The launching of a concerted campaign against U.S. business cooperation with China, seen as a weak link in the otherwise tight bipartisan consensus for confrontation with China, was signalled by former Deputy National Security Advisor and anti-China hand Matt Pottinger, in a March 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Beijing Targets American Business,” adapted from his March 10 speech to the Hoover Institute.
Pottinger tells American businessmen “wishing for simple, lucrative commercial ties,” they must realize that the “ideological dimension of the competition” between China and the United States “is inescapable, even central.”
Beijing is out to impose a communist order; we must defend “American values.” To win the race against China, he rails, “will require America and its allies to consider in every policy we adopt, every bill we introduce, and every partnership that government and industry undertake, whether it increases our collective leverage in this competition or surrenders leverage to a hostile dictatorship in Beijing.”
President Joe Biden’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance proved “there is significant continuity in U.S. strategy,” Pottinger writes. Beijing recognizes “that its efforts to influence Washington are increasingly in vain,” and that it is why it is “focusing its influence activities on other segments of American society, the business community in particular.”
