President Biden speaks at the White House on Sept. 6. He’s scheduled to leave this week on a trip to India and Vietnam.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
President Biden is scheduled to depart on Thursday for India and Vietnam, two strategic countries that neighbor China. Like much of the president’s foreign policy, this trip is implicitly about China and its growing influence.
Biden’s first stop is New Delhi, where he’ll meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was warmly welcomed with a state dinner in Washington this summer.
Modi is hosting the G20 summit of the world’s leading wealthy and developing countries. Biden plans to use the event to try to strengthen two institutions that provide lending and support to developing countries: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
This push is widely viewed as an effort to beef up alternatives to Chinese lending programs, including the Belt and Road Initiative, which has saddled some countries in Asia and Africa with debts they cannot repay.
“Given both the scale of the need and, frankly, the scale of the PRC’s coercive and unsustainable lending through the Belt and Road Initiative, we need to ensure that there are high-standard, high-leverage solutions to the challenges countries are facing,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
An employee of a souvenir shop in Hanoi, Vietnam, packs a shirt bearing an…
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