In last week’s episode of “America Competing with a Rising China,” the geopolitical equivalent of a TV series, Joe Biden took the wheel of a Ford truck and all but burned rubber as he pulled away from reporters who had come to witness the stunt.
Biden’s visit came on the eve of Ford’s announcement of a new, all-electric version of its model F-150, the most popular motor vehicle in the United States, and he used it to enlist the automaker’s innovations in his ongoing campaign to prove not just that “America is Back,” whatever that means, but that the country can outcompete its biggest rival, China.
Invocations of China as a summons to a restoration of American greatness have been coming fast and furious under this president, who has also repeatedly wielded the specter of Chinese power to justify his policy priorities.