(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) If the morning session of Thursday’s Heritage Foundation leadership summit struck a largely Reaganesque tone, the afternoon speakers—and, in particular, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., tore it down faster than the Berlin Wall after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Hawley and others tasked with addressing the imminent threat from China to American sovereignty said that the Republican Party must first look inward and cut bait with the neoconservative mindset that defined the era from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush.
“The Republican party as we know it must be reformed,” Hawley said.
Other China experts later indicated that the threat of a war over China’s takeover of Taiwan may be exagerrated but that the trans-Pacific superpower may already be in a cold war with the U.S.—one that they had been decades in planning while the West slept.
America is now “30 years into this experiment,” Hawley said of the push to modernize China’s economy by designating it a “most favored nation” and bringing it into the World Trade Organization in 2001—one of the major foreign acts of then-President Bill Clinton, who benefited greatly from Chinese donors.
However, Hawley acknowledged that Republicans were equally bullish on the idea of China becoming a democratic trading partner, and that it was the globalist ex-CIA Director George H.W. Bush, during his presidency, who first brought the term “New World Order” into the public sphere during his 1991 State of the Union speech.
“The verdict is in: The politics of ‘New World Order’ capitalism has failed,” Hawley said.
In retrospect, he said that allowing and facilitating the rise of communist China will prove “one of the most colossal errors any global power has made in its history.”
In addition to empowering and emboldening China, Hawley noted that the globalist movement embraced by conservatives had undermined middle-class Americans, giving America’s radical Left the opportunity to ally itself with Washington, D.C.’s permanent administrative state.
“The cultural Marxists are now in power. …They run the Democratic Party,” Hawley said. “If we lose the middle class, we will lose… the country,” Hawley said.
His talk came shortly after the Heritage Foundation rolled out a policy paper titled “Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China.”
In a panel discussion following Hawley’s talk, several China experts—including one of the paper’s authors, Heritage fellow Michael Pillsbury—addressed a range of concerns about China.
Conservative journalist Peter Schweizer responded to a question about whether a war with China was imminent by saying there already was one in progress.
“My view is that China’s already at war with us,” he said.
“Their mindset is they don’t want a kinetic war with the United States,” he said, but instead “to paraphrase Churchill, they want the fruits of war.”
Also on the panel was Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who was reluctant to hype the prospect of a ware with China that would give the deep state and Pentagon officials further justification for demanding extra funding to feed their federal spending addictions.
In order to tackle China, the U.S. first needed to get its own house in order by ending its wasteful quagmire in Ukraine that had left the U.S. military hopelessly unprepared for another major conflict.
“They would love for us to just keep throwing out billions and billions of dollars,” Roy said. “… We’re not in a position to ratchet up the machine like we were in 1941 because we’ve spent ourselves into oblivion.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
