Biden's Foreign Policy Blunder Drives China and Russia Closer, Expert Warns

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Michael Pillsbury says President Biden's faulty foreign policy has driven China and Russia into a closer strategic partnership, calling it a "blunder of the highest order."

President Biden's foreign policy has driven China and Russia into a closer strategic partnership, according to one expert, who calls it a "blunder of the highest order."

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Michael Pillsbury made the comments on "Fox & Friends" in response to a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing. The two leaders pledged to strengthen bilateral ties and garner additional support for the war in Ukraine.

Pillsbury argued that the "shocking" relationship between the two nuclear world powers would never have happened under the Trump administration. He said Trump had sought to gain leverage over China by imposing tariffs, but that Biden had failed to do so.

"To draw, to push together two nuclear powers, Russia and China, it's really a blunder of the highest order... The Russians had a million army troops built up on the Chinese border for a while, so to see them come together like this to me is just shocking. It's one of the biggest blunders we'll see in my lifetime," Pillsbury said.

Putin and Xi claimed to want an end to the war in Ukraine, but Pillsbury remained skeptical.

"This would never happen under Trump," he said. "This is a big blunder, I think, by the Biden people to drive Russia and China together. This was one of Trump's goals never to allow this to happen."

Pillsbury's comments come as China vowed "resolute measures" against the U.S. in retaliation for Biden's newly announced tariffs on $18 billion worth of Chinese imports. The new measures include an increase in the tariff rate on electric vehicles from 25% to 100% this year, along with hikes on tariffs in "strategic sectors" including steel, aluminum, semiconductors, batteries, and solar cells.

Former Trump national security aide John Ullyot argued that the summit between Putin and Xi was a "show of force" against the U.S., as both countries face deepening tensions with the West.

"It's a show of force in the sense that it is… a rebuke to the West, that has… put in these sanctions," Ullyot said on "FOX & Friends First." "But it also is a sign that there's increasing access here between Russia and China, where… Russia has been shut off from exporting oil and natural gas to the Western Europe, and so now they're having to look at other markets, and of course, the biggest market… that's a border state of theirs, and in the region in Asia it is obviously China, so they want to strengthen that."

The hikes come after Trump imposed tariffs on thousands of Chinese goods in 2018 and 2019 in response to an investigation that found China was violating U.S. intellectual property laws and coercing American companies into transferring sensitive technology to Chinese firms as a condition of gaining access to China's market.

Pillsbury warned that the closer ties between China and Russia could have serious consequences for the U.S. and its allies.

"We're seeing what [former President] Trump was trying to do with China when he called himself ‘Tariff Man’ to get leverage over China to help us in various ways," he said. "That's simply not happening with Biden."