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The United States is engaged in a new Cold War with China and needs to counter the “existential” threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to the United States and the world order it leads, according to a major new report by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.
The report offers detailed foreign and domestic policy prescriptions built on the policies used during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a clash that ended with its collapse in 1991. The authors expose CCP tactics and issue a call to arms for all segments of government and society.
“Cold Wars aren’t new, but it is now indisputable that the challenge of China is a new Cold War,” said James Carafano, Heritage vice president and editor of the report. “What this report explains is not just why it’s a different Cold War but exactly how to fight it and win it.”
“The greatest existential threat facing the United States today is the People’s Republic of China, led and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” adds Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. “Whether politicians and pundits in Washington care to acknowledge it or not, the United States is in a new Cold War with the PRC, an adversary even more capable and dangerous than the Soviet Union was at the height of its power.”
According to the report, “The authoritarian regime in Beijing — its global ambitions, growing power, and values diametrically opposed to America’s own — poses the greatest threat the United States has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In both word and deed, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a one-party state ruled by the CCP, has made it abundantly clear that it is determined to supplant U.S. global leadership, establish hegemony over the Indo–Pacific, and rewrite the international order in the CCP’s image.”
The report notes that the Biden administration has repeatedly said it is not seeking a Cold War with China but has failed to recognize the reality of Chinese Cold War tactics being employed against the United States.
“It does us little good to repeat again and again that we aren’t seeking a new Cold War when the CCP has been stealthily waging one against us for years,” former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger recently told a new congressional select committee on China.
The plan offers a set of comprehensive policies that range from banning CCP lobbying in the United States to bolstering nuclear deterrence against a growing Chinese nuclear threat. It also calls for action to end China’s role in supplying materials for the deadly opiate fentanyl that is killing more than 100,000 Americans annually.
Chinese police operations in several U.S cities also would be shuttered under the plan.
“It is past time for a plan to protect the American homeland from nefarious PRC actions and take the fight to the Chinese Communist Party,” the report states.
The plan is an indirect criticism of President Biden and his administration that adopted a policy of competing with China while at the same time seeking to cooperate with Beijing on issues like North Korea and climate change.
