The United States must invest at home if they want to win the global competition, economic, but also political, against China, pleaded Monday the head of the American diplomacy Antony Blinken in a speech on the need for a “renewal national”.
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“Probably more than ever in my career, if not in my life, all the distinctions between domestic and foreign policy have simply disappeared,” he said from the engineering school at the University of Maryland, near Washington. .
“Our national renewal and our strength in the world are totally linked,” he added.
“Nothing we do will strengthen our position and influence in the world more” than an investment in the American “workforce”, in the “economic dynamism” of the United States, in its “ability to” ‘innovation’ and in their ‘infrastructures’, he insisted.
It was, for the Secretary of State, to clarify the idea at the heart of the foreign policy of President Joe Biden: to prove that democracies work to win the unprecedented competition against “autocracies”, China in head.
“Our rivals are approaching us slowly but surely. In some areas, they are already ahead of us, ”warned Antony Blinken, warning against the risk of seeing America become“ less competitive in a more competitive world ”.
While the Democratic president has made his mega-program of investments in broad American infrastructure a key to his tenure, and is fighting to have it passed by Congress, the secretary of state stressed that the China spent “three times as much” in this area as the United States.
“The Chinese and Russian governments, among others, say in public and in private that the United States is in decline, and that it is therefore better to adhere to its authoritarian view of the world than our democratic view,” he said. he also pointed out. “If we and all democracies can show that we bring results to our citizens, then we can refute the lie that authoritarian countries love to tell, that our system is polarized and crippled to the extreme and responds better to them. to the needs and aspirations of the populations. ”
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