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At Harvard, Biden addresses US relationship with China

Vice President Joe Biden spoke to students, faculty, and staff at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on Thursday.Winslow Townson/Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE -- Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School Thursday night, Vice President Joe Biden gave a foreign policy speech in which he addressed plans for an international order that he said is “literally fraying at the seams.”

“Managing our relationship with China is the single most essential strategy” for long-term global peace and prosperity, he said, but the US will “push back where we must.”

He said US foreign policy rests on five principles: strengthening existing alliances; building better relationships with emerging powers such as Brazil, Mexico, and India; dealing with “asymmetrical” threats from powers such as Syria and Russia; countering violent extremism from terrorist groups such as ISIS, and maintaining a strong economy at home.

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Biden condemned the “use of corruption as a foreign policy tool,” which he said was Russia’s tactic in destabilizing Ukraine. Speaking about ISIS and other extremist groups, Biden said the US response should be “deadly serious” but there is “no existential threat, none, to our way of life or our security.”

“We didn’t crumble after 9/11; we didn’t falter after the Boston Marathon. We own the finish line,” he said to the audience of 750 people, including his sister Valerie Biden-Owens, a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

Biden rejected the notion that the US should have intervened in Syria earlier, saying there was no “moderate middle” to cultivate -- “the moderate middle was made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers,” but that the US now is training more than 7,000 moderate rebels there.

The United States’ leading role in the world, he said, is contingent upon America remaining ”the most vibrant” world economy.

Michael O’Loughlin is the national reporter for Crux, the Globe’s website about Catholicism.​