Last week, America
discovered
that hackers tied to Chinaâs Peopleâs Liberation Army gained access to more than two dozen systems critical to this countryâs national security. Perhaps now, the federal government will finally stop coddling the U.S. business leaders who help make these vulnerabilities a reality.
Business leaders treated Chinese President Xi Jinping like a pop star when he visited America last month. Corporate executives gathering to hear the dictator speak didnât just give him one standing ovation â
they stood and applauded three separate times
. Most entertainers would dream of such a response, but Xi wasnât there to entertain â he was there to woo corporate America.
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The gathering included some of the most influential and powerful names in business, such as Apple CEO Tim Cook, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, and Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Stanley Deal. Xiâs message was tailor-made to win over his corporate audience. âNo matter how the international situation evolves, Chinaâs resolve to foster a market-oriented, law-based, and world-class business environment will not change,â
he told the crowd gathered in San Francisco.
The meeting hits home how eager Americaâs business elite are to work with our nationâs foremost enemy. It would have been unthinkable for corporate America to cheer on Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War, but business titans are doing the modern-day equivalent of that now without consequence.
Itâs not just poor form for corporations to cozy up to China â it also poses serious security risks to our homeland. Yet some of our biggest companies, such as Apple, enjoy a âsymbiotic relationshipâ with the communist state, as CEO Tim Cook
said earlier this year
. This relationship requires Apple to follow the Chinese Communist Partyâs censorship policies and other dubious standards to remain in the country.
Not long ago,
Sen. Marco Rubio
(R-FL) sent Mr. Cook a letter expressing concern over the companyâs potential purchase of NAND chips from Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), a state-owned company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party. The Apple-China relationship has been described as a â
win-win
â for both parties, but this suggestion forgets there is another party that counts â America, the country that made Apple possible. With Apple and China in partnership, itâs not surprising that the Department of Homeland Security placed Appleâs operating system on a
warning list
. Yet, DHS still does
business with the company
.
The same is occurring with SAP Concur. This software firm continues to
provide services
to the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security despite its heavy investments in China and the work it does with several CCP-connected companies, including major players such as Alibaba and Tencent. Concur has even made software to
work
with Tencentâs WeChat, allowing users to transfer sensitive information into this service, which is by some accounts the
preferred vehicle
for Chinaâs Communist Party to steal data, censor, and propagandize in the U.S. This American company also chooses to
store all its local data in China
, providing another vulnerability for Chinese intelligence to exploit.
Companies like these forget their obligations to serve the national interest and put profit above all else. Thatâs the same reason business leaders clapped so fervently for Xi. They see him as a man to do business with, not as a zealous foe of America. But those in charge of Americaâs national security need to be smarter.
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The Department of Homeland Security has
warned
American businesses about the dangers of using Chinese hardware and digital services. The U.S. government has also warned about the dangers of Chinese-made drones and even the dangers of the popular social media app TikTok. Under what scenario does it make sense to bring companies neck-deep in China into DHS itself? This is not a hard question.
Rick Santorum served as a U.S. senator for Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007.
