Biden thinks that only US leadership stops the world from the 'law of the jungle,' his top diplomat says

• Blinken said that Biden sees US leadership as vital to global stability.
• When the US sits back and countries like China step in, Biden thinks it leads to "chaos," he said.
• Biden has made competing with China a top foreign policy goal.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an interview with The Washington Post said that President Joe Biden believes it's in the world's best interest for the US to act as a global leader.

"What he sees time and again is that ... when we're not leading," then another country, often China, "tries to assert itself in our place" and this can be harmful to US interests, Blinken said. "Or no one shows up" and it leads to "chaos and law of the jungle," the secretary of state added.

Former President Donald Trump had a starkly different perspective on foreign affairs, as evidenced by his "America First" philosophy. Trump often took a unilateral approach to foreign policy, pulling the US out of major agreements and railing against international institutions the US played a key role in establishing, like the United Nations and NATO. Experts and diplomats warned that Trump's handling of foreign policy created a void in global leadership that China was rapidly filling.

Blinken's summary of Biden's foreign policy to The Post presented a picture of a president with a decidedly traditional, but also pragmatic worldview. Biden believes the US should be at the helm in terms of global leadership, which includes challenging China and Russia, but also views cooperation and compromise as crucial aspects of effective foreign policy.

"The president is very clear-eyed about two things," Blinken told the Post: He must "hold Russia to account for any reckless or adversarial actions it takes" while simultaneously remaining open to "areas in which it may be in our mutual interest to work with Russia." Biden recently referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose critics often wind up dead or seriously harmed, as a "killer." This prompted outrage from the Kremlin.

Blinken, who got into a public spat with China's top diplomat in Alaska last month after bringing up the Chinese government's human rights abuses, also said it's not the goal of the US to "contain China, hold China back, keep it down."

This, however, deviates from Biden's recent messaging on China. The president in a recent speech, for example, said that he wouldn't let China become the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world.

"They have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. That's not gonna happen on my watch," Biden said of China.

The president has made challenging China a top foreign policy goal, condemning the Chinese government's human rights violations while pushing for investments in infrastructure and underscoring the importance of making the US more competitive in technology and science.

"Do you think China is waiting around to invest in its digital infrastructure or research and development? I promise you, they are not waiting," Biden said in a speech earlier this week touting his $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. "But they are counting on American democracy to be too slow, too limited, and too divided to keep up the pace."

The Biden administration this week also took steps to derail China's effort to build the world's fastest supercomputer, necessary for the development of virtually-unstoppable hypersonic missiles and other advanced weapons.