President Trump channels his inner Reagan

Originally published by RealClear Policy

Yesterday, President Donald Trump struck what is arguably the single most important blow for freedom since Ronald Reagan took down the Soviet Union. Interestingly, one of the architects of the latter victory played an indispensable role in informing and encouraging the former.

Roger Robinson served as the Senior Director for International Economic Affairs on the Reagan National Security Council during four critically important years, from 1981-1985. In that role, Robinson drew upon his previous career as an international banker with Chase Manhattan Bank, which included serving for several years as a special assistant to its chairman, David Rockefeller, and as the vice president responsible for lending to the Soviet bloc. In short, he knew where the proverbial “bodies were buried” in the USSR and deftly exploited his understanding of the Kremlin’s limited sources of cash-flow to help President Reagan knock the pegs out from under its Communist regime.

For the past two decades, Roger Robinson has applied those same skills to countering our time’s existential threat to freedom: another totalitarian enemy, this one doing business as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the early 2000s, Robinson organized and led the PetroChina Coalition, a pick-up team of national security professionals, environmentalists, trade union leaders and human rights activists determined to block the CCP’s first effort to raise unrestricted funds in the U.S. capital markets. It took the form of an initial public offering for the Chinese National Petroleum Company’s subsidiary known as PetroChina. In the face of the Coalition’s effective opposition, the IPO ultimately was issued in Hong Kong instead and pulled in a small fraction of what it had expected to command in a Wall Street debut.

For the following decade, Roger Robinson served as a member of the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, for much of that time as its Chairman or Vice-Chairman. He ably led the Commission in providing Congress and the public with an invaluable second-opinion on Communist China, sanity-checking official thinking and intelligence assessments of the CCP’s capabilities and ambitions.

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