Racism against Chinese people would include discrimination against Chinese Americans and Taiwanese people, for example. It should go without saying that none of the U.S. laws being proposed against adversary nations, including some China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran nationals, include these groups; therefore, they aren’t racist. In fact, laws meant to decrease the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), like laws intended to reduce the power of Nazis in the early 1940s and later, are anti-racist in intent and effect. They decrease the power of a racist political party and are, therefore, in themselves anti-racist.
Although legal bans on most forms of discrimination are more than reasonable, their overbroad application to nationality, including in times of war or national emergency, should be reexamined. This reexamination should consider that these four adversary states are gradually increasing threats of war against the United States and our allies and that they now attempt to use their citizens abroad as spies and soldiers.
In war, a soldier must discriminate friend from foe. If a man wanted entrance into one’s trench in Europe in the 1910s or 1940s, his nationality first had to be determined. If German, he was more than denied. If from an allied country, such as the United States, the UK, or France, he was allowed entry and in a hurry. His skin color didn’t matter. This was a form of discrimination based on national origin and a necessary form during war.
As the above suggests, we now have a new kind of trench warfare in addition to the mud and beam trenches of Ukraine. The new trenches are called information security, including the cyber type. Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran attempt to infiltrate agents into the United States and allied information systems, including through its citizens, in a very broad-based way. The spoils are spread widely in the massive military and industrial sectors of U.S. adversaries.
Allowing adversary nationals from these countries into positions of trust in the United States and among our allies, including through the purchase of land, has been a mistake of existential scale for the United States. In 1971, when the United States opened to China, the country had an economy and military that was a fraction of the size of its economy today. Now, China’s economy exceeds that of the United States when considering purchasing power parity, and the People’s Liberation Army has more ships than the U.S. Navy. Our forces are nearly forced out of large bodies of international water through Beijing’s incremental enclosure of maritime commons and saber rattling. This leaves our allies and partners in Asia, including Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, in a tenuous position. If the CCP’s genocide against Uyghurs is any indication, our allies in Asia and, ultimately, we ourselves could be threatened by the most extreme forms of CCP racism.
Continuing down this path of accepting genocide and racism by giving away the keys to the information kingdom to those under adversary control—whether they be from China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone who values freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, that will likely require some form of discrimination based on nationality. This isn’t racism. In the case of new laws meant to oppose the CCP and other adversary countries, including in Europe, it’s the opposite.
