Trump Will Hold China Accountable for This Pandemic

Medical supplies and beds in a tent where volunteers set up an Emergency Field Hospital in Central Park on March 30, 2020. (Bryan R. Smith / AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Even before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) unleashed this pandemic on the world by engaging in a futile coverup—resulting in infected people being allowed to fly out of China, spreading the virus to the far corners of the globe—the dangers of freely associating with that criminal regime were apparent.

I read a book in 2005, written by a man named Thomas P.M. Barnett, called “The Pentagon’s New Map.” He talked an awful lot about China in that book, and how globalization presented a fantastic opportunity for U.S. policymakers to engage with China.

Barnett enthusiastically sold a vision of the United States and the CCP regime becoming such good financial partners, so closely bound together by commercial ties that most political obstacles would gradually fade away as the CCP warmed up to the West, and an armed conflict between the two countries would be reduced to an absurd idea.

I bought that book and read it after catching Barnett on a PBS television program giving the PowerPoint presentation that became the basis for the book. At the conclusion of the lengthy chapter dealing with China, Barnett made a joke about how you make a roomful of U.S. generals cry: by showing how globalism means we'll never be going to war with China.

Instead, we were going to be their joined-at-the-hip business partners.

All I can say now, because at the time I didn’t know a thing about the real CCP, is that Barnett made it all sound plausible.

I don’t read Barnett anymore; he was wrong. Closer ties and outsourcing our vital infrastructure to the CCP didn’t “open up” China so much as it left the United States vulnerable to a hostile regime.

That was painfully apparent long ago, and the current pandemic only makes that more evident. I wrote a column last October about how expectations of what engagement with the CCP would lead to were catastrophically wrong. Here’s how it read, in part, in discussing the NBA self-censoring scandal:

“The entire free world has had an eye-opening look at exactly how China intends to use its vast economic leverage outside its borders.

And what an ugly look it was.

The Chinese regime doesn’t have to explicitly demand that Western companies punish its critics for them. Many people who run these companies will leap to censor and oppress their own employees without waiting for the Chinese to demand it.”

...

“The popular theory that was sold for decades was that by engaging China and opening our doors to them, we were going to ‘democratize’ them. Take a good look at what you have seen recently, as U.S. corporate interests bowed the knee to actual tyrants.

The exact opposite happened. China is making full use of its financial clout to force Western corporations into acting like political extensions of itself.” Bureaucratic globalists with visions of worldwide peace and economic prosperity have been telling themselves fantasies about CCP leadership for the past several decades.

It took the recent NBA and Blizzard Entertainment scandals to make people see how China influences big American sports and entertainment institutions. But it took the CCP virus to starkly flush out how the CCP is also influencing many major U.S. media institutions.

The CCP has been buying control and influence over Western media outlets for decades. Slowly. Carefully. Quietly.

Yes, foreign countries such as China, Russia, Qatar, Iran, and others haven’t been just buying themselves positive press here in the West for decades, they’ve been purchasing slanted news coverage.

The globalists opened the doors and created a massive foreign bribery industry that runs out of Washington. And yes, news media outlets have played a key role in building this monstrosity.

But current events are forcing this relationship into the open where everyone can see it.

The American public has spent more than a week watching mainstream U.S. news media reporters functioning as de facto proxies for the CCP regime, in an attempt to furiously browbeat a U.S. president into repeating CCP talking points.

They utterly failed to force Trump to change his language, of course, but by even attempting that, many of these political activists disguised as reporters exposed their true allegiances.

The Truth Is Already Out There

China’s communist government, in the past five months, tried to cover up a virus outbreak, let it spread all over the world, and continued to lie about it until after mid-January. Trump knows the truth about that. Which means there will be consequences, and serious ones.

When this president is reelected, there will be widespread panic among the globalists. Because it’s not just the NBA and a few other U.S. entertainment companies that need reformation to remove all that vile CCP influence. The entire political elite class in Washington and in the U.S. news media needs a reformation too.

And when Trump gets his second term, that’s what’s going to happen. The CCP’s insidious worldwide influence is going to be dramatically scaled back after this pandemic. U.S. industries will be coming home, and the CCP’s media shills in the West can’t stop it.

Because they can’t stop Trump.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion ... But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.