It’s time to play hardball with China

Editor’s Note: Center Senior Fellow Grant Newsham’s new book, When China Attacks: A Warning to America, is available for preorder and will release on Tuesday, March 28. Click here to purchase.

Are Americans finally waking up to the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China?

If so, they can accelerate that reveille call by picking up a copy of retired Marine Col. Grant Newsham’s new book, When China Attacks: A Warning to America.

Newsham has spent much of his life in the Indo-Pacific region. He served there while in the Marines and as a foreign service officer, and he spent two decades working for banks and tech firms in Tokyo. In short, he knows what he’s talking about.

And Newsham has a lot to tell us, particularly those Americans who have not followed U.S. relations with the PRC for the last 20 years.

Newsham begins When China Attacks with an imaginary but realistic account of a Chinese assault on Taiwan and the disastrous aftermath if that invasion succeeds, a catastrophic event both for the Pacific nations and for the United States. By maps and explanations, Newsham makes clear that if the Chinese gain control of Taiwan, and if they branch out from there, claiming various bodies of water and making good on bargains already struck with some Pacific islands, they will threaten Australia, Hawaii, and the West Coast of the U.S.

Newsham’s title, however, contains a second meaning. He makes clear, as some of us are aware, that China has waged war against the United States for a long time now. In an article that appeared here in Intellectual Takeout in January, I defined the PRC strategy and practice of unrestricted warfare: the use of everything from drugs to inciting social discord to intellectual theft to undermine the U.S.

When China Attacks leaves my article in the dust. With chapters like “Biological Warfare: China Sickens America,” “Chemical Warfare: Killing Americans by the Tens of Thousands,” and “Financial Warfare: Defenestrating the American Dollar,” Newsham gives readers detail along with expert analysis that I couldn’t begin to match.

These chapters lay out the rot and ruin that China’s unrestricted warfare, abetted by the policies of some in our government and corporations, have brought to America’s towns and cities. Those crumbling neighborhoods in Baltimore, Chicago, and other major cities in large measure bear visible witness to this devastating assault.

Equally disturbing are the politicians, corporate heads, and celebrities in the entertainment and sports arenas who have kowtowed to the CCP to keep the goodies and cash flowing their way. Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with China—his laptop reveals that he was offered $10 million a year for setting up “introductions”—are only the tip of this iceberg of schmoozing and greed.

The hopeful news comes at the end of When China Attacks. It’s late in the day, but Americans still possess the ability, according to Newsham, to turn the tide, and he gives us specific guidelines for launching a counterattack. First, and vital to this effort, we must open our eyes and acknowledge “that the United States is already at war with the People’s Republic of China.” At the same time, we must begin to instill in Americans, particularly the young, an understanding of communism and its century-long history of oppression and savage brutality. “Most Americans under forty have no real sense of communism,” Newsham correctly observes, “and certainly not of its depredations and bellicosity.”

Our government needs to take the lead in this awakening. The old belief that globalism and trade, always a lopsided proposition with the CCP, would liberalize communism was never true. Our president, Congress, and pertinent federal agencies need to reassess their approach to dealing with the PRC.

And the Chinese dragon is not invulnerable. That nation is rife with corruption, guilty of ongoing human rights violations, and ridden with what Newsham calls “system fragility,” which means the PRC has faults that we and other democratic governments should be pointing out to the world. As Newsham puts it, we “should aggressively, unapologetically, speak up for the system of rights, freedoms, and accepted rules of international behavior that has been largely responsible for peace and security for decades and has benefited most of the planet (and allowed the PRC’s development).”

Newsham reminds us that the United States has faced tough situations at other times in our history. In 1942, for example, “it seemed like we (and our allies) were losing everywhere—and it seemed like we might indeed lose World War II. We didn’t.”

He then writes, “We’ve seen all this before, and we still prevailed. Because we wanted to.”

And that’s the ticket. We must have the desire to resist the People’s Republic of China and to keep our way of life and our freedoms.

At the end of When China Attacks, Newsham correctly observes, “Communist systems always destroy themselves.”

We just need to make sure the PRC doesn’t destroy us first.

Picryl-The U.S. National Archives, NC – ITO