Joe Biden said China was becoming too weak to invade Taiwan, blaming the slowing economy on helping to reduce the threat of a full-scale attack.
Despite Beijing’s bellicose rhetoric and manoeuvres in the South China Sea, Mr Biden the slowdown would affect Beijing’s ability to seize control of Taiwan over which it has claimed sovereignty for decades.
“I don’t think this is going to cause China to invade Taiwan,” Mr Biden said in Hanoi on the second stop of his trip to Asia.
“As a matter of fact, the opposite. It probably doesn’t have the same capacity that it had before.”
Relations between Washington and Beijing have been tense in recent years with the US administration cancelling Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China in February amid a row over the appearance of surveillance balloons over the US.
There have also been tensions over trade especially in technology.
The approach, however, has softened in recent months with senior administration figures including Mr Blinken and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visiting China.
But Mr Biden sought to explain the shifting strategy when he spoke to reporters on Sunday.
“Really what this trip is about, it’s less about containing China. I don’t want to contain China. I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about,” he said.
“We’re not looking to hurt China. Sincerely, we’re all better off if China does well by the international rules.”
Republicans have attacked Biden’s China policy
Mr Biden added that he expected to meet Chinese president Xi Jinping “sooner rather than later.” The Chinese leader did not attend the G20 summit in New Delhi.
Mr Biden played down the threat posed by China, arguing that the country faced significant economic challenges.
Earlier this year he referred to the Chinese economy as a “ticking time bomb”.
The Biden administration has come under attack from Republicans over its China policy, which has seen several senior members of the administration travel to Beijing in recent months.
In June they condemned his decision to send Mr Blinken to China, accusing the administration of undermining US national security.
‘Don’t appease China’
And Republican presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, stepped up the attack on Sunday by describing his approach to Beijing, which she accused of killing Americans with Fentanyl.
“For Biden to realise, you don’t send Cabinet members over to China to appease them,” she said on CNN’s State of The Union.
“You start getting serious with China and say we’re not going to put up with it. They keep sending different Cabinet officials over…and it’s embarrassing.
“They are putting a Chinese spy base up in…Cuba, off the coast of Florida and don’t wait for the fact that they are going to be sending Chinese military troopers there. What are we doing appeasing China instead?”
In Washington, there have been bipartisan calls for new laws to prevent China from buying farmland near military installations.
And Ms Haley, who was the US ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, demanded the country take back land which it had already bought.
