WASHINGTON–The former speaker of the House of Representatives joined current members of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a former senior Trump White House official, Chinese dissidents, and U.S. national security experts in condemning the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ruthless rule and drive to dominate the globe at a recent event in Washington.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued that the CCP already had secured three strategic victories: first, in its growing domination of the South China Sea; second, in its One Belt, One Road initiative gobbling up infrastructure into the heart of the West; and third, in its tipping-point technological triumph in the global 5G wireless market.
Overall, Gingrich said, the United States is “watching a revolution in strategic economic capabilities and a revolution in geographic location of power and all of it is being done while we sleepwalk.”
Members of the academic left in the United States and the reporters who grow out of it, Gingrich said, “pervade the whole system,” leading to “three generations now of teaching people lies.” The answer, Gingrich said, is “you’ve got to go beat them.” Americans “have a tendency not to vote for self-immolation.”
Joining Gingrich at the roundtable hosted by Committee on the Present Danger: China on April 9 at Reserve Officers Association national headquarters across the street from the U.S. Capitol Building was Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Ted Cruz (R-Texas). He echoed Gingrich’s concern, saying, “China is in my view, and in the view of many, the greatest long-term geopolitical risk that the United States faces.”
To eliminate that risk, Cruz said the United States needs to do three things: Turn the light of transparency and truth on Chinese totalitarianism; rebuild the United States’ military capabilities to face the Chinese threat, including with space-based missile defenses; and decrease rampant Chinese spying, manipulation, and theft inside the U.S. homeland.
Cruz concluded with the rallying cry, “Truth is stronger than lies, and light is stronger than darkness.”
Likewise, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence member Chris Stewart charged that China’s “intention is to dominate the United States and every other Western democracy.” He said the CCP is “moving methodically towards that goal,” and that “from the intelligence perspective, there is nothing that I worry about more.”
Finally, Steve Bannon, the former strategic adviser to President Donald Trump, said the “Trump Revolution” began with recognition among America’s working class of threats to the country’s republic, including that of communist China.
Bannon said, “The Chinese people are among the most noble people that have ever walked the earth, and they have been oppressed and abused for a millennium and are now under a ‘new emperor’—a radical cadre” of the CCP. In Bannon’s view, globalist elites know full well that the current government in Beijing perpetrates human rights abuses at home and economic destruction abroad, yet consistently “sell out the American people and the Chinese people.”
Bannon warned that the United States must defend itself against the threat of both communist China and its globalist enablers.
In the end, Bannon argued, it was liberty that would, in fact, make the Middle Kingdom great again. “When you have rule of law and freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” Bannon said, “there is nothing that the Chinese people cannot accomplish.”
Brian Kennedy, chairman of the Committee for the Present Danger: China, said the Soviet Union’s fall “was not inevitable or even likely, instead it was well thought out, debated in forums like this and later implemented by men and women in the Reagan Administration who defended Reagan’s policies.” Likewise, he flagged a lack of awareness among Americans about communist China’s threat, but applauded Trump, who, “like Reagan before him, understands this threat and is taking actions to ensure our national survival.”
