Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed the Biden administration on Sunday, saying officials in the U.S. government are acting like “lovestruck teenagers” in dealing with their counterparts in communist China.
Cotton made the remarks during an interview on Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday” with host Shannon Bream.
“Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is over in Singapore, Chinese counterparts don’t want to meet with him there, they refuse that,” Bream said. “We’ve had these incursions with a jet, a Chinese jet and now with warships and the Taiwan Strait, some aggressive behavior there.”
“But there’s talk that this administration is looking at potentially lifting some tariffs and saying, ‘We have to do better with communication between these two countries,'” she continued. “I mean, how are we doing managing that relationship?”
Cotton responded, “Well, Biden administration officials should stop chasing after their Chinese communist counterparts like lovestruck teenagers.”
“It’s embarrassing, and it’s pathetic,” he continued. “In fact, it projects weakness to China, it encourages them to do things like buzz our aircraft, or come within a few hundred yards of our ships, encourages them to send spy balloons floating all across America. Reducing those tariffs would send the same message.”
“And to get back to this bill that we just voted on, the single best way we can deter China and Iran and Russia is to have a military capable of deterring them,” he continued. “That’s one of the core lessons of history. If you look at say World War I and World War II, there were a lot of misguided diplomatic decisions that led to those wars. But fundamentally, it was disarmament by countries like Great Britain and the United States that encouraged German ambitions and then ultimately aggression.”
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