The ‘long duel’ between the U.S. and China is escalating
As a result, President Biden will have little choice but to carry on the policies Rogin attributes to the “hard-liners” of the Trump years. Rogin separates these serious national security specialists from two other factions: the oddball collection of wacky “super hawks” and the eager-to-please-the-CCP Wall Street gang inside and outside the Trump White House. The “whole of society” approach — uniting all levels of government with allies, the private sector and the public against Chinese predations — that Trump-era hard-liners advocated wouldn’t have been a natural fit for former secretary of state John F. Kerry or former national security adviser Susan Rice, whose hapless “diplomacy” in the late Obama years is skewered by Rogin. But Biden simply can’t retreat now in the face of Chinese aggressions. He will have to stand up not just for Japan, Australia and India — our “Quad” allies — but also for Taiwan and an expanded U.S. Navy. Anchorage should set the stage for all that will now follow.
The rising conflict also affects the GOP. Would-be presidential nominees who bring legitimate national security credentials to the table will find themselves at a significant advantage in a campaign already begun. That’s a small group including former vice president Mike Pence, former secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo, and Senate Intelligence Committee members Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). (Three former ambassadors, Richard Grenell, Nikki Haley and Robert C. O’Brien, are also in the hard-liners camp and have been reported to be mulling runs for the White House.)
If China’s aggression becomes the issue of first importance, though, Republican governors who hope to run in 2024 have one card to play: Congress has just gifted them billions of no-strings-attached dollars in the vast stimulus bill. As Rogin details, conflict with China requires massive U.S. investment in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as hardening cyber and power networks in every region of the country. Returning supply chains to the United States, increasing industrial capacity and investing in shipyards in need of rebuilding (and the manufacturing that supports them) are all projects that savvy governors can embrace. Red-state governors who direct their recovery dollars to dual purpose investments that serve their states’ and the country’s “whole of society” approach to the CCP will lessen the gap between themselves and their credentialed rivals.
The “long duel” with the CCP has been out in the open since a series of speeches in the latter half of the Trump era, beginning with an address from Pence in October 2019 and ending with one from Pompeo last July with the birthplace and grave of Richard Nixon as his symbolic backdrop. (Disclosure: Pompeo delivered his speech at the invitation of the Richard Nixon Foundation, of which I am president and CEO.) Pompeo finished a months-long roll back of 30 years of illusory “win-win” approaches to China with the terse admonition regarding the Communists in Beijing who one-upped even Ronald Reagan’s sturdy Cold War diplomacy by modifying Reagan’s “trust but verify” admonition about the Soviets into Pompeo’s formulation for the CCP: “Distrust and verify.” Anyone who reads Rogin’s book will need little proof of the wisdom of the adage, given the genocide in Xinjiang, the repression of Hong Kong and the coverup in Wuhan. It is later than you think, and America’s edge is narrower than it has ever been.
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