It is insanity to empower China, our most significant geopolitical rival, to continue its long-term effort to replace the United States as the world's premier superpower.  It is even crazier to allow the Chinese to do so at our expense.

For nearly two decades, we have allowed China through currency manipulation, theft of intellectual property, and ridiculous trade imbalances to raid the U.S. economy of trillions of dollars.  With these ill gotten gains, China is increasing its influence, expanding its military, bullying its neighbors, and causing problems (or putting itself in a position to cause problems) throughout the world.

Forget negotiation.  Implement tariffs, and look to countries that do not demonstrate expansionistic behavior for manufacturing.  Reliance on China to meet our technological needs is a fool's errand.  Funding Chinese expansionism is a calamitous mistake.  Far safer alternatives for outsourcing manufacturing exist.  India is but a single example of an ally that could play a far greater role in manufacturing without the risk of strengthening a militaristic, totalitarian regime.  It is time to do what is best for America and the free world rather than what is best for multinational globalists.

It was during the Clinton administration that the Congress passed and Clinton signed into law legislation awarding China permanent normal trade relations and in the process gave support to China's ongoing bid to join the World Trade Organization.  It was on President Clinton's watch that China was provided access to U.S. missile technology and supercomputers.  For the sake of perceived economic benefit (and campaign donations), the United States opted to ignore Chinese human rights abuses, ignore China's totalitarian government, ignore American security interests, and set China on its course to become our greatest competitor both economically and militarily.  

As a result, the world now stands idly by in the face of accelerating militarization of a totalitarian state that is imprisoning Muslims in re-education camps; persecuting Christians, Buddhists, and Uighurs; spying on its citizens; and ignoring international law from the Spratly Islands to the Philippines.

The watching world, while expressing concern, has apparently up until Donald Trump seen Beijing's escapades as trivial in comparison with potential access to the vast Chinese market.  The day seems to have arrived, however, when the genie of Chinese military and economic adventurism must be put back in the bottle.  It is time to stop funding the Chinese government in its efforts to establish hegemony over East Asia and beyond.  It is time for the free world to awaken from the politics of wishful thinking and reduce its reliance on Chinese manufacturing, thereby defunding the communist regime's ability to threaten its neighbors.

I have good friends in China and good Chinese friends in the United States.  I have spent weeks traveling in China and look forward to doing so again.  I doubt that anyone can spend time in China without being amazed both by its beauty and by the generosity of its people.  My familiarity has given me great sympathy for the vast challenges facing a nation of 1.4 billion people.  Having said that, just imagine the economic power of a China built on free markets, capitalism, and equal opportunity.  Imagine what an economic engine that would create!  Sadly, instead of economic and social freedom, the people of China have a totalitarian, expansionist government that is a threat not only to its citizens, but to an ever increasing region of our world. 

The time has come when the free world can tolerate the threat that is China only at its own great peril.  Normal State Department dribble — "don't make demands; work with them, and they will realize the value of freedom and become more like the West" — has once again failed, and China during the Bush and Obama years seems to have determined that Americans no longer have the will to resist their aggressiveness in the South China Sea.

Thank goodness we now have a president who understands the danger of an empowered China and is committed to the support of our East Asian friends and allies.  Freedom-loving countries can no longer afford to fund Chinese adventurism with their business and their dollars.

It is time to end China's free ride.  It is time for Western capital to flee Chinese financial markets.  China must reform.  China must change.  The United States and other free nations desperately need to provide the economic impetus that will force change upon this reluctant regime.