Scranton Joe’s penchant for lovable gaffes is harming President Biden’s diplomacy-dominated foreign policy. Secretary Blinken barely had time to bask in praise over his Beijing visit before Communist China hit the roof over an impolitic presidential slight, calling Chairman Xi a “dictator.”

The two things a strongman rarely forgives are being exposed as a dictator and doubting he has absolute control. In two sentences uttered during a California fundraiser Tuesday night, Mr. Biden hurled both accusations at Mr. Xi. The president, who has previously downplayed this winter’s spy balloon incident, now seems eager to overplay his own success in handling the affair. 

“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it was he didn’t know it was there,” Mr.  Biden said. “That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened.”

Such remarks are “extremely absurd and irresponsible,” the spokeswoman at Beijing’s foreign ministry, Mao Ning, told reporters. Mr. Biden has committed “an open political provocation,” she added, and he violated diplomatic etiquette. 

And with that, a widely-held sense that tensions are being lowered between the world’s top superpowers are bound to dissipate. Much of Communist China’s statecraft is based on face saving. Blunt comments are frowned upon.

Mr. Blinken, in his trip, including a Monday sit down with Mr. Xi, seemed to have internalized these insights. He was willing to overlook his hosts’ slights in order to promote a diplomatic mission at hand. 

As back home Mr. Blinken was getting over a jet lag, Democdratic Washington, including the president, was praising Mr. Blinken’s performance in the communist capital. 

“We’re on the right trail here,” Mr. Biden told reporters prior to the California fundraiser Tuesday. Asked if he felt that Mr. Blinken had made any real progress at Beijing, the president shot back, “I don’t feel. You know it’s been made,” adding that the secretary “did a hell of a job.”

In reality, any progress made during Mr. Blinken’s visit favored the narrative and interests of his Chinese hosts. Mr. Blinken was greeted upon arrival by low level foreign ministry bureaucrats, rather than the foreign minister. He was informed that Mr. Xi would grace him with an audience only 45 minutes before the meeting. Beijing seemed intent on tightly controlling the choreography. 

In his public remarks Mr. Blinken made a point of saying that America does not support independence for Taiwan. While no concrete agreements seemed to have been finalized, the secretary was proud that lines of “communication” were established and that they signaled a promise for an upcoming thaw in relations that were fraught since the balloon incident. 

Publicly at least, Mr. Xi indicated that he too is interested in a thaw. “Whether the two countries can find the right way to get along bears on the future and destiny of humanity,” he said after the meeting.

At the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Beijing and Havana are “negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops and other security and intelligence operations” as close as 100 miles off America’s shores.

The report follows an earlier disclosure that Beijing is paying Havana billions of dollars to set up a spy shop on the island. The White House at first said the report was inaccurate, only to later verify it, while claiming that the Chinese-Cuban deal was nothing new and that President Trump had overlooked it. 

In a letter to the White House, seen by the Sun, the chairman of the House select committee, Congressman Mike Gallagher, says that the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese companies that helped set up the Cuban outpost “have relied in part on accessing or exploiting U.S. intellectual property, even as they have undermined U.S. interests, violated U.S. export control restrictions, and boosted the surveillance and censorship capabilities of authoritarian states.”

Mr. Biden’s approach to national security is based on the notion that diplomacy, verging on appeasement, can achieve national goals better than power projection. He has called the spy balloon “silly” and denied that America’s top adversary is setting up shop on our doorstep in direct challenge to our interests. He is begging  for a “thaw,” and is watching Chinese military expansion while Pentagon budgets nominally shrink. 

Meanwhile, Beijing makes some vague statements about getting along. “The Chinese, like the Americans, are dignified, confident and self-reliant people, and they both have the right to pursue a better life,” was one of Mr. Xi’s utterances following his meeting with Mr. Blinken. Yet China’s actions are increasingly adversarial and threatening.

That Mr. Blinken’s trip would lead to a summit between the American president and the Beijing party boss now seem unlikely. Michael Kinsley once defined a gaffe as telling the truth when one shouldn’t. Mr. Biden made his, and now it is difficult for Mr. Xi to remain “dignified” without retaliating. 

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This dispatch has been expanded from the bulldog.