Posted on 10/21/21
| News Source: Newsmax
Nicholas Burns, President Joe Biden’s nominee for ambassador to China, appears to have changed his tune on the back-and-forth between Washington and Beijing regarding the novel coronavirus, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the U.S. ”needs to investigate” and that the Chinese ”need to answer questions,” the Washington Examiner reports.
Burns, a retired career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, used his confirmation hearing to stress that China poses ”the greatest threat to the security of our country and the democratic world” in the 21st century.
He also said the U.S. ”cannot trust China on Taiwan” and that the most important thing the U.S. could do ”is to deepen our security cooperation, to expand our arms provisions to Taiwan.
”Our responsibility is to make Taiwan a tough nut to crack.”
On COVID-19, he said, ”we don’t know how this virus originated for sure, there are multiple theories, and the Chinese need to answer questions,” a far cry from comments he made in 2020 when he said it was ”racist” for then-President Donald Trump to refer to COVID-19 as the ”Wuhan virus.”