I know, some of you are saying, Colonel, this is a blinding flash of the obvious. Sadly, this is not obvious to those in policy making positions in our nation. The episode last week with the intelligence gathering balloon from China, which violated US sovereignty hovering over strategic installations, is just the latest in a long list of affronts by the Chinese Communist Party. Hereinafter, I will refer to them as the ChiComs.
The United States foolishly believed that we could normalize relations with these brutal ChiComs, grant them most favored trade status, and allow them entry into the global economic community in an attempt to change their behavior. The ChiComs only saw this as a weakness and an opportunity. China realized that the United States did not defeat the Soviet Union militarily, but rather economically. Yes, our military posture, capability, capacity, readiness, and will enabled the economic collapse of the USSR as theyheld onto failing socialist economic policies. China recognized that they could stay communists but use free market capitalism as a means to create economic dependence of the West...due to our hunger for cheap goods.
Over the ensuing years, China has grown economically while maintaining its global belligerence and human rights violations. They are still the ChiComs. And much like a tick inserts itself into its host, so has China inserted itself into the global economy, gorged itself on our economic blood, and infected us with disease. And yet we, save for the four years of the Trump administration, have done nothing. The ChiComs have stolen countless amounts of our intellectual property and demanded forced transfers of technology from businesses seeking to operate in China. The ChiComshave become so very powerful that even the National Basketball Association fears standing up to them.
The ChiComs have developed a grand strategic plan called "One Belt, One Road" which lays out their drive to economic and military dominance. The great Panama Canal which was built with American ingenuity, and lives lost, has been operated by Chinese owned contractors. Just think, we built the Panama Canal for the strategic maritime purposes of transitioning our Naval fleets from Atlantic to Pacific oceans, and vice versa. China is all over our very own hemisphere building port facilities...Bahamas, Jamaica to name a few. Even a few summers ago during a cruise my wife Angela and I were taking, we learned that the Chinese are investing in the port facility in Athens Greece.
In Afghanistan, not only has the Biden Administration turned the entire country back over to a designated terrorist organization, the Taliban, but we also have allowed the ChiComs to be in position to exploit Afghanistan for its mass amounts of raw materials, including lithium, necessary for electric vehicles (EVs). So, the Biden administration is undermining our very own oil and gas industry, seeking to force Americans to buy EVs while China is corners the market on lithium, needed for EV batteries. You can’t make this stuff up. As well, in abandoning Afghanistan, Biden surrendered one of the most strategic air bases in the world, Bagram AB. While the ChiComs have certainly exploited, thanks to the Taliban, the billions of dollars of equipment and military technology left behind.
During my tenure in Congress, we had an issue with Chinese drywall in South Florida. Yes, it was cheap, and it was also killing Floridians. But China has seriously upped that game in new and very disturbing ways. There can be no debate that Covid was a biological warfare agent released upon the world by the ChiComs. A sad reality is that some in our own government enabled this by funding gain of function research. How many Americans lost their lives due to this biological warfare attack? And not just directly, but consider the lives lost by committing suicides as they watched their businesses crumble, and subsequently fail. How many of our young people took their lives due to the severe Covid restrictions that took away the best years of their lives? And now, China has expanded to chemical warfare by way of fentanyl, a substance that originates in China and then ships to the transnational narco-criminal terrorists in Mexico known as the cartels. In one year, fentanyl killed more Americans than the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.
On top of that, thanks to Tik Tok, the ChiComs are enacting a cultural assault against America. And along with ZTE and Huawei, both of which have a headquarters footprint within 30 minutes from where I live, the ChiComs are attacking our information technology infrastructure as they buy up vast amounts of farmland and land near strategic military installations.
And how did we react to them floating a surveillance balloon over Montana? Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his trip to China for this week...damn, that's gonna hurt their feelings.
The Chinese Communist Party has declared war against America and they have already taken the lives of millions. And we cannot even find the testicular fortitude to take down their doggone balloon.
We must immediately begin restoring our supply lines, especially medical, from China to America, or to real allies in the Pacific rim. We need to establish a NATO like collective security organization in the Pacific. We should start expelling any Chinese nationals who have ties back to the CCP, and I mean students, professors, and businesses. We should recover lands bought by ChiComs. You can bet they would not allow me to purchase a parcel of land in China. We need to stop allowing China to dictate to us our foreign policy; that means open and normal relations with Taiwan. Heck, I wish we had more joint economic endeavors with Taiwan, especially in the areas of technology and chip development. And lastly, we cannot continue to watch the ChiComs outpace us in Maritime military growth, but that is what's happening. Our Navy is focused on pronoun use while China is focused on aircraft carriers and missiles...along with fortifying islands and claiming waterways.
It does not take a China expert to see what is happening--just some common sense and guts, both of which are lacking in this compromised Biden administration. Xi Jinping knows weakness when he sees it, and it is occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Naval Observatory. The ChiComs know that they have two years of free reign, and they will use that advantage. Let me impose a little philosophy upon y'all--the world is more Machiavellian than it is Kantian. If you do not know of which I refer, then readup. This train wreck is coming if we do not embrace, admit, and declare that the Communist Chinese Party IS our #1 geo-political foe.
Steadfast and Loyal.