How America’s Enemies Are Winning Without Firing A Shot

As founder and CEO of State Armor, I spend a lot of time in state capitals walking state officials through one basic fact: The Chinese Communist Party almost never tries to match America strength-for-strength. Their game is subversion, and they seek asymmetric opportunities to turn our own strengths against us.

For more than a century, affordable, abundant energy has underwritten America’s superpower status. Cheap electricity, domestic oil and natural gas, and a reliable power grid built the modern economy and made this country a leader in innovation. Every time you flip on a light switch or fire up a server farm, you’re tapping into a strength Beijing would rather see us abandon.

Beijing’s preferred path to victory over America doesn’t involve disrupting pipelines or knocking off our electricity, though they are pre-positioning to do that. They would rather convince Americans to voluntarily walk away from the energy abundance that made us prosperous.

That is why State Armor has been investigating organizations like the Environmental Law Institute and the Energy Foundation China. Our recent report on the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and earlier research on Energy Foundation China describe a disturbing reality: organizations that style themselves as climate advocates are cultivating deep ties to Beijing and undermining America’s energy independence. On paper, they look like innocuous nonprofits. In practice, they benefit China by turning the screws on U.S. energy production and pushing our industries toward Chinese-controlled supply chains.

Energy Foundation China, a U.S.-based grantmaking nonprofit that serves as a key vehicle for Beijing-aligned energy advocacy, has funded campaigns promoting a rapid American transition away from reliable domestic energy production toward energy supply chains controlled by the CCP. At the same time, EFC’s China operations are overseen by government agencies in Beijing and guided by officials embedded deep in the CCP’s bureaucracy.

Environmental Law Institute, for its part, is intent on constraining U.S. oil and gas on the home front by promoting radical environmental theories to punish energy producers in American courts. In contrast, despite China being the world’s largest polluter, ELI takes an accommodative approach and works closely with senior CCP officials within the Chinese system.

Beijing doesn’t see these U.S.-based non-profits as partners; it sees them as marks. Beijing is busy strengthening its own domestic energy infrastructure while weakening ours. While Chinese officials talk up their climate credentials, China keeps approving and building new coal plants, directly contradicting their own stated environmental goals.

At the same time, China has spent years tightening its grip on the supply chains for solar panels, battery components, critical minerals, and rare earth processing, resulting in Chinese control of so-called “green” technologies.

The result is a one-way trade and a national security nightmare. We are urged to shut down American oil, gas, and coal while China sells us the replacement hardware those choices require, complete with documented remote-access kill-switches. We give up energy independence and buy energy dependence on China.

What’s more, China is applying this same playbook — exploiting our own system and institutions to weaken our key domestic strengths — in a fight to undermine the data centers that will power America’s AI revolution.

This month, State Armor warned that Chinese-linked networks were beginning to amplify opposition to the data centers, turning local worries about electricity demand and locations into a campaign against the entire infrastructure.

OpenAI soon publicly confirmed our finding, detailing how it dismantled a PRC-linked operation that used AI-generated content to stoke fears over data center buildouts, electricity prices, and environmental impacts. Chinese state-controlled outlets have since leaned into the same themes, even as Beijing rapidly subsidizes its own AI infrastructure at home.

First, it was American oil and natural gas. Now it is the data centers that will support advanced AI and drive the next generation of U.S. productivity growth. Tomorrow the target will be whatever industry gives the United States its next strategic edge.

None of this means every environmental group or every critic of data centers is taking cues from Beijing. But policymakers need to see the larger pattern: the CCP has become skilled at spotting legitimate domestic disputes and amplifying the arguments that slow American progress while clearing a path for its own.

The CCP does not need Americans to cheer for communism or adopt its ideology. It just needs us to pass laws and regulations that sideline our own strengths and deepen our dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains.

The greatest strategic gift we could hand Beijing is persuading Americans that the very things that made our nation prosperous — energy abundance, heavy industry, server farms humming with computation — are liabilities rather than assets. China has no intention of making that mistake. Neither should we.

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Michael Lucci is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of State Armor, which he created to develop and enact state solutions to global security threats. Follow him at: @Michael7ucci