Washington should focus more on challenges within US than destablizing China, Russia: media

BEIJING - Washington should reconsider its foreign policy and focus more on challenges within the United States than trying to destabilize China and Russia, said a recent opinion piece in the South China Morning Post.

"America needs a new path, rethinking its assumptions about itself and foreign policy, before dealing with Beijing and Moscow," said the opinion published Tuesday.

In the opinion, author Tom Plate, distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, wrote that although US President Joe Biden's administration has labelled China and Russia as US main international challengers, "the true existential challenge comes not from afar but from within."

"The US economy may well be recovering but the American psyche is still mostly flatlining," Plate noted, adding, "Washington would do better with its time and money if it were to focus less on how to destabilize Beijing or Moscow and more on how to destabilize an America that seems lost at home and adrift abroad."

Citing a recently published political memoir by US professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University Richard A. Falk, Plate said Washington needs "a new course" rather than "a course correction."

"Militarist approaches to the foreign policy" are ineffective in today's world, and this is a fact that China and Asia understand, while the United States and the West do not, Plate quoted Falk's memoir as saying.