U.S. efforts to engage China labeled biggest strategic failure

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The United States’ “greatest strategic failure” took place after the end of the Cold War in the promotion of China, a policy of engagement that has now produced a new existential danger to the nation, according to a new book by two top China experts in the U.S.

Retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell and Bradley Thayer, a national security specialist, write that American foreign policy needs a major overhaul to prevent China from dominating the world.

The book, “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure,” highlights what the authors say were multiple failures of U.S. intelligence agencies, the American military, and successive Democratic and Republican administrations to confront the challenge posed by China.

“Over the past 40 years, the U.S. national security community, led by administrations from both political parties, pursued a policy of engagement with the PRC,” Capt. Fanell, a former intelligence director for the Pacific Fleet, told Inside the Ring. “Not only did this policy demonstrate a failure to understand the true nature and strategic intention of the Chinese Communist Party for world domination, but they failed to prepare America’s national defense against such a threat.”

The book argues that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a policy euphoria in Washington produced what the authors call “threat deflation” regarding nation-state adversaries such as China, while devoting most attention to terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S. military stopped teaching great power politics and communist ideology. That produced a generation of military leaders who lack a fundamental understanding of these challenges.

American intelligence agencies also failed to keep a sustained focus on the peer competitor threat of China, the authors say. U.S. business leaders are also to blame for what the authors say were hefty investments in China due to financial opportunities and avarice trumping strategy.

As for China, it co-opted and corrupted American elites who ignored growing threats posed by Beijing.

Chinese government strategists conducted a successful covert campaign of political warfare that succeeded in convincing the U.S. national security establishment that Beijing posed no danger. This view was evident in frequent official pronouncements for decades from government, military and intelligence officials that China posed no threat to America.

The result: China rose from a minor power in the 1980s to a major threat today.

Mr. Thayer said the failure to comprehend the threat produced a generation that allowed China’s leadership to gain access to the West’s economic ecosystem.

“The U.S. needs to see the Chinese Communist Party threat for the existential threat that it is and develop a strategy for its defeat by returning to lessons of power politics that won the Cold War,” said Mr. Thayer, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy.
The authors present a nine-point program to fix the problems.

“First, the rise of the PRC from minor state to peer competitor was a profound strategic failure for the United States and the greatest failure of the U.S. military and intelligence community,” the book concludes. “The U.S. national security must understand why this occurred and what must be accomplished to correct it.”

Failing to counter the threat will result in the advancement of the Chinese Communist Party’s grand strategy.

China wants “to replace individual liberty and freedom with a totalitarian world of collectivism and slavery to the state that is set to be forced on America and the rest of the free world,” Capt. Fanell said.

DNI: No ’existential threat’ from climate change

The Office of Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment, made public this week, again failed to support assertions by President Biden and his administration that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity.

A section of the 40-page assessment, disclosed in Senate testimony on Monday, states that the sole impact of global warming is a “risk to U.S. national security interests” resulting from climate and environmental changes. Climate change intersects with geopolitical tensions and vulnerabilities of “some global systems,” the report states.

American intelligence analysts assert in the report that Instead of producing an existential calamity, climate-related disasters in low-income nations will deepen “economic challenges” and raise the risk of intercommunity conflict over scarce resources.

Altered climate will also increase the need for humanitarian and financial assistance, the DNI report says. Other effects include “climate-related disasters and economic losses” that could spur cross-border migration.

As for any war arising from the impact of climate change, the report warns that as nations battle over access and resources in the Arctic, where sea ice is receding, there is a risk of “miscalculation, particularly while there is military tension between Russia and the other seven countries with Arctic territory.”

Mr. Biden referred in his recent State of the Union speech to the “climate crisis.” In November, the president described climate change as an “existential threat to all of us” and “the ultimate threat to humanity.”

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns echoed the president that same month. On the social media site X, Mr. Burns described a meeting in China as a summit on “the existential threat of climate change.”

But the ODNI threat report listed impacts of climate change that were serious but far less than threatening to human existence, worsening flooding, drought, heat waves and intense storms.

Droughts are affecting shipping and energy generation in Central America, China, Europe and the United States, with insurance losses increasing 250% in the past 30 years. Bad weather also “may” affect food systems in Africa, Latin America and South Asia, the report said.

Rising land and ocean temperatures, changing rain patterns and an increase in storms could contribute to food and water “insecurity, malnutrition and disease outbreaks,” the report said.

The climate language for this year’s assessment is nearly identical to the threat assessments of the past two years, noting “risks” but no mention of an existential threat.

A DNI spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chinese spying ops

China’s intelligence services are expanding global operations in a bid to promote the ruling Communist Party’s goals, according to the annual threat assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence made public this week.

Chinese services, including the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Public Security and the People’s Liberation Army intelligence units, seek to “challenge U.S. national security and global influence, quell perceived regime threats worldwide, and steal trade
secrets and [intellectual property] to bolster China’s indigenous [science and technology] sectors,” the assessment report states.

“Officials of the PRC intelligence services will try to exploit the ubiquitous technical surveillance environment in China and expand their use of monitoring, data collection and advanced analytic capabilities against political security targets beyond China’s borders,” the report said, using the abbreviation for People’s Republic of China.

In addition, Beijing “is rapidly expanding and improving its AI and big data analytics capabilities for intelligence operations,” the report said. “More robust intelligence operations also increase the risk that these activities have international consequences, such as the overflight of the United States by the high-altitude balloon in February 2023.”

A Chinese surveillance balloon traveled unimpeded across the United States and flew over sensitive missile and military bases before being shot down by a U.S. fighter over the Atlantic in early 2023.

Mark Kelton, former deputy CIA director for counterintelligence, once said the scope of Chinese intelligence activities amounted to a barrage of operations unseen since the days of KGB espionage.

“The Chinese intelligence storm impacting the U.S. is a secret assault on America that is without parallel since that mounted by Moscow in the 1930s and ’40s,” Mr. Kelton said.

Under a Justice Department program known as the China Initiative, the Trump administration launched a crackdown that involved numerous arrests of spies, including Chinese intelligence officers.

The program was halted under the Biden administration on the grounds that the arrests and counterspy activities conducted through the program were racially biased against Asians.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.