A showdown is building between Communist China and the West.
In his actions regarding rising tensions over Taiwan, trade, TikTok, fentanyl, artificial intelligence, the future of Greenland and the Arctic Circle, and the future of the Panama Canal—just to name a few—President Donald Trump has made it crystal clear from his first days back in power that there’s a new sheriff on the global stage and Beijing had better take notice.
Trump highlighted some of China’s nefarious activities in his inaugural address, notably telling the American people: “China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
Good for him.
More and more Americans understand that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pose a clear and present danger to U.S. national security and our allies in the Pacific, with their nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, 2-million-man army, and rapidly growing navy. But do Americans also understand that the CCP poses a grave and growing threat to the national security of Israel and the Jewish people, as well?
The bitter reality is that China has become virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. China is also actively selling weapons—and even nuclear technology—to Israel’s worst enemies.
Ever since the Iranian revolution in 1979, for example—and especially with the eruption of the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s—Beijing has been selling arms to the Iranian regime. China helped Iran build its aggressive and advanced ballistic missile program. They also helped Iran go nuclear, building some of Tehran’s earliest nuclear power plants, including the Isfahan Nuclear Research Center, which trained some of Iran’s first nuclear scientists and helped Iran develop its uranium enrichment system.
But that is just the beginning.
Chinese weapons are being provided to Israel’s enemies. I recently toured an IDF base where I was shown 18,000 weapons that Israel captured from Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon before they could be used to launch an invasion of northern Israel. Guess where most of those weapons were built. If you guessed Iran, Russia, and Communist China, you’re right.
If this weren’t enough, China is flooding social media with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.
“What we saw after October 7th was a drastic change in the social media within China—the anti-Semitism became more unplugged, more free-flowing,” said Aaron Keyak, the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. “That’s a conscious decision by the Chinese government to allow that kind of rhetoric to be greatly increased.”
Both as a novelist and a journalist, I carefully study both the United States’ enemies and Israel’s enemies. I read their books and their speeches and take them seriously. Unfortunately, too many politicians and intelligence analysts in the West seem to dismiss or discount the threats made by our worst enemies or try to explain them away.
But one of the themes of my political thrillers—including my newest, “The Beijing Betrayal”—is this: To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.
Didn’t Adolf Hitler lay out his wicked, genocidal plan in his book, “Mein Kampf,” for all the world to see? Yes, but American, British, and French leaders either didn’t read the book or didn’t take Hitler seriously. That’s why they were blindsided by World War II and the Holocaust.
Didn’t Saddam Hussein tell the world in advance that he owned Kuwait, that Kuwait was all his, and that he was going to take it by force? Didn’t he amass hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops on the border of Kuwait in the summer of 1990? Of course—but Washington, London, and Paris didn’t take Saddam seriously. That’s why they were blindsided on Aug. 2, 1990, when Iraq finally did invade Kuwait.
Didn’t Osama bin Laden openly and proudly declare war on the United States in the late 1990s? Didn’t he attack two U.S. embassies and then the U.S.S. Cole and threaten to do far worse? Yes. But American officials simply couldn’t imagine a group of radical Islamist terrorists hijacking jet planes and flying kamikaze missions into American cities. And that’s why they were blindsided on Sept. 11, 2001.
At the core, the problem is that too many politicians and intelligence officials in the West simply don’t believe that evil exists. They think of themselves as too smart, too educated, too sophisticated to believe that evil is real. So they either ignore our worst enemies or don’t take them seriously enough. And thus, they’re repeatedly caught completely off guard when the next worst-case scenario comes to pass.
Yet the evidence is real and growing: Communist China is not simply a threat to U.S. national security and to the safety and well-being of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and our other allies in the Pacific. The CCP is also an increasingly serious threat to Israel and the Jewish people as they arm Israel’s worst enemies and flood social media with anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda.
It’s time for the Trump administration, Congress, and Israeli leaders to urgently develop creative and comprehensive strategies to counter the range of threats from Beijing—now, before it’s too late.