During the past week, the Washington Post and Politico published articles asserting President Trump is not a “China Hawk” and instead is a “pro-China President.” These articles, both published on the same day, provide nothing more than what can be described as the biased view of the pro-PRC Engagement school. The Engagement school has dominated the policy positions of both Democrat and Republican presidencies until 2017 when President Trump first assumed office. Now that President Trump has returned to the Oval Office, the “Engagers” are once again casting doubt on the President’s agenda for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These two articles assert that Trump is intellectually shallow and only views America’s national security through a transactional lens, not from a great power political perspective.
On the contrary, we argue that the evidence clearly demonstrates that President Trump comprehends the existential threat from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led PRC. His words and actions demonstrate he understands that the CCP declared “People’s War” against the U.S. and the stark reality that the PRC is at war with the United States. Trump understands this fundamentally—as no other president has. In the first three weeks in office, he has demonstrated that he and his team are meeting the threat expeditiously—despite the numerous critics who claim that Trump is giving gifts to the PRC as articulated in these two widely read pieces from the Washington Post and Politico.
The empirical evidence is clear that Trump is moving as no president has before to protect America from the PRC’s hyper-aggression against the American people and our vital national interests. The Biden administration’s open borders policy allowed fentanyl and other opioids to enter the U.S. in amounts never witnessed, not to mention the large number of military-age males. To combat the PRC’s employment of fentanyl and other opioids as weapons against the American people, President Trump immediately dispatched the military to the border, declared the drug trafficking gangs terrorist organizations, and employed tariffs on Canada and Mexico to coerce their assistance to halt the drug traffic. This is to say nothing of the additional tariffs President Trump levied on the PRC following his precedent-setting phase-one tariffs in his first administration.
His swift move to close the border and to apply tariffs is an unspoken recognition and admission of the CCP’s strategy to replicate their own version of an “Opium War” against the United States. Ironically, the original Opium War (the First Opium War of 1839-1842) was between the Qing Dynasty and the British Empire, not the United States. Fortunately, and for the world to see, the unimpeded flow of narcotics into the U.S. is at an end, and Americans now can begin to recover from this dark time in the lives of so many Americans. This is prima facie evidence of President Trump’s deep understanding of the threat from the CCP and his agenda to combat it.
In addition, Trump is laboring to provide protection against the other avenues of attack that the PRC employs to target Americans. For instance, Trump has proclaimed his agenda to create an “Iron Dome” to protect the U.S. from enemy (read PRC) ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile attacks. This week U.S. Air Force B-1 bombers flew joint patrols with FA-50s from our treaty allies in the Philippine Air Force providing a tangible demonstration of President Trump’s commitments in the South China Sea. Then there are his statements regarding America’s strategic interest in Greenland, which strengthen the ability of the U.S. to meet Russia’s influence and the PRC’s hyper-aggression in the Arctic.
Even the U.S. Postal Service’s temporary suspension of the delivery of packages from the PRC and Hong Kong has sent a signal that President Trump is not going to sit by any longer and allow the PRC to decimate America’s 18–24-year-old population that has been so adversely impacted. The fact that customs agents had to check packages from the PRC because Trump ended the de minimus rule exempting shipments under $800 from customs duties was a reminder of the power that America has against the PRC’s economy. While it is yet to be announced, online retailers like Temu and Shein may soon be prohibited from selling their cheap wares in America. Because this also impacts DHL, FedEx, UPS, and other international shippers, the message was sent to Wall Street that the days of unquestioned trade with the PRC are not assured. This is salient because Beijing relies on exports to move the PRC out of its economic doldrums and any measures that retard the PRC economy deepens the legitimacy crisis the CCP faces.
Likewise, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has traveled to Panama to encourage that country to evict PRC entities from their de facto control over the Panama Canal and to end their membership in the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). That is a tangible step forward in demonstrating the Trump administration’s “silent war” with Beijing and one that should be repeated by many other states in the Caribbean and Central and South America to remove the CCP scourge from the Western Hemisphere.
Additionally, President Trump will welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House in the second week of February. Importantly, this will be before he speaks with Xi Jinping, the leader of Communist China. That is an unambiguous message that Trump recognizes the greatness of India and the many points of shared interests between the world’s two largest democracies. The threat that the PRC poses to both states may now be addressed with urgency and in the manner required. So much time and so many opportunities were lost under the Biden administration as it did not promote a more aggressive engagement posture with our friends in Delhi. Instead, Biden castigated India and never missed an opportunity to denigrate New Delhi and neglect how the two might work together. Nothing exemplified this disrespect from the Biden administration more than the appointment of Eric Garcetti as Ambassador to India. Now, with Modi’s visit to Washington, the two leaders can focus on the threat from Beijing, and effective solutions to the PRC’s hyper-aggression can be forged.
What is most amazing is that all of this has been accomplished in under three weeks.
Given this trajectory, Americans can expect even greater steps in the near future. These will include the reform of the Department of Defense to make it more combat-effective and further its conventional (primarily naval) and nuclear capabilities so that it is able to meet the threat from the PRC. There will be greater involvement with the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), which includes Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., to formulate defense cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region.
But most importantly, there has been the very palpable return of American leadership to international politics and the Indo-Pacific region. The days of an enfeebled president are over. There is now a dynamic and focused occupant of the Oval Office. Other states, whether they are allies and partners or enemies of the United States, grasp that American power is now employed to advance American interests and that “peace through strength” will be the byword that informs U.S. national security policy.
James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer are authors of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure. The views expressed are their own.
The CCP is dangerous mainly because its collective decision-making at the top is polluted by hubris about China’s real capabilities. These people live in a cultural bubble where China once had the ability—through numbers mainly—to be the world’s hegemon but somehow missed out on it for the usual excuses about foreign interference. It never had this capability because almost everything in China is a derivative of something invented elsewhere. If it’s an export item, it’s one-hundred percent derivative. This doesn’t give you capability; it gives you the hubris that comes from daydreams with no basis in reality.