Vice President Pence handed each and every family member a card, saying, “If you need anything large or small, you call this number. We will help you.”
As we loaded back onto the presidential aircraft, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said of Trump, “He’s exactly where we are, Matt. We have to keep helping him. And them.”
And I will.
CHAPTER NINE
China Is Not Our Friend
There is a story we tell ourselves that China will behave just like us. We just need to invite them in, show them more of the Western world, bring them closer. This is a lie. Exposing the truth will help us see China—and our leaders who indulge them—clearly.
When we think of great power politics, we often obscure it in the niceties and sophistries of diplomacy. Gentle words smooth over the harsh reality of Swiss bank accounts and Panama Papers bribe records. It’s easy to talk abstractly, hard to have a real talk. But there is a kind of power that comes with telling the truth, a natural hierarchy that separates who is serious from who is seriously wrong, sometimes identifying good and branding evil. It just so happens Donald Trump is the best brander in the world.
Our first obligation is to tell the truth about China without the clutter of old trade deals and riches that never quite materialized (except for the elites, of course). To be candid, we must know who we are and who they are. We must be as aware of our own weakness as they are of ours. After all, they’ve had centuries of reading The Art of War and we have a president who has written The Art of the Deal. President Trump knows when to use sticks and carrots to get a negotiation moving. But the time may have passed for carrots. Carrots are for rabbits and horses, not dragons. While other generations have sold out to China, our generation must see that the Chimerica dream is actually a nightmare—and we are living it.
This China fiction is spread by our supposed business elites, who imagine untold riches if only we love China a little more. They tell us that China is good for business, but their multinational business successes come at the expense of American workers. The United States Chamber of Commerce seems to fight for everything other than the United States and her commerce. They even criticized President Trump for working to redomesticate critical medical manufacturing in the wake of the COVID pandemic. I was surprised to learn that over 90 percent of ibuprofen is made outside our country. Can we not even have an America First headache anymore?
The Chinese story has been a fairy tale, but like a lot of fairy tales it has come to a deadly end—the coronavirus outbreak there leaving an estimated hundred thousand dead in the first few months of 2020 alone, drowning in their own fluids, alone in a hospital bed. Why is it that so many pandemics seem to come from China? Why can’t they get it together? Why can’t China function like other modern countries? It is not unreasonable to ask these questions.
Motivated by naivete and political correctness, we’ve looked the other way and played pretend. It’s hard to grasp the enormity of the problem. We are outnumbered by the Chinese, and we have lost our focus. Han Chinese is the default setting for the human species—1.3 billion and counting. When you’re one in a million in China, there are still 1,300 just like you. While we’ve wasted our time and treasure putzing around the Middle East, the Middle Kingdom has grown larger, smarter, and more ambitious. For most of my life, America has chased desert democracy mirages while the Chinese have steadily built positional advantage over their neighbors and us. We’ve been drained, clumsily attempting to build democracies out of sand, blood, and Arab militias.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have built skyscrapers, aircraft carriers, and supply chains to enhance their might. While we were fretting about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans Americans from paying business bribes to Third World countries, the Chinese were showing up with suitcases of cash and ready prostitutes. In the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas—right in our backyard—the Chinese are closing deals. They have been as cunning as we have been clueless. Chinese intelligence professionals know the motives for creating double agents summed up among English speakers by the acronym MICE—money, ideology, coercion, and ego—and they have many promising targets among the global elite. They have found it is easy to corrupt the very people who have been serving as the China-dismissing, clueless storytellers.
When I was a boy, I was taught to feel sorry for the Chinese. My mother would tell me to clean my plate because there were starving kids in China. Their one-child policy meant they sent their daughters—and they were all daughters; Chinese culture is rough on women—abroad for eager American couples to adopt. That is, those who weren’t aborted. China was a tragic case and certainly not a great power. We had to be magnanimous to help our Chinese friends up out of poverty. At the end of the twentieth century, there was a Chinese economic miracle, but we lost sight of the cost to the American dream.
Things have changed—fast.
The enormity of the Chinese problem is a modern one, brought on in the last fifty years. Only Nixon could go to China, but it was Henry Kissinger, after traveling there in 1971, who went to work for China and cashed the checks. You’re never too old—Kissinger is ninety-seven as I write this—to sell out. There’s a lot of green to be had in Red China but none of it is going to go to you. No, you get the bill for the elite’s virtue signaling and adventurism.
The former national security advisor and secretary of state even
