The New York Times Channels It’s Hitlerian Appeasement Past in Today’s Communist China

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The New York Times is playing a very dangerous collaborative game with the Chinese Communist Party that risks weakening both American resolve and national security.  In its lead editorial March 11, 2023, the Great Lady opined that:

[T]he relationship between the United States and China, for all its problems, continues to deliver substantial economic benefits [and] because the two nations are tied together by millions of normal and peaceful interactions every day, there is a substantial incentive to maintain those ties as a basis for working together on shared problems like climate change.  America’s interests are best served by emphasizing competition with China while minimizing confrontation.

In coming to this stunning Vichy France conclusion, the New York Times did give lip service to the failure of opening US markets to China to bring about its democratization, China’s authoritarian assault on democracy around the world, the theft of our intellectual property rights, the repression of Uighur Muslims, Communist China’s provocations in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, it’s ridiculous balloon caper over Montana, and Xi Jinping’s latest gambit to arm the Russians as Putin attempts to rape Ukraine.  Yet, despite these cautions – the forced subjugation of Hong Kong was not even noted – the New York Times still thinks it’s cool to get into bed with a country that is trying to rob America blind and subjugate the world. 

There seems to be no end to woke liberal foolishness; and one would do well to remember here the New York Times soft pedaling of Hitler’s anti-Semitism which asserted in its very first article about the dictator that such antisemitism was “not so violent or as genuine as it sounded.”[i]  Moreover, its coverage of the Nazis’ murder of Jews was likewise denounced as “fragmentary, incremental, and buried in dry briefings on interior pages” – a, by the way, description eerily similar of today’s New York Times coverage of Communist China.

This is what bothers me most about the New York Times current soft pedaling the dangers of Communist China.  It’s not just that I’ve done extensive research on the subject and published a trilogy on Communist China’s economic and military rise.  I also had first-hand access to all manner of government documents as a White House official that not only confirmed exactly all of what I had been writing publicly but also suggested, as hyperbolic as some critics of mine insisted I was, that even I had underestimated the scope of Communist China’s treachery.

In the not so mysterious way that the New York Times works, the paper’s editors have followed up its soft line editorial with a March 21, 2023 Daily Brief asking whether we are in a new “Cold War” with China. Carefully parsing this latest salvo, one can observe the same kind of soft pedaling observed in its editorial.

The key message of the Daily Brief is that Communist China has legitimate concerns about being “encircled” by the United States and its allies and that we are effectively pushing Communist China into Russia’s arms. Here, the Gray Lady seems oblivious to the propaganda content of the encirclement theme – the dictator Xi Jinping regularly uses the rhetoric to rally his nationalist troops.

More importantly, the Gray Lady seems equally oblivious to the fact that Communist China is not being pushed anywhere.  It is simply seizing another moment in history to play Russia against the United States.

In this case, Putin desperately needs Communist China’s support politically at the United Nations and elsewhere and, more importantly, needs to acquire Chinese arms as its own arsenal – particularly its tank fleet – moves rapidly towards empty. 

For Xi Jinping’s part, he covets Russia’s vast natural resources, particularly in Siberia, and high technology expertise, particularly in the military sphere. One should note here that Communist China includes the old Imperial Russia as one of those countries that forced China into its “unequal treaties,” and the Communist Chinese history books teach that large chunks of today’s Russia rightfully belong to the Chinese, with the port of Vladivostok a poster child along with vast portions of Siberia.  Yes, Russia, you should beware of China’s intentions.

Perhaps even more to the point from the US’s strategic point of view, Xi Jinping sees this opportunity to aid Russia in its time of need as a way to gain leverage over Biden in the United States – this opportunity provides him with a way to try to bargain away things like the Trump tariffs on Chinese products or to gain more access to US technology.

One would do well to remember here that the current Communist Chinese Superpower the world is now being confronted with is the bastard child of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and their love affair with Mao Zedong in the 1970s.  As the Laurel and Hardy of foreign policy, Kissinger and Nixon tried to play Communist China off of the Soviet Union; but wound up just getting played – as Nixon would later lament.

This failed Kissinger-Nixon gambit was, unfortunately, the beginning of a Long March to Communist China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, China’s subsequent dismantling of the US manufacturing base through unfair trade – the US did lose more than seventy thousand factories to Communist China – and China’s current domination in world manufacturing which, in turn, has allowed Communist China to build its own war machine.

Remember here: America’s trade deficit with Communist China is roughly equivalent to Communist China’s military budget so, in effect, American consumers are paying for the arming of a country that wants to take us through coercion if possible a la Sun Tzu or through military force if need be.

My request and admonition to the New York Times and its woke mob of faux journalists is to do your homework on Communist China. The only real solution here is to decouple economically from Communist China, reengage diplomatically around the world to counter Communist China’s soft power and debt trap offensive, and aggressively lean forward to defend American interests and democracy.

Memo to the New York Times: We are already at war economically and in cyberspace with Communist China so let’s discard the rhetoric of “competition.” If we are tough on China as we should be, perhaps we can avoid the military confrontation nobody wants. Peter Navarro.  Out.

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[i] The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning - Vox