“When I was with Xi Jinping — and I was on the Tibetan plateau with him — and he asked me in a non-public evening meal, he and I, and we just about every experienced an interpreter, he said, ‘Can you define America for me?’ ” Biden recounted in the course of a swearing-in ceremony for new staffers. He said he responded basically: “Alternatives.”
The anecdote, harkening to his 2011 supper inside of a Chengdu resort restaurant, was intended to offer Biden’s perspective of the American dream as he assumed the presidency. But it also acted as an intentional reminder that he enters the work with a long record of cultivating international actors who he will now experience as an equivalent — and, in some conditions, an adversary.
He launches his worldwide attempts Friday afternoon with a call to Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a reliably standard 1st diplomatic outing …
