“If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” declared the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in a statement reposted Tuesday by the Chinese Embassy. President Donald Trump has engaged the CCP in a punishing spiral of escalating tariffs, which have now exceeded 100% in both directions. But the conflict is not limited to trade, as tensions grow between the U.S. and China on numerous diplomatic and military fault lines.

Trade War

Front and center has been the trade war, with Trump hiking tariffs on Chinese goods to an effective tariff rate of 145%, while the CCP has raised tariffs on American goods to 125%. “The U.S. escalation of tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which seriously infringes on China’s legitimate rights and interests and seriously undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system,” complained China’s Finance Ministry.

That grievance might carry more weight if China did not routinely violate the legitimate rights and interests of other nations, particularly the U.S., through currency manipulation, slave labor, intellectual property theft, and intense censorship.

Travel Advisory

In an apparent attempt to extend the trade war horizontally, China’s Tourism Ministry on Wednesday issued a travel warning for the U.S., stating, “Recently, due to the deterioration of China-U.S. economic and trade relations and the domestic security situation in the United States, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reminds Chinese tourists to fully assess the risks of traveling to the United States and be cautious.”

The U.S. State Department issues travel advisories to discourage Americans from visiting parts of the world rendered dangerous through civil unrest, rampant crime, or oppressive or uncooperative governments. China’s travel advisory, especially the allusion to an imaginary “domestic security situation” is calculated to deter Chinese tourism to America, and thus hit the U.S. economy on another pressure point.

Cyber Attacks

The CCP has accompanied its longstanding economic belligerence with accelerating aggression in cyberspace. Last year, in a breach called Salt Typhoon, Chinese hackers broke into U.S. telecommunications networks, including those belonging to AT&T and Verizon, and they used the data to spy on the unencrypted calls and texts of government and political figures, including people working on the Trump and Harris presidential campaigns.

A separate breach called Volt Typhoon attempted to gain a foothold in computer networks managing critical U.S. infrastructure, while a third attack in December broke into the U.S. Treasury Department and accessed employee workstations.

The CCP has always denied responsibility for these powerful cyberattacks in public, but they came close to acknowledging a role in them during a secret December meeting in Geneva, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Thursday. At the meeting, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs official Wang Lei told the American delegation that the infrastructure hacks resulted from the U.S. military’s backing of Taiwan. The language was oblique enough to avoid a direct admission of guilt, but nevertheless clear enough to convey the threat.

In response to this reporting, China’s embassy in Washington dismissed “so-called hacking threats,” choosing instead to attack the U.S. for “using cybersecurity to smear and slander China.” The U.S. State Department responded that “Chinese cyber threats are some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security,” and that “the United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to safeguard U.S. critical infrastructure from irresponsible and reckless cyberattacks from Beijing.”

Military Tensions

Regardless of the details of the secret December meeting — a last hurrah for former President Biden’s diplomatic team — American officials assess that China escalated its aggressive actions around Taiwan by 300% in 2024, in what the U.S. military calls not just exercises by rehearsals for an invasion.

“Foremost” of the challenges the U.S. faces in the Indo-Pacific is “China’s increasingly aggressive and assertive behavior,” said Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. “Their unprecedented military modernization encompassing advancements in artificial intelligence, [hypersonic missiles], space-based capabilities, among others, poses a real and serious threat to our homeland, to our allies, and to our partners.”

Unfortunately, China not only threatens the U.S. homeland from their own hemisphere but from ours. “China’s military has too large of a presence in the Western Hemisphere,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared Wednesday at the Central American Security Conference in Panama. “Make no mistake, Beijing is investing and operating in this region for military advantage and unfair economic gain.”

After pressure from the Trump administration, a Chinese company agreed to sell ports it operated at either end of the Panama Canal, but Hegseth noted the further threat of Chinese military inroads into Latin America.

This brings us full circle, to the CCP declaration that opened this article: “If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.” Perhaps someone should tell them that cribbing lines from manipulative movie villains (“If it’s war Guilder wants, it’s war they shall get,” Prince Humperdinck, “The Princess Bride”; “If it’s a war Aslan wants, it’s a war he shall get,” Queen Jadis, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”) makes them sound a little too sinister — not to mention eager.

“The era of capitulating to coercion by the communist Chinese is over,” declared Hegseth on Tuesday. China’s “growing and adversarial control of strategic land and critical infrastructure in this hemisphere cannot and will not stand.” Those aren’t quite fighting words, but I don’t think Xi will invite Hegseth to tea anytime soon.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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