This article was first published in 19FortyFive on December 21, 2022. Click Here to read the original article.

North Korea’s Friday announcement that it had successfully tested a “high-thrust, solid-fuel motor” was seriously bad news for the United States and its allies. Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program has long received considerable international attention (although regrettably little effective response), but last week’s test reached a potentially significant milestone. Solid-fuel missiles, unlike their liquid-fueled counterparts, are quickly launchable once deployed from hidden arsenals. They are essential to a nuclear power’s first-strike capability, sent on their way before they can be pre-emptively destroyed on the launching pad, which is a major risk for liquid-fueled missiles. North Korean propaganda always merits independent verification, but this rings depressingly true, following as it does months of extensive, continuing missile testing, nearly 70 launches this year, and increasingly harsh rhetoric by Kim Jong Un’s regime. 

The Biden administration reacted passively, letting the test proceed without significant reaction. Perhaps it was consumed with its rearrangement of the bureaucratic deck chairs on the State Department Titanic to handle its nearly invisible China strategy. There’s nothing like a government reorganization to help divert from a policy vacuum. Unfortunately, North Korea’s quickening menace hasn’t even provoked any visible paper reshuffling.  

While Beijing is undoubtedly this century’s existential threat for America, Pyongyang is an immediate danger — to Northeast Asia, the United States, and worldwide. As the North’s capabilities accumulate with increasing speed, it may be difficult to identify the significance of each new piece of bad news. But North Korea remains a desperately impoverished country, once again reportedly enduring significant food shortages and still shrouding its experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. Indulging in the expenditures necessary for the offensive military systems it is building, its nuclear-weapons program most prominently, underlines just how determined, and likely how close to fruition, Kim’s project is. 

Japan and South Korea Getting Serious 

North Korea is effectively China’s surrogate in destabilizing Northeast Asia. Although both sides deny that Pyongyang is subordinate to Beijing, it is long past time to appreciate that China’s support for the North is effectively the foundation keeping the Kim dynasty in power. China’s Communist party supports the world’s only hereditary Communist dictatorship because it suits them; if China wanted North Korea’s nuclear program ended, it could terminate its support tomorrow. Kim Jong Un would be unable to hold onto power for long, replaced most likely (and perhaps bloodily) by a general at Beijing’s beck and call. Stripped to its essentials, the Beijing-Pyongyang relationship is not nearly so complicated as the charade we have, in effect, accepted these many years. 

The key conclusion is that China and North Korea constitute a joint threat. They are not independent variables, although the nature of their threat manifests itself in many different ways. From that conclusion flows the logic that an opposing strategy must address how to handle this combined threat over time, whatever aspect seems most imminent at any particular point. Indeed, if anything, given the intensifying cooperation between North Korea and Russia regarding Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the global nature of the growing threat is even clearer. Washington may be having trouble understanding this point, but last week, after due deliberation, Tokyo reacted with stunning decisiveness. 

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged to double Japan’s defense budget in five years (thereby reaching the target of 2% of GDP for military expenditure set eight years ago for NATO members). Fulfilling the pledge would make Japan’s defense outlays the world’s third-largest, behind only the United States and China. Tokyo also published Defense of Japan 2022, a white paper stressing the threat from Beijing and Pyongyang and the continued strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Moreover, as Japan foreshadowed earlier this year announcing its assistance to Ukraine, the new defense strategy says clearly that “North Korea defends Russia.” The European Union should certainly take note of this resolve emanating from the Far East. 

A few days before, Japan announced its purchase of up to 500 Tomahawk cruise missiles, a move the Washington Post characterized as “a stunning break with a long tradition of eschewing offensive weapons.” With a range exceeding 1,000 miles, Tomahawks fired from Japan could easily reach Beijing, and they could hit all of North Korea. Obviously much more remains to be accomplished before Prime Minister Kishida’s objectives, and those of Defense of Japan 2022, can be achieved, but Tokyo’s forward thinking is impressive. 

In South Korea, Yoon Suk-yeol, still a relatively new president, has had considerable success in moving away from the “sunshine policy” of his immediate predecessor, notably by restarting joint military exercises with the U.S., which were unwisely curtailed during President Donald Trump’s futile efforts to negotiate with Pyongyang. Yoon has also taken steps to improve relations with Japan, which is critical to more effective collective-defense measures in the Western Pacific. South Korea’s growing appreciation that Chinese threats to Taiwan implicate its own national security marks a critical advance in Seoul’s strategic vision. 

Foreign Policy Is a Big Domestic Political Issue 

The real problem here, in facing China and North Korea, is the passivity of the United States. President Biden’s seeming resolve to continue for a third term the failed Obama administration policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, and its self-imposed imperative of climate-change negotiations with China, have stifled development of an effective U.S. policy response. Once-promising initiatives like the Asian Quad are stalled, and new military initiatives regarding Korea, worthwhile though they may be, are decidedly limited in scope. Around the region, for example, concern for China’s efforts to establish hegemony has motivated Vietnam to consider major increases in weapons purchases from America, but Washington is reacting to these developments, not leading. 

The already-underway 2024 U.S. presidential campaign is likely to turn more on foreign policy and defense matters than most other recent elections. A major land war in Europe, the continuing threats of international terrorism and nuclear proliferation, and above all China’s growing menace and that of its North Korean sidekick, are increasingly impossible to avoid. The Biden administration’s quiescence, particularly on Asian threats, jeopardizes U.S. national security. Now that it could jeopardize Biden’s political security, perhaps the White House will awaken. 

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton. 

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner on December 7th, 2022. Click Here to read the original version.

The “peaceful rise” of China as a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs has long been Beijing’s mantra to conceal its extraordinary expansion of military capabilities. Its rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, which makes it the third-largest nuclear power after Russia and America, urgently requires adapting U.S. nuclear and overall military strategy to respond to this increasing threat. This process has begun, but it remains dangerously inadequate and far too slow. The newly elected Congress provides a critical opportunity to raise the alarm about China, especially its nuclear capabilities. 

Lulled for years by Deng Xiaoping’s stratagem “hide your strength, bide your time,” policymakers believed China sought only “minimal nuclear deterrence,” enough to deter nuclear attacks but not more. That is no longer true, if it ever was, as China replaces “hide and bide” with “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Testifying at his September confirmation hearing to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Anthony Cotton said, “We have seen the incredible expansiveness of what they’re doing with their nuclear force, which does not, in my opinion, reflect minimal deterrence. They have a bona fide triad now.” By developing land, air, and sea delivery systems, China is acquiring a first-strike capability and the resilience to withstand a first strike and still respond with devastating nuclear force. This is not a “peaceful rise.” 

The Biden administration’s nuclear posture review, in a declassified edition released later, agrees that America “will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” Incredibly, however, the review asserts this threat will arise “by the 2030s,” which is manifestly incorrect. We are there now. 

Undoubtedly the hardest strategic problem is dealing simultaneously with two near-peer nuclear powers, both in terms of deterrence and, if need be, actually launching nuclear weapons on two fronts. Cold War deterrence theory essentially assumed a bipolar U.S.-USSR scenario. Incredible intellectual and operational work went into thinking through deterrence in such circumstances and the consequent weapons and delivery system requirements both to maintain deterrence and to retaliate if it failed. 

A tripolar nuclear world is far more dangerous and complicated. How do we deter two nuclear threats simultaneously? Will Russia and China act as allies or behave opportunistically? Will we have enough warheads and delivery systems to handle two separate nuclear crises? We are nowhere near able to answer these questions confidently, and Cold War history should teach that we are already well behind in responding, both conceptually and operationally. 

Indeed, we can only say with certainty that substantial additional nuclear warheads and delivery systems are necessary — and sooner rather than later. America must also urgently progress beyond the limited national missile defense program then-President George W. Bush launched over 20 years ago. The reality is that comprehensive homeland defense measures capabilities are inescapable when facing the combined Chinese and Russian threats. Any other conclusion is irresponsible. 

One trap to avoid is believing that arms control agreements with China will solve or at least mitigate its rising threat to Washington and our allies. We should quickly jettison the alluring view, already in the air, that arms control will restrain China any more than it restrained Russia or rogue states like Iran and North Korea. 

During the Trump administration , we saw the implications of China’s growing nuclear capabilities in part because the New START agreement with Moscow would expire (unless jointly extended by the parties) in February 2021, which was rapidly approaching. Clearly, New START has failed badly, and its extension would inordinately benefit Moscow over Washington. Russia had repeatedly violated the treaty, it did not cover tactical nuclear weapons, with which Russia had a huge advantage, and it did not address more recent technological advances like hypersonic cruise missiles. 

Most critically, however, there is no logic to bipolar nuclear arms control treaties in a tripolar nuclear world. Why should America continue to bind itself in a treaty with Russia if China is left completely free to increase its nuclear arsenal without limit? Moscow agreed to bring China into any future negotiations, but Beijing oh-so-politely demurred, explaining modestly that its nuclear forces were not nearly so extensive as to warrant including them in a successor to New START. That’s where things remain today, notwithstanding the Biden administration’s grave miscalculation in extending bilateral New START without any changes until 2026. 

Continuing to invite Chinese participation in future nuclear weapons negotiations serves one important purpose. If Beijing still declines to participate, it will demonstrate its clear hypocrisy. And if China joins the negotiations, it will almost certainly gridlock them, thus forcing U.S. policymakers to realize that protecting the United States is a matter of strategy and hardware, not ephemeral arms control agreements. The next two years are a period of vulnerability for America but provide ample time for Congress and possible 2024 presidential candidates to lay out their arguments. Let the debate begin. 

John Bolton was the national security adviser to President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. 

By Ambassador John Bolton

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on November 28th 2022. Click here to read the original article.

Taiwan’s local elections on Saturday weren’t exactly held under fire, but the threat from China was palpable enough. The island’s competitive voting contrasted sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress in October, which effectively made Xi Jinping president for life. Videos of Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, being forcibly removed from the convention are historic, now underlined by scenes of the Chinese government repressing public protest over its draconian zero-Covid policies.

Taiwan’s local elections typically don’t foretell how the public will vote for the national government. Take President Tsai Ing-wen, who as head of the Democratic Progressive Party won re-election in 2020 by wider margins than in 2016, even though the Chinese Nationalist Party—the Kuomintang, or KMT—made significant inroads in 2018. The KMT again made major gains this election, including Taipei’s mayoralty, despite the DPP’s effort to nationalize the elections by stressing Beijing’s threat.

While Taipei’s domestic politics mirror those of other industrial democracies, few countries face so imminent an existential threat. National attention now turns to 2024, when Ms. Tsai’s last term ends. Shortly after Saturday’s results, Ms. Tsai resigned as DPP leader, opening the way for a new party chairman. All of Taiwan’s political leaders should emulate her approach: less partisanship and more statesmanship for crafting strategies to deter Beijing’s threat to Taiwan and the entire Indo-Pacific.

In the U.S., both parties recognize that Taipei expects Washington to help with the Chinese threat. Nevertheless, it is imperative that America convey its expectations of Taiwan and synchronize strategies. Prioritizing these conversations will decrease isolationist sentiment in the U.S., most recently on display in disagreements over arming Ukraine against Russia. America aids Ukraine because it advances our strategic interests, and Ms. Tsai and other Taiwanese leaders must make their case vigorously, as President Volodymyr Zelensky has done.

By demonstrating seriousness of purpose, Taiwan can refute one canard still alive in Washington: that Taiwan’s citizens are insufficiently committed to their own defense. Geostrategist Edward Luttwak recently wrote in these pages of “the persistent fecklessness” of Taipei’s military preparedness, while its “youth can continue to play video games.” Such criticism is unjustified and corrosive, as Taiwan can’t open itself to criticism that it is free-riding on U.S. political and military aid.

America must stop treating Taiwan’s defense as an exercise in developing a lengthy list of weapons systems to provide. Strategy is more than list-making, however estimable the list, especially given our recent failure to prioritize budgetary and operational matters. In the Ukraine case, the U.S. faces daunting logistical challenges in delivering weapons to Kyiv while also restarting or accelerating production lines to meet the needs of itself and endangered allies such as Taiwan. Promising weapons that are unavailable for several years is empty virtue-signaling. The depletion of U.S. arsenals directly affects our own security, a vulnerability that Washington can no longer ignore.

Taipei urgently needs comprehensive political thinking, too. Its political leaders and diplomats—many of whom are up against Beijing’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy—must begin planning and acting at higher strategic levels than before, integrating existing bilateral efforts into a global grand strategy. The same goes for the U.S. and its allies, who need more-comprehensive strategies to defeat the existential Chinese threat. China has a strategy and is obviously executing it.

Beyond Taiwan, Washington rightly has expectations of other Indo-Pacific allies. We must fully integrate Taiwan into rapidly emerging Indo-Pacific political and military structures for deterrence purposes. Taiwan isn’t merely a “customs territory” but a functionally independent state. Though most nations resist entertaining full diplomatic recognition for Taiwan, this isn’t currently an imperative. Significantly enhancing substantive, near-term political ties is both feasible and more important than the trappings of full diplomatic recognition. Israel has long mastered this complicated role-playing, and Taiwan and its Indo-Pacific neighbors have quietly engaged in the minuet for years.

Now, however, is the time for diplomatic rock ’n’ roll. Let’s prevent whining from isolationists that America didn’t realize what it was undertaking if, sooner rather than later, China provokes a crisis in Taiwan. Taipei is the epicenter of what for Washington could be another “present at the creation” moment—as Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, described the beginning of the postwar world. The U.S. and all its allies must be ready to perform.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

By Ambassador John Bolton

Taiwan may be Asia’s most imminent flashpoint, but the threats facing South Korea are no less perilous. North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs continue advancing amid constant rumors of another nuclear test, which would be North Korea’s seventh. Particularly significant for South Korea’s emerging strategy in response is the growing realization that threats across the Indo-Pacific aren’t discrete and unrelated but ultimately emanate from one actor: China. 

In Seoul, speculation about Pyongyang’s next nuclear detonation centers on the days just before America’s elections. The Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress, expected to enshrine Xi Jinping as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, begins on Oct. 16. Kim Jong Un won’t risk spoiling the Chinese congress during its session, but the ensuing weeks will offer a dramatic opportunity to flaunt his nuclear capabilities. Mr. Kim’s recent announcement of his first-strike nuclear policy, together with blunt warnings he won’t negotiate away the nuclear program, publicly codifies North Korea’s longstanding nuclear doctrine. 

Seoul has always understandably concentrated on Pyongyang’s threat. Now, however, it sees Beijing’s belligerence toward Taiwan, interference in South Pacific Island states, and critical support for North Korea as interrelated parts of an overall Chinese Indo-Pacific strategy. This assessment points to what should be obvious: Beijing is ultimately responsible for Pyongyang’s nuclear threat. For too long, the U.S. has allowed the Chinese government to pretend (through the Six-Party Talks, for example) that it is genuinely committed to finding a solution on nuclear proliferation. This fantasy is increasingly difficult to sustain, since North Korea never threatens China. Instead it threatens South Korea, Japan and America. 

More-comprehensive policies countering China’s Indo-Pacific threats, previously seen as unconnected, are slowly developing. President Biden enhanced the profile of the Quad (Japan, India, Australia and the U.S.) and approved the Aukus partnership to provide Australia nuclear-powered submarines. He also met with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a potential step to “trilateralize” Washington’s ties with Seoul and Tokyo. Nonetheless, the administration’s overall China policy remains fragmentary and opaque if it exists at all. 

Significant U.S.-South Korea military exercises (canceled by Donald Trump as an unreturned favor to Kim Jong Un) are resuming, with the USS Ronald Reagan carrier-strike group arriving in Pusan for joint maneuvers. The Reagan’s deployment (the first carrier visit since 2018) sends Pyongyang a strategic signal, but it is unaccompanied by any evidence the White House is prepared to jettison the failed 30-year diplomatic minuet with North Korea. Repeated administration offers to engage the North have elicited no interest. 

Mr. Yoon is working to improve relations with Japan, meeting informally with Mr. Kishida last week in New York, and their foreign ministers discussed problems blocking closer linkages. Improving ties with Japan is only a first step toward broader South Korean involvement in East Asia, but it is a critical one. Japanese opinion views a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan as tantamount to an attack on Japan, a view Seoul doesn’t share. Beijing’s menacing stance toward Taiwan, however, is inexorably bringing South Korean leaders a fuller understanding of China’s many interrelated efforts to control its periphery. Greater cooperation between Taiwan and South Korea is critical to thwarting China’s ambitions. 

The Quad should become a “Quint” by making South Korea a full member. Seoul’s perspective and capabilities would measurably enhance the grouping’s potential to address Beijing’s use of North Korea as a surrogate, its threats in the South China Sea and to Taiwan, and its aggressive behavior in the South Pacific. Moreover, Seoul-Tokyo engagement in a Quint context could more easily encourage bilateral patterns of cooperation than if the two were limited to stewing in contentious bilateral issues. 

A Quint would demonstrate broader resolve in the face of China’s attempts to keep the U.S. and its allies off balance through divide-and-conquer tactics. South Korean participation in wider regional structures would help eliminate strategic ambiguity about Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese attack. Biden staffers have apparently rebuffed suggestions to make South Korea part of the Quad. If so, this mistake needs prompt reversal. 

The tempo of Indo-Pacific challenges is increasing, with threat levels rising. But as the U.S. confronts critical tactical decisions, such as how to arm Taiwan effectively to deter Chinese belligerence, it must be careful not to ignore larger strategic issues. South Korea and its new president are ready for regional defense cooperation beyond the existing hub-and-spoke bilateral alliance with the U.S. All the concerned countries in the Indo-Pacific would benefit. Let’s not miss this opportunity. 

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. 

This article first appeared in the Washington Post on September 12th, 2022. Click here to read the original article.

John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” 

Few areas of the world seem more distant from the United States than the island states of the South Pacific. World War II reminiscences have faded, and the words “South Pacific” now resonate more as a Broadway musical title than a geographic locator. For U.S. national security, this needs to change, sooner rather than later. 

Get the maps out; Chinese leaders, diplomats and the military have theirs nearly memorized. Hemmed in by what it calls the “first island chain” (stretching from the Kuril Islands, through Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia), China has longed to break free into the broader Pacific Ocean. Beijing is interested in this wider horizon because its aspirations extend not merely to hegemony along its immediate Indo-Pacific periphery, but to far wider objectives, already reflected in its pursuit of economic interest in Africa and the Western Hemisphere. 

Taiwan is thus important to China not just because of nationalistic fervor, but also because dominance over Taiwan would irretrievably pierce the first island chain. Another breakout strategy over the tyranny of geography is to leapfrog the close-in islands and stake out positions across the Pacific — which is precisely what Beijing appears now to be attempting. 

The Pacific’s insular nations are small in land mass and lightly populated, although huge when their ocean territories are included. Xi Jinping has marked them as vulnerable, seemingly intent on going island-hopping, using intimidation, bribery or whatever it takes to achieve China’s ends. 

The immediate crisis is in the Solomon Islands, where U.S. forces won a critical victory in 1942-1943 on Guadalcanal, a World War II turning point. In August, senior administration officials Wendy Sherman and Caroline Kennedy, whose fathers fought in the Solomon Islands, led a U.S. delegation to mark the 80th anniversary of the battle at Guadalcanal. Signifying growing Chinese hegemony, however, and perhaps issuing an insult at China’s behest, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare failed to attend the ceremonies near Honiara, the capital. Weeks later, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel was denied permission to make a port call, another apparently intentional discourtesy. Most recently, elections scheduled for next May were postponed until 2024, a move that opposition leaders consider an ominous sign of China’s influence. 

A Chinese base in the Solomons would directly menace Australia (about 1,200 miles away), harking back to the Japanese threat during World War II. I was recently in Sydney, and found that Australians need no persuading about China’s rising regional threat. What they seek is a more visible, vigorous U.S. presence in the region, and rightly so. The Solomons are in jeopardy now, and while “domino theory” inevitability might not yet obtain, other island states are clearly vulnerable. 

America has for too long paid insufficient attention to the South Pacific. In 1945, the United States assumed Japan’s former League of Nations mandate over the new United Nations’ Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. After plebiscites in 1983, one island chain became the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, thereby remaining part of the United States, adjacent to Guam, long a U.S. territory. Three other island groupings — Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia — chose independence. (American Samoa is a separate territory.) 

These three new nations all signed “compacts of free association” with the United States, which provide that Washington supervises their foreign affairs (short of declaring war), including prohibiting the presence of foreign military forces without U.S. permission. The compacts have been extended once and are now up for renegotiation because they expire over the next two years. 

This is not a moment to falter or for shortsightedness. Fortuitously timed as the renegotiation is, the White House should take full advantage of the opportunity to cement long-term strategic relations with this trio of nations to keep China out. The costs of enhanced U.S. involvement are trivial in the context of global aid budgets; and the sea and land expanses involved are only somewhat smaller than the continental United States itself. 

When I briefed President Donald Trump just before his meeting with the three leaders of these freely associated states in 2019, he asked, “Why am I meeting these people?” His successors should not need to ask. 

South Pacific responsibilities need not rest on the United States alone. Australia, New Zealand and Britain all have contemporary relationships and regional histories, dating back to naval coaling or whaling stations. France retains three extensive overseas territories (New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Fortuna), represented in France’s Parliament, and whose territory is deemed part of the European Union. 

Countering Chinese aggressiveness in the South Pacific should be a matter of urgent bipartisan agreement and action, rare as they might be today. The faraway island of Bali Hai, celebrated in a certain musical, is closer than we thought. 

By Ambassador John Bolton

In an unprecedented joint public appearance on July 6, FBI Director Christopher Wray and his British counterpart, MI-5 Director General Ken McCallum, warned a London audience of business leaders and academics that China posed a “massive, shared challenge.”  Beijing, said Wray, was “set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”  McCallum was equally forceful, describing China’s “coordinated campaign on a grand scale,” representing “a strategic contest across decades.”

This is not the first time Wray has spoken out in unambiguous terms.  On January 31 at the Reagan Presidential Library in California, he stressed that China’s threat to America’s economic security had “reached a new level—more brazen, more damaging than ever before.”  This stress on foreign-government threats to America’s private sector may seem unusual for the FBI, but Wray has correctly focused on the incredibly broad scope of Beijing’s menacing behavior, well beyond intelligence gathering and clandestine actions against the U.S. and allied governments. 

Wray’s public statements are complementary to Vice President Mike Pence’s 2018 warning about Beijing’s widespread efforts to influence U.S. public opinion.  Unfortunately, we are, even now, only just awakening to the extraordinary scope of China’s whole-of government (which, in Beijing’s case, essentially means whole-of-society) operations against our economy and society, and that of our allies.  This awakening must spread, and quickly.

In government, President Joe Biden’s performance is decidedly mixed.  He deserves credit for the first in-person meeting of the “Quad” (Australia, India, Japan, and America), a constellation with enormous potential (but, so far, few practical achievements) for constraining China.  The Pentagon agreed to the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (“AUKUS”) project to build nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarines for Australia, a conceptual and operational breakthrough whose success or failure has major strategic implications across the Indo-Pacific.  By contrast, Biden may have already rescinded Trump administration decision-making rules on offensive cyber efforts, thereby returning to Obama-era procedures that effectively strangled such measures, crippling our ability to strike pre-emptively against Chinese election-meddling efforts.  Biden, seemingly intimidated by Chinese complaints about a projected Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has urged her not to go.

AUKUS and the Quad represent initial steps in constructing a denser alliance framework, more akin to the North Atlantic pattern.  Analysts have long worried that America’s bilateral Asian alliances are merely “hub-and-spoke” arrangements, but this picture is changing.  Newly inaugurated South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, for example, is seeking to forge closer trilateral relations with Tokyo and Washington, symbolized by the three leaders’ recent meeting in Madrid.  The “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership (among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US)  consists entirely of Pacific powers.  The pieces are there for robust Indo-Pacific cooperation against the full range of Chinese threats.

Ironically, America’s sleeper problem, one spotlighted by Wray and McCallum, lies in the private sector.  Despite two decades of increasing warning signs, American firms, led by financial and high-tech enterprises, invested and traded with China as if international political risk no longer warranted deep consideration in business decisions.  Extensive capital investment in China exposed intellectual property to Beijing’s high-tech piracy.  Forced-technology transfers as a condition to do business there, and the dangers to supply chains from political tensions, were ignored or minimized.  Even today, as the political risks of doing business with China are skyrocketing, especially in sensitive national-security-related areas, many U.S. business leaders still do not appreciate the threats they face.

Assurances that China does not engage in commercial espionage or theft of intellectual property should carry no weight with Western businesses.  In 2015, Xi Jinping and a gullible Barack Obama agreed that neither of their governments “will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property,” a commitment to which Beijing’s Ministry of State Security has paid no heed whatever.

Worse, too many business executives and politicians across the spectrum seem to believe that the proper response to Chinese threats is massive Federal expenditures to bolster U.S. competitiveness.  This approach fundamentally misperceives the problem.  America doesn’t suffer from a deficit of creativity and innovation.  It suffers instead from decades of China stealing our creativity and innovation, as FBI Director Wray has forcefully explained, and in some cases benefitting from the gratuitous transfer of intellectual property by credulous Americans heedless of the consequences.  

Beijing has weaponized what superficially appear to be commercial telecommunications firms like Huawei and ZTE, making them arms of the Chinese state.  The Trump and Biden administrations have imposed increasingly strict sanctions on such firms, but enormous damage has already been done, including putting at risk communications involving America’s land-based, ballistic-missile forces.  Beijing’s espionage deviousness is exemplified by its offer to build a Chinese garden at Washington’s National Arboretum, which would actually be a concealed listening post or accessing user data from the popular Tik-Tok app.  We are still not adequately awake to the potential that virtually any Chinese “business” enterprise could be an agent of commercial infiltration and exploitation.

However, appropriate defensive measures should not be confused with massive subsidies to the U.S. information-technology industry.  There is clearly a need for more Federal spending to counter Chinese espionage and piracy of intellectual property and other critical data, but that spending should be for military, and intelligence measures to enhance our defensive and offensive capabilities.  Moreover, money to replace existing equipment sold by Huawei, ZTE, and others, largely in rural and sparsely populated areas, but which can affect the nationwide telecommunications grid, is well spent.  Expenditures for “regional technology hubs” by contrast, will not enhance creativity, but will shrink the Federal dollars available for critically needed efforts at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.

Chris Wray has more than enough to occupy his time at the FBI, so his public focus on the threat of Chinese espionage demonstrates just how serious he judges the threat to be.  American businesses and government should pay more attention to what he is saying.