by WorldTribune Staff, December 19, 2017
Decades of negligent foreign policy by both Democrat and Republican administrations allowed China’s surge in geopolitical leverage, editor and author Brett Decker said.
During a Dec. 18 discussion on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Decker noted that previous administrations’ foreign policy myopia allowed China to cultivate deeper relationships with America’s allies, further enhancing its power relative to the U.S.
Meanwhile, U.S. administrations’ focus on Afghanistan and Iraq led them to miss broader threats emanating from China’s rise, Decker said.
Decker said that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision amounts to a “refocusing” of American foreign policy to “[look] at things as a whole, again… instead of this hyperfocus on these sort of never-ending wars.”
Decker is a bestselling author who was editorial page editor of the Washington Times and an editorial writer and editor of the Culture & Thought page at The Wall Street Journal. He serves on the advisory board of FreePressFoundation.org.
Successive U.S. administrations neglected to address China’s military growth, said Decker who pointed to five fatal flaws in U.S. policy:
- Failing to recognize the ‘Economic component of the Chinese threat’;
- Wasteful spending at home and abroad;
- ‘Middle East myopia’ while asleep at the Chinese switch;
- Obama’s ‘touchy-feely utopian feel-good’ naivete;
- Ignoring China’s military expansionism.
“[China is] focusing now on the ability to project power,” said Decker, pointing to Chinese expansion of military power. “Their goal is to have naval parity with the U.S. by 2030, and already in the Western Pacific people say they’re pretty close to being equal to us. You know, that’s scary.”
Decker noted that former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush both facilitated the “hollow[ing] out of our industries,” while they “welcomed [China] to do it.”
SiriusXM hosts Joel Pollak and Rebecca Mansour pointed to the national security risks posed by the American defense industry’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing to supply parts of U.S. military technology.
As of October, China owns $1.1 trillion of the federal government’s $20.6 trillion debt.
Chinese ownership of the federal government’s debt is dangerous in the event of confrontation, said Decker: “If they hold so much of our debt, that gets them a certain amount of control. I think that’s a big danger.”
Pollak noted that “So much of our equipment, for communication and other things, depends on these rare earths that China controls.”
Decker said that President Barack Obama believed he could counter China’s ambitions through diplomatic overtures of appeasement.
“Obama said a bunch of stuff, and then what did he do?”
Trump’s “realism,” said Decker, was a “refreshing” change from the Obama administration’s “touchy-feely utopian feel-good stuff.”
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