In the high-stakes race for AI supremacy, America cannot afford to be outmaneuvered. The threat posed by China&#8217;s <a href="https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/technical-performance?utm_source=chatgpt.com">accelerating AI capabilities</a> demands a holistic, robust strategic response.
The question is not whether America should beat China, but whether it should adopt a strategy of diffusion, abundance, and national strength, or outsource that strategy to a single company. Demanding that we trust Anthropic’s judgment, adopt their safety regime, and treat their corporate interests as synonymous with the national interest is as narrow as it is undemocratic.
Anthropic&#8217;s latest policy paper, cloaked in the guise of national security analysis, does exactly this, revealing a self-serving agenda: manipulating genuine geopolitical risks to justify regulations that would cement the company&#8217;s own market dominance.
The company’s core bet is that the United States must first establish a strong domestic AI safety regime, then, on that basis, negotiate against China. In this telling, America wins through frontier AI being governed through strict regulatory red tape. This isn’t just hypothetical; we have seen this in their own lobbying at the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-road-to-war-with-anthropic-e536f669">state</a> and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2023/11/02/bidens-executive-order-on-ai-could-help-25-billion-startup-anthropic/">federal level</a> for testing mandates, compute controls, reporting requirements, and institutionalized oversight. In their playbook, once the U.S. builds this regulatory thicket that only Anthropic can navigate, Anthropic…I mean, America, will be in a position to stand up to China.
This Anthropic playbook frames the U.S.-China AI competition across four fronts — intelligence, domestic adoption, global distribution, and resilience. They declare that intelligence is the decisive factor. This framing is no neutral assessment. It is a calculated effort to elevate the very capabilities that Anthropic already claims to excel in: closed, frontier systems powered by massive compute clusters and proprietary safety processes. The company conveniently ignores that China is rapidly closing the gap with recent breakthroughs, or that <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sounds-035916833.html">half of the world’s AI researchers</a> are in China.
The underlying logic is clear: if intelligence is supreme, then the ones building the most advanced closed models become the globe’s indispensable champions, requiring protection and deferential regulation. Yet their own analysis undermines this premise. A few lines later, they admit, “intelligence alone is not sufficient.” China can overcome an intelligence deficit through faster, cheaper, and more globally distributed deployment of &#8220;good enough” AI.
The problem is that most enterprises don&#8217;t need the absolute cutting edge; they need solutions that solve their problems at a price they can afford, with the flexibility to customize and deploy as needed. A model delivering 80% of frontier capability at 20% of the cost will capture far more market share than one offering marginal improvements at premium prices.
This is the genuine Chinese threat, not surpassing America at the bleeding edge, but flooding global markets with &#8220;good enough&#8221; AI that becomes the default choice for businesses, developers, and governments worldwide. Anthropic&#8217;s dismissal of China&#8217;s open-weight models as currently lagging in adoption reveals a dangerous blindness to the dynamics of market disruption.
Yes, American closed frontier models lead today. Enterprises are paying real money for our leading systems. But corporate leaders are already looking at their AI bills and asking hard questions. The value is real, but so is the cost. If an enterprise can get much of the same value from an open model at a fraction of the price, that option becomes attractive very quickly.
The company’s treatment of open-source AI development reveals its true agenda. They warn that Chinese labs release dual-use capable models as open weights, allowing users to strip away safety guardrails. This concern has merit, but Anthropic’s implied solution is to<a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/ai-pre-approval-proposal-could-hand-washington-kill-switch-over-speech-innovation?utm_source=chatgpt.com"> restrict</a> open-source AI development broadly. This would devastate American startups, universities, and small businesses while conveniently protecting their market position.
Anthropic uses export controls as a rhetorical cudgel to justify a broader regulatory framework that would entrench its own position. The same pattern appears in Anthropic’s solutions. Close loopholes in export controls? Fine. Strengthen enforcement against chip smuggling, foreign data center workarounds, and unlawful diversion? Yes. Defend American models from distillation attacks? Absolutely. However, what American policymaker or serious U.S. lab is “allowing” China to steal capabilities?
Export controls and anti-distillation defenses can be tools, not a full strategy. They may slow China in the short term, but, as we have seen in the telecommunications industry, they alone cannot make the world dependent on American technology. These controls will not create global developer loyalty. They cannot ensure that enterprises, governments, and startups choose American AI over cheaper Chinese alternatives.
In the long term, if we follow Anthropic’s prescription, this approach can backfire. Accelerating China’s drive for self-sufficiency, inspiring a parallel chip ecosystem, and pushing global markets toward non-American alternatives. The goal should be for American models and our <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/05/chinas-ai-models-are-closing-the-gap-but-americas-real.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com">computing capacity advantage</a> to become the global standard. A policy that walls off markets without an affirmative diffusion strategy will enable our adversaries to fill the vacuum, and the U.S. will lose influence over critical infrastructure.
Maybe that is what Anthropic wants.
The stakes in the AI race are too high for such transparent self-interest. Policymakers must look past the veneer of national security analysis and scrutinize whose interests are truly being served. The future of American innovation and global competitiveness hangs in the balance. Allowing one company’s corporate strategy to define the rules of the game would be a strategic catastrophe.
***
Nathan Leamer is the executive director of Build American AI and a former policy advisor to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

Anthropic AI – Photo Illustration

The High-Stakes AI Race Between The World’s Global Superpowers

Anthropic

Communist China

Data Centers

DW Opinion

At the recent summit with President Donald Trump in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping invoked the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides in his opening remarks, saying: “The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”
Cue the predictable, breathless coverage from the mainstream media, which has rushed to take Xi’s remarks at face value and eagerly embraced the Chinese Communist Party’s framing, a narrative that aligns perfectly with the elite talking point popularized by Harvard’s Graham Allison in his 2017 book &#8220;Destined for War.&#8221; In it, Allison argued that a rising power (China as Athens) must inevitably clash with an established hegemon (America as Sparta) unless “cooler heads prevail.” For nearly a decade, this thesis has been treated as an unassailable truth in think tanks, Wall Street boardrooms, and foreign-policy circles. The deeper implication is that America should step aside gracefully, accommodate China’s “peaceful rise,” and accept managed decline so the benevolent dragon can assume its rightful place as the world’s new leading power.
Unfortunately for our elites, it turns out that the Thucydides Trap is fake and gay.
Fake, because it is nothing more than pop-political science masquerading as profound historical destiny. Gay, because, well… it’s ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War basically involved Sparta and Athens arguing over who got to be the top in the Mediterranean. And it’s both fake and gay because most of the commentariat has read Xi Jinping’s condescending history lesson to Donald Trump completely backward and missed the real signal.
Let me explain.
Graham Allison’s Destined for War hit bookshelves in 2017, just months after Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 victory. It was the first time since Nixon that a U.S. presidential candidate had openly rejected the bipartisan elite consensus on China, as evidenced by Trump hammering China on its currency manipulation, massive trade surpluses, IP theft, and hollowing out of American manufacturing while on the campaign trail. His promise to America was a total “America First” reset by slapping tariffs and decoupling from China.
The foreign policy and business establishments were in full panic mode. For decades, they were drunk on the Kool-Aid that economic liberalization inevitably leads to political liberalization, as they pushed for China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. Of course, we know now that it never panned out as Beijing failed to blossom into a “responsible stakeholder,” nor did it have any desire to embrace Western norms.
Allison’s book arrived as the perfect intellectual counterweight to President Trump’s new agenda. Suddenly, every think tank panel, Davos dinner, and editorial board had a shiny new framework to wield: You can’t get tough on Beijing — that’s Sparta panicking and triggering the Thucydides Trap. It reframed Trump’s hawkishness as dangerous and historically illiterate brinkmanship that risked catastrophic war. The message to policymakers, CEOs, and pundits was to push for continued “strategic engagement,”  i.e., keep the money flowing, keep the technology transferring, and don’t let this populist disruptor upset the profitable status quo. The business elite lapped it up because it gave them the perfect intellectual cover to keep doing what they already wanted and were incentivized to do: make obscene amounts of money in China, while pretending it was sound political strategy. In other words, Thucydides was a rhetorical weapon deployed to neuter the first serious challenger to the China engagement consensus in two generations.
Putting aside his distinguished record in political science and international relations, in this particular work on China and the Thucydides Trap, Allison commits a fundamental error. The bulk of the historical evidence shows that, contrary to his thesis, status quo powers have rarely launched preventive wars against perceived future rivals. In reality, it is the rising powers that usually strike first when they sense opportunity and weakness because established ones have far too much to lose — wealth, prestige, stability, and hard-won power.
For example, it was Imperial Japan, the ascending challenger in 1904, that launched a surprise attack on the long-established Russian Empire. Later in the 1930s, a recovering and resurgent Germany faced no preemptive assault from Britain, France, or the Soviet Union; the established powers dithered and appeased until the revisionist forced their hand. Even the Peloponnesian War, the supposed origin story for this historical analogy, does not fit the script Allison assigns it. Thucydides, an Athenian general writing after his own side’s catastrophic defeat, portrayed Sparta’s fear of Athenian growth as the “truest cause.” Yet the historical record reveals an aggressive, expansionist Athens provoking a reluctant Sparta through a series of calculated affronts. The vanquished, not the victors, shaped the narrative that has endured for 2,400 years.
Allison rests his entire thesis on 16 historical cases of rising versus ruling powers. Critics have dismantled this dataset for cherry-picking, miscoding, and ignoring critical variables such as agency, ideology, and revisionist behavior. In at least 14 of the 16 examples, the historical record simply does not support the core claim that fearful status quo powers preemptively attack rising challengers. Many of the wars were instead initiated by aggressive rising states, not paranoid incumbents.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the U.S.-China relationship itself. After emerging from World War II as the undisputed superpower, America did not crush Mao’s revolutionary regime despite Chinese forces killing tens of thousands of American soldiers in the Korean War. Nor did America retaliate against the Chinese for providing massive, sustained aid to North Vietnam throughout the Vietnam War. Instead, the United States opened diplomatic relations in the 1970s, integrated China into the global trading system, and, through investment, technology transfer, and market access, engineered the greatest economic lift in human history. So not only was Beijing’s rise never thwarted by Washington, it was actively aided and abetted by America.
Fast-forward to 2026, and the picture looks far less rosy for Graham Allison and his fellow elites who once eagerly proclaimed the dawn of the “Asian Century.” The structural headwinds they long downplayed have now become impossible to ignore. A collapsing property sector, demographic freefall, crushing local government debt, chronically weak domestic consumption, and tightening U.S. export controls have collectively shattered the narrative of China’s inevitable overtake of the United States. Recent projections show the nominal GDP gap between the U.S. and China actually widening by 2030.
So what is the signal that most of the mainstream media missed? Back in 2015, at the peak of China’s swagger, Xi Jinping had declared: “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” At the time, Beijing was surging with double-digit growth (on paper), the Belt and Road Initiative was rolling out to great fanfare, island building in the South China Sea was barely met with any Western response (thanks, Obama), and the American president was still preaching “strategic patience.”
Why would the man who had only a decade ago dismissed the concept as non-existent, now suddenly treat the Thucydides Trap as the central dogma defining the U.S.-China relationship?
To answer this, one must read between the lines. The difference in what Xi said in 2015 vs. 2026 is what, in poker, you would call “a tell.”  In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu teaches to “appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” When China appeared unstoppable, Xi pretended there was no trap at all in order to lull America into complacency. Now that China is visibly weakening, he suddenly discovers the Thucydides Trap and warns of looming danger — projecting strength and issuing veiled threats to deter pushback.
This seminal text is a window into the operational doctrine of how the Chinese Communist Party thinks and acts. The mainstream media, predictably, has missed it entirely. What they hail as “statesmanship” is in reality a desperate tactical feint from a revisionist power whose “century of rejuvenation” has slammed into harsh headwinds. Xi invoked the phrase to ostensibly warn Trump against “disrupting the relationship.” In reality, he was making a veiled threat: Don’t contain us. Don’t push back too hard. Keep the one-way transfer of wealth, technology, and power flowing, or you’ll be the paranoid Sparta that starts the war.
The Thucydides Trap was always a strategically convenient fiction, weaponized to keep America passive while its rival rose. Xi is not educating Trump on ancient Greek history; he is testing him. Rising challengers press their advantage until they meet credible resistance. Xi’s blatant flip-flop is proof that the balance of power is tilting back toward American strength. America should reject Xi’s premise and continue to maintain unrelenting pressure across every domain — economic, technological, military, and diplomatic — to force Beijing to choose between genuine internal reform and managed decline on far less favorable terms.
Americans should see Xi’s sudden rediscovery of the Thucydides Trap as a clear sign that their country is not in inexorable decline, no matter how loudly the usual chorus of influencers, podcasters, and legacy media insists otherwise. Ignore the usual suspects shilling for managed decline. What we are witnessing is a weakening rival’s desperate plea for America to once again choose self-delusion over self-defense.
***

Multiple Mao

The Thucydides Trap Is Fake And Gay

Global power

History

Thucydides Trap

A Chinese immigrant escapes one of history&#8217;s most brutal communist regimes, crosses the Pacific, lands in America, collects a multi-million dollar net worth, and then steps in front of a red carpet microphone to <a href="https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2056115103926252025">declare</a> that capitalism is &#8220;the greatest evil in the world.&#8221;
That is exactly what Hacks star and professional they/them progressive Poppy Liu said at a recent premiere, before adding, generously, that she would &#8220;be okay with [capitalism]&#8221; if fewer people lived under oppression. A noble sentiment. A historically illiterate one (because capitalism leads to <a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/capitalisms-triumph">less oppression</a>) and coming from her specifically, one of the most spectacular acts of self-unawareness in Hollywood this week.
How do we know? Because last year, Poppy sat down with the L.A. Times to <a href="https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2025-02-21/sunday-funday-poppy-liu-best-things-to-do-los-angeles">share</a> her ideal Los Angeles Sunday. The schedule: 10:30 a.m personal training session. 11:30 acupuncture recovery. A quick bite at Amara Cafe. An afternoon trek to Koreatown for fresh fruit. Dinner at Levant Bistro. Movie night. And then, naturally, some late-night TikTok couch rot to wind down, after she put “they” to sleep. (The toddler is <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cus5xghr8PN/">nongender</a>.)
Every single stop on that itinerary was brought to her by the economic system she&#8217;d like to dismantle.
The irony is again richer than a 12-course tasting menu.
Let&#8217;s briefly audit what capitalism actually provided for Poppy&#8217;s American dream. The personal trainer hustling clients in a free market. The acupuncturist running a private practice. The cafe, the restaurant, the movie theater: all private enterprises, all paying wages, all generating profit, all apparently evil. The phone she used to post about it all? Designed by a company, assembled across a global supply chain, powered by semiconductors and lithium batteries that exist because competitive markets incentivized someone to invent them.
Her career? Funded by capitalist studios and streaming giants. Her designer wardrobe and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DYWgo0vgQ0Z/?hl=en">thousand</a>-dollar couture dress? It operates through international trade and global capitalist markets. Her immigration story? The electric car with GPS and safety features that brought her to the vanity show? All market-driven. All only possible because she landed in a country built on economic freedom rather than state control.
China, where she spent much of her youth, tried the alternative. It killed tens of millions of people through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and fostered state-managed famine on an industrial scale.
She made it out, made it to America, made millions, and her takeaway is that capitalism is the problem.
This deranged mentality that she and other elites are projecting is going to slowly kill America, if we let it.
It’s nothing new, however. Hating the merchant class is one of the oldest political tricks in human history. <a href="https://heartland.org/opinion/economic-ideas-plato-aristotle-and-the-ancient-greeks-part-2/">Ancient</a> Greeks viewed private trade as disruptive. Medieval Europeans were <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1301/trade-in-medieval-europe/">suspicious</a> of commerce. For centuries, aristocrats <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie">rallied</a> against anyone who threatened the established order of wealth. The resentment predates Marx by millennia. He just gave it a pamphlet.
What <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/marx-exploitation-abc-unequal-world/">Marx</a> actually did was shift the target. Before Marx, people resented wealth. After Marx, they were taught to resent the wealthy. To hate the person, not just the gap. To see every successful entrepreneur as a thief, every profit as exploitation, every billionaire as a threat to democracy. Modern progressives didn’t invent this; they just introduced it to the youth on TikTok.
And it’s working. Only 54% of Americans now view capitalism <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">positively</a>. The lowest number in 15 years. This ought to terrify you.
As I “Sunday Scrolled” on Instagram, I came across a viral <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWjaRWeiF5X/">video</a> that inaccurately reframed the entire economic debate between Capitalism and communism as a father asking his daughter: if another kid doesn’t have a lunch, do you share yours? She says yes. Dad says, “Then you’re a little commie.” The implication was that capitalism means hoarding your sandwich while your classmate starves. It was emotional, clever, and completely wrong.
A child voluntarily sharing her lunch is not communism. That’s private property plus individual charity. Americans donate over $590 billion <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Americans+donate+over+%24500+billion+annually%2C&amp;oq=Americans+donate+over+%24500+billion+annually%2C&amp;gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBBzcwOWowajeoAgCwAgA&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8">annually</a>, the highest charitable giving rate on earth. Communism isn&#8217;t the sweet kid at the lunch table. Communism is the government seizing the cafeteria, mismanaging the food supply, and leaving everyone hungry. Ask Venezuela. Ask the Soviet Union. Ask the 45 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward">million</a> people who died in Mao&#8217;s Great Leap Forward.
The video had 5.6 million views. The comments had a collective IQ of 80. The indoctrination is working.
Nobody is arguing that capitalism is perfect. It is flawed, but obviously the best option we’ve got. Under it, global extreme poverty cratered from 42% to under 9% since 1990. Lifespans doubled over the last century. The smartphone in your pocket contains more computing power than NASA used to land astronauts on the moon, and you can buy one for a few hundred dollars. This happened because markets reward innovation, competition drives down costs, and human ingenuity is allowed to function.
Every alternative has delivered something else. Stagnation. Poverty. Body Counts.
Even <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2426-memberblock">Sweden</a>, long the Left’s favorite argument for socialism, is embracing capitalism wholesale: free markets, private enterprise, lower taxes, and strong property rights. And of course, it’s working. The country has seen massive increases in innovation and Initial Public Offerings, so much so that the small country of 11 million is far outpacing Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
What the Poppys of the world are selling is not a better system. It is envy dressed in the language of compassion, packaged by people wealthy enough to never feel the consequences of the ideas they promote. They hate billionaires from their million-dollar homes. They hate corporations on the devices that those corporations made. They perform poverty from penthouses and call it solidarity. They fight “oppression” over oat-milk matchas.
Poppy Liu immigrated from a country that starved its own people in the name of economic equality, built a career in a country that rewards talent and ambition, accumulated real wealth, and concluded that the problem is capitalism.
She is welcome to her opinion. She is welcome to donate her sequined couture, her L.A. restaurant tabs, her streaming residuals, and her personal training sessions to the revolution. We&#8217;ll take the million-dollar home too, since she&#8217;s offering.
For the rest of us: you are not a bad person for believing in free markets. You are not greedy for wanting to keep what you earn. You are not heartless for understanding that a system rewarding innovation and competition has done more to lift human beings out of poverty than any government program in history.
The greatest evil of all time did not build the modern world. Capitalism did.
Don&#8217;t let the millionaire tell you otherwise.

“I Love Boosters” Los Angeles Premiere

The Miseducation Of Poppy Liu

Capitalism

Poppy Liu

IMG_6737

Weekend Punch: Michael Sobolik On Defeating Red China

Punch

Taiwan

To my sheer dismay, I opened a letter the other day informing me of yet another speeding ticket. How? I saw no cops. I stay just slightly above the speed limit like every other functioning adult in this country. No flashing lights, no sirens, no officer pulling me over to exercise any semblance of human judgment.
No need. The District of Columbia has taken a page straight out of the Chinese Communist playbook, embedding surveillance cameras on every major road in the city, lying in wait to snare Washington, D.C. residents in a money trap. The same residents, by the way, who already pay some of the highest taxes in the nation.
$400. I was as thrilled to see that bill as Pete Hegseth was <a href="https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2054745647819948456">shaking</a> President Xi&#8217;s hand this week. Granted, I was going too fast, and I&#8217;ll pay it like a law-abiding citizen, but I shouldn&#8217;t have to feel like I&#8217;m dodging the Ministry of Public Security just to get to work.
Because that&#8217;s exactly what this is. China operates one of the world&#8217;s largest surveillance states, with an estimated 700 million CCTV cameras tracking its residents&#8217; every move. The Fox News crew <a href="https://x.com/i/status/2054699064940216690">found</a> that out the hard way during Trump&#8217;s Beijing trip, getting slapped with a $40 ticket for parking illegally for two whole minutes! It&#8217;s <a href="https://x.com/i/status/2054726431918420393">authoritarian</a>. It&#8217;s Orwellian. And it&#8217;s a reminder: keep CCP-style surveillance and Chinese influence out of America.
Speed cameras are annoying and invasive, but they&#8217;re the least of what&#8217;s crushing the Chinese people. China is a disaster area. As President Donald Trump sits across from Xi Jinping this week, it&#8217;s worth remembering exactly who the enemy is and exactly how weak they really are.
You wouldn&#8217;t know it from their propaganda show. As Trump stepped off Air Force One in Beijing, he was greeted by perfectly choreographed children, waving flowers and American flags with rehearsed smiles, robotically jumping to the music. It looked like a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c7DIWEIvWA">scene</a> out of The Interview. Abnormal. Creepy. Stop it.
Beneath that polished, stage-managed surface is a nation rotting from the inside.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I30A5Z63Uyk">China&#8217;s</a> nominal GDP per capita is under $15,000 a year. Ours is $95,000. They’re facing a huge demographic problem after their one-child policy prevented 400 million births, gutting their workforce and leaving no one to pay the bills — bills that now sit at a 336% debt-to-GDP ratio, propped up by trillions in bad loans that will never be repaid. Beijing long ago crushed free enterprise in favor of a top-down mercantilist system where the Party picks winners and losers, and the result is a country that can&#8217;t innovate or build, which is why America is running away with the AI race and the global hegemonic title.
So instead, they steal — up to $600 billion in American IP every year — and mass-produce what they can, because they have no regard for human life or child <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods-print?items_per_page=10&amp;combine=china">labor</a> laws. That same apathy toward their own people shows up in how they govern them: heavy taxation just to keep the nation afloat, a military that&#8217;s large but technologically limited, with no real deep-water capability or meaningful power projection. Their one-party autocracy doesn&#8217;t produce innovation; it produces loyalty oaths. China is not an ascending power threatening to displace us. It&#8217;s a declining one, desperately trying to stop the bleeding.
The CCP is not just our adversary. They are our enemy. And they&#8217;re losing. Some of it is self-inflicted, some of it is courtesy of our sanctions, investment restrictions, and the compounding advantage of being a free market that keeps innovating while they stagnate. But the Iran situation? That&#8217;s the cherry on top.
Fifty-four percent of China&#8217;s total oil imports come from the Middle East. Another 3–5% was coming from Venezuela before that dried up. They are almost entirely dependent on a region currently on fire, and they have no leverage to do anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it plainly this week: Chinese ships are stuck in the Persian Gulf, Chinese cargo got hit over the weekend, and their export market is in limbo. An Iran war hurts China far more than it hurts us.
That desperation is precisely why this week&#8217;s White House meeting produced real <a href="https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2054859596938785204/photo/1">concessions</a>. China agreed to greater U.S. access to Chinese markets, an end to fentanyl precursor exports, a halt to purchasing American farmland, and — most significantly — that Iran cannot ever have a nuclear weapon. The Strait of Hormuz stays open. China even wants to buy American oil, because when your energy supply chain runs through a war zone, you get pragmatic fast.
Our little enemy has been backed into its rightful corner. We need more of this, because China has been running a full-spectrum assault on the United States for years: espionage, economic theft on a historic scale, and subversion right here at home.
In California, <a href="http://justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/arcadia-mayor-federally-charged-acting-illegal-agent-peoples-republic-china">Arcadia</a> Mayor Eileen Wang just pleaded guilty to spying for the PRC. A sitting mayor. A <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/4568091/lu-jianwang-convicted-chinese-spy-post-new-york-city/">Bronx</a> man named Lu Jianwang was just convicted for operating a secret Chinese &#8220;police station&#8221; in Manhattan&#8217;s Chinatown, monitoring dissidents and harassing fugitives on direct orders from Beijing. Eric Swalwell, the disgraced former congressman, got honey-potted by a Chinese spy named Fang Fang while sitting on the House Intelligence Committee — and it barely made a ripple. Chinese &#8220;students&#8221; embedded in our research universities go home upon graduation and take whatever they&#8217;ve collected with them. TikTok is a CCP <a href="https://2017-2021.state.gov/chinas-coercive-tactics-abroad/">propaganda</a> pipeline running on 170 million American phones. The <a href="https://2017-2021.state.gov/chinas-coercive-tactics-abroad/">Confucius</a> Institutes spent years pumping Beijing-approved curriculum into U.S. campuses, scrubbing any mention of Taiwan, Tiananmen, or the Uyghurs — the same <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-muslims-repression-genocide-human-rights">Uyghurs</a> sitting in Chinese concentration camps right now — millions of them.
So when Xi this week <a href="https://x.com/AtlasWireHQ/status/2054852243476947274">claims</a> he wants &#8220;strategic stability&#8221; between China and the United States — great. Close the spy stations. Stop the fentanyl. Stop the stealing. Then we&#8217;ll take you seriously.
The fake news will tell you China holds the cards this week. They don&#8217;t. They never did. Trump is in Beijing, Xi is making concessions, and China is desperate for oil, stability, and a lifeline. That&#8217;s not strength. That&#8217;s a country running out of options.
America, don&#8217;t be like China. Don&#8217;t let their surveillance creep into our cities. Don&#8217;t fall for the communist propaganda, whether it comes from Bernie Sanders, AOC, honeypotters, or Xi himself.
And D.C.? Take those stupid cameras down.

China: Enthusiastic ‘Red Guards’ wave copies of Mao Zedong’s ‘Little Red Book’ (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zhuxi Yulu), Tiananmen, Beijing, c. 1966

Don’t Be Commie Chinese If You Please

At the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Xi asked if the two countries could avoid the Thucydides trap. Here&#8217;s what he had to say:
<blockquote>
Currently, transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe and the international situation is fluid and turbulent. The world has come to a new crossroads: Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide more stability for the world? 
</blockquote>
The Thucydides Trap is a term coined by Harvard professor Graham Allison. It theorizes that when a rising power threatens a global power, conflict generally follows. For Allison, a historian, the Thucydides model was the rise of Athens, which threatened Sparta&#8217;s regional dominance. When Sparta saw Athens rising, war became inevitable. Sparta tried to shut down Athens to prevent the Athenians from overcoming them.
There&#8217;s only one problem here: China is not Athens, and we are not Sparta. China is not the rising power, and we are not the declining power.
In reality, if conflict arises in this moment, it would not be because of the so-called Thucydides Trap. It would be much more in line with the closing window theory: the idea that sometimes a power sees its window closing because of a self-defeating policy and has to act aggressively as the window closes.
To take an example, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 largely because it saw its window of opportunity closing. It had conquered Poland; it had conquered France, and it was dominant over the European continent.
But it was also unable to conquer Britain.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2426?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Nazi Germany saw that Britain would likely survive Operation Sea Lion, the Nazi attempt to take over the British Isles. They saw that the United States might enter the war, feared the Soviets might attack first, and thus needed a lot of oil resources and land in the east, which catalyzed their attack on the Soviet Union.
The window, in other words, was closing.
This is one of the theories behind why Nazi Germany decided to initiate a bunch of foreign wars, because despite all the talk about how the Nazis had revitalized the economy, that was nonsense. They had created a kind of Chinese-like economy in the sense that it was heavily regulated, heavily subsidized, heavily controlled by the government, massively debt-ridden, and then they had to invade other countries for resources.
The real risk here is that China feels threatened; Xi has actually put China&#8217;s economy on a road to nowhere. They have a demographic problem. They have a military problem. They have an economic problem. And so China might lash out, knowing that its window is closing.
What can the United States do about that?
We have to ease their transition back into second-rate status, which means, basically, de-escalation on issues like Taiwan. We don&#8217;t want them attacking Taiwan because that&#8217;s bad for them and it&#8217;s bad for us. But we have to box them in simultaneously, which is why I have been encouraging — for literally decades at this point — better trade relations with all of Eastern Asia. We should have better trade relations with Japan and better trade relations with South Korea.
The Chinese are particularly weak opposition right now. This is why all of the headlines about how the war in Iran is going are incorrect. The real way that the war is going is that the people predominantly being deprived of the oil are the Chinese.
Not only that, if this war was supposed to create momentum against the United States in the region, why is every single country in the region on the side of the United States and against the Iranian regime, so much so that, apparently, the Saudis actually participated in foreign attacks in Iran?
I&#8217;ve spoken to top officials in many of these governments; they want to align with the United States. They increasingly want to align with Israel. Some are openly aligning with Israel, such as the UAE.
The Saudis would like to openly align with the United States and Israel, as well. They just have to run the gauntlet of domestic opposition to recognition of Israel.
Let’s reverse the clock back to the first Gulf War, when the United States was so afraid of Israel being unable to work with the Arab states because the Arab states would not work with Israel, that Israel took dozens of incoming Scuds from Iraq in the middle of that war. The United States, under President George H.W. Bush, told Israel they could not respond because he was afraid it would break up the coalition of the Saudis and the rest of the countries in the region.
But now, Israel is openly operating in coordination with all of those countries against Iran. That&#8217;s how much things have changed, which is why the Iranian foreign minister, knowing Iran is now isolated, issued a statement basically threatening the UAE, Bahrain, and others.
The regimes in the Middle East that know what the future looks like, a future that is largely reliant on American and Israeli technology and American oil and Western economic development, are not reliant on solidarity with a government in Iran that wishes to destroy them.
What has happened with oil is the single greatest untold story in modern American politics. Back in 1973, Israel fought the Yom Kippur War —yet another war where they were near extermination — in which Arab armies attacked Israel unprovoked, trying to destroy the state of Israel and wipe the Jews off the map.
They failed.
However, their failure led to the Saudi royal kingdom deciding to impose an oil embargo against the United States for the U.S.’s support for Israel in the late stages of the war, and that had a significant economic impact on the United States for a full decade.
Things have radically changed because America is now the leading producer of oil and liquefied natural gas on planet Earth. We control the means of production. We control the means of distribution. We control what is leaving the Strait of Hormuz via Iran. We control what exits Venezuela.
This is a radical shift.
The story of how America&#8217;s drilling freed up our geopolitical position is an amazing one. U.S. crude oil exports have been rising precipitously because we are the dominant producers. We have completely shifted geopolitics through our capacity to innovate and the natural resources we can access.
By the way, it is not just the presence of natural resources that makes a country rich. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on the planet, but it&#8217;s barely able to produce 1.5 million barrels of crude per day because it nationalized its oil industry.
We do have problems here, but economically speaking, we are blowing everyone out of the water. If you&#8217;ve got a buck, you are not investing it in China. You&#8217;re not investing it in the Europeans. You&#8217;re not investing it in Japan.
You&#8217;re investing it in the United States. That is the reality.
That’s because of our free-market system, the innovations, and the private companies, which are unbelievably efficient.
We have totally shifted geopolitics. China is weaker because of our oil industry. They are not rising while we are declining.
In fact, it is just the opposite.

GettyImages-1048647832

The Biggest Lie About China Just Fell Apart In Public

Ben Shapiro

Free Markets

NEW YORK, May 13 (Reuters) &#8211; A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after a trial over federal prosecutors&#8217; allegations that he operated a &#8220;secret police station&#8221; on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan&#8217;s Chinatown neighborhood.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the U.S. Attorney General that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China&#8217;s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California.
Lu was arrested in April 2023. He had pleaded not guilty to the three felony charges he faced: conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, acting as an unregistered agent of China, and obstruction of justice.
A jury in Brooklyn federal court reached the verdict after a weeklong trial. Lu faces up to 30 years in prison.
&#8220;May today’s verdict send a message to other foreign agents–the FBI maintains its unwavering resolve to reveal and disrupt the clandestine operations of adversarial nations,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge James Barnacle in an announcement of the verdict.
The Justice Department has in recent years been ramping up probes into what it calls &#8220;transnational repression&#8221; by U.S. adversaries such as China and Iran to intimidate political opponents living in the United States.
CHINA CALLS CHARGES FABRICATED
China&#8217;s government has called the charges in the case &#8220;fabricated&#8221; and part of an effort to smear the country&#8217;s image. Beijing has said there are centers outside China run by local volunteers, not Chinese police officers, that aim to help Chinese citizens renew documents and offer other services.
In her opening statement on May 6, prosecutor Lindsey Oken said Lu &#8211; a naturalized U.S. citizen &#8211; had ties with Chinese law enforcement and met with officials who tasked him with opening the station during a trip to China in 2022.
Oken said Lu ran the station out of a nondescript office building in Chinatown. She said he started out by helping Chinese nationals living in New York with renewing driver&#8217;s licenses, which alone is a crime if not disclosed to the U.S. government.
Oken said Lu also agreed to help the Chinese government locate a pro-democracy activist living in the United States. Prosecutors did not allege that the activist was harmed.
John Carman, a lawyer for Lu, said his client agreed to open the center to help Chinese nationals who were unable to travel to the country to renew documents due to the COVID pandemic. But Carman said Lu was not tasked by the Chinese government to do so.
A co-defendant arrested alongside Lu, Chen Jinping, pleaded guilty in 2024 to conspiring to act as an unregistered Chinese agent.
The arrests followed a 2022 investigation published by Spain-based advocacy group Safeguard Defenders that reported China had set up overseas &#8220;service stations,&#8221; including in New York, that illegally worked with Chinese police to pressure fugitives to return to China.
&nbsp;
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Karen Sloan; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

FILE PHOTO: Lu Jianwang arrives at Brooklyn federal court during his trial in New York City

Chinese Agent Found Guilty In NYC ‘Secret Police Station’ Case

China

New York

New York City

Police

China is not just America&#8217;s geopolitical opponent; they are our geopolitical enemy. They have been our geopolitical enemies since the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime in 1949.
We may have spent decades pretending that this isn&#8217;t true; Richard Nixon famously moved to open China as a way of separating China from the Soviet Union, and some neoliberals may have opened our markets to Chinese goods, hoping that free markets would lead to political moderation, but all that time, China was still our enemy.
The People&#8217;s Republic of China is a historically mass-murdering, currently terrorist-supporting, surveillance state of unprecedented proportions directed at destroying America&#8217;s global hegemony.
And they&#8217;re taking the long view. They can wait us out. They are taking advantage of our openness in order to defeat us. Whether it&#8217;s stealing literally tens of billions of dollars in intellectual property, stacking American universities with Chinese operatives, or infiltrating our political system, China is our geopolitical enemy.
This came to the fore in 2020, when China unleashed the Wuhan virus on the rest of humanity by lying and pretending that it was not transmissible from human to human, and by lying to the W.H.O., which was basically a Chinese front organization at that point.
Many folks have pointed out that we have supply chains that lead back to China, and we need to find ways to actually decouple from China.
So what should we be doing?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2424?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
We need to use both the carrot and the stick. That means we need to cut good trade deals with countries such as Canada. We need to cut better trade deals with all of the people who might move toward China but might move toward us.
We need to isolate China by flexing our economic power. The way you flex your economic power isn&#8217;t just about telling people they can&#8217;t access our markets unless we get better access to theirs. The way that you flex your economic power is by cutting deals that isolate China.
You tell countries: Pick between us. You can either have access to American markets or to Chinese manufacturing. Those are your choices.
If we utilized our power in this way, we could isolate China.
We can also cut off their sources of revenue and power. President Donald Trump has been doing this with alacrity. If you look at Trump&#8217;s foreign policy and what he has been doing, much of it is directed at minimizing Chinese power and influence. The operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was designed to cut off a chief source of oil revenue for China.
Much of what is directed against Iran is actually directed against China. China receives 10-15% of its oil imports from Iran.
Isolating Iran cuts off a source of power and revenue for China. Helping Ukraine to defeat Russia in Ukraine is a way of cutting off a support base for China, because Russia is basically a giant gas station for China at this point.
What else can we do? Strengthen our own economy.
One of the big problems we have is the massive dependency in the United States on China buying our debt. China owns trillions of dollars in American debt. They buy American bonds. The tacit threat in doing so is that, at a certain strategic point, they could flood the market with those American bonds.
They could take a loss. They could cram that down on their own citizens, just make their own citizens poorer. They don&#8217;t really care about their citizens.
This is a stark reminder that if you wish to be a world power, you cannot be a bloated welfare state.
I know that there&#8217;s a third rail of American politics, and that third rail of American politics is all of the entitlement programs. President Trump and his administration have taken the position that the entitlement programs in the United States require no systemic changes.
The problem with that perspective is that when you bloat your own economy, when you create enormous anchors on the American ship of state, it is very difficult to move in the ways you need to move.
Our debt is a huge problem. What we should be doing is getting lean and mean in terms of how we actually run our ship of state. We should make our economy more innovative, lower taxes, and cut down the bloated welfare state.
Finally, we badly need to cut off China&#8217;s avenues for stealing our IP and destroying our institutions. One easy way to do that: Zero Chinese foreign exchange students. Zero.
I understand that there is a strong incentive for our university systems to bring in Chinese foreign exchange students, since foreign students pay full freight while American students pay a discounted rate.
We should not be importing students from places that hate the United States in order to study at our universities. Period. End of story. I do not care whether those are students from Iran, and I do not care whether those are students from sub-Saharan Africa. I don&#8217;t care whether they are students from China; it doesn&#8217;t matter.
Bringing people to the United States to access our systems and then going back to their home countries is a gigantic mistake. There is no upside for us. It is all downside.
To pretend that some geopolitical enemies do not take advantage of our openness here in the United States to harm us is nonsense. They absolutely do.
All of these things are possible — and necessary.

How America Became Blind To China’s Long Game

The Enemy America Helped Build Into A Global Superpower

Foreign Policy

Opinion

President Donald Trump is headed to China this week, and according to the legacy media, he is in a weak position. He has no cards to play. The Chinese have the upper hand.
This is total crap. President Trump has spent a decade totally reshaping the global power map. China is in trouble, and Trump is heading into the summit in a power position on every front.
Go back 10 years. Everyone said that China would be dominant 10 years ago.
Wrong.
Today, the Left and the woke Right — which is basically the New Left —  say that America should cede global power to “multi-polarity,” which means China and Russia.
That&#8217;s not just stupid. It makes them useful idiots for the world&#8217;s worst regimes.
According to some sources, China is overconfident. They believe that they have the upper hand. The Chinese government is allowing people in China to see what&#8217;s happening in America, and because that coverage is often negative about America, it&#8217;s reinforcing the Chinese government&#8217;s perception of its own strength.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-ep-2423?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Now, Trump is headed to China, and our beloved legacy media is chanting that multi-polarity is happening.
Wrong.
China is in its weakest global position in at least a couple of decades.
China is an awful, terrible, autocratic, economically fascist, one-party state. They&#8217;ve had serious systemic problems for years, decades, even up to today. Those problems have been masked over the last three decades or so by China&#8217;s shift from a completely closed economy in the 1970s to one that engages with world markets, moving from communism at home to a form of mercantilism under the predecessors of Xi Jinping.
There are always moronic economists here in the West who are in love with the idea of a mercantilist, centralized state, meaning a state in which the government directs where private money should be spent and determines which trade deals can be made. Everything is government-sponsored. Everything is government-subsidized. Everything is government-regulated.
A lot of economists love this stuff because it gives them the illusion of control.
But China is not the economic powerhouse they&#8217;re making it out to be.
China can direct its economy in a few different directions with serious power, and it can take whatever it has of its economy, cobble that together, and then can punch in one direction.
For example, if they want to generate extraordinary levels of power, they can build many nuclear plants or dig for coal, and they don&#8217;t care about the environmental effects.
Thus, they can really out-produce us in terms of energy. And they can build some new cars that are pretty competitive by stealing and adapting Western technology, which they do.
But let us be real. The Chinese economy is not truly competitive with the American economy in any serious sense. Their products are not better than ours. Their services are not better than ours. Their economy is not better than ours. Not even close.
They lack innovation. So they can build these gigantic labs, and they can force a bunch of people into those labs, but when you don&#8217;t have free markets, you have a problem. The system of free markets allows for better products and services because of competition.
You want to know why every major AI company is located in the United States? Because they&#8217;re all competing with each other. In fact, many of them are located a few blocks from one another in Silicon Valley. That is not atypical in a free market economy.
China has a serious debt problem. They hide their debt problem by stealing money from their citizens.
We&#8217;re always hearing about the Chinese military; they have a gigantic nuclear arsenal. But technologically speaking, they are far behind the United States now. Maybe they can pick it up, but not if they&#8217;re also lagging in AI, which is why we need to win the AI race.
The only thing that can solve China&#8217;s demographic, productivity, and military problems is winning the AI race.
This is why it&#8217;s so stupid when you see people from the Left to the woke Right making the case for AI in the United States to be set back.
It&#8217;s nuts. That would hand global power to the Chinese.
You&#8217;re constantly hearing about China&#8217;s gigantic army. It’s huge, but manpower isn&#8217;t everything, as we saw in the Ukraine war.
Similar to Russia’s, the Chinese military isn&#8217;t up to snuff. China relies on older, less sophisticated chips. What&#8217;s more, China doesn&#8217;t yet have the capacity to project deepwater power. They have many boats in their navy, which is effective in coastal zones, but they have no capacity to project power beyond those zones.
China&#8217;s entire governmental system is built around a lack of competition. The problem with Chinese centralized control is that it cannot produce innovation or building or thriving.
President Trump knows all of this, and he has been spending the last 10 years putting the screws to China. It is the through line of his foreign policy.
People look at Trump&#8217;s foreign policy and ask, &#8220;What&#8217;s he doing in Iran? I don&#8217;t understand what he’s doing in Venezuela. I don&#8217;t understand what he’s doing with Japan.&#8221;
All of it is oriented to China. All of it.
President Trump is opportunistic in foreign policy terms. He waits for an opportunity to arise, and then he takes advantage of it.
A dozen years ago, people were talking about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or what they called the Silk Road Initiative. It was designed to basically create massive debt traps for countries. China would give them free money, but it wasn&#8217;t free; it would come with constraints. Those countries that were poor would take the loans, and then Beijing would basically foreclose on the loans and take control of property in strategic areas.
Countries were joining because they saw free money.
But it turns out the countries have been withdrawing from the Belt and Road Initiative, and even Chinese investment in the Belt and Road has been dropping precipitously.
The reality is that when it comes to the economic battle between China and the United States, we have the upper hand.

Trump_Xi

Trump’s Biggest Advantage Over China Is Obvious

When the U.S. Geological Survey <a href="https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/lithium-eastern-states-could-replace-imports-a-century-or-more">announced</a> that Appalachia contained enough lithium to supply America for more than 300 years, it was more than just a watershed moment for our country. It was another setback for Communist China, already reeling from a <a href="https://www.hudson.org/economics/chinas-economic-slowdown-options-advanced-economies-thomas-duesterberg">weakening economy</a> and dependence on foreign oil, and could loosen its stranglehold on the lithium-ion battery supply chain.
But realizing the potential from these gains requires policymakers to have wisdom and backbone, and resist the false prophets, both foreign and domestic, who will no doubt stand in the way.
Highly conductive yet incredibly malleable, lithium powers much of our lives in the 21st century. It is a critical tool in modern electronics and at the center of everyday life, from smartphones and tablets to batteries. As recently as the 1990s, the United States was the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/01/chart-countries-produce-lithium-world/">world’s leading</a> lithium producer.
Then, as with many other facets of life, the outsourcing started. While we debated environmental impact statements and activists shut down mines, China moved decisively.
Today, China controls between <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/china-controls-over-80-battery-materials-crucial-us-defense-equipment-unsettling-report-reveals">70 and 80%</a> of the world’s lithium capacity and production. It dominates the entire supply chain. Friendlier countries like Australia and Chile may be home to the largest raw materials deposits, but China owns the manufacturing capacity. And many of the mining facilities in <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-overtake-australia-worlds-top-lithium-miner-by-2026-fastmarkets-says-2025-06-25/">Australia and Chile</a> are, sadly, majority Chinese-owned. Take the Greenbushes Lithium Mine in Western Australia, the world’s largest and highest-grade hard-rock lithium mine. It is also <a href="https://www.igo.com.au/site/operations/lithium-holdco-joint-venture">majority-owned</a> by the Chinese-based Tianqi Lithium company.
Lithium isn’t just a mineral; it’s the oil of the 21st century. Right now, Communist China is calling the shots. Here at home, we have only <a href="https://www.thecentersquare.com/nevada/article_c1a1834f-8cc8-4b45-b75a-2a3691369535.html">one operating lithium mine</a> in Nevada.
The Trump administration not only understands the threat but is acting on it. In his first term, the president <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/05/2020-22064/addressing-the-threat-to-the-domestic-supply-chain-from-reliance-on-critical-minerals-from-foreign">declared</a> a national emergency around the “vulnerability to disruptions in the supply of critical minerals.” In March 2025, the president signed an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/immediate-measures-to-increase-american-mineral-production/">executive order</a>, “to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”
Pushing for more lithium production at home is part of a broader deregulatory agenda and renewed focus on American energy dominance. After four long years of the Biden administration using every lever available to shut down domestic energy, President Trump sent a clear signal that a new day had dawned by declaring a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-energy-emergency/">National Energy Emergency</a> on day one of his new term.
We are already reaping the benefits. While gas prices are elevated, they are far lower than in the rest of the world. Less talked about is the price of natural gas, which accounts for half of our country’s electricity. It has barely moved here at home since the conflict in Iran started, whereas many parts of Europe and Asia have felt <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/04/03/why-are-natural-gas-prices-stable-in-the-us">70%</a> price increases.
Now we can apply those same principles to lithium. But developing a major lithium mine takes years and can be shut down quickly. The process will no doubt stretch into a presidential administration that may not share the wisdom of Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda. The Democratic Party may still be licking its wounds from recent electoral defeats, but its would-be leaders haven’t lost their green appetite.
Billionaire Tom Steyer, one of the frontrunners to become California’s next governor, declared “<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/23/tom-steyer-climate-progressive-voters-00889698">every day will be climate day</a>” in his administration.
As they did with fracking a decade ago, environmental extremists, often funded by overseas interests, will raise holy hell about every cultural concern in the name of “science.” Their allied third-party organizations will launch disruptive protests and a blizzard of costly lawsuits.
Just as the Russians sought to undermine America’s rise as a fracking powerhouse with <a href="https://www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/the-menace-russian-hybrid-warfare-and-how-thwart-it">misinformation campaigns</a>, China will not sit idly by while America disrupts its monopoly. Expect lawsuits, media campaigns, and pressure on American politicians to slow-walk or kill lithium mining projects. Look no further than Steyer, who amassed his estimated <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/us/tom-steyer-california-governor-coal.html">$2.4 billion fortune</a> running hedge funds on the backs of foreign coal miners while advocating “green” policies to kill these jobs here at home. It’s beyond hypocrisy; it’s pure evil.
Relying on China for critical minerals is insanity. Beijing has shown a willingness and ability to weaponize supply chains. There is no reason that every smartphone battery and every defense system, or even the Left’s precious electric vehicle battery, should be dependent on CCP-controlled lithium. Energy security is national security.
America has natural resources on its land. Our people have the ingenuity. What we need now is the will — and the courage to tell the environmental Left and Beijing that our lithium will power our future, not Chinese dominance.
***
Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia.  Contact him at daniel@powerthefuture.com and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF.

Lithium-ion Battery Manufacturer In Jinhua

Make America Mine — And Manufacture — Lithium Again

Lithium

rare earth minerals

Imagine waking up and calling your mother on the phone to say good morning. The phone keeps ringing, but no one answers. After repeated calls, emotions begin to heighten, anxiety sets in, and then panic. That’s how I felt on September 10, 2018, when my mother disappeared. Over seven years later, those feelings still course through my body like it was yesterday.
My mother, <a href="https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/scott-rubio-durbin-and-colleagues-reaffirm-call-for-the-immediate-release-of-dr-gulshan-abbas/">Dr. Gulshan Abbas</a>, is a 63-year-old Uyghur retired physician, a woman of deep kindness who devoted her life to healing others. Since 2018, she has been unjustly imprisoned in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, cut off from her family. She is a mother of two <a href="https://www.cecc.gov/media-center/press-releases/chairs-ask-president-bring-home-americans-unjustly-detained-china">American</a> daughters and grandmother to four beautiful granddaughters.
Her disappearance came less than a week after her sister <a href="https://campaignforuyghurs.org/leadership/">Rushan Abbas</a>, a U.S. citizen and prominent Uyghur human rights activist, <a href="https://www.hudson.org/events/1591-china-s-war-on-terrorism-and-the-xinjiang-emergency92018">spoke publicly</a> about Beijing’s persecution and mass detention of Uyghurs. Soon after, the Chinese authorities sentenced her to 20 years in prison for fabricated crimes. This retaliation for my aunt’s advocacy in the United States is a stark example of Beijing’s growing campaign of transnational repression — punishing individuals in China for the actions of their relatives abroad.
While families across America gather to celebrate Mother’s Day, my world will remain quiet. There will be no morning phone call to hear my mother’s voice, no chance to tell her how much I love her, and no opportunity for my daughter and nieces to sit in their grandmother’s lap. She has missed first steps, first words, first days of school — years of a family growing up without her.
This is my eighth Mother’s Day marked by a physical ache to see my mother’s face and hear her voice.
Living in this reality is hard. Every statement from Beijing or Washington, D.C. leaves me wondering if this will finally be the moment of her release. That day has not yet come. In the meantime, I am left to answer an impossible question from my seven-year-old daughter and three nieces, who have never met their grandmother: “Why isn’t she here?”
I don’t have a good answer. I tell them that she is good and kind, brave, that she loves them, and wants nothing more than to be here with them.
There are moments when the world seems to notice, when hope feels closer. And then those moments pass. But for families like mine, the reality never changes. We are still waiting. Still hoping she is not forgotten.
As President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, I’ll be glued to the news. President Trump should boldly raise my mother’s case and secure her unconditional release and safe return home. I also call on Beijing to act first. As a priority political prisoner, releasing her would be a gesture of good faith that costs nothing and restores a family.
Her release would not only reunite our family — it would send a powerful message that American families should not bear the cost of Beijing’s transnational repression.
My mother is enduring hardships we cannot fully see or understand. We worry about the mental strain of this ordeal and the toll on her body, which suffers from several chronic health conditions. The fragments of information we receive are never enough to ease our pain or change the reality that she is still not home. Instead, they have only deepened my resolve, because staying silent would mean accepting she doesn’t matter. She does.
Whatever steadiness and strength that keep me going come from my mother herself — from her quiet courage, her compassion, and the love with which she raised me. I hold on to the hope that one day, we will be reunited. Until then, I will keep speaking and advocating, because she taught me that love is not passive; it shows up again and again, across the years and oceans.
If your mom answers the phone this Mother’s Day, please don’t take that for granted. I would give anything to hear that line pick up, and her voice on the other end.
***
Ziba Murat is a Uyghur American advocate whose mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, has been imprisoned in Xinjiang since 2018.

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One Daughter’s Mother’s Day Nightmare From Xi Jinping

Mothers Day

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China is warning of retaliation as the European Union moves forward with an aggressive plan to reindustrialize the continent and wall off key sectors from foreign competitors — particularly Beijing.
At the center of the brewing dispute is the Industrial Accelerator Act, also known as the &#8220;Made In Europe Act,&#8221; a sweeping proposal from the European Commission that would require a significant share of products in strategic industries to be made in Europe when public money is involved.
European officials argue the move is long overdue, as businesses across the bloc have complained they are competing against heavily subsidized Chinese firms — particularly in sectors like electric vehicles, batteries, and industrial materials. <a href="https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/04/27/china-slams-made-in-europe-push-mulls-retaliation">According</a> to EU Industry Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné, the act “will create jobs by directing taxpayers’ money to European production, decreasing our dependencies and enhancing our economic security and sovereignty.”
The proposal would impose strict domestic content requirements across strategic industries. Electric vehicles purchased with public funds, for example, would need to be assembled in Europe, with up to 70% of components sourced within the bloc. Similar thresholds would apply to materials like aluminum, cement, and key clean energy technologies.
It also directly targets foreign firms — primarily ubiquitous Chinese manufacturers — by requiring them to partner with European companies, limit ownership stakes, and in some cases transfer valuable technology in order to access EU markets or subsidies.
That has drawn a sharp response from Beijing: “If the EU &#8230; presses ahead with the legislation, and thereby harms the interests of Chinese companies, China will have no choice but to take countermeasures to firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of its enterprises,” China’s Ministry of Commerce of the People&#8217;s Republic of China <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260427-china-warns-eu-made-in-europe-plan-countermeasures">warned</a> in a statement.
Chinese officials have accused the EU of erecting discriminatory barriers and violating principles of the World Trade Organization, arguing that the “European preference” system unfairly shuts foreign competitors out of public funding and investment opportunities.
The legislation is part of a broader “European preference” strategy aimed at reversing years of industrial decline. European officials say more than 200,000 jobs have already been lost in energy-intensive industries and the automotive sector since 2024, with hundreds of thousands more projected this decade.
At the same time, China has expanded its export footprint across European markets while building factories that EU officials say generate limited local economic benefit. “They come, build on European land, and run operations with minimal local value,” one EU official <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/what-is-eus-draft-made-europe-law-2026-02-17/#:~:text=Makers%20of%20electric%20vehicles%20bought,will%20negotiate%20the%20final%20law.">said</a>. “Europe is not a supermarket — it has to be a factory.”
Beyond procurement rules, the proposal would impose strict conditions on foreign investment in strategic sectors, particularly targeting countries like China that dominate global manufacturing capacity. Investments exceeding €100 million could face caps on foreign ownership, mandatory technology transfers, and requirements that a substantial share of production and employment remain within Europe.
Chinese officials say they are open to negotiations but have made clear that retaliation remains on the table if talks fail, underscoring a growing economic rift between Brussels and Beijing as Europe joins the United States in reassessing its reliance on Chinese manufacturing.
The plan is not without critics within the Union, Sweden and the Czech Republic have warned the measures could deter investment and raise costs, while Germany has urged a more flexible approach that allows cooperation with allied trade partners. The proposal must still pass through the European Parliament and member states before becoming law, setting up a contentious political fight within the bloc.
Regardless of the final outcome, the direction is clear: Europe is moving to reclaim its industrial base, even at the risk of escalating tensions with China. Beijing, for its part, seems to be prepared to respond in kind.

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Europe And China Enter A High-Stakes Game Of Economic Chess

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