President Joe Biden’s first major foreign policy speech on restoring “America’s place in the world” has been postponed due to two inches of snow, reports the The Washington Free Beacon.
The speech will be "rescheduled due to inclement weather," a White House official told reporters, adding that Biden "looks forward to visiting later this week when the agency's staff and diplomats can more safely commute to attend."
Biden’s trip to the State Department would have been his first to a Cabinet agency. The visit was meant to underscore his administration’s focus on repairing American alliances and using diplomacy as a tool abroad, according to an official who spoke with CNN.
Biden was sharply critical of former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy and promised a dramatic shift when he took office.
Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, over the weekend said the Biden administration plans to respond quickly to China’s increasingly assertive policies toward Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and others areas by building leverage with allies.
“They're pointing to dysfunction and division in the United States and saying, ‘Take a look at that, their system doesn’t work. Our system does,’” Sullivan said at an event sponsored by the nonpartisan United States Institute of Peace.
“Step one is … to refurbish the fundamental foundations of our democracy. That goes for everything from our democratic system itself, to issues of racial inequity, to issues of economic inequality, all of the things that have contributed to the shine coming off the American model.”
“China is right at the top of the list of things that we’ve got to work together on and where there is work to do to get fully aligned,” he said.