Lessons to be learned from past four years: China Daily editorial

While China is firmly focused on running its own affairs well, its top leader has repeatedly stressed that it is willing to take steps together with all parties to promote common development and global peace and stability. This joining of hands on the development journey is not selective, and the country also extends the hand of friendship and cooperation to the United States urging it to help build a community with a shared future for mankind.

However, the US under the Joe Biden administration has repeatedly paid only lip service to such a cause. By signing into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 on Monday, US President Joe Biden clearly wants to make sure the expansionist US global strategy and the aim of countering China will continue well beyond next month when his administration leaves office.

The defense policy bill sets the US defense budget at over $895 billion, up 1 percent from the previous fiscal year, and it features provisions on purchases of military equipment and boosting the United States' "competitiveness" with countries such as China and Russia, including establishing a fund that could be used to send military resources to the island of Taiwan in much the same way that the United States has backed Ukraine.

For years, the US, driven by its insatiable desire to maintain its military supremacy, an important tool for it to sustain its global hegemony, has boasted the world's largest military spending and military buildup, which have in turn enabled the country to project its power globally, wage wars and invade other countries at will.

It is therefore no surprise at all that the latest US defense policy, despite the rhetoric of "defending the homeland" and "countering global adversaries", has laid bare a far more ambitious goal: the consolidation of the US' military hegemony, which brings nothing but instability to other regions and feeds into its own military-industrial complex.

To justify its massive military spending, the new US defense policy bill is filled with "China threat" fallacies. The bill, with its 107 mentions of China, sounds like a manifesto for Washington's increasingly paranoid agenda to confront China. It not only targets sensitive sectors such as LiDAR and semiconductor equipment, but also extends its military purchase prohibitions to Chinese goods ranging from drone technology to more mundane items, such as imports of Chinese garlic.

With the US' strategic focus shifting to so-called great power competition, the US has been peddling a belligerent narrative stoking global tensions and bloc confrontation through such tactics as consolidating its military alliance network, forcing other countries to take sides and fueling regional conflicts.

Its constant hyping of an outdated "China threat" theory has not only strained bilateral ties with China but also tarnished China's development interests and worsened its security environment. No wonder the presidential signature on the Act immediately drew strong criticism and protests from China, with the Foreign Ministry urging the US side not to implement the negative articles concerning China.

China has repeatedly warned that the four red lines on bilateral relations, namely the Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China's path and system, and China's development right, must not be challenged. Yet the hostile content related to China in the US defense bill suggests Washington has no intention of honoring these red lines.

It is probable that China will not be the only one to find fault with Biden's newly released defense bill. For one thing, his successor will not be pleased at finding that the bill has authorized more than what was requested by the Biden administration for the US military's involvement overseas.

It is widely known that US president-elect Donald Trump is not a big fan of the massive US military spending overseas, and if his first term in office is anything to go by, he appears to have little penchant for wars either.

The incoming Trump administration does not need to follow the ill-advised global playbook forced upon it by its predecessor. Confronting China will not only cost the US a pretty dollar but also risk a head-on conflict between the world's two largest economies. Neither prospect serves the US' interests. The next US administration would be well-advised to eschew the confrontational and frictional approach to global affairs practiced by its predecessor and instead seek to foster an open, inclusive and nondiscriminatory environment for international cooperation. That is the right way to "make America great again".