WASHINGTON—Prominent national security and human rights experts have launched a new effort dedicated to educating U.S. citizens and policymakers about the threat posed by communist China.
The coalition, called the Committee on the Present Danger: China, includes former Clinton administration CIA Director R. James Woolsey, former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett, former Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), former Strategic Defense Initiative Director Ambassador Henry Cooper, and Chinese dissident and China Aid President Bob Fu.
More specifically, “[its] purpose is to explain these threats, which range from the military buildup of the PRC, their active information and political warfare that targets the American people and our business, political, and media elites, their cyber warfare, and their economic warfare,” said Kennedy.
America, Kennedy said, “has not been so divided politically since the Civil War,” and its “media and half our political system have spent the last two years” pursuing allegations of Russian collusion that turned out to be baseless. He said this is “especially ridiculous when one considers the array of threats posed by the People’s Republic of China.”
During that time, Kennedy said, “the Soviet Union had very few economic ties with the United States.” By contrast, he pointed out, China’s ties to the United States are “extensive,” through which Americans “have transferred trillions of dollars of wealth through trade.” Red China also has “stolen and extracted” U.S. technologies, through which it has “become a First World military and economic power.”
Though this dynamic is “poorly understood, especially here in Washington,” Kennedy said he was “encouraged that the threat is understood by President Trump.”
Kennedy pointed to statements that Trump wrote 20 years ago, in his book “The America We Deserve”:
“We have to make it absolutely clear that we’re willing to trade with China, but not to trade away our principles, and that under no circumstances will we keep our market open to countries that steal from us.
“There are some things more important than profits, and one of them is our own national security.”
Trump wrote that communist China “fears freedom because it knows its survival depends on oppression. It does not respect individual rights. It is still, at heart, a collectivist society. As such it is a destabilizing force in the world, and should be viewed that way.”
Alternative Warfare
An array of foreign policy, human rights, and national security experts spoke at the event on March 25 at the Reserve Officers Association headquarters, including original CPD director, former naval aviator, and Pentagon official Chet Nagle, who noted that since the original committee had closed its doors, “another existential threat to America has arisen,” namely “communist China’s plan to dominate the United States, and ultimately the entire world.”In addition, Woolsey said, America is “almost completely unprepared to deal with” the implications of fifth-generation communications technology, known as 5G. “We have to be able to turn away Chinese domination of our internet,” he said. Through Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., the dominant Chinese telecom and electronics manufacturer, and “other paths,” the Chinese regime has “embarked very heavily on that effort. That is a loser for us in every way one can possibly lose.”
He continued, “Every purchase of Huawei materials, everything that is being done by people who have blinders on with respect to what the Chinese are going to be able to do if we don’t stop them—everyone who has blinders on better take them off.”
Biggest Organized Crime Group
Vice President of the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars Lianchao Han, who also spoke at the event, argued, “The Chinese Communist regime has become the biggest threat to the United States and the free world.” According to Han, “This threat is real, and very, very serious—but many people have not realized the magnitude, and the scope, and the seriousness of this threat.”The “engagement and appeasement advocates,” he said, “continue to push for their failed China policy.” Therefore, “it is our duty to inform and educate the American public and decision-makers” about what members of the CCP “intend to do and why they’re so dangerous.”
According to Helprin, “China can accomplish its first war aims,” namely clearing its vicinity of American power, by eliminating “our vulnerable bases there, none of which has sufficiently hardened aircraft ... [nor] air and missile defenses sufficient to defeat a saturation attack.” Without these assets, he said, the United States “will be defeated.”
“All this, without striking the U.S. homeland.”
The distance across the Pacific is twice that across the Atlantic, Helprin said, and by “spiking the Panama Canal” by blocking it with attack submarines to deny us passage, the “Chinese would have to fight only 60 percent of our fleet.” The United States has “catastrophically truncated development of long-range air power,” and has a Navy “half the size of the Reagan Navy.”
Overall, he argued, “it is foolish, cowardly, and, in the long term, not survivable to accept that provisioning our defense is secondary to assuring our comfort.” In the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000, U.S. military spending constituted 5.7 percent of GDP, Helprin noted, while today, as during the Obama administration, that figure remains at just 3 percent.
“We sleep as a nation because we betray our ancient character,” Helprin said.