Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editors’ Note: In past articles, we have highlighted the schizoid nature of American relations with China. Are they a significant trading partner that should be our chief supply line of strategic minerals, pharmaceuticals, windmills, solar panels, and the like, or are they an existential enemy? If they are the latter, why the Trump reversal on Chinese students and the agreement to let 600,000 of them into the country? Steve Bannon is supposedly close to President Trump, but Bannon seems to have a different view than the President, a view that we share with Bannon. This country needs to make up its mind, and soon, as to what our future with China should look like. American businesses view China as a vast market and a significant supplier of low-cost labor. Our trading instincts collide with our security interests. But what may be suitable for business in the short term may not always be good in the longer term. The theory has always been that trading relations mitigate conflict. Countries that have a financial interest in each other don’t go to war. This theory is not supported by history.

“We must decouple and hard decouple starting tomorrow morning.”

That was former adviser to President Donald Trump Stephen K. Bannon, on the relationship between the United States and China in his remarks at the National Conservatism Conference in the District of Columbia on Thursday.

Bannon, who is the current host of the “WarRoom” podcast stressed in his discussion about “making American First” that the greatest, external existential threat to America is in Beijing and that everything else is a sideshow. He said that the American ruling class, including many Republicans, essentially sold out the country and allowed China to rise as an adversary to the United States.

Bannon pointed to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who said on Thursday that Trump’s tariffs and his policies toward Ukraine have made this the most dangerous era since the 1930s, just before World War II.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Bannon said. “America First is what’s going to save this country.” He pointed to the recent joint meetup between Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian leaders, calling it a “flex,” demonstrating that they think they are winning a World War III that has already begun.

“Mitch McConnell and the neoliberal neocons are what got us here,” he said. “Thirty years of rot.” Bannon said that in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square protests, Communist China was on its last legs but is now ascendent. He said that China’s rise in the last 30 years is clearly not because of Trump’s tariffs.

Bannon said there are clear signs we are already in a kinetic third world war, given the mass casualties that have occurred in the war between Ukraine and Russia that outstrip the total casualties in the fall of France and the battles of North Africa in World War II. What’s “happening in the Middle East” is part of that larger, global war as well, he explained.

These wars did not start on Trump’s watch, Bannon said. And right now, America’s allies in Europe lack strength and political will because they are rotting from the inside due to radical Islam.

Therefore, Bannon recommended that Americans need to “wash their hands” of the conflict in Ukraine, which is a problem for the European Union, not the U.S. It’s a war that the U.S. simply can’t financially and militarily afford to keep engaged in, he said.

Unfortunately, the U.S. made a “Faustian pact” with China that enriched our geopolitical adversary and tech oligarchs at the expense of the American people, Bannon said, noting that Trump has been the only political figure in American history to say, “We are not going to do it this way.”

Bannon said that to truly contain China we need to isolate them. He recommended that the U.S. aggressively cut off Iran’s oil that provides 80% of China’s energy needs. This will put the mullahs off from capital and will hurt China, he said. Bannon also said that the U.S. needs to send hundreds of thousands of Chinese students “home,” because ultimately the CCP needs tech expertise to succeed.

He said that a lot of focus is put on Israel, but what is happening there is a sideshow of what’s happening globally. The true enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, Bannon said, aren’t in Tehran, they are in London, Paris, New York, and Western cities where Jihadists threaten Jews.

Bannon said that what really needs to happen is for the U.S. to hard pivot to Asia, where the real threats exist, and entirely decouple from China.

“The Middle East is not the main event,” he said. “This is the main event.”

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.