How does former US vice president Joe Biden lose the US presidential election? Dozens of national and swing-state polls dating back to the spring have consistently given him a winning lead.
Nearly all now predict Biden will defeat US President Donald Trump handily on Nov. 3.
Depending on how key states break, it could be a landslide — plus a Democratic clean sweep of the US Congress.
Even if the polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, Biden, whose national lead is 10 percent, is still projected to win the popular vote by 7 percent.
He still wins battleground states, such as Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona, and, with them, the electoral college that was former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s undoing four years ago.
All of Trump’s clumsy and divisive efforts to change the dynamic of the race have failed so far. His COVID-19 histrionics won him scant sympathy. It seems the die is cast.
So, assuming the polls are not totally off, what could go wrong for Biden? One risk, given his age, 77, is that he becomes unwell, either from COVID-19 or some other cause. That would not disqualify him, but it would undermine confidence in his fitness to lead.
Or Biden could make a trademark gaffe, though it would have to be truly egregious to matter.
More plausible scenarios are that deliberate fraud or sheer incompetence skew the election outcome or, if the result is close, Trump refuses to accept defeat and wins in the US Supreme Court, as former US president George W. Bush did in 2000.
However, another elephant trap lurks: the risk that an international crisis could erupt — by accident or design — allowing Trump to pose as the nation’s doughty defender while sidelining Biden. The more desperate Trump gets, the higher the risk of this happening.
China needs watching closely right now. Its hawkish dictator-president, Xi Jinping (習近平), has over-reached, and faces possible pushback at home.
Yet on past evidence, he will double down — to reassert his post-virus authority and justify his increasingly counterproductive hardline policies. If push comes to shove, Xi could turn on the US.
Xi has come a long way since he stood smiling in the White House’s Rose Garden alongside then-US president Barack Obama in September 2015 and promised a new era of bilateral friendship.
“China is committed to the path of peaceful development and a foreign policy characterized by good neighborliness and partnership,” he declared.
China believed “democracy and human rights are the common pursuit of mankind” and respected international law, national sovereignty and freedom of navigation, he said.
“China does not intend to pursue militarization” of the South China Sea, Xi said.
Yet since then, China’s behavior has grown steadily more aggressive and lawless. Xi has picked fights with India, Australia and European countries, crushed democracy in Hong Kong, reduced domestic freedoms, and tightened the state’s chokehold on Tibetans and Xinjiang’s Uighurs. His South China Sea pledge proved meaningless.
US attitudes have changed radically, too. Trump’s damaging trade dispute, sanctions and “China virus” rhetoric have turned supposed amity into open hostility.
In particular, Trump’s weapons sales and stepping up of diplomatic and military support for Taiwan have infuriated Xi, who has vowed to “recover” the “renegade province” by any and all means.
Meanwhile, deteriorating relations have accelerated debate in Washington about ending the 40-year-old policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether the US would fight for Taiwan if it were attacked.
Richard Haass, an influential foreign policy veteran, said that only a clear US pledge to intervene will deter China and its ever-more formidable military.
“There is speculation that Xi will marry his ambitions with the new means at his disposal to realize his ‘China Dream’ and force reunification with Taiwan, potentially as soon as 2021. No one should dismiss the possibility that Taiwan could become the next Hong Kong,” Haass said.
Current US policy is untenable, conservative columnist George Will wrote.
“China is demonstrating the arrogance that begets recklessness... Taiwan might provide the most perilous US moment since the Cuban missile crisis,” he wrote.
Concern that US attitudes are hardening and that Washington is actively encouraging Taiwanese defiance — potentially thwarting the putative crowning achievement of Xi’s reign — has produced a rising torrent of threats, aerial incursions, invasion drills and vitriolic sniping from Beijing in the past few weeks.
“The militaristic tone reflects the hawkishness of Xi. The risk is that the propaganda could translate into more provocative actions... Recent military moves in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait raise the possibility of actual clashes, intended or not,” the New York Times’ Steven Lee Myers wrote.
Never one to dial down confrontation, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Tokyo last week, cranking up the “China threat.”
The US focus is on next year, but what if Xi decided to make a move now, at a moment of maximum US distraction and vulnerability, when Pentagon chiefs are in isolation and Trump’s eccentric behavior grows ever more bizarre? In such an emergency, Biden’s preferred policy of dealing with China through verbal strictures, dialogue and alliances might look lame.
Xi probably has no wish to help Trump get re-elected. He will surely not risk a head-on collision if he is thinking clearly.
However, given internal pressures, and his post-2015 record of unchecked aggression, no one knows which way he will jump. Xi might calculate that now is his best chance to force the Taiwan issue.
Trump has long accused Biden of being soft on China. If a crisis with Beijing erupted by chance, or were deliberately provoked by either side, he is not above exploiting it electorally to make the Democrat look weak and himself strong — even if doing so risks a war. Biden must hope the guns stay silent.
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