Putin visits Xi in Beijing seeking greater support in Ukraine war
'The Hundred Year Marathon' author Michael Pillsbury joined 'FOX & Friends' to discuss his take on Putin's visit as China vows 'resolute measures' in response to Biden's new tariffs.
President Biden has made his "biggest blunder" yet by driving China and Russia into a closer strategic partnership through his faulty foreign policy, one expert warned, as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Beijing to strengthen bilateral ties.
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Michael Pillsbury argued on "Fox & Friends" that the "shocking" relationship the two nuclear world powers have fostered never would have happened under the Trump administration.
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"Basically… 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," Pillsbury told co-host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday.
"That's simply not happening with Biden and 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's comments come as Putin visited Xi in Beijing to strengthen bilateral relations and garner additional support for the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands during a meeting in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2023. (Sergei Guneyev/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Putin began his two-day state visit on Thursday, where both countries claimed to want an end to the war in Ukraine.
"This would never happen under Trump," Pillsbury 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."
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Meanwhile, China has 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, the White House said.
"China heavily subsidized all these products, pushing Chinese companies to produce far more than the rest of the world can absorb. And then dumping the excess products onto the market and unfairly low prices, driving other manufacturers around the world out of business," President Biden said Tuesday in a speech at the White House.
Former Trump national security aide John Ullyot argued the summit between Putin and Xi was clearly a "show of force" against the U.S. as both countries face deepening tensions with the West.
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"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 Thursday 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."
"There's a pipeline that is out now on hold that they want to get approval for the pipeline that goes through Mongolia from North Russia," he continued. "But more than anything else… this is a show that there's an axis that… Russia can exploit to work with China to go against the sanctions that are put on Russia, so also get financial and currency stability as well."
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.
Fox News' Greg Norman contributed to this report.