Our Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is off Thursday to China, on a mission that even the administration doesn’t expect to be a success. Ms. Yellen once resisted before Congress the idea of  holding the Federal Reserve to even a voluntary, non-binding monetary guideline that the Fed would set itself. Now she seems intent on establishing some kind of rules in respect of how the communist party runs the world’s second biggest economy. 

Good luck, we say. What credibility is she going to have at Beijing when fiscal and monetary policies in America are in disarray? The dollar is not defined in law. Our debts are larger than our annual output. Inflation is running at 4 percent. With all the inflation, we’re going to be repaying our debts to China with dollars that are worth less than those it lent to us. How does one say in Chinese, “Hey, what kind of racket is that?”?

The mandarins at Beijing, we imagine, are as aware as we are of the greenback’s slide as measured in the real basis of monetary value, gold. With Ms. Yellen at the Treasury’s helm, the dollar is now worth little more than its record low, set during Covid, of a 2,075th of an ounce of gold. During her tenure at the Fed, the dollar sank a little more than 5 percent, to a 1,333rd of a gold ounce in February 2018 from a 1,262nd four years earlier.

The greenback’s plunge under Ms. Yellen’s stewardship could explain why Communist China is among the nations looking for “alternatives to the dollar,” as the Financial Times put it in a dispatch in May. At a time when central banks around the world are purchasing gold at a pace not seen since the heyday of Bretton Woods, “a key question,” the FT says, is “what role gold will play in Beijing’s plans to internationalize the renminbi.”

Mr. Xi’s proposal to begin “settling payments for Saudi oil and gas” in China’s currency, the FT reports, citing financial analysts, “will only gain traction” if the currency “can be converted into gold.” Noting that China’s central bank “has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world,” some $3.2 trillion, the FT observes that Beijing “has reported adding gold for six months running.”

The “sustained gold purchases,” a McKinsey partner, Oliver Ramsbottom, suggest “a long-term policy to loosen capital controls,” boosting  “the renminbi’s challenge” to the dollar. Mr. Xi could be thinking along the same lines as Brazil’s leftist president, Lula da Silva, who professed to wonder “why every country needs to trade in the dollar” and asked “Who decided it was the dollar after the disappearance of the gold standard?”

Faced with these headwinds to the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” — which enables America to run large budget and trade deficits at relatively low cost — one could imagine President Biden and his economic advisers would be battening down the hatches and trying to strengthen the greenback. Instead, Ms. Yellen’s mission to Beijing, following Secretary Blinken’s recent expedition, conveys the impression of America as a supplicant.

That impression is bolstered by the fact that Mr. Xi and his camarilla can reckon how much America will need to borrow in the years to come as a result of our failure to curb federal overspending. Uncle Sam will need as much as $20 trillion over the next decade alone, Veronique de Rugy notes in these columns, pointing to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, and $114 trillion in the next three decades.

Ms. de Rugy asks whether it is “credible” to imagine that investors will agree to buy all this debt, especially as “China and Japan have already reduced their holdings of American bonds.” So no wonder Ms. Yellen is off to Beijing, hat in hand, making another attempt to rekindle the illusion of friendship — a “mini-thaw,” optimists call it — between two nations with what increasingly appear to be different values.