embracing communist china: america’s greatest strategic failure

For decades, the United States has underestimated the threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In doing so, it has left our country vulnerable to their devious plans--a profound, strategic miscalculation. As a result of this carelessness, the United States is at risk of losing its dominant position in global politics.

But how did this happen? How was it possible that the US could lose its dominant position after its Cold War victory and allow the rise of a peer enemy over a short period of time--about thirty years?

In Embracing Communist China, authors James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer get to the bottom of this heinous miscalculation.

Broken down into three central arguments, Fanell and Thayer lay out not only the reason for China’s rise in power, but how the United States could have prevented it.

• Due to failures on the parts of the national security commission, strategists, military personnel, and the intelligence community, a historical case of ＂threat deflation＂ caused our country to refute all supplied information of China’s growing power. By not taking this seriously, the PRC has risen with the goal of usurping the US as a global superpower.
• US business interests and financiers trumped strategy. Seeing China as a source of cheap labor for manufacturing, investment, and intellectual labor--including for research and development--the mighty dollar’s influence reigned supreme, overlooking the big picture.
• With their advancements, China used its political warfare strategy to promote threat deflation under Deng Xiaoping. As such, the PRC--learning key lessons from the Soviet Union’s mistakes in the Cold War--focused on elites from all aspects of US and other Western societies, enriching them and shaping their perception of China and of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while using the enticement of a growing market to influence their behavior.

As Americans, we can no longer think of China as a secondary power, but one that is looking to remove the US as the most powerful country in the world. By understanding the profound strategic failures made by the US, are we able to correct them and so defeat the PRC as we did the Soviet Union.

James E. Fanell is a retired U.S. Navy captain, serving twenty-nine-years in the military. He is the former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Government Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and Founding Member of the Committee on Present Danger China.

Bradley A. Thayer, Ph.D., is a founding member of the Committee on Present Danger China and a former visiting fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.