On Wednesday, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, E.W. Priestap, told lawmakers that China’s spying is a threat to “not just the future of the United States, but the future of the world.”
He added, “The Chinese government is proposing itself as an alternative model for the world, one without a democratic system of government, and it is seeking to undermine the free and open, rules-based order we helped establish following World War II.” In the same speech, Priestap played up the similarity of the Cold War as a way to understanding the increasingly belligerent rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
All of that sounds like pretty scary stuff, and given America’s lack of military preparedness and revelations of Chinese hacking taking a trove of personal data from hundreds of millions Americans, it’s not unfounded.
But if lawmakers are serious about countering these threats and preventing a new Cold War, then rather than taking its inevitability for granted, they must look to our allies to reinforce the economic and political world order that, for the most part, enables stable development.
From NATO to the World Trade Organization and even the United Nations, Beijing is angling to buy political allies and exert influence. It’s not wholesale destruction it’s after, but a wholesale rewriting of the rules. That’s far from the strategy employed by the Soviet Union, and it requires a much different response than the Cold War, but one equally dependent on close collaboration with allies.
Instead of taking a dark line of “America First,” as President Trump did at the U.N. this fall, we should be reaching out to our allies, as National Security Advisor John Bolton advocated on Thursday morning, with the goal of fostering strong relations and partnerships, which are the essence of the post World War II world order.
From fostering close relations with our neighbors in Canada and Mexico to recognizing the mutual benefits of NATO to full engagement with the U.N., these relationships form the bulwark against Beijing’s growing power.
The importance of those alliances, not ill-defined talk of China as a menace, should be the priority for lawmakers from the FBI report.
