Chinese Threat Should Top Trump Pentagon Agenda
“Stability” of Communist Party Rule Is Not a U.S. Interest
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will host President Trump and 800 top military officers and their aides at an extraordinary meeting Tuesday at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. There is much speculation about the purpose of the exercise, ranging from imminent reductions in force among the flag and general officer cohort, to sweeping reorganizations of some commands, to shifting focus to hemispheric defense and growing support for law enforcement in crime-ridden U.S. cities.
There is one item that had better be at the top of the agenda, however: The prospects for hostilities that could be initiated at any time by the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese have been undertaking the largest military build-up in history. The CCP’s clear intent is to be able to fight and defeat our armed forces and society for the Party’s stated purpose of destroying America.
Long before the Chinese Communists acquired the means to challenge us militarily, they began to advance the goal of taking us down by waging “unrestricted warfare” against this country. Our Committee on the Present Danger: China has posted more than 210 webinars documenting the various lines of attack the CCP has employed to date, and their ominous success.
The penultimate of these programs addressed a topic particularly requiring our military’s urgent attention: The infiltration of Chinese personnel into America during the Biden open-borders era. If one recalls the level of damage and costs inflicted by nineteen amateurs on September 11, 2001, that pales in comparison to the potential harm that could be caused by many orders-of-magnitude larger numbers of highly trained professionals.
If that sounds alarmist, consider that a House subcommittee reported that U.S. Border Patrol encountered 27,496 Chinese nationals illegally entering the United States at the Southwest border during the seven months between October 2023 and April 2024. Those are just the ones that were counted. One Chinese national was sentenced in May 2025 after pleading guilty to piloting a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base during a military satellite launch. He was arrested while boarding a flight to China at San Francisco International Airport. An additional 277,398 Chinese foreign students were here in the U.S. legally during 2023-2024. Some of them also break our laws; Xiaolei Wu, a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, was sentenced in 2024 for cyberstalking and threatening a person promoting democracy in China, though President Biden later granted him clemency.
Chinese forces in the U.S. could cause disruption and chaos sufficient to impede, if not preclude, power-projection from the continental United States to distant targets of Chinese aggression overseas.
These prospects raise a serious question about U.S. policy towards China. According to an official U.S. government read-out of a recent conversation between Secretary Hegseth and his Chinese counterpart, Minister of National Defense Admiral Dong Jun, “the United States does not seek conflict with China nor is it pursuing regime change or strangulation of the PRC.”
In other words, we are not pursuing the overthrow of the CCP, even though the communists are exhibiting no such restraint in their policy toward America. Worse yet, some in the Trump administration seem intent on pursuing a policy of actually propping up the Chinese Communist regime at a time when it is being buffeted by acute economic, demographic and apparently political crises. President Trump is evidently being told that were we to do otherwise, the result could be the toppling of the CCP and chaos in China.
In short, we are committed to preventing domestic difficulties in the PRC even as its dictator, Xi Jinping, is seemingly doing everything practicable to create, exacerbate and exploit them here.
To be sure, there is no certainty about when and how China’s odious Communist regime might fall, or what would come next. President Trump, Secretary Hegseth and the leadership of America’s armed forces, however, must understand that there are acute risks associated with the status quo—a Chinese government determined to destroy us remaining in power and operating with few constraints.
The bottom line is that the United States must resist the temptation to intervene, as it has done repeatedly in the past, to prop up the CCP. We must instead act, as President Reagan did forty years ago, by enhancing our military preparedness, helping liberate enslaved people from epic misrule, and defusing the threat that Communist China poses to American security.
Frank Gaffney acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration. Today, he is the President of the Institute for the American Future and the host of “Securing America” on the Real America’s Voice network.
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