When Air Force four-star Gen. Mike Minihan in late January predicted war with China by 2025 and then a Chinese spy balloon began floating over the United States a day later, many woke up for the first time to the threat Beijing poses.
Poll after poll indicated that the public is newly worried about a conflict and is demanding that the Biden administration take a harder line with the Chinese government.
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But Asia expert and retired Marine Corps Col. Grant Newsham said it may be too late and that China isn’t just at war with the U.S. already but that U.S. casualties have already reached 70,000.
“We are under attack, and the one obvious good example is the fentanyl assault,” Newsham said of the drug made mostly in China and smuggled in through Mexico. “This is the one that is finally getting some attention, that killed 70,000 Americans last year. Seventy thousand,” he said with emphasis.
In his remarkable new book, When China Attacks: A Warning To America, published by Regnery, Newsham details how the communist country is likely to overcome America’s superpower role without firing a shot here.
“They’ve been attacking us on a number of fronts,” he said in an interview from Taiwan. “We tend to look at war as a 100-yard dash where both sides get to the starting line, they stretch and get ready, and the shooting starts, and we think that’s the beginning of a war. From China’s perspective, it actually starts a lot earlier than that and involves attacks on different fronts that we don’t recognize.”
The book releases later this month and is already a No. 1 international presale bestseller on Amazon.
His book is not a paint-by-numbers review of the potential war but a well-researched, richly footnoted blueprint of China’s efforts that several Asian experts in the military have been warning about for years but who have been met with shrugs from top brass and pro-China administrations dating back to former President Richard Nixon.
Newsham believes the “war” will be focused on Taiwan and come next year while the U.S. is in a divided presidential election and a possible recession. “You want your enemy distracted,” he said, adding President Joe Biden was likely to waffle on getting involved and that that would lead the world to give up on U.S. dominance.
Unlike the tough-talking Trump administration, Newsham said the Biden administration appears to be afraid of China. And, he added, past business dealings with China by the first family, notably the president and his son Hunter Biden, have compromised the White House.
“Who is it that scares the Chinese?” he asked. “They just have to pinch themselves to stop from laughing at us.”
Newsham offered a path to counter China, but he said there was little time to act.
He said it would take a national effort similar to the all-in approach during World War II. For example, he urged the public to boycott Chinese goods and elect anti-China politicians. He called on Wall Street to kick Chinese firms out of the stock market so they can’t keep cashing in. And he called for a massive campaign to begin making computer chips, arms, and heavy industry equipment in the U.S.
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America, he wrote, needs to “make stuff again.”
And fast. “If we lose the war with China, it will be because we want to lose. Make no mistake: Their goal is to take away our freedom,” he said.
