By John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Richard Levine

May 19, 2020

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” King Lear enjoined, but this we must do to upend the wrath that has emanated from the most powerful foe America has faced. As terrible as the coronavirus crisis is, we must imagine a world ten or 20 years from now, in which the People’s Republic of China’s nominal gross domestic product is 50 percent larger than that of the United States.

What power would an unconstrained China wield? What force of arms would they muster to intimidate and to control?

If China’s actions in the coronavirus catastrophe offer any window into this communist regime’s machinations, deceitfulness, and debasement of human life, it is that the threat they represent is unlike anything America has faced.

At the inception of World War II, many strategists conjectured that both Germany and Japan were destined to lose the war; their populations and economies were too small, and their access to raw materials too tenuous, to be able to wage a protracted war against the Allies. Later, the Soviet Union posed a great challenge.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, CIA analysts predicted the Soviet economy would surpass America’s. This calculus drove many costly American decisions. Today, America’s GDP is at least 12 times Russia’s. China, however, is seemingly destined to outpace the United States in GDP during the next 20 years. Indeed, China has plausibly already overtaken the United States, if GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

It is ironic that four American actions enabled this ascent: first, American scientific aid to end famine in China; second, President Carter’s diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and his commitment that the U.S. government engage with elements of the PRC; third, President Clinton’s facilitation of the PRC’s ultimate ascension to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and his expansion of Chinese access to dual-use (civilian/military) technology; fourth, President Obama’s embrace of the PRC as a non-adversarial peer state, which completed the PRC’s envelopment of America’s institutions. //

It is logical to assume that after some initial point, Chinese political, military, and intelligence officials realized this outbreak of a new virus could be used to damage the economies of the West and thus facilitate Chinese hegemony. Given China’s history of pandemics, its political establishment must have had planning documents in place to serve the Communist Party of China’s interests, should such a scenario of a novel pandemic unfold. Manipulating data would be central to any such operational plan.

On May 7, the PRC recorded its dead in Hubei Provence, whose capital is Wuhan, at 4,512, out of 4,637 for the entire country. According to Chinese authorities, 125 fatalities occurred in all other provinces, which comprise 1.38 billion people.

If the virus did experience exponential growth, and doubled every day, in 28 days it should have infected 268 million people. A 1 percent mortality rate would thus result in millions of deaths, not fewer than 5,000. Even if the PRC underreported its losses by a factor of ten or twenty, these figures do not make sense.

Are there scenarios that explain these numbers? One explanation would involve an accidental release from the virology lab at Wuhan that was almost immediately recognized, engendering swift and firm containment procedures within China, but denied to the rest of the world by China’s continuance of international travel from the virus’s point of origin.

The second scenario is related, but crueler. Given China’s research into biological warfare, it is conceivable that entities within China may have sought a naturally occurring virus that would be just transmissible and virulent enough to cause massive disruption in Western countries, but could be limited and mitigated, given the regime’s foreknowledge, within China. Allied intelligence must determine if either scenario took place. //

China appropriates national assets worldwide in loaded energy and development deals. The pandemic will only accelerate this unless countervailing action ensues. In Djibouti, China holds 77 percent of debt. Kenya, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia were all on the cusp of asset appropriation before the present crisis.

China has lent African nations $124 billion from 2000 through 2016. The largest portion of each loan is not generally provided to the borrower, but spent in China to finance Chinese-made inputs and trained labor. The recipient country, in effect, finances jobs and manufacturing in China. The reward for targeted countries is to have their assets appropriated, due to loan non-performance.

If the West slides into steep recession, developing nations may sell whatever they can in national riches to China for cents on the dollar. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative will thus be realized. This avarice is the PRC’s Achilles’ heel.

America must exploit this weakness by offering African and developing nations an alternative to the BRI. Facilitating opposition to Chinese aims among these nations must be a central component of a new U.S. strategy. America must exploit China’s susceptibility to client-state erosion. We must innovatively marshal hard and soft power to unseat the PRC from its footholds in Africa and elsewhere. //

10 Actions the United States Must Take

The problem is not the Chinese people, nor their proud heritage that stretches back thousands of years. It is communism. We must challenge China:

1. Return all production of our medicines, medical supplies, and equipment to the United States or to countries that are our allies;
2. Enact severe limits on Chinese graduate students in all scientific subjects; shutter all Confucius Institutes at American universities until they be stripped of their propagandistic mission;
3. Entrench principles and restrictions so that China can buy no more of our corporations, universities, or national assets;
4. Help deny, across the world, the ability for China’s Huawei to deploy its 5G networks, systems, phones, and devices, as tools for espionage, industrial and otherwise, could be implanted in these systems;
5. Threaten to extend tariffs substantially if the PRC does not make all virus data and sites available to our scientists, so that we may understand fully the genesis and the spread of the present pandemic; the PRC must also release any COVID-19 whistleblowers and eliminate all wet markets;
6. Put into law criminal penalties for any American company or individual who shares proprietary or sensitive information with China, when such information has application to our defense, high-technology, or energy-related industrial base;
7. Accelerate Freedom of Navigation passages and exercises through waters that China falsely claims, with maximum U.S. naval power expressed; in this, we should include, when possible, ships of the British, the Australian, and the Japanese Navies;
8. Undertake determined efforts to deny China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially in Africa; extend alternative terms to key nations on the brink of asset appropriation due to China’s predatory lending practices;
9. Announce a new military package to reinforce Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. To this end, we should consider the sale of the F-35 due to the deployment of the advanced Chengdu J-20 fighter by China. This sale would either be as a replacement for the pending transfer of less-advanced F-16Vs to Taiwan or as a supplement to this force;
10. Radically reduce IP theft. Explicate that China’s economic expansion would have been impossible without their theft of American technology; produce and distribute lists of American technologies and products stolen or copied by China; urge other free countries to do the same, so that the world will recognize this danger. //

During the present pandemic, China’s most abhorrent exports may be fear and disinformation. Twice before this crisis, and in the living memory of many Americans, our nation has experienced pandemics. According to the CDC’s website, during the 1957 Asian Flu, “The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.”

The U.S. population in 1957 was 172 million; thus, adjusted for our present population, the Asian Flu would have killed 222,000 Americans. Of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, the CDC has written, “The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.” America’s population in 1968 was 201 million; adjusting for today, the Hong Kong Flu would have killed 164,000 Americans. Neither pandemic altered American economic life. //

The way we have answered this pandemic is not repeatable: our array of actions cannot be mounted if another wave or pandemic strikes. This is our gravest sin: we have shown China, Russia, and Iran, as well as terrorist actors, that our nation may be brought low if faced with a new pathogen.

To establish deterrence so a future malevolent actor sees our capacities both to endure and to respond, America must exact a high price from the People’s Republic of China. In this cause, we must seek the support of all the free nations of the world.

If America had done a tenth of what China has done to the world, even given the most charitable view of their acts, the PRC would do anything to make us pay. If we are not willing to act, and decisively, we are leaving the field to an unhindered, unremorseful, and ravenous state with a degree of relative economic power that we have not faced since the War of 1812.