US Deluded About Threat Posed by China: Center for Security Policy

Frank Gaffney, executive chairman at the Center for Security Policy and the co-author of the new report, “The CCP is at War with America," at CPAC on Aug. 6, 2022. (Otabius Williams/The Epoch Times)

The threat imposed on the United States by the Chinese regime far exceeds the Soviet nuclear threat, according to executive chairman at the Center for Security Policy Frank Gaffney.

“The Soviet nuclear threat …. was nothing, nothing, compared to what we now face in terms of the comprehensive threat .... from the Chinese Communist Party,” Gaffney said in a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ program.

“[Yet], we have persisted in this delusion that they’re not at war with us or that,“ Gaffney said. ”We can continue to do business with them, we can engage with them, we can prop them up, we can enrich them, we can make them more powerful, we can make them more dangerous, without any danger to ourselves. It is madness.”

Bankrolling Warfare

Gaffney pointed to the estimated three to six trillion dollars of United States pensions, retirement, and investment funds pouring into the Chinese economy, which he said, “has enabled them [China] to have us bankroll their unrestricted warfare against us.”

The money, stemming from federal government employees, either military or civilian [ones], is being “moved into [Chinese] companies that are building weapons systems with which to kill those men and women in uniform,” the expert noted.

“[Yet] Wall Street sees no problem with this. They say, ‘Well, as long as it’s not illegal, we’re going to continue to do it,’” he added.

Gaffney described such behavior as “betraying [our] country.”

“If they persist in it, it is treason ... and it ought to be treated as such,” he said.

Business With China

The expert singled out the “hide and bide” strategy, meaning “Hide your strength, bide your time,” coined by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

According to Gaffney, this approach has been applied in China’s business dealings with the United States.

“The Chinese … conceal their determination to destroy the United States under the false pretense that they just want to be a partner with us, they just want to be a member of the international community,” Gaffney said.  The pretext is that China simply wants to enrich its people and become more integrated into the world community.

That strategy has succeeded in luring the U.S. business sector into opening up technology, operations, and even its most proprietary information, Gaffney added, such that “over time, biding their time, the Chinese would be able to destroy our industrial base, most of our supply chains, certainly the independence that we had in virtually every area initially, and move all of those supply chains and the stuff that goes into them to China,” Gaffney added.

“Deng … understood that by getting the United States completely dependent upon China, they would have a degree of resilience against the kind of punishment that Reagan meted out to the Soviets that ultimately resulted in their destruction,” he said.

To prove this point, Gaffney quoted Chinese expert Gordon Chang: “Food, energy, medicines, personal protective equipment, rare earth minerals, steel, everything you need for war, in short, they are now hoarding and husbanding and making less and less available.”

“It’s hard to get your head around the horrible [things] that could flow from the kind of dependencies that we continue to have and the vulnerabilities that arise from it,” Gaffney said.

Pushing Back

To counter the challenges posed by the Chinese regime, Americans need to understand that the enemy is a transnational organization and must be treated as such.

“We need to disengage from this mortal enemy. The supply chain and other dependencies is a formula for our destruction, absolutely unquestionably,” Gaffney said.

Rebuilding the military is an urgent priority, Gaffney stressed. The U.S. military is “neither situated nor capable of dealing with the kind of threat that we have helped the Chinese military become,” he added.

The expert further called for Americans to cut off “the most serious of our self-inflicted vulnerabilities, the financing that we are providing to the Chinese Communist Party that is enabling all of this.”

“Every American, who has money in the U.S. capital markets today must say to their financial managers, their pension fund managers, the people who are handling their investments, ‘I don’t want my money invested in Chinese Communist Party companies. Period. Get it out of there,’” Gaffney said.