“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”  This declaration by Goethe concerns the fabricated semblance of freedom, which humbles humankind. Elites after Tiananmen Square in 1989 misjudged the course charted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Our leaders thought that after the fall of the Soviet Empire, the PRC’s adaptation of capitalism would inevitably lead to a pluralistic form of government. 

China, infused with American and other foreign capital and technology, was creating great wealth and with it, millionaires. Surely, this was capitalism, which would lead to democracy and to freedom for the Chinese people.  What was not understood was that an alternative national model existed, which fused party control and the eradication of internal opposition with an ostensibly capitalistic structure. The PRC, in its economic measures and in its ruthless suppression of dissent and targeted minorities, in fact, resembles the prewar form of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Wilhelm Messerschmitt, the Krupp family, Hermann Schmitz of IG Farben, and Claude Dornier, among others, were inventors and industrialists who became extraordinarily wealthy in the 1930s due to Germany’s rearmament and industrialization efforts. For China, the rigid communist example had been poison. The socialist model of prewar Germany was different: what Germany accomplished, economically, scientifically, and militarily, if scaled up from a European country of moderate size and population to one the size and scope of China, could dominate the world. Despite the myriad of names that China has coined for its economic reforms and plans, this is the essence of the model that the PRC adopted after the fall of the USSR, but masked to the outside world. 

For the PRC to continue its march and still be a semblance of its original creation, pitiless political and ideological suppression, theft of intellectual property, harassment, and deceit would need to remain married to access to foreign capital, undergirded by the regime’s insincere homages to freedom and to democratic principles. These flourishes concerning liberty were enough to seduce or to co-opt the elites in the countries of the world that had given China the sustenance required to build its repressive empire. Indicative of our lassitude is the case of Liu Xiaobo, sentenced in 2009 to eleven years of imprisonment for writing parts of the Charter 08 manifesto, which demanded political freedoms within China. Liu’s incarceration was not met by any meaningful action on the West’s part to curtail China’s access to foreign capital or technology. Liu would receive the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, but he would remain in prison until his release in 2017, granted after he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

The observation that fake magic is real and that, conversely, real magic is fake, describes the difference between imagined expectation and truth. In the former case, we harbor the thought that the display, which we only observe partially, may be real, though we know it to be false. China’s narrative concerning its adherence to democratic principles has supported the world’s desire to accept the Communist Party of China’s account of the genesis and the evolution of the Wuhan virus. This caustic mental haze has become rooted among our governmental, academic, and business leaders. We, as a society, appear willing to be led on a course that presages catastrophe. 

This blindness must end. 

If China’s actions in the coronavirus catastrophe offer any window into this communist regime’s deceit and its debasement of human life, it is that the threat the PRC represents is unique in American history. 

Communism is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. To contend that aspects of China’s government emulate the characteristics of a cursed regime is to rupture the world order, but the people of Tibet cry out, the Muslims, Christians, and other men and women of faith in China cry out, and, today, the citizens of Hong Kong wail, as do all those touched by the coronavirus. 

Do we not hear?  

In its pursuit of unchecked power, China resembles the ouroboros, a dragon that strives to devour itself, for the sustenance that this nation derives from the West and from capitalism feeds the Communist Party of China’s quest to destroy that which it consumes. In all, the ouroboros represents both the beginning and the ending of time, which equates, most particularly, to the termination of the legacy of China’s Century of Humiliation, which began with the Opium Wars and with China’s submittal to an assembly of Western powers, and later to Russia and to Japan, from 1839 to the beginning of the communist epoch in 1949. 

The PRC’s emergence and its recent actions thus bear relation to the concept of creative destruction as formulated by the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [1942]). Creative destruction, though now applied to various capitalistic practices, was derived from Marxist thought. As the name implies, it argues that the destruction of what was is necessary to create the clean slate on which new creation may rest.  This is China’s path as charted by its communist party.  By our nation’s inaction, we have seemingly accepted this progression because the economic cost to us of disclaiming it is deemed too great.

The coronavirus crisis is horrific, but we must imagine a world ten or twenty years from now, in which the People’s Republic of China’s nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is fifty percent larger than that of the United States.  What power would an unconstrained China wield?  What force of arms would they muster to intimidate and to control?

At the inception of America’s entry into World War II, many strategists conjectured presciently that both Germany and Japan were destined to lose the war; their populations and their economies were too small, and their access to raw materials too tenuous, to be able to wage a protracted war against the Allies. Later, the Soviet Union posed a great challenge to our establishment of a post-war order conducive to international peace, development, and individual freedom. 

Throughout the 1950’s and early 1960’s, CIA analysts predicted the Soviet economy would surpass America’s, a prediction that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev often repeated. This calculus drove many American decisions.  Arguably, the mistakes made by America in Southeast Asia were, in part, impelled by those errant estimates.  The USSR never came close to matching the United States in economic output; today, America’s GDP is at least twelve times Russia’s.

China, however, is seemingly destined to outpace the United States in GDP during the next decade; indeed, China has plausibly already overtaken the United States, if GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Though China is far poorer than America in income per capita, its population is approximately 4.25 times that of the United States. Thus, as China’s per capita income grows to approximate that of developed nations, its total economic power will outstrip any rival state. 

Adopting elements of the construct used by our country to rebuild Western Europe and Japan after World War II, four American actions, undertaken through an uninterrupted course of eight administrations, resulted in these significant steps that aided the ascent of the communist People’s Republic of China: first, scientific aid to end famine in China (Norman Borlaug, Nobel Laureate, and the father of the Green Revolution, spent time working in China; as a consequence of Borlaug’s work, the land in Asia devoted to semi-dwarf rice and wheat types grew from 200 acres to 40 million, helping to feed hundreds of millions of people on the continent); second, President Carter’s diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China as China and his commitment that the United States Government engage with reciprocal elements of the PRC; third, President Clinton’s facilitation of the PRC’s ultimate ascension to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and his expansion of Chinese access to dual-use (civilian/military) technology; and fourth, President Obama’s embrace of the PRC as a non-adversarial peer state completed the PRC’s envelopment of America’s institutions and our modalities of power. 

The esteemed British economist Angus Maddison wrote that, “China had been the world’s biggest economy for nearly two millennia, but in the 1890s this position was taken by the United States. . . . Chinese GDP per capita was lower in 1952 than in 1820, in stark contrast with experience elsewhere in the world economy.  China’s share of world GDP fell from a third to one twentieth.  Its real per capita income fell from parity to a quarter of the world average.” 

A substantial part of this precipitous economic decline can be attributed to the Opium Wars instigated by the British government. These campaigns forced the narcotics trade upon China and compromised, in various ways, the country’s sovereignty. China’s far more recent commerce in fentanyl may be considered its payback for what the West did to it. The Treaty of Tientsin ended part of the Second Opium War: Great Britain, the United States, France, and Russia were parties to the asymmetrical documents that comprised the treaty, which as ratified by the Chinese Emperor in 1860, further debased the country. China, today, views itself as more than a country: it is a civilization. From the Communist Party of China’s perspective, the present turnabout in its power relationships is fair play, but to acknowledge this perspective must not engender our discounting the PRC’s present threat to the world.

On September 25, 2015, the White House released its official statement on U.S.-China Economic Relations. Its statement revealed a disastrously flawed course. For example, the White House factsheet noted, “The U.S. side reiterated its commitment to encourage and facilitate exports of commercial high technology items to China for civilian-end users. Both sides commit to continue detailed and in-depth discussion of the export control issues of mutual interest within the U.S.-China High Technology and Strategic Trade Working Group.” 

More troubling was the Obama Administration’s enshrinement of Chinese goals with regard to industry penetration and co-option, “The United States and China commit to limit the scope of their respective national security reviews of foreign investments (for the United States, the CFIUS process) solely to issues that constitute national security concerns, and not to generalize the scope of such reviews to include other broader public interest or economic issues. . . . When an investment poses a national security risk, the United States and China are to use their respective processes to address the risk as expeditiously as possible, including through targeted mitigation rather than prohibition whenever reasonably possible.” The factsheet also limited America’s capacity for correction, for it announced, “Once an investment has completed the national security review process of either country, the investment generally should not be subject to review again if the parties close the investment as reviewed under the respective national security review process.”

The United States, in past conflicts, has been slow to anger. In confronting this present pandemic and the Chinese actions that led to it, fury, which is often fleeting, must be held in check, for it must be displaced by actions and policies that can abate portions of the grave damage loosed on the world and enshrined by our past obsequiousness. In addition, any proper national strategy must peer into the future, to consider capabilities that must be attained, to meet threats that are unformed, but real.

Despite the wrongs committed against China in the past, the People’s Republic of China must not represent the future, for it is corrupt. Harking back to what Ronald Reagan did to spur the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United States must enunciate that its objective is the peaceful end of the Communist Party of China. China existed for four thousand years before the formation of a communist junta within its borders; China can only achieve greatness combined with liberty and wealth if it frees itself from one-party rule and the despotism that this type of government always brings. This commentary is an expansion of issues discussed in a previous article of our authorship, published by The Federalist.

Actions:

- Forge a consensus to adopt a new national strategy to address the unprecedented threat that the People’s Republic of China poses to America and to the world.

- Declare the strategy and the cause in public fora.

The Present Danger:

It is logical to assume that after some initial point, Chinese political, military, and intelligence officials realized that this outbreak of a new virus could be used as an economic weapon to bring down the economies of the West and thus assure Chinese hegemony. Given China’s history of spawning new illnesses, China’s political establishment must have had planning documents in place to serve the Communist Party of China’s interests, should such a scenario of a novel virus spread unfold. Various stratagems to contain the spread in China, sow fear around the world, and involve certain elements of the legacy media and the elites of targeted countries, may be part of a broader, communist initiative. Manipulating data with regard to the virus would be central to any such operational plan.

On May 7, 2020, the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, assembled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering, using data accumulated by the Chinese, recorded the dead in Hubei Provence, whose capital is Wuhan, at 4,512, out of 4,637 for the entire country. According to Chinese authorities, 125 fatalities occurred in all other provinces, which comprise 1.38 billion people. A novel virus would go unrecognized for weeks.  Indeed, China’s own questionable records support this conjecture.  

If the virus did experience exponential growth, and doubled every day, in 28 days it should have infected 268 million people. A one-percent mortality rate would thus result in millions of deaths, not fewer than 5,000. Of course, we do not know the true characteristics of the virus’s spread.  It clearly did not evolve in China in a manner suggestive of rapid, exponential growth. However, even if the PRC underreported its losses by a factor of ten or twenty or more, China’s very-low death and infection counts do not make sense.

Are there scenarios that explain these numbers? One explanation would involve an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was almost immediately recognized, engendering swift and firm containment procedures within China, but denied to the rest of the world by China’s continuance of international travel from the virus’s point of origin. 

The second scenario is related but crueler. Given China’s research into biological warfare, it is conceivable that a clandestine military or intelligence group within China sought to ensure supremacy through the acquisition of a naturally occurring virus that would be just transmissible and virulent enough to cause massive disruption in Western countries, but could be limited, given the regime’s foreknowledge, within China. Such a virus could have been released accidentally or purposefully, with or without the knowledge of the PRC’s most senior leadership.  Allied intelligence must determine if either scenario took place, and if so, in what form. 

Releases of biological warfare agents have occurred elsewhere. Perhaps the most infamous is the inadvertent leak of anthrax, in 1979, in Sverdlovsk, which killed 64 persons in that city, now called Ekaterinburg. This release was acknowledged first in 1992 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who participated in the cover-up years earlier, when he was the communist party chief of that metropolis. In the intervening thirteen years between the disaster and the acknowledgment that the deaths were caused by agents developed for germ warfare, the international scientific community established no firm consensus as to what had truly happened, for many believed the Soviet’s disinformation campaign. While an engineered virus, resulting from manipulation done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, must be considered unlikely and unsupported by the present set of facts, without access to the lab, its data, and the initial sites of the spread, speculation does not equate to certain knowledge.

Abetting the PRC’s denial of the access necessary for international investigators to determine the virus’s genesis is the media’s puerile argument that since the virus has been determined by independent studies of its genome to be of natural origin, it could not have come from the virology laboratory at Wuhan. This argument is wrong on two counts: first, definitive proof of the virus’s origin and its evolution is not available due to the Communist Party of China’s destruction of relevant materials and sites and its obstruction of international inquiries; second, by its own admission, and as is clearly communicated in its name, the state-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology does study naturally occurring viruses.

Actions:

- Determine by the joint action of allied intelligence agencies, and through other means and investigations, the true genesis of COVID-19.  

- Document the acts of deception and instigation undertaken by the Communist Party of China to seed the virus; present this information to the world.

The Challenge:

The PRC represents a multidimensional threat that encompasses all aspects of hard and soft power. Hard power is the use of coercion, monetary enticements, and force to attain policy goals; soft power is the result of attraction and co-option concerning outcomes, which become shared, to attain objectives supportive of interests. Until this pandemic, American soft power seemed destined to remain the dominant force in world affairs even as the PRC surpassed America’s GDP. 

Concurrent with the expectation of future Chinese economic preeminence, America’s national debt and other competing priorities will serve to constrain U.S. military power. America’s breadth of soft power was to be the barricade against these vectors. It was hoped that our nation would withstand future Chinese economic might coupled with near military parity, for the United States would retain vast reservoirs of soft power, not possessed by other nations.

Our popular culture, our free press, and our multinational businesses have heretofore been liberalizing and democratizing forces, which have reflected America’s supremacy in all major forms of soft power. The magnitude and the stability of this bulwark must be reconsidered; the PRC now wields substantial power in Hollywood and insinuates its control and propaganda into our press, our businesses, and our universities. 

The PRC has transmuted aspects of America’s soft power into that which is responsive to communist objectives.  The means for this metamorphosis are America’s freedoms, its laws, and its politicians, who are informed by the academy. Strategic purchases of U.S. businesses and the placement of Chinese companies on American stock exchanges and indexes have given the PRC enormous suasion over the avenues of American soft power. 

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has reported that as of February 25, 2019 there were 156 Chinese companies listed on the three largest U.S. exchanges. These firms had a combined capitalization of $1.2 trillion. 

On May 20, 2020, the U.S. Senate approved, without objection, the bipartisan Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act; it is now in the House of Representatives, having been introduced by Brad Sherman (D-CA). This legislation, if signed into law, could, in effect, force certain Chinese firms to be delisted from U.S. exchanges.  According to the official summary of this legislation, “This bill requires certain issuers of securities to establish that they are not owned or controlled by a foreign government. Specifically, an issuer must make this certification if the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board [PCAOB] is unable to audit specified reports because the issuer has retained a foreign public accounting firm not subject to inspection by the board.  Furthermore, if the board is unable to inspect the issuer's public accounting firm for three consecutive years, the issuer's securities are banned from trade on a national exchange or through other methods.”

Thus, in effect, Chinese companies would be compelled to use public accounting firms that are inspected by the PCAOB, after an initial period of required disclosures, to be made if a business is not presently in compliance with this requirement. This is very important; to be most meaningful, however, we should implore the U.K. to follow our Senate’s lead and to enact similar measures to protect Britain’s financial markets. 

Through investment and by direct and indirect pressure, the PRC, in its various forms, has influenced America’s most important media companies. These media companies, in turn, own major news networks, services, and publishing houses. An example of Chinese power in Hollywood is contained in the movie sequel Top Gun: Maverick. In the original 1986 film, Maverick’s iconic bomber jacket displayed military patches that included both Japanese and Taiwanese flags. 

In the new movie, a film made possible through the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, these flags are replaced with meaningless patches rendered in similar colors to obscure what was done. Citing this example, Senator Ted Cruz has introduced the SCRIPT Act to halt Pentagon assistance to companies whose films are censored in service to Chinese demands.

The PRC’s insertion into Hollywood has a model: until 1940, Hollywood studio films were subjected to German censorship or cancellation so that the studios could retain access to the German market, which before World War I had been the second-largest in the world. It is critical to note that this censorship affected American films shown not just in Germany, but worldwide. 

This history is crucial because it provides the context for the PRC’s penetration and its mechanisms of control in today’s Hollywood. Only now, the control exercised by a foreign power has far greater reach, for today’s media conglomerates that own the film and television studios also own major news networks. Therefore, to maintain access to the Chinese market for film and television, there exists, if not substantial pressure, the business context to manipulate and to bowdlerize news in America to curry favor with China. 

We now face information warfare on a level never experienced. This battle, moreover, has been waged almost entirely in one direction: against the United States. Misled by the majority of our press, we, as a society, have entered a palace of mirrors, each distorting the image of what is real. It is, therefore, critical to understanding that many persons perceive the present crisis as hyperreal, in the sense that its predominant narrative, which postulates no intrinsic Chinese governmental culpability, has supplanted the true nature of this pandemic.   

This has occurred because the narrative has been shaped by sources controlled by the Communist Party of China, which are amplified by sympathetic or by unwitting members of the media in the West. The created narrative is thus more real to the public, due to its narrative strength, than is the actual situation. Cyberwarfare is another agent. Without the immediate dissemination of veridical information, errant public-policy decisions are bound to follow. 

In the years leading up to World War II, strong business relationships with Germany and Japan prevented the free countries of the West from acting decisively to forestall German and Japanese aggression. Public sentiment to avoid future wars, after the losses in the Somme and in Verdun, held sway. Now, the economic and business pressures for America and its allies to foreswear meaningful action against the PRC are as great as can be imagined. 

To act decisively to limit Chinese exploitation and adventurism portends economic strife and the end of a globalist international order that has existed for fifty years. We must, however, put ourselves to the question: Do we have a choice? 

If the intelligence services of the United States and its allies find proof that the PRC, knowing that the virus had initially spread from its virology lab in Wuhan, or emanated from some other source, such as the city’s wet market, locked down travel to other parts of China while permitting international transport from this city, at the time the Communist Party of China prevented international fact finding, this state committed what amounts to a war crime. If this is proved so, then inaction is an invitation for repetition or mimicry, for the path to disassemble America is manifest. Without a response measured to this assault, we will show weakness and undermine deterrence.

Actions:

- Recognize the nature of the PRC’s multi-dimensional threat, no matter the near-term cost. 

- Take decisive, bipartisan action to limit the PRC’s misappropriation of elements of American soft power.

- Provide the public with highly accurate and timely information about the coronavirus and the PRC’s role in the present disaster. 

- Pass the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act; support similar measures in the U.K. and elsewhere.   

- Deny the PRC access to American media companies, especially those that control news networks; pass the SCRIPT Act.

The Recalibration:

Even without specific reference to China, the present pandemic makes clear that America must adopt a manifold of new initiatives to better protect against biological as well as chemical and nuclear threats, including electromagnetic pulse weapons and radiological agents. Possibly more destructive than a pandemic would be a failure of our power grid resulting in a protracted black-sky event, in which electricity is no longer available from our established infrastructure. This can be caused by cyberterrorism, by an electromagnetic pulse, or by kinetic damage to key nodes. 

Heretofore, the U.S. Government considered the consequences of a pandemic in abstract terms; we have lacked the institutional structures and vocabulary to institute needed actions, even when significant intelligence was at hand. Resulting from multiple visits to the virology lab in Wuhan by a U.S. delegation, detailed Department of State cables in 2018 warned of substantial safety issues. 

These reports, however, caused no meaningful action although the potential transmissibility of the bat-borne viruses, studied at the lab, and the ramifications of such transference to persons, had been the focus of acute concern in the scientific community. What was missing for this intelligence to have made a difference, in order to avert a future, worldwide crisis, was an established pathway and bureaucracy to permit the time-urgent transmission of such information to decision-making authorities at the highest levels of government.

The creation of such avenues for information and decision-making is a complex task, for the duplication of existing bureaucratic elements can be worse than no action at all. Therefore, the president should engage a special taskforce to map existing, relevant governmental structures and to recommend a new system, which would be robust, anticipatory, investigative, and responsive to a spectrum of future threats in this domain. Part of the solution must be the creation of interagency groups that can speed intelligence and threat assessments to senior officials in order to promote rapid and preventative action.

Another strand that must be realized is the modern replication of World War II’s War Production Board to ensure a measure of autarky in the production of a range of medicines and related raw ingredients. Domestic production of critical medical devices must also be pursued, with consideration given to the enactment of targeted, multiyear tax cuts and other incentives for American companies that repatriate production from China.

In the case of medicines and medical equipment, supply vulnerability studies must be instituted to determine the net levels of domestic and allied manufacture necessary to ensure supplies of these goods in a time of emergency.  The 1984 National Security Council Stockpile/Industrial Mobilization Planning Study, one of the largest investigations of its kind, can provide a template for the required interagency analysis and recommendations.

The War Production Board brought together cabinet officials and the CEOs of major U.S. corporations to ensure the extraordinarily rapid expansion of war-related production. From 1940 to 1943, aircraft production increased fourteen-fold. This was accomplished, in part, through the introduction of a Controlled Materials Plan, which by allocating, through a system of preferences, key materials to designated industries and factories, guaranteed the unhindered production of required armaments. Employing a public-private structure, rapid increases in the production of medications and equipment may be attained.

Actions:

- Attain the time-urgent transmission of critical intelligence, with regard to disease propagation, through the creation of new organizational structures within government.

- Create the capacity to cope with biological, chemical, and nuclear threats as well as EMP and black-sky events.   

- Require that production of our medicines, medical supplies, and equipment be returned to the United States or to countries that are our allies, which possess secure sources of supply and transport; propose multiyear tax cuts and other incentives to speed change.

- Establish the capability, based on our World War II experience, to facilitate public-private management structures in times of emergency, which may be buttressed by preferential allocations of critical materials, to enable the production of essential medicines, machinery, products, or other needed articles. 

Instability:

Concomitant with the PRC’s insertion into our system of higher education, our economy, our media, and our core businesses, China has embarked on a global strategy that constitutes a new imperialism. The PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to shape connectivity and alliances on a global scale, which may include 65 other countries that comprise 30% of global GDP and 75% of established energy reserves. China’s aggressive parlay in the construction of various types of power plants throughout the developing world is recognized as being inextricably tied to the BRI and is, therefore, inherently imperative.

China and Russia appropriate national assets worldwide as a result of loaded energy and development deals. This drive is only enhanced by the pandemic if no countervailing action ensues.  In Djibouti, China holds 77% of the debt. In Venezuela, Russia received 49.9% of Citgo in 2016 as collateral for $1.5 billion in cash.  Kenya, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia were all on the cusp of asset appropriation before the present crisis. 

Estimates are that China lent African nations $124 billion from 2000 through 2016. Presently, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy values Chinese loans to developing nations at $520 billion, an extraordinary sum. Yet, as destabilizing as these acquisitive loans are, the true situation may be far more dire.

Dr. Christoph Trebesch, author of the Kiel study, contends that a tremendous amount of Chinese lending is “hidden.” This may amount to an additional half trillion dollars or more of indebtedness to China by impoverished countries. If so, these amounts may, indeed, dwarf the funds lent by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The largest portion of each loan made by the PRC may not be provided generally to the borrower, but spent in China to finance Chinese-made inputs and trained labor. The recipient country is, in effect, financing jobs and manufacturing in China. Worse still, the ultimate reward for targeted countries is to have their assets appropriated, due to loan non-performance, which China may purposely contrive as the hidden tenet of each transaction. 

Given the PRC’s actions in this domain, its loans to developing nations must, as a matter of U.S policy, be turned from being a pillar of coercion into an albatross. Great Britain and India are leaders of the 54-member-state Commonwealth of Nations: this constellation of countries, which stretches across the globe, should be mobilized into a powerful alternative to China’s exploitative model of development.

Actions:

- Undertake determined efforts to deny China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially in Africa.

- Inform the governments and the elites of developing nations as to the nature and the extent of Chinese and Russian predatory lending. 

- Turn the colossal extent of the PRC’s loans to developing countries against the Communist Party of China. 

- Extend alternate terms to key nations on the brink of asset appropriation due to China’s rapaciousness.

- Advance a substitute to the BRI; cooperate in this endeavor with Britain and with India.

-Marshal support for these initiatives from the member states of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Energy:  

The production, distribution, and use of electricity, during the next several decades, will undergo a transformation more profound than any experienced since the time of Edison. Power, information, and communications will fuse; power lines will be transformed to be channels that move energy and information multi-directionally. New power stations, coupled with smart electric grids, will be foundational to this transformation.

The real-time delivery and use of electricity and information, encompassing all data related to supply and demand, will permit optimality in resource allocation and investment. Such efficiency is impossible without a spectrum of newly developed technologies. These technologies, taken as a whole, constitute the smart grid, an intelligent electricity distribution network, designed to meet the precise needs of system participants. The information layer of the smart grid will contain business process data that will be critical for industrial competitiveness in the 21^st century.

Of special concern is China’s and Russia’s building of nuclear power plants internationally, which may be coupled with smart electric grids. China has 45 nuclear power reactors in operation domestically and 12 under construction; the nation’s plans call for the building of 30 more plants in key countries and regions in the next 20 years. Russia has 38 nuclear power reactors in operation at home and has contracts or plans to build at least 20 in foreign countries.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China is responsible for more than half of new investments in nuclear power. If China transitions to fast-neutron reactors, which recycle large quantities of plutonium fuel, their potential for worldwide dominance increases. 

The leadership of China understands fully that for a world in search of low-carbon energy, fission power represents the chief viable avenue, for at least the next forty years. This constitutes a potential market opportunity that will, almost certainly, exceed one trillion dollars. 

Nations in the Middle East, in Africa, in the Indian subcontinent, and in Asia should be offered a multinational, free-market alternative to nuclear plants built by China or by Russia. Invigorated efforts, by a consortium of allied powers, in the provision of fission plants to interested countries must be part of a new strategy that enshrines low-carbon energy and joint security in an alternative form to Chinese or to Russian designs. 

The safety of new plants must be a primary concern: project technology, quality, fuel-cycle protection, maintenance, education, and defense should be peerless. These are attributes that Chinese or Russian technology and operation can never provide. 

Nuclear power generation occurs in a tripartite world of plant construction: China constitutes one dominion, as does Russia. The last dominion is made up of every other country that builds or is capable of building nuclear power plants. 

Failure to combine and to use the multifaceted abilities of corporations and institutions in allied nations will doom each individual nation’s nuclear power industry to failure, over time, in being able to compete against the state-sponsored enterprises of China or Russia. Only through a concerted, new offensive, which will deploy a multinational, business framework that will engage and link participating states, and private companies within such states, into an international consortium, may such a new enterprise be able to leverage and combine each nation’s strengths to support the award of new plant contracts, despite China’s and Russia’s mobilization of many forms of national power in support of their nuclear industries.

China’s and Russia’s Loan, Build, Seize development model for national projects such as nuclear power plants is disreputable. The acquisitive development strategies shortchange stakeholders outside China or Russia. Projects built by China or Russia are dependent on rigid supervision from afar, suspect safety regimes, inferior technology, and lack of quality control and proper administration. 

China and Russia offer limited educational and training opportunities for the citizens of purchasing nations. The defensive systems for nuclear plants built by China or Russia are backward and subject to failure or defeat. The fuel-cycle management for these projects is exploitive and locks purchasing nations into unalterable, life-of-plant terms.

During the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent, which lasted from 1858 to 1947, Britain built cantonment churches, which resembled normal places of worship, but were, in fact, dual-use structures that could be transformed into forts during periods of insurrection. Chinese and Russian power plants, built all over the world, inherently have the ability to be employed as redoubts for Chinese and Russian military forces. They are thus tools for instability and suzerainty.

World population will grow to 8.2 billion by 2025; this addition of almost a half-billion persons makes precise resource management a necessity. This is particularly so in developing states in which birth rates are very high.  Median estimates for world population are 8.6 billion in 2030, and 9.8 billion in 2050. 

With such unprecedented increases, only abundant electricity and information may dampen the inculcation of enmities between peoples, which feed on perceptions of waste and inequality. Indeed, intelligent governance will have better prospects to take root in enriched environments; this will promote conflict resolution and the adoption of non-violent means of intercession.

Actions:

- Lead in the creation of low-carbon sources of energy and smart grids, which will carry electricity and information precisely to meet emergent needs.

- Contest China’s and Russia’s present dominance in the construction and in the management of nuclear plants beyond their borders.

- Organize free nations to form a consortium of companies, to build safe and secure nuclear plants around the world, which will provide the electricity that future populations will require.

Disrupted States:

If the West slides into a steep recession, developing nations, deprived of their ability to sell raw materials to the United States and to Europe, and faced with many developmental loans that they will have no ability to repay, may sell whatever they can in national riches to China for cents on the dollar. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative will thus be realized surreptitiously and consummately from a communist viewpoint. Yet, it is this avarice that is the PRC’s Achilles’ heel.  

America must exploit this weakness by offering African and developing nations an alternative to the BRI. The assembly of such nations to spur contestation must be a central component of a new U.S. national strategy.  To effect this, America must exploit China’s susceptibility to client-state erosion. To end-run China, America and its allies must innovate disruptively, support capitalistic principles, and marshal a spectrum of hard and soft power to unseat the PRC from its footholds in developing nations.

Should America continue to be locked down, in some form, for an extended period of time, the unintended consequences will be massive and may inflict more damage than the virus. Developing nations, deprived of revenue from the sale of their commodities and goods to developed nations, will surely suffer catastrophic losses and many deaths due to inadequate income to provide for proper nutrition and healthcare. Such a scarcity in available food, when coupled with sub-Saharan health systems, which in many countries spend one-hundredth as much per capita as does the United States, will yield catastrophic consequences, with countries’ healthcare systems possibly being overwhelmed by both the coronavirus and by other diseases.

The plight of developing nations is perhaps the strongest reason why America must overturn its past relationship with China. Looking forward, by the year 2100, seventeen of the world’s most populous cities, comprising approximately 700 million people, will be in sub-Saharan Africa. If ample electricity is not available, mass migration, war, religious extremism, and new pandemics will result. The cost to the world’s nations will be measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. 

If a pestilence as virulent as Ebola spreads globally, it may take the planet decades to recover. The challenges that Africa faces will be replicated across the world. China has exploited this overwhelming need and challenge for its own advantage, thus ensuring its own development, as opposed to its assistance to other nations.

Immense, densely populated urban areas must have electricity for the desalination and the provision of water, precision farming, jobs, governance, and human advancement. America and its allies must offer reliable, scalable alternatives to carbon fuels, which often consist of the open burning of wood or coal in less economically developed countries. Such open, unfiltered sources of energy create massive quantities of black carbon, causing severe pollution and disease, in contrast to modern, coal-fueled, power plants that employ technologies to mitigate pollution. 

A range of development projects to include renewable energy, secure thermoelectric plants, and smart electric grids must be proffered as a substitute for the PRC’s model of Loan, Build, Seize; only America and its allies can provide an alternative means of progress for poor countries. Ceding this ground to China or to Russia can only ensure the continued impoverishment of nations that are experiencing the highest birthrates in human history.  Poverty and burgeoning, urbanized populations are substrates for future pandemics perhaps far more virulent than COVID-19. Cabinet officials from the Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and Energy, supported by our intelligence community, and by other agencies, must convene interagency groups to develop a set of initiatives to undermine and to replace the BRI.

Actions:

- Expose the PRC’s greed in its acquisitions of the national assets of developing countries through China’s deployment of its model of Loan, Build, Seize.

- Form an assembly of developing states to oppose China’s tactics of resource and asset acquisition.

- Disrupt the PRC’s usurpation of developing countries by creating new alternatives that suppress recipient corruption and fulfill societal needs through free market principles and innovation. 

- Convene cabinet-level meetings, supported by new interagency groups, to establish policies and programs to suppress China’s external, developmental ambitions.

Intelligence:

Of all the forces in the world today, only weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), disease, and the PRC can affect meaningfully our nation’s course.  It follows, therefore, that these three specters should dominate the efforts of America’s intelligence community.  Terrorism (that does not involve potential WMDs), Russia, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and Iran are secondary in their ability to damage the United States. 

If China did, indeed, prohibit internal travel from Wuhan while permitting international flights, such information should have been conveyed immediately to U.S. national authorities, but it remains far from certain that such a transfer of intelligence took place.  Updated tasking and bureaucratic structures are required to institute new collection priorities. 

The Director of National Intelligence should be charged by the president to study, report, and institute a government-wide recalibration of our intelligence assets to support the reordering of our priorities.  Publicly, the Director of National Intelligence must proffer an elaboration of new, allied measures to counteract the virus-related subterfuge propagated by China and its information operations aimed at misdirecting public opinion in free societies.

Counterintelligence must also be a priority.  The incipient nature of Chinese appropriation is difficult to contest.  Much of it relies on Chinese financial power, coupled with a belligerent type of soft power that is referred to as sharp power.  Classical disinformation operations, undertaken using an array of social media platforms, are coupled with ‘or else’ stratagems that relay consequences for countervailing actions, in order to instill passivity that targets the weakest nodes antagonistic to Chinese aims. 

The PRC reportedly uses artificial intelligence (AI) to support decision and game theory to prioritize its intelligence efforts.  These techniques were developed in the United States, but are not generally employed in decision-making by America’s most senior leaders.  This must change. 

A support structure for mathematically based decision and game theory must be established in the White House.  Consequential decisions and strategies should be the subject of several independent analyses: first, the descriptive and referential analysis; second, the aforementioned AI-supported examination.  The Cabinet must be presented with both.   

This more rigorous approach to decision-making should be harnessed to support counterintelligence operations directed at the PRC’s penetrative tactics.  With AI, there is the potential to counterpunch in near-real-time.

Actions:

- Reorder America’s intelligence priorities: make the emergence of disease, the PRC, and WMDs the top intelligence targets.

- Require that the DNI undertake the realignment of our nation’s intelligence priorities; this restructuring should be documented in classified and in public reports.

- Direct the DNI to release a public catalogue of measures to be taken by American and allied informational agencies to counteract China’s blatantly false narratives relating to COVID-19.

- Instruct America’s intelligence-related agencies to mount information operations to counter Chinese efforts in this domain.

- Build the capacity to employ AI-supported analyses to support decision-making at the highest levels of government. 

Trade and Theft:

Any response to China’s transgressions must hold trade as a central concern. Almost nothing affects the PRC more than changes in trade policy. Trade imbalances and China’s theft of intellectual property must be addressed by using an array of policy levers. Economist Albert Hirschman wrote in 1945 that, “A country trying to make the most out of its strategic position with respect to its own trade will try precisely to create conditions which make the interruption of trade of much greater concern to its trading partners than to itself.”  Most cases that allege harmful trade practices involve Section 201 (domestic injury) or Section 301 (unfair foreign practices) of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974. 

To develop a new paradigm supportive of the American worker and, therefore, inimical to China, resolute action must be taken, for America’s 2019 trade deficit with China reached $345.6 billion. What is not commonly noted is that this trade deficit does not include intellectual property (IP) theft by China and by other nations. Total losses of this type to the U.S. economy far exceed two trillion dollars in the last ten years alone.

Expressing this theft in relatable terms, this sum could have made two million American families instant millionaires. Such loss estimates are conservative: IP theft does incalculable harm in reducing incentives for U.S. companies to invest in research and development, for it makes little sense to invest in something that will be stolen. 

Losses to U.S. competitiveness are immense and take many forms: in 2011, 75% of China’s $12 billion domestic software market was satisfied by pirated software, much of it stolen from American companies. Due to this, Chinese PC business-related software spending was 7% of comparable U.S. software spending. This conveys massive competitive advantages to Chinese firms and entrepreneurs. 

Another aspect of IP theft is system compromise. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) antiballistic missile and the P-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft, along with other U.S. weapon systems, have been found to contain counterfeit parts that may reduce mission performance. According to former Democratic Senator Carl Levin, “There is a flood of counterfeits and it is putting our military men at risk and costing us a fortune.” The range and methods employed by the Chinese deemphasize blatant, transparent thefts, governmental involvement, and insertions, but have increased in their sophistication and breadth. 

The cessation of Chinese IP theft will require a concentrated effort and new modalities by the U.S. Government working with American industry, yet such action would yield enormous benefits, and if coupled with synchronous actions by allied governments, the PRC would be impinged, but would have no avenue of complaint. As an initial step, the NATO countries, Australia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea should develop the means to rapidly pass intelligence between them regarding industries and companies that possess key technologies believed to be at risk, or that have been targeted by China according to intelligence sources. 

A multilateral initiative of this type is foundational to success in this difficult and contested sphere. Affected countries can then work with businesses to halt illicit transfers.  In terms of counterfeited items, with particular concern for the compromise of military equipment through the unintended incorporation of Chinese-made parts, a system of etching, lithography, and secret coding by time, date, and place of manufacture may secure each part and thus inhibit Chinese infiltration and the compromise of our military systems.

The 2013 IP Commission Report prepared by former Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair and by Ambassador John Huntsman stated that the following measure be considered in the context of IP theft, “if the loss of IP continues at current levels” and other remedial actions fail, “Recommend that Congress and the administration impose a tariff on all Chinese-origin imports, designed to raise 150% of all U.S. losses from Chinese IP theft in the previous year, as estimated by the secretary of commerce.” 

U.S. imports from China in 2019 amounted to $452.2 billion, resulting in a net trade deficit of $345.6 billion.  Assuming IP losses due to China of $270 billion for 2019, the imposition of the suggested tariff would yield $405 billion in revenue, wiping away the entire trade deficit, if trade continues at present levels. In actuality, however, tariffs at these levels would reduce trade substantially, which the PRC fears.

In our consideration of IP theft, we must not overlook direct efforts to infiltrate or to co-opt.  Mathematician, aerospace engineer, and nuclear physicist Hsue-Shen Tsien, born in Shanghai, was educated at MIT and then recruited to work at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a scientist, he participated in the creation of the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Hsue-Shen Tsien was later stripped of his security clearances due to concerns that he was a communist and a spy and in 1951 was declared subject to deportation. Subsequently, Hsue-Shen Tsien was allegedly traded for American pilots, captured during the Korean War. 

Upon his arrival in China, Hsue-Shen Tsien became the architect of China’s atomic bomb program. Later, he became known as the “Father of Chinese Rocketry” for his work in the development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile; the fruits of Hsue-Shen Tsien’s work and associations now undergird North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Unfortunately, this type of case is not unique. Thus, prevention of the PRC’s exfiltration of defense, high-technology, and energy-related data has to become the first priority of the Counterintelligence Division of the National Security Branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

To address the trade imbalance and IP theft, asymmetric responses must then be gamed, and pathways found.  The arsenal of American policy tools may then be leveraged in a systematic way, which minimizes deleterious consequences. Preservation of our technological base requires that we enact severe limits on PRC graduate students in all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. Therefore, we should rescind, where possible, any grant funding to students from the PRC. In addition, all Confucius Institutes at American universities should be shuttered until they be stripped of their propagandistic mission.

The exception for national security reasons to the presumption in favor of free trade is embodied in the World Trade Organization as well as our nation’s trade laws. Contracting nations to the WTO have recognized the requirement for independent defense and security measures, which need to be exempt from general legal obligations: the WTO incorporates Article XXI of GATT 1994, which provides for national security exemptions. 

The president can expand his use of Section 232 findings (as specified in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962), which require the president determine whether imports “threaten to impair the national security.” As an immediate measure to effect a level of self-sufficiency with regard to domestic medical production, Section 232 could be employed to ensure that a specified level of the nation’s supply (net of exports) be provided by domestic or allied sources for drugs and medical products.

There have been calls, in the wake of this pandemic, for the United States to abandon the WTO, which succeeded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It is premature for the United States to leave an organization that has embodied our principles and has its root in our establishment of a world order in the aftermath of World War II.  China has abused the WTO’s policy that permits countries to self-identify as developing nations. The PRC, second only to the United States in economic output, has declared itself to be a developing nation and thus is the beneficiary of WTO rules designed to assist such countries. This must end. 

The United States, working with allied nations, must attempt to reform the WTO, to constrain China’s abuse of the WTO’s principles and agreements, which were designed to promote free trade and fairness. Only if America does not succeed, should we consider the abandonment of an international organization that we did so much to create and nurture, and should the need to abandon the WTO come to pass, our exit must not be unilateral.

To address trade imbalances with China, a comprehensive list must be assembled of the policy tools, laws, illicit practices, customs, inducements, and regulations that China uses to spur trade. Such information should be at hand from the United States intelligence community and from other offices of government. Responses must be wrought using decision analyses to shape strategy. 

In the wake of the present pandemic, President Trump must declare the magnitude of IP losses to the U.S. He must state America has heretofore expended little meaningful effort to eliminate such theft. Thus, the president must enforce fair and reciprocal trade, which takes full account of the PRC’s goals. Congress must act in a bipartisan manner to grant the president expanded trade tools, which answer China’s threat to our national security and economy.

Actions:

- Oppose Chinese IP theft in all its forms.

- Explicate that China’s economic expansion would have been impossible without their theft of American technology; produce and distribute lists of technologies and products stolen or copied by China; urge other countries to do the same.

- Make the numbers relevant: explain that the U.S. has lost enough from IP theft to have made two million American families instant millionaires.

- Target counterfeit parts and assemblies, which may compromise critical machinery or weapon systems; institute tagging measures to ensure genuineness.

- Lead the NATO nations, Australia, Japan, and the Republic of Korea in the collection and the dissemination of business-specific information related to IP theft and countermeasures.

- Institute punishing tariffs against the PRC if IP theft persists.

- Initiate comprehensive controls to prevent the stealing of data, by foreign agents, from our defense, high-technology, and energy-related industrial base; order the FBI to make such IP theft the top priority of its Counterintelligence Division, and put into law criminal penalties for any American company or individual that shares proprietary or sensitive information with China, which pertains to these matters.

- Limit strictly the opportunities for students from the PRC to study the STEM subjects at the graduate level.

- Employ Section 232 findings to shore up our medically related industries.

- Develop a comprehensive, publically available inventory of China’s unfair trade practices and the tools it uses to achieve its aims.

- Reform the WTO or leave it along with other U.S. allies.

Offsets:

To name but five American businesses under full or partial Chinese ownership is to demonstrate the penetration of our economy by large Chinese companies.  Motorola Mobility and IBM's personal computer division have been acquired by Lenovo; Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, is owned by the WH Group; Legendary Pictures Productions, LLC, is owned by the Wanda Group, which also has held a significant stake in AMC Theatres, the largest chain in America. 

Combined efforts to stem IP theft will have little long-term effect unless they are married with measures to prohibit or to take back the PRC’s ownership of key U.S. and allied businesses, which may have been facilitated using proxies or front companies. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a senior multiagency group chaired by the secretary of the treasury, is charged with the responsibility to determine if the security implications of foreign investments disqualify pending mergers or acquisitions of American companies or their operations. 

The Exon–Florio Amendment (50 U.S.C. app 2170) was signed into law by President Reagan and grants the president the authority to block any investment or acquisition if a “foreign interest exercising control might take action that threatens to impair the national security.” CFIUS was designated by President Reagan as the bureaucratic mechanism that serves this decision process. Unlike the processes employed by many other countries, CFIUS is not directly chartered to review business transactions that threaten harm to the American economy or to its workers, though there has been movement in this sphere.

President Trump signed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) into law in 2018.  FIRRMA essentially enlarged the scope of CFIUS to include consideration of a transaction’s impact on U.S. manufacturing, competitiveness, and the protection of transformative technologies. The transactions now assessed include not only acquisitions, but licenses, sales, real estate, minority holdings, and stakes in venture capital or private equity funds. The expanded compass of CFIUS is critical, but more must be done.

To chart an enhanced course for CFIUS, the world’s nations should be categorized into five tiers. Kept classified, these groupings would comprise Allied, Friendly, Non-Aligned, Adversarial, and Belligerent nations. The latter two categories should be preclusive, in most circumstances, of ownership or of significant minority positions in U.S. enterprises. Present circumstances argue for a determination that the PRC is, indeed, an adversarial state. 

One of our first actions in this sphere must be the prohibition, in the United States and across the world, of the deployment of Huawei’s 5G networks, systems, phones, and devices. It should be considered obvious that tools for espionage, industrial and otherwise, can be implanted in these systems and apparatuses.

Depending on the final U.S. Government verdict on Chinese responsibility for the spread of the virus, America might demand reparations; if so, such reparations should be scaled not as a function of the ravages of the disease, but as a function of the Communist Party of China’s duplicity in their presentation of the facts concerning the genesis of the disease, its evolution, its spread, and the party’s alleged acts to hoard personal protective equipment and to limit travel within China from Wuhan, while promoting international travel from that city and from its province, Hubei. 

If reparations are sought, only those individuals and entities directly affected by the virus’s spread should be compensated. A precedent must not be set for reparations to be determined by a disease’s initial point of origin, for viruses do occur naturally and this process can only sometimes be controlled or mitigated. Instead, the demanding of compensation or the support of private lawsuits must be derivative of complex, preferably multinational, assessments of state malfeasance or criminality. 

America’s actions in this regard must not be framed in such a manner that may call into disputation the Public Debt Clause section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned.” To do so would cause irreparable harm to the global financial system.  It would also initiate reprisals by China that would destabilize world markets and economies.

Actions:

-Entrench principles and restrictions so that China can buy no more of our corporations, universities, or national assets.

- Strengthen CFIUS; create a new system for ranking nations, which will, in practice, exclude adversarial and belligerent states from amassing businesses or assets in our economy.

- Prohibit, where possible, Huawei’s planned deployment of their 5G networks.

- Permit the pursuit of reparations or private lawsuits against the PRC, if evidence is accrued, only if such actions are consonant with U.S. national objectives and are derivative of state malfeasance or criminality.

The Spearhead:

Elaboration of new American measures to counteract China’s coronavirus subterfuge, which is the costliest catastrophe in history aside from open warfare, should be structured to prevent a parallel event from occurring in the future. The key to such ability is the requirement for open, international inspections of biological laboratories in the same manner and with the same diligence as is required in the inspection of nuclear facilities. 

A new, multinational initiative must integrate security and intelligence components to create a biological threat-response capability equivalent to that of our Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), whose mission is to be "prepared to respond immediately to any type of radiological accident or incident anywhere in the world." This task will be complex and extremely difficult because biological inspections will require foresight and mastery over a far larger domain of possible agents than those involved in nuclear inspections and response capabilities. A multinational approach is indispensable, given the scope of this challenge.

Associated with this facility must be the creation of B Teams, of the type employed to assess Soviet strategic-force capabilities during the height of the Cold War. The function of such teams would be to provide a competitive and divergent view to that generated by a particular bureaucracy charged with making such assessments. This friction, caused by competing appraisals, forces all investigators to hone their analyses, providing the decision-maker with a far more comprehensive and robust assessment of capabilities and threats than that which could be generated by a single source.

Just as we have created gradated codewords that are used by the government to classify nuclear accidents and events, the United States and its allies need to craft a common vocabulary for biological incidents. These designative terms should mirror those in use as nuclear-incident descriptors (Broken Arrow is the most commonly known term of this type: it refers to a nuclear-related event in which escalation is not at risk). The ordering and the use of these new terms within government will allow greatly enhanced and task-specific response times to biological emergencies.

These difficult initiatives must rest on an unprecedented diplomatic offensive. The United States must make common cause with its traditional allies to confront and to contain China. Further, developing nations must be included, for they have seen their assets appropriated by a communist state that foregoes no opportunity to exploit corrupt officials who sell out their own countries. 

Importantly, Islamic nations must form a barrier opposed to Chinese expansionism because of both the PRC’s rapaciousness and its doctrine.  In addition, only an assembly of Islamic nations can press successfully for humane treatment for the 25 million Uyghur Muslims as well as other oppressed Muslim communities within China. The demand for a complete end to China’s reeducation camps must become a hallmark of American, allied, and Islamic efforts to end this atrocious abuse, which does not even leave the dead in peace, for it is the practice of the Communist Party of China to destroy Muslim cemeteries in Xinjiang, home to China’s Uyghurs.

Australia has demonstrated resolve in its efforts to hold China to account. Its position astride crucial sea lines of communication is of immense military value. Therefore, the strategic Port of Darwin, which was leased for 99 years in October 2015 by the Landbridge Group, which is based in China, must come under total Australian control, with the existing lease terminated. 

Enhanced relations with Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, must be pursued with vigor.  Malaysia is also of great importance as are our traditional bilateral alliances with Japan and with the Republic of Korea.

Perhaps the most vital diplomatic action that may be taken would be the creation of a steadfast alliance between India and America. India’s and China’s respective populations are almost the same. India ranks third in the world in GDP (PPP) and will occupy at least this place for the foreseeable future.  Fundamentally, America must move to a much closer relationship with India, which is democratic and is the product of many traditions, including its shared heritage with the United States of having once been part of the British Empire and thus enshrining both common customs and the English language.  

Another component of this enhanced relationship could be greater coordination with the 54-member-state Commonwealth of Nations.  India became the first Commonwealth republic in 1950 on the day its constitution came into force. This association comprises 20% of the world’s land and is a natural alternative for mutual development that may be substituted for China’s BRI. Many avenues for growth are present in these relationships. 

If not returned to the United States, any manufacturing now done in China, for or by American companies, can be better accomplished in India, for it is the world’s largest democracy, and as such offers a degree of openness that the PRC will never match. Military cooperation between the U.S. and China should largely cease (except for crisis de-escalation exercises); equivalent exchanges and exercises with India should be substituted. 

In 2005, a “New Framework for the India-U.S. Defense Relationship” was signed by both nations. This document and efforts in ensuing years to create a strategic partnership have received bipartisan support in the United States. It is time to augment this cooperation. In addition to joint military training, there is substantial space for military support and development. 

What is not commonly known is that India is one of only six countries that possesses nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs); India launched its first SSBN in 2009 and its second in 2017. India also operates an aircraft carrier, which was originally built in 1987 for the Soviet Navy, and is completing its own indigenous design.

The current plan by India to construct nuclear-powered attack submarines, advanced corvettes, and other vessels, is essential for regional defense. 

The Obama Administration recognized the importance of India’s pursuit of sea power. The “2015 Framework for the U.S.-India Defense” committed both nations to collaboration regarding aircraft carriers and jet propulsion technology. This initiative built upon the 2009 sale of eight P-8I anti-submarine warfare aircraft to India, which marked an important advance in military commonality. Four more planes were later ordered, and the purchase of an additional ten is contemplated. The 2017 Department of State approval of the sale of the MQ-9B armed drone, which, as of 2020, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar procurement of 30 unpiloted vehicles, to be split among India’s armed forces, is indicative of future military initiatives that must be prioritized.

Though large, India’s Navy requires modernization, with many ships in need of replacement. Enhanced Navy-to-Navy development, procurement, and operations should therefore be a vanguard to a much closer military relationship between the countries. Complicating this embrace is America’s need to balance our relationship with Pakistan and to help ensure that India’s military capabilities support stability. 

Pakistan was a member of both SEATO (the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty) and CENTO (the Central Treaty Organization, which was comprised of Middle-Eastern states and the United Kingdom; America was foundational to the organization’s creation, but never formalized its participation). Pakistan is also the recipient of renewed U.S. military assistance.

Through the creation of SEATO in 1954, and the Bagdad Pact (later known as CENTO) in 1955, the United States tried to recreate NATO in other areas to contain communist power. Both organizations were failures; SEATO was dissolved in 1977, CENTO, in 1979. The United States is party to a non-binding security agreement with Australia and New Zealand, called the ANZUS Treaty. It has suffered severe internal disruptions and, unlike NATO, does not possess an integrated command structure nor designated forces from each country. 

Consideration, therefore, should be given to conducting bilateral or multilateral talks to frame a new alliance structure, which could check the Communist Party of China’s escalatory or revanchist actions. India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and America could form the core of a powerful defensive alliance. As with NATO, such an organization could, over time, expand its membership to include other states, such as Indonesia.

These developmental talks should be considered an outgrowth of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which is held at the ministerial-level between the United States, Australia, Japan, and India. These consultations were first initiated by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in 2007. They must now evolve into a more formal means of strategic and military cooperation for the noted states.

Two other militarily related initiatives must be pursued immediately. Freedom of navigation passages and exercises need to be accelerated through the waters that China claims falsely, with maximum U.S. naval power expressed; in this, we should include, when possible, ships of the British, the Australian, and the Japanese Navies. 

To promote stability and deterrence, strong consideration should be given to the sale of F-35s to Taiwan due to the PRC’s deployment of the advanced, fifth-generation Chengdu J-20 long-range fighter, which possesses some stealth characteristics. This transfer could follow the Department of State’s recent approval for the sale of 66 F-16Vs to Taiwan; alternatively, such a sale could serve as a substitute for some or all of these updated F-16s.

Actions:

- Create a threat response capability for biological events that is like our Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST).

- Establish B Teams to provide divergent views to that of the bureaucracy about evolving threats and emergencies.

- Implement a series of codewords, for a range of biological events, to speed countermeasures.

- Work with Islamic nations to stop China’s systematic abuse of Chinese Muslims.

- Enhance diplomatic and other efforts to stem the PRC’s advance by coordinating closely with Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

- Embrace India as part of a core American coalition; coordinate with India’s military.

- Seek to establish a new alliance structure to flank and to overmatch the PRC; work with India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea on this proposal.

- Conduct augmented freedom of navigation transits in waters that China wrongly claims.

- Determine Taiwan’s requirement for a fifth-generation fighter; consider the sale of F-35s to that island nation.

The Future:

The Communist Party of China, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, has shown no signs of introspection or retrenchment. Its quest to dominate Hong Kong completely is in direct contravention of its prior commitments. China has broken the Sino-British Joint Declaration, a treaty between itself and Britain, which designated Hong Kong to be a Special Administration Region of China, in which Hong Kong’s capitalism and its freedoms, derived from British rule, could not be changed until 2047. This treaty was filed with the United Nations in 1985 after its ratification by the PRC and by Britain.

Elements within the PRC have considered claiming all of Mount Everest, though the mountain’s summit lies astride Tibet’s border with Nepal. More recently, China’s media has argued for the future incorporation of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Kyrgyz tribes were overwhelmed by the Qing dynasty in the 18^th century. However, parts of Kyrgyzstan were ceded to Russia in the late 19^th century, with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic obtaining full control in 1919. 

The Dzungar Khanate, which fought the Kazakhs, was destroyed by soldiers of the Qing dynasty in the 18^th century. Through this abhorrent campaign of annihilation, part of what is modern Kazakhstan was held by China’s past dynastic empire. Following Russia’s advances, the Bolsheviks’ Red Army occupied Kazakhstan in 1920.  Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan gained full sovereignty after the fall of the USSR: each declaring their independence from that empire in 1991. Afterward, Kazakhstan negotiated its present border, which is demarcated by a treaty with China.  Kyrgyzstan also attained a border agreement with Beijing.

It is sobering to contemplate that any element inside the PRC would propose annexing, through unspecified means, these two independent nations. Halting the PRC’s encroachment and its attempted domination in Central Asia must be deemed critical to world security.

The problem is not the Chinese people, nor their proud heritage that stretches back thousands of years; it is communism. We must, therefore, challenge Xi Jinping’s governing principles that are codified in “Xi Jinping Thought,” for, in their effect, they substantiate one-man rule, which is inimical to individual initiative.  Remarkably, they even appear untrue to the principles of Chinese communism and thus betray the country as just another despotic state. 

Xi Jinping’s duplicity and his malfeasance during this present pandemic have brought deserved international condemnation upon China and its communist rule. In so doing, Xi Jinping’s actions are reminiscent of the dishonor that Nikita Khrushchev caused the Soviet Union when he took his shoe in hand and banged it upon a table during the 902^nd Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1960. If powers in China remove Xi Jinping from office, this act alone would be insufficient to recalibrate relations to a point of normalcy; concrete remediation by the PRC must follow.

The Chinese threat must not be misrepresented, for our emphasis must be to disrupt the many caustic elements of China’s geopolitical strategy. We must move to sanction the PRC. If America had done a tenth of what China has done to the world, even given the most charitable view of their acts, the PRC would do anything to make us pay. 

If we are not willing to act and to act decisively, we are leaving the field and we are leaving it to an unhindered, unremorseful, and ravenous state with a degree of relative economic power that we have not faced since the War of 1812. We dare not marginalize this crisis, for to do so is to admit defeat.  This pandemic has almost certainly uncovered treachery by the PRC in its pursuit of world domination by whatever means necessary; the pandemic did not have to be planned, it is enough that the communists seized on it, took advantage of it, and had special knowledge of its origin.

For deterrence to be established so that a future malevolent actor is given notice of our capacities both to endure and to respond, America must exact a high price from the People's Republic of China for their patent deceitfulness and carnage. In this cause, we must seek the support of all the free nations of the world. 

To be blocked, China must be denied access to intellectual property involving technology from corporate, governmental, or educational entities and be excluded from any degree of dominion over our media and our communications infrastructure. Tariffs need to be extended substantially if the PRC does not make all virus data and sites available to our scientists, so that we may understand fully the genesis and the spread of the present pandemic. The PRC must be made to release any COVID-19 whistleblowers and to eliminate all its wet markets, which, if left undisturbed, may incubate the next biological crisis.

An important step in confronting Chinese soft power is to limit its influence in the United Nations and its fifteen specialized agencies. President Trump’s exit from the World Health Organization (WHO) is a necessary first step to stem this pillage. 

In support of basic human rights, our government should contemplate holding a multinational symposium on the future of Tibet. Consideration should be given to the publication by the Department of State of a new counterpoint to Tibet Transformed, for this book, now decades old, was a centerpiece of Chinese propaganda that glorified falsely the advancement of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule. Thereafter, President Trump should meet with the Dalai Lama. 

We are morally obligated to redouble our support for religious or other persecuted groups within China such as the Uyghurs and members of the Falun Gong. This should entail a broad interfaith dialog, which would also include Chinese and American Christian leaders, joined by Muslim clerics, Tibetan Buddhists, members of the Falun Gong, and other oppressed groups. Together, plans to avert religious or group persecution within China must be drawn and implemented.

Actions:

- Confront the PRC as to its abrogation of its treaty concerning Hong Kong; stand for freedom.

- Deny the PRC’s attempts to intimidate or to coerce the independent nations of Central Asia.

- Explicate the errancies contained in “Xi Jinping Thought.”

- Explain Xi Jinping’s malfeasance, as manifested during the present crisis.

- Enact steep tariffs if China does not allow the collection of important data concerning COVID-19; push China to release all COVID-19 whistleblowers and to close all wet markets.

- Expose the lies China has promulgated concerning its occupation of Tibet.

- Support religious liberty in China through an array of means; provide sustenance to oppressed groups, including the Falun Gong.

Channels:

Retention of America’s supremacy in the creation and in the application of soft power is fundamental, for hard power alone, given the world’s interconnections and interdependence, is insufficient to channel future courses of events that govern outcomes. China is on the verge, however, of becoming a peer competitor in its use of soft power and in its introduction of sharp power. This must not mean American stultification, but the burnishment of American advocacy and influence by vesting our power within the connectivity and informational domains that we dominate. Such influence may only be retained if a floor of allied containment of China is realized.

The creation of a new, decentralized World Wide Web must be pursued with vigor. Censorship on major web platforms threatens to limit personal freedom and expression. This very much supports the Communist Party of China’s aims.

Brewster Kahle, computer engineer and founder of the Internet Archive, has joined Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in calling for the creation of a decentralized web, more resistant to government or corporate control. The creation of this new web architecture would constitute a great advancement for freedom movements across the globe. Indeed, Mr. Kahle has stated, “China can make it impossible for people there to read things, and just a few big service providers are the de facto organizers of your experience. We have the ability to change all that.”

It may be argued that during the present pandemic, China’s most abhorrent exports have been fear and disinformation.  Yet these disgorgements were advanced by much of America’s legacy media. Twice before this crisis, and in the living memory of many Americans, our nation has experienced pandemics. 

According to the CDC’s website, during the 1957 Asian Flu, “The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.”  The U.S. population in 1957 was 172 million; thus, adjusted for our present population, the Asian Flu would have killed 222,000 Americans. This pandemic did not change the economic life of America.  While there was a recession from August 1957 to April 1958, the Asian Flu is not considered to be a primary causal factor.  Of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, the CDC has written, “The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.” America’s population in 1968 was 201 million; adjusting for today, the Hong Kong Flu would have killed 164,000 Americans.  A mild recession occurred from December 1969 through November 1970; neither it nor the pandemic affected America’s economic condition.

While it may be contended that the present pandemic had the potential to be much worse than the two that preceded it, the present dread, stoked by a foreign power and by an echoic press, has certainly ruptured America’s economy in ways inconceivable before this event. To cower, however, in the face of this pandemic and to not make the hard choices necessary to ensure American primacy is to be unfair to future generations. 

How our country has thus far answered this pandemic is not repeatable: our present array of actions cannot be mounted if another wave or pandemic strikes. This is our gravest sin: we have shown China, Russia, and Iran, as well as terrorist actors, that our nation may be disempowered if faced with a new pathogen. In so doing, we have done what no competent general would ever do, we have exposed our flank. 

We must not afford the leadership of China the luxury of knowing what America will or will not do in response to this crisis.  Our nation must explore a variety of tools and pressure points to counteract the Communist Party of China’s intentions. As was done with the Soviet Union, we can no longer ignore the plight of captive nations held by China. To prosper, we must reclaim America’s foundations and principles. We must reject utterly the adoption of a worldview that enshrines an all-powerful state serviced by great monopolies, for to accept this would be to grant China victory in a great, undeclared war.

Actions:

- Create a new, decentralized web, supportive of cybersecurity, which will be able to penetrate the PRC’s firewalls, to reach its citizenry.

- Place the present pandemic in the context of past plagues that our nation has overcome.

- Promote deterrence by exacting a high price for the PRC’s unacceptable acts.

- Answer the call of captive nations and peoples within China’s empire.

Obligations:

Vastly complicating the monumental tasks proposed herein is internal dissention within the United States unmatched since the Civil War. A national strategy must be enduring to be meaningful; it cannot be based on party rhetoric, but must be rooted in an examination of our nation’s founding principles. It must survive changes in administrations until it is succeeded by a new national strategy, more relevant to some future time. 

In 1943, Congressman Andrew May stated publicly that the Japanese Navy was setting its depth charges too shallowly. After the war, Admiral Charles Lockwood wrote that this admission prompted the Japanese to reconfigure their weapons: “ten submarines and 800 officers and men" were lost as a result.  Of equal gravity today are statements by political leaders that undermine the nation’s power in a time of crisis. Only by returning to the principles of bipartisanship and the precept that “politics stops at the water’s edge” may America be vested with its full abilities and its palisade of defense.

At the commissioning of the USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN-730) in 1984, the bipartisan nature of Senator Jackson’s extraordinary career was extolled, for it was marked by important agreements with members of both parties.  Such independence of thought is almost impossible to imagine today, but it is mandatory in the formulation, enactment, and entrenchment of a new national strategy, which may carry our nation forward.

Misconceptions by the press and by the public concerning the adversary we face are of equal concern.  Any overarching strategy is doomed to failure if it is not supported by the public. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats and Ronald Reagan’s Oval Office addresses achieved the inclusion of the American public in crucial policy deliberations involving security. This president must use his own means to promote needed public dialog on the issues presented herein. President Trump must articulate that the focus of the administration’s policies and actions is directed at the Communist Party of China and not the Chinese people, who are the object of internal suppression. 

The prime difference between the United States and the People’s Republic of China must be explained clearly.  Communists believe their citizens are part of a collective that exists to serve the state: this constitutes a hive mind.  Free people are individuals. Evolution has created us as such, and America’s Judeo-Christian heritage confirms that God’s relationship is with each person. 

In the PRC, the state is sanctified. Our founding fathers believed this to be a cardinal mistake. The paramount importance of the separation of church and state is best understood through the study of its contrapositive.  If church and state are not separate, then their natures and dominions are joined. The state becomes the object of worship: this is the essence of communism.  

If church and government are fused, such action is tantamount to a dictum that all the promises of religion are available in this world, but this is nonsense, for to erect heaven on Earth, through man’s labors, is an impossibility: the attempted inculcation of which has caused the death of tens of millions of men, women, and children in the People’s Republic of China in the last century alone. If America does nothing else, the most basic action our country can take is to expound the primacy of the individual above the state. It is this proclamation that communists and totalitarians most fear. Its substantiation will be the basis for our meeting China on terms that it cannot match.

Actions:

- Embrace our roots as a great nation.

- Entrench bipartisanship, which must transcend political ambitions, for our nation to flourish. 

- Enshrine and propound that “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are our nation’s unequaled armor against the expansionist imposition of communism and what that would foreshadow for the world.

John Poindexter is a physicist and a former Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Robert McFarlane is chairman of an international energy company and a former Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Richard Levine is a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Technology Transfer and Security Assistance and a former NSC Staff Director for Policy Development.