How America Became Blind To China’s Long Game

China is not just America’s geopolitical opponent; they are our geopolitical enemy. They have been our geopolitical enemies since the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime in 1949.

We may have spent decades pretending that this isn’t true; Richard Nixon famously moved to open China as a way of separating China from the Soviet Union, and some neoliberals may have opened our markets to Chinese goods, hoping that free markets would lead to political moderation, but all that time, China was still our enemy.

The People’s Republic of China is a historically mass-murdering, currently terrorist-supporting, surveillance state of unprecedented proportions directed at destroying America’s global hegemony.

And they’re taking the long view. They can wait us out. They are taking advantage of our openness in order to defeat us. Whether it’s stealing literally tens of billions of dollars in intellectual property, stacking American universities with Chinese operatives, or infiltrating our political system, China is our geopolitical enemy.

This came to the fore in 2020, when China unleashed the Wuhan virus on the rest of humanity by lying and pretending that it was not transmissible from human to human, and by lying to the W.H.O., which was basically a Chinese front organization at that point.

Many folks have pointed out that we have supply chains that lead back to China, and we need to find ways to actually decouple from China.

So what should we be doing?

We need to use both the carrot and the stick. That means we need to cut good trade deals with countries such as Canada. We need to cut better trade deals with all of the people who might move toward China but might move toward us.

We need to isolate China by flexing our economic power. The way you flex your economic power isn’t just about telling people they can’t access our markets unless we get better access to theirs. The way that you flex your economic power is by cutting deals that isolate China.

You tell countries: Pick between us. You can either have access to American markets or to Chinese manufacturing. Those are your choices.

If we utilized our power in this way, we could isolate China.

We can also cut off their sources of revenue and power. President Donald Trump has been doing this with alacrity. If you look at Trump’s foreign policy and what he has been doing, much of it is directed at minimizing Chinese power and influence. The operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was designed to cut off a chief source of oil revenue for China.

Much of what is directed against Iran is actually directed against China. China receives 10-15% of its oil imports from Iran.

Isolating Iran cuts off a source of power and revenue for China. Helping Ukraine to defeat Russia in Ukraine is a way of cutting off a support base for China, because Russia is basically a giant gas station for China at this point.

What else can we do? Strengthen our own economy.

One of the big problems we have is the massive dependency in the United States on China buying our debt. China owns trillions of dollars in American debt. They buy American bonds. The tacit threat in doing so is that, at a certain strategic point, they could flood the market with those American bonds.

They could take a loss. They could cram that down on their own citizens, just make their own citizens poorer. They don’t really care about their citizens.

This is a stark reminder that if you wish to be a world power, you cannot be a bloated welfare state.

I know that there’s a third rail of American politics, and that third rail of American politics is all of the entitlement programs. President Trump and his administration have taken the position that the entitlement programs in the United States require no systemic changes.

The problem with that perspective is that when you bloat your own economy, when you create enormous anchors on the American ship of state, it is very difficult to move in the ways you need to move.

Our debt is a huge problem. What we should be doing is getting lean and mean in terms of how we actually run our ship of state. We should make our economy more innovative, lower taxes, and cut down the bloated welfare state.

Finally, we badly need to cut off China’s avenues for stealing our IP and destroying our institutions. One easy way to do that: Zero Chinese foreign exchange students. Zero.

I understand that there is a strong incentive for our university systems to bring in Chinese foreign exchange students, since foreign students pay full freight while American students pay a discounted rate.

We should not be importing students from places that hate the United States in order to study at our universities. Period. End of story. I do not care whether those are students from Iran, and I do not care whether those are students from sub-Saharan Africa. I don’t care whether they are students from China; it doesn’t matter.

Bringing people to the United States to access our systems and then going back to their home countries is a gigantic mistake. There is no upside for us. It is all downside.

To pretend that some geopolitical enemies do not take advantage of our openness here in the United States to harm us is nonsense. They absolutely do.

All of these things are possible — and necessary.