OPINION:
While the Biden administration is focused like a laser on convincing Americans their country is systemically racist, the once murky post-Cold War world order is coming into specific relief. Our enemies are counting on us not having the guts to fight them. President Biden and most of official Washington are proving them correct.
Beijing is developing its own digital currency to compete with the dollar. China has committed $400 billion in oil purchases and other economic assistance to Iran. Russia’s military and espionage operations go beyond mere saber-rattling. China and Russia recently signed a new military cooperative masquerading as a joint lunar base program.
The ties that bind these authoritarian powers are growing, as President Biden’s weakness advances their shared global narrative of a U.S. in decline.
The U.S. foreign policy elite must acknowledge that a new world order has indeed taken shape pitting these brutal dictatorships against the free nations of the West in a clash that is far more dangerous than the one we dealt with 50 years ago.
This New Axis is far better positioned to advance their goals of global dominance than their failed 20th century forebearers. During the first Cold War, the combined economic power of the Soviet bloc nations was easily dwarfed by that of a surging U.S. economy and its allies harnessing the creative freedom and free markets of the post-war era.
The West has allowed Russia to blackmail Europe for decades over energy. We’ve placated the terrorists in Iran. An insatiable thirst for capital, cheap labor and cheap products has allowed China to become an economic powerhouse whose impact is now felt on every continent.
We’ve desperately clung to the foolish belief that with the first Cold War won, China, Russia and others would cast aside their tyrannical governments and imperial designs.
Americans need to accept reality that decades of appeasement and facilitation have made this bloc powerful and made it inseparable.
It’s the type of cooperation the Soviets never had. Moscow cobbled together a bloc of aligned nations, none of which had independent economic or military prowess, plagued by mismanagement, poverty and stretched resources.
We have a compounded problem now that requires both a domestic and foreign policy response, neither of which we are presently executing. A dangerous paralysis has set in over time. Mr. Biden’s Russia sanctions in the face of the SolarWinds attack are a joke along with his climate-obsessed foreign policy that will be ignored by the New Axis.
The U.S. must lead in weakening these enemies using every tool at our disposal. It means taking concrete steps to finally stop Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and replace it with U.S. energy supplies and renewable technologies.
U.S. states should ban Communist Chinese-linked companies from purchasing agricultural and energy lands. The U.S. should ban the use of Chinese materials and technology from critical infrastructure projects.
Nearly 40% of finished drugs and 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients are manufactured in foreign countries. No Axis-aligned or authoritarian nation should be among them.
The Trump administration’s sanctions against Huawei worked in straining the company’s core business. More Chinese technology and telecom companies should be added to our blacklists.
Rapidly finalizing new trade deals with the United Kingdom, EU and other free nations to dissuade them from embracing more Communist Chinese companies, investments and products must be a priority.
We need to quickly wean ourselves off Chinese rare earths, lithium and other raw materials. The U.S. needs to finally execute an Africa strategy to counter China’s Belt and Road debt-trap diplomacy there.
These measures are a start to countering the New Axis. Every president’s quest to look like Roosevelt or Reagan has resulted in decades of nonsense photo-ops and half measures. Those need to give way to a bold, holistic strategy appropriate to the scale of this new world order.
• Tom Basile, host of Newsmax Television’s “America Right Now,” is an author and adjunct professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches earned media strategy.
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