When Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced last October that a Chinese state-owned corporation must sell more than 100 acres of agricultural land in northeast Arkansas, she became the first state executive in America to force a Chinese Communist Party-run company to sell its U.S. farmland.
Soon, action pushing back on the CCP's malign influence — not just through agricultural land ownership — will be commonplace in states across the country if a new organization has its way.
Launching on Wednesday morning, State Armor aims to "transform America’s decentralized system of federalism into a tremendous national security asset" by working to expose malign efforts undertaken by the CCP and educate policymakers and everyday Americans about "threats to our supply chains, vulnerabilities caused by Chinese technologies, the pitfalls of enabling the Communist Party's gross human rights violations in China, and the CCP's violation of civil liberties in America."
Michael Lucci, the founder and CEO of the new venture, noted how "states are now on the front lines against foreign adversaries" and for years have been "targeted by well-resourced, technologically sophisticated foreign adversaries, particularly Communist China." The CCP, Lucci emphasized, is "engaged in a broad effort to supplant the United States so it can rewrite global norms according to its authoritarian model."
That means the Chinese Communist Party "aggressively pursues a strategy to gain economic leverage over state and local governments, to make states dependent on their technologies, and to suppress the First Amendment-protected speech of Chinese dissidents within America," Lucci added.
The nascent non-profit says that it plans to mobilize stakeholders ranging from everyday Americans to experts to help states across the country develop and implement "comprehensive, commonsense, and bipartisan solutions to protect themselves from what is widely regarded as a generation-defining foreign threat."
U.S. Rep Mike Gallagher (R-WI), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, emphasized in a statement that, "from CCP-affiliated purchases of agricultural land to efforts by the party to influence state and local politics, states are on the front lines of our New Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party."
"We may call this a ‘strategic competition,’ but this is not a polite tennis match," Chairman Gallagher warned. "The most fundamental human rights and freedoms are at stake. I commend State Armor for acting with a sense of urgency to expose the CCP’s nefarious networks across our states and equip local lawmakers with the tools to fight this New Cold War," he added.
Former National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien also lauded State Armor's mission "to bring awareness and ready-for-action plans to push counter-China policies that many of our state leaders know need to get done, but just aren't sure where to start. It's no secret the Chinese Communist Party poses a major threat to the American way of life, but until now there hasn't been a group solely focused on taking on Communist China at the state level," O'Brien underscored. "States want to take action — State Armor will be there to show them how."
Given the Biden administration's failure or refusal to swiftly or adequately address foreign threats from, among other foes, the Chinese Communist Party, states may again prove to be the country's best hope in tackling such problems in lieu of federal action.
All one has to do to see the current administration's posture toward China is remember the days when a CCP spy balloon was allowed to drift across the United States — from Alaska to South Carolina — gathering and sending information back to Beijing that the U.S. government still does not fully understand. Or recall the Biden administration's efforts lobbying China to dissuade Putin from invading Ukraine, a fool's errand that wasted months and only resulted in closer relations between Moscow and Beijing.
States have repeatedly proven themselves ready and able to enact needed policies to address shortcomings at the federal level. Texas Governor Greg Abbott's efforts to secure the U.S.-Mexico border show that federal inaction doesn't mean there's no way to fix glaring issues. As State Armor pledges to do, their resources, network, and blueprints aimed at ushering good policy proposals into reality across the country should make good state-level leadership even easier.