The foreign policy portion of U.S. President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address sounded ambivalent at best. While it denounced Vladimir Putin’s personal war against Ukraine, the leader of the free world hardly touched on China in his hourlong speech.
To be precise, Biden referred to China twice in the address. When discussing his economic policy, for instance, he said, “It is going to transform America and put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st century that we face with the rest of the world — particularly with China.”
That said, many in Japan are still uneasy, if not disappointed, about the lack of reference to China — the other challenger to the United States, alongside Russia, which also seeks to change the status quo by force on the other side of the globe.