence during a speech on Friday morning in the nation’s capital.
“As we look across the world now, we are a nation adrift. The Biden foreign policy is rudderless, weak, misguided, and solicitous of America’s adversaries,” the Florida governor told an audience at the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership Series in Washington, D.C. “Biden has … sacrificed strong policies against the [Chinese Communist Party], which we need, in favor of climate talks and a summit with Xi Jinping. All the while, China provides patronage to Russia and to Iran.”
“This is just a fact: American power is on the decline,” DeSantis said. “This has been happening for some time, but it is accelerating under the Biden administration.”
After briefly speaking about the nation’s foreign policy following the Cold War and America’s status as the world’s unrivaled superpower, DeSantis framed the current historical moment as a return to a world with two leading powers.
“Where are we now? Well, now we’re back in an age of great power rivalry,” he said. “We are in an age in which we now have a peer competitor, and that competitor is the Chinese Communist Party, and it’s something that we have to face, and we have to have policy that’s going to protect the American people from the looming China threat.”
Throughout his speech, DeSantis underscored China’s role supporting Iran as a destabilizing force for American national interests in the Middle East.
DeSantis also spoke earlier in the day on Fox News, previewing his foreign policy speech.
“We’re going to unveil a whole-of-government approach to deal with what really is our top threat, the Chinese Communist Party. If you look what’s happening in Gaza and Israel and Hamas, you know, that’s all funded by Iran. Who’s Iran’s leading benefactor right now with the black market oil sales? China,” DeSantis told Fox News.
“You look at Russia and Ukraine, who’s Russia’s main benefactor? China. Who represents a peer competitor to us militarily and increasingly economically? China. We’re back in an era of great power rivalry after the end of the Cold War and the age of terrorism. We still have a lot of other threats, but we’ve got to get the China issue right. And so, I’m going to have a policy that’s going to get that job done.”
DeSantis, a U.S. Navy veteran, has been critical of the White House’s response to Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists, saying Biden is “floundering” and “not doing what it takes to stand by Israel.”
On Thursday, the Florida governor announced the shipment of weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, and drones to Israel ahead of its looming invasion of the Gaza Strip.