If the United States and China are dealing, for decades it’s been a good bet that the Chinese Communist Party is winning.

China has long exploited America’s greed, naïveté and freedoms to lie, cheat and steal its way into becoming our foremost foreign adversary — under a prevailing US policy of engagement and appeasement marking virtually every presidency in the last 50 years save that of Donald Trump.

The uniquely compromised-on-China Biden administration has sought to restore the status quo to the greatest extent politically possible, operating under the same old failed premise that we must desperately seek to embrace the CCP as a potential partner, rather than forthrightly confront it as the enemy that it is; that pursuing areas of purported mutual interest will somehow culminate in kumbaya, rather than that Beijing will cynically take advantage of our goodwill to empower itself.

For the latest installment of this perpetual tragedy of American projection if not treachery, look no further than the proceedings this week in a Potemkin San Francisco newly swept free of the drug addicts and dysfunction the CCP helped create in waging a modern opium war on the United States.

On the eve of the APEC summit, according to reports, President Biden and General Secretary Xi Jinping have agreed to a long-bandied deal whereby China will crack down on the chemical companies that produce the poisons shipped abroad, primarily to Mexico, used to create the fentanyl flooding our streets.

In exchange, the United States will drop sanctions against China’s Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, which had been blacklisted by the US Department of Commerce for its involvement in “human rights violations and abuses” in Xinjiang.

Another way of characterizing the deal is as follows: China claims it will turn off its chemical warfare killing machine, which is taking the lives of 70,000 Americans per year, if the United States will let China’s security and spying apparatus — implicated in the horrors of Xi’s slave labor gulags — once again be able to freely access our technologies to continue its repression.

Who do you think will uphold its end of the bargain?

How will the CCP interpret the fact it can extort us into sanctions relief by leveraging its biological weapons factories?

And what are we to make of the idea that despite the CCP’s depredations, and leadership of an axis of anti-American regimes extending from Russia to Iran to our own backyard in Cuba, the Biden administration is so intent on working with it?

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has indicated progress on combating fentanyl could “open the door to further cooperation on other issues.”

The CCP has done nothing to merit such comity and everything to deserve our enmity.

Xi Jinping likely cannot believe his luck in counterparts.

The question now is becoming less about whether and more about when he will push that luck to Taiwan’s shores.

Benjamin Weingarten is editor at large at RealClearInvestigations.