China is a bad actor on the world stage. Americans have known this long before it lied about the coronavirus, a pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 people and caused the loss of untold trillions of dollars of economic activity. The regime’s record on human rights abuse, currency manipulation, and theft of intellectual property speaks for itself. It’s shown outward aggression toward the United States in the South China Sea. It has demonstrated that it plans on expanding its influence throughout Eurasia, Africa, and South America, hoping to supplant the U.S. as the world’s preeminent superpower.
Despite these actions, most of the leadership in Washington has facilitated China in its goal of overtaking the U.S. That’s not necessarily because we have bad leaders, but because we’ve subscribed to a failed ideology.
For more than two decades, the bipartisan foreign policy establishment believed it could remake the globe in its image. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, elites thought Western humanism would be the last plateau of human evolution. Countries unwilling to move toward that system of government organically could have it imposed on them by force (consider Iraq), or through the free market, as is the case with China.
This way of thinking became rooted in Washington’s collective psyche, and anyone who challenged that orthodoxy was treated as a social pariah standing in the way of progress. Our foreign policy and economic elites believed that once China opened itself up to the world and liberalized its economy, it would ultimately change its government and adopt Western values.
Quite the opposite occurred. It’s the U.S. that has altered itself to meet the demands of the Chinese Communist Party. Our media parrots its propaganda, our leading athletes lambast those criticizing the Communist government’s domestic politics, American tech companies work with firms linked to the Chinese military, and our film industry self-censors to comply with its authoritarian regime.
China has always been aware of the West’s plans for its regime. But the Communist Party has drawn on thousands of years of Chinese and Western thinking to subvert these goals and accumulate massive wealth and power at the cost of America and our allies. The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu once said that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” And this is precisely what China has done.
Over the past 30 years, China managed to dominate the market on everything from the rare earth minerals that we use in our cell phones and cars to the ingredients in pharmaceuticals that we put in our bodies. It’s spent decades as a currency manipulator, stolen untold sums worth of intellectual property, and flooded the U.S. with fentanyl, helping exacerbate the opioid crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
China is slowly transforming the U.S., not the other way around.
It should come as no shock that a country with as many rampant abuses as China isn’t worried about serious repercussions when it comes to the coronavirus. It’s become America’s creditor, pharmacist, manufacturer, and perennial villain. Our addiction to cheap consumer goods and adherence to globalism has created a dependency on a country whose government is extremely irresponsible at best.
Much can be done in the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic to protect Americans from future outbreaks. It’s possible that under President Trump’s direction, Peter Navarro could help move supply chains home. Nonetheless, the U.S. will always be vulnerable to China so long as our leaders are committed to the ideologies of globalism and neoliberalism. It’s up to either our leaders in Washington to reform themselves or to voters to elect new leaders in both parties who refuse to subscribe to that broken ideology.
Ryan Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) is the author of the book They’re Not Listening, How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution.
