Commentary

Beijing’s latest retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods are not a policy disagreement—they’re part of a strategy. This is not about trade imbalances or soybeans. It’s about power.

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has waged a quiet, calculated war on American leadership. And only now are more Americans realizing the truth: Communist China isn’t rising peacefully—it’s undermining us from within, with the goal of replacing the United States as the world’s dominant power.

When Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, he didn’t provoke a trade war. He acknowledged one. He understood what elites in Washington refused to see for years: China doesn’t want fair competition—it wants to win by any means necessary. Trump’s tariffs weren’t just economic—they were strategic. They were a direct response to decades of CCP aggression disguised as diplomacy.

Now, in retaliation, Beijing is hitting back with new tariffs and renewed threats. But even more telling is China’s move to restrict access to rare earth minerals—critical components in everything from smartphones to fighter jets. These aren’t just trade actions. They’re warning shots. The CCP is showing the world that it’s ready to weaponize global supply chains to cripple competitors. That’s not the behavior of a responsible international actor. It’s the move of a regime that sees interdependence not as cooperation, but as a means of leverage.

For more than 20 years, the United States has handed China opportunity after opportunity. The theory was simple: bring China into the world economy, and it’ll become more open and law-abiding. So we let China join the World Trade Organization in 2001. We opened our markets. We looked the other way as the regime manipulated its currency, subsidized industries, and stole hundreds of billions in intellectual property.

The result? Entire American industries were gutted. Factories shut down. Small towns collapsed. And as the U.S. economy hollowed out, Beijing funneled its profits into military expansion, surveillance tech, and global influence operations. That wasn’t an accident. It was the plan all along.

Trump’s tariffs were a course correction. They forced China to feel pressure for the first time in years. They made U.S. corporations rethink their blind dependence on Chinese supply chains. They exposed the risks of doing business with a country that plays by no rules but its own. And more than anything, they pulled back the curtain on a lie that defined global trade for two decades: that Beijing was a trustworthy partner.

It never was. And the CCP is proving that now.

Beijing isn’t lashing out because of hurt feelings. It’s retaliating because Trump’s policies are striking directly at one of the regime’s strongest weapons: economic blackmail. The tariffs disrupted the CCP’s playbook. The United States began to claw back leverage. China’s economy is slowing. Foreign investment will quickly dry up, and Beijing knows it.

So now, in desperation, the CCP is showing its teeth. It’s using trade barriers, state propaganda, and resource blackmail to force Washington back into submission, as well as trying to form a worldwide anti-Trump coalition.

It won’t stop there.

The CCP’s ambitions go far beyond tariffs. It’s building military bases in international waters, buying up ports and farmland, pushing authoritarian surveillance tech abroad, and tightening its grip over global institutions. None of this is accidental. It’s a full-spectrum campaign to rewrite the global order, with Beijing on top and Washington sidelined.

The United States cannot afford to return to the failed strategy of appeasement. Every time we “engage” China with no consequences, the CCP gets stronger. Every time we prioritize cheap goods over national security, we give away leverage. The stakes are no longer theoretical. This is about whether the 21st century will be led by a free and sovereign United States—or by a totalitarian regime bent on control.

We need to finish what Trump started. That means keeping—and expanding—tariffs on Chinese industries. It means securing critical supply chains, especially in rare earths and technology. It means cutting Chinese access to U.S. markets when the regime violates trade norms or poses a threat to national security. It means protecting Taiwan. And it means standing firm, even when Wall Street, multinational CEOs, and foreign lobbyists cry foul.

This isn’t about isolation. It’s about independence. It’s about breaking the dangerous dependency on a regime that openly uses economic ties as a weapon.

The CCP’s retaliation isn’t the end of a trade dispute. It’s the beginning of a reckoning. We either confront this threat head-on or watch American leadership slip away, one concession at a time.

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