“The government here in Beijing is not contributing to” the fentanyl crisis that is causing death and destruction throughout the United States, Biden administration Ambassador Nicholas Burns declared. These should be alarming words, coming from the current US ambassador to China. Burns is no rookie. He has been a powerful player on the diplomatic stage for decades, having served in significant posts within the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations and in lesser roles for George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton before being tapped by Joe Biden. It is impossible for him not to know the degree to which the Chinese communist regime controls the business climate in its country, including the black market.
“Beijing rarely acts against the top echelons of Chinese criminal syndicates unless they specifically contradict a narrow set of interests of the Chinese Government. Chinese criminal networks provide a variety of services to Chinese legal business enterprises, including those connected to government officials and the Chinese Communist Party,” explained Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the globalist Brookings Institution, in testimony before a House Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions hearing on March 23.
Maybe, If We Ask Them Nicely ...
Yet Burns told Politico in an interview posted May 4 that he hopes to convince the Chinese government to team up with the United States to help solve a problem for which it is not responsible:
“Can we work on the fentanyl problem? The government here in Beijing is not contributing to that problem. But black-market Chinese firms are and they’re shipping illicit precursor chemicals to the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America that make the fentanyl that poisons and often kills Americans. And so we would like the government here in Beijing to use its power to shut down the flow of precursor chemicals from these black-market Chinese firms to the drug cartels’ [fentanyl] production sites. That has been a difficult dialogue. But we’ve got to continue it.”
Where does this seemingly deliberate naiveté come from? Burns believes the United States must “cooperate” with China whenever it can. He frequently cites climate change as a key example. There seems to be a pattern. Burns was strongly critical of former President Donald Trump’s get-tough stance on China, which he believed hampered America’s ability to “work with” the Asian nation to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Trump “should close ranks to work with China, Japan, South Korea, Europe and Iran” to fight COVID, Burns tweeted in March 2020. “Instead, he thinks we can dig a moat around America.” More willful naiveté? Or is there another explanation for Burns’ soft-lens approach to dealing with outrageous Chinese actions that have killed almost a hundred thousand of Americans in recent years?
Green Streak to China
That would be money. Like an astonishing number of leading officials on the Biden administration’s foreign policy team, Burns has made a killing in the private sector between gigs with ruling establishment presidencies. A must-read July 2020 article by Jonathan Guyer at The American Prospect lays out the vast extent of the corporate/governmental revolving door gravy train enjoyed by Team Biden’s foreign policy wing. “[M]any of the people who work closely with Biden are enmeshed in the opaque world of strategic consultancies and by extension a network of the world’s biggest businesses,” Guyer wrote. “If they’ve been consulting for corporations with offshore interests, this spells potential conflicts.”
Among the names listed: Nicholas Burns of the Cohen Group.
Burns’ bio is a monument to insider elitism by any measure. A version posted at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he is currently on leave from his position as a professor, contains the following:
“Burns is Executive Director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum, Senior Counselor at the Cohen Group, and serves on the Board of Directors of [semiconductor components enhancer] Entegris, Inc. ...
“He also serves on the boards of ... Refugees International [and] The Trilateral Commission ... He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.”
The Cohen Group, which Guyer identified as a source of Burns’ personal wealth, has deeply entrenched business ties with China. From a page on its corporate website:
“China is a market of enormous opportunity and complexity. The Cohen Group's China Practice has a solid record of success with professionals in offices in Beijing, Tianjin and Washington, DC.
“Building upon decades of experience, on-the-ground management expertise, and long-time personal and professional relationships throughout the region, TCG's China Practice helps companies succeed in the Chinese market. TCG enables Fortune 500 Companies, as well as small- and medium-sized enterprises, to achieve their commercial goals in China through tailored government, business, and media relations strategies.”
Nicholas Burns (Photo by Sha Hanting/China News Service via Getty Images)
Company founder and former Clinton administration Defense Secretary “William Cohen's involvement with China spans nearly 30 years, beginning in his days as a young Congressman from Maine in 1978 when he traveled to China to meet with Deng Xiaoping,” the firm boasts. “Since then, he has been a constant presence in the US-China relationship, including commercial development and security cooperation. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the US-China Business Council and as an honorary professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. Secretary Cohen is joined by a talented team of China specialists, including Chinese nationals with extensive experience in Chinese government ministries and the private sector, as well as Americans with combined decades of experience involving China.”
“Can we come together as the two largest carbon emitters?” Burns mused to Politico on developing an amicable working relationship with China. “We have an obligation to each other and the world to make progress on that issue. Can we work together to predict or anticipate the next pandemic and to work together to arrest the next pandemic?”
These dreamy remarks, coupled with his shocking rejection of any active role by the bloody Beijing regime in exacerbating the fentanyl crisis plaguing America today, must be seen in the bigger light of a man whose swelling bank accounts have been tethered to powerful US business elites who will never abandon China, no matter how dirty and distasteful things get. Not so long as there are corporate profits to be mined.
