Engagement Gave Us Corrupt Leaders and Now a Manchurian Candidate

Original article here


“Personnel is policy” is one of Washington’s truisms. A world on fire would suggest that the U.S. is following the wrong policies. Therefore, it has the wrong personnel. Principal among the wrong personnel chosen by the Biden administration is a demonstrated consistency in choosing those who favor engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). President Joseph Biden, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are classic cases of Washington D.C. insiders who advocated for engagement for decades. Now that they are the dominant voices in U.S. foreign policy Americans must understand the devastating impact they have had on their national defense and personal safety.

The policy of engagement has myriad problems, but its central ones are, first, that it gave the CCP direct access to the political, business, media, and intellectual elite of the United States, second, it gave those individuals a pecuniary and political stake in the prosperity of the CCP, and third, that elite sustained that policy for decades, long after it was apparent that the relative power of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was increasing in relation to the U.S.’s, and that their nuclear and other military capabilities continued to thrive, as did their technological prowess, and diplomatic might. Year after year, the threat from our elites deflated. They were incapable of understanding that a prosperous CCP meant a decrepit United States. These pro-CCP-engaging elites bought into Beijing’s propaganda that competition with the PRC was a “zero-sum” mentality that needed to be avoided.

President Biden, his family, and their associates profited handsomely from the policy of engagement. The full record may never be known. It will certainly have to wait until he is no longer useful to the Democratic Party before the truth emerges. Blinken worked with Biden to create the Penn-Biden Center to which PRC entities have funneled scores of millions of dollars to promote policies of engagement. Campbell was instrumental in the 2012 Scarborough Shoal incident between the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The incident led to a U.S. abandonment of our treaty ally the Republic of the Philippines’s position which ultimately caused Manila to yield its sovereign territory and provided the PRC with another victory in its territorial expansion in the South China Sea. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is no better, as he has sustained the failed and dangerous policy of engagement with the PRC, even after being publicly berated in 2021 on American soil by the PRC’s top wolf warrior diplomat, Yang Jiechi. Harris’s National Security Advisor is Philip Gordon, who signed an open letter in the Washington Post proclaiming that the PRC was not the enemy of the U.S. It is. To be so wrong about the enemy, the fundamental threat to the U.S. of the 21st century, is a colossal error.

2023 was a year of humiliation for the U.S. as it witnessed the embarrassment of a cavalcade of Biden administration senior officials traveling to the PRC or other locations to convey the Biden administration’s desire to appease the PRC’s demands. 400 U.S. business leaders gave Communist Dictator Xi Jinping a standing ovation—twice—when at a dinner in the Bay Area in November 2023.

The intellectual headlock of engagement will only be broken if Donald Trump returns to office.

Thus 2024 offers the prospect of a better year. Or a much, much worse one.

Vice President Harris’s ties to the CCP seem to be the usual one for prominent politicians. Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is so tied to the CCP, at least since 1989, that one wonders if a search of his wallet might find a CCP membership card. His ties are so strong—more than 30 visits, many of which were made when Americans in the PRC were very rare—that he had to have encountered Chinese intelligence agents. He would not have returned to the PRC had those agents not been satisfied with his performance. Many of these trips overlapped with his 24 years in uniform as a member of the U.S. National Guard. One wonders what these agents were able to learn about American military doctrine and operations.

The policy of engagement explains how the U.S. got such corrupt leaders.

At a fundamental level, the American people and U.S. national security interests have been poorly served by the Biden administration. The United States needs personnel and policies that recognize the stark reality of the Sino-American confrontation. The U.S. is fighting a Cold War with the PRC that Beijing commenced in 1949 when the CCP seized control. In 2019, this new Cold War took on a grave intensity when PRC dictator Xi Jinping called for a “People’s War” against the United States. In fact, the Sino-American Cold War has already lasted for decades, unlike the Cold War against the Soviets, the U.S. has not mobilized but rather consistently minimized the PRC threat by threat deflating.

Under engagement policies, that will never change. To reverse this trend, America needs a Truman or a Reagan, great presidents to respond with vigor and unrelenting focus to the threat—unfortunately, we have a Biden, and conceivably a Harris-Walz.

Biden’s or Walz’s engagement with the PRC will not age well. There very well may be a war between the U.S. and its allies against the PRC. In that conflict, many Americans may die, and the U.S. homeland may be attacked.

Thus, scores of millions of dollars from PRC entities or ideological sympathy with the CCP will look traitorous. So far, the PRC has not provided the U.S. with the equivalent of Soviet overt aggression and intervention as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Czech Coup, or the Berlin Crisis. The PRC has preferred to expand no less deliberately than the Soviets but has employed political warfare far more effectively. These unique variations from the Cold War with the Soviet Union pose substantial dangers for the U.S. as they have retarded an effective U.S. response due to the predisposition of personnel, in successive U.S. administrations, to interpret this lack of a direct attack as justification for their policy of engagement with the CCP.

But this will not last. A hyperaggressive state like the PRC is increasingly overt in its belligerence against the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, and India. It is increasingly overt in its aggression against the American people through chemical weapons like fentanyl—which have already killed hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens.

The U.S. has been hindered by personnel who have promoted this unpreceded and pernicious threat deflation so that they may have engagement. As a result, the Biden administration has taken only modest measures to confront the threat from the PRC, and these were neither sufficient nor effective actions, and they pale in comparison with what is necessary. With the important exception of the Trump administration, the U.S. has been slow to recognize that it is in an existential fight with a peer competitor.

Personnel are indeed key. In a country of 340 million people, is it too much for the American people to ask that the Democrats do not select a U.S. vice presidential candidate who intentionally gets married on the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square Massacre? On that date, many thousands of Chinese were killed by the CCP as the Communists crushed China’s democracy movement. One suspects that his selection was intentional precisely because of his close relationship with the CCP and full embrace of engagement.

***

James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer are authors of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.

By Published On: August 18, 2024Categories: UncategorizedComments Off on Engagement Gave Us Corrupt Leaders and Now a Manchurian Candidate

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About the Author: Patriotman

Patriotman currently ekes out a survivalist lifestyle in a suburban northeastern state as best as he can. He has varied experience in political science, public policy, biological sciences, and higher education. Proudly Catholic and an Eagle Scout, he has no military experience and thus offers a relatable perspective for the average suburban prepper who is preparing for troubled times on the horizon with less than ideal teams and in less than ideal locations. Brushbeater Store Page: http://bit.ly/BrushbeaterStore

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