President Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela and Iran are the first time that any president has made any progress against China’s decades old effort to peacefully subvert the U.S.
It is no secret that China has two goals: to seize control of Taiwan and to become the lone global superpower by 2049, the centennial of the communist control over the country. China is our primary geopolitical rival, if not our mortal enemy.
Over the past few decades, China has successfully subverted the U.S. through globalization. The U.S. now depends on China for antibiotics, energy, technology hardware and vital rare earth minerals and their processing. China could shut off exports of these and other goods, and our economy, society and security would be crippled.
Yes, China would hurt itself by doing these things, but China is an iron-fisted totalitarian state where any social unrest would be much more easily (read brutally) addressed than in the U.S.
But there’s much more.
Some parts of the Chinese goods we have imported have been sabotaged. Utility scale batteries had to be removed from the U.S. Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune in 2024 because sabotage had been discovered. Remotely controlled “kill switches” have been discovered in Chinese-made electric vehicles.
Wall Street firms have been lured into lucrative relationships with Communist China. American universities are chock-full of researchers and students from Communist China. Chinese nationals of unknown loyalty have become U.S. citizens and even senior government employees. Some have been arrested as espionage agents by the FBI.
China has been funding environmental groups to advocate for regulations that wreck our economy. The mainstream media is strangely pro-China and often holds up China as a model of government efficiency. I could go on, but you get the point. China has had us over a barrel for quite some time – until recently.
But China has an Achilles heel beyond the limitations of communist planning – China is oil and gas poor.
The life blood of the modern world is oil and gas. But China doesn’t have enough oil and gas to project its power in the way that it would like. China has plenty of coal, and coal can be liquified into petroleum products, but that is very costly and not really practical.
Because China is oil and gas poor, it has been frenetically trying to electrify as much of its economy as possible to reduce its demand for oil and gas. From its massive reliance on coal to increasing use of nuclear power and even some wind and solar to its production of electric cars and trucks, China has been trying to reduce its reliance on the global oil and gas market. That way, whenever it makes its geopolitical moves, it would be able to survive a potential global oil and gas embargo against it.
But Trump has now changed all that. Venezuelan oil reserves and production, much of which supplied China, are now under U.S. control. The same will soon be true for Iranian reserves and production.
China can electrify all it wants, but it cannot invade Taiwan or supplant the U.S. as the lone global superpower with batteries. It would need oil and gas to do all that. Trump has now made China’s goals that much more difficult.
For the first time since the communists seized control of China in 1949, a U.S. President is making real strategic progress against our most formidable foe. If he succeeds, it will be quite the accomplishment.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and attorney. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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