President Trump has succeeded in building a new international consensus to deal with the Chinese threat in a way that previous administrations have failed to do, according to senior White House officials.
Robert O’Brien, President Trump’s assistant for national security affairs, speaks Wednesday (Oct. 28) at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.
Over the past four years, the United States has faced unprecedented challenges to foreign policy and national security, notably the neo-crown virus pandemic and the Chinese Communist regime’s ambitions for global hegemony.
O’Brien argued that under President Trump’s leadership, the United States has achieved remarkable results in many areas of national security and diplomatic efforts, particularly in dealing with the Chinese threat, as no previous administration has been able to do.
“President Trump’s bold leadership style is key to building a new international consensus for our resistance to China. The old conventional wisdom in the United States was that it was only a matter of time before China would liberalize its economy and then liberalize its politics. And President Trump is the first major leader to recognize that this conventional wisdom is wrong,” O’Brien said in his speech.
O’Brien went on to point out that, against all expectations, the international community is seeing China becoming increasingly more nationalistic, more mercantilist, and more authoritarian. Especially since Xi Jinping has come to power, the CCP has become more committed to Marx and Leninism.
“Over time, China has not become more like us. During the current administration, the United States and the free world are increasingly standing up to all forms of Chinese aggression,” he said.
O’Brien noted that it is President Trump who refuses to accept the status quo in trade relations with China. President Trump believes that imposing tariffs on Chinese goods could partially compensate for the damage China’s strategies of forced technology transfer, theft of intellectual property, and huge subsidies to state-owned enterprises have done to the United States in its trade with the country.
An important achievement of President Trump’s China policy was the signing of the first phase of a trade agreement in January of this year, through a trade war and negotiations with China. The agreement prohibits China from forcing U.S. companies to transfer technology and open their markets to tens of billions of dollars in U.S. agricultural sales and financial services companies, and partially addresses the manipulation of the exchange rate.
On the other hand, the Trump administration has worked to prevent Chinese companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party, such as Huawei, from entering the United States, and to block Chinese intelligence and spy groups from easily stealing private U.S. data and state secrets.
O’Brien said President Trump has also taken decisive steps to limit the ability of Chinese military personnel to use the student visa process to enter the United States and steal U.S. technology, intellectual property, and armaments information.
Washington believes that Chinese military personnel studying and pursuing advanced degrees in science and engineering in the United States strengthen China’s defense and offensive capabilities by entering U.S. universities and research institutions as foreign students or visiting scholars, taking U.S. research innovations and intellectual property with them for free.
The Chinese people, O’Brien said, are hardworking and intelligent people with extraordinary capabilities. However, China should “engage in your own inventions and technological innovations, and not steal from us. It is not honorable or decent under any law or system to get what you don’t work for”.
“Therefore, for China to truly become a great nation, it must stop doing such things. A great nation is not built by stealing. We have learned that, and we must stop China from doing it,” he said.
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