What on Earth was Joe Biden doing during eight years of top-level intelligence briefings during the Obama administration?

I ask that question because, while he might be an eight-year former Vice President and the Democratic 2020 presidential front-runner, Joe Biden suggested this week that it's stupid to recognize China as America's great geopolitical challenger in the 21st century. As Biden put it, "China is going to eat our lunch? Come on man!"

This is a very foolish arrogance for which Biden has no excuse. After all, the PDB intelligence briefings which Biden received from the first day of his vice presidency contain the highest-level information the U.S. government and its allies produce. And a good portion of those briefings would have pertained to China and its ambition to displace American influence everywhere.

China certainly spent the 2009-2017 period doing some very important things. These included its audacious theft of U.S. intellectual property and military technology, the hacking of U.S. government databases as a means to targeting and recruiting U.S. intelligence officers, the assassination of U.S. intelligence agents on Chinese soil, a military buildup, and the seizure of vast areas of the South China Sea. Biden would have received intimate briefings on each of these problems. And Biden's briefings should have fostered his appreciation for China's boldness in challenging America.

That's what Xi Jinping is about: boldly challenging America in order to replace the U.S.-led international order with a Chinese feudal system. And as China's vast telecommunications-espionage, military, and mercantile efforts prove, Beijing has a very real prospect of succeeding in its ambitions. That is, unless the U.S. uses its international order to show nations that they can be richer, safer, and more respected within our system, rather than under China's. That effort will also require credible U.S. military strength capable of defeating Chinese aggression.

For Biden to push these concerns aside with such flippancy is no mere gaffe. Indeed, as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. pointed out on Twitter, it is Biden's successor to Obama's 2012 derision over Russia's threat — and we all know how that ended.

Obama's delusion was counted in bodies and lost U.S. credibility. Hopefully, Biden won't get the chance to make the same mistake.