Watching Joe Biden tackle foreign policy is like, well, watching someone who has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” That was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s assessment several years ago, and it’s even more consequential with Biden as commander-in-chief. Another man with experience, Colonel Allen West, weighs in with why the Chinese Communists are taking advantage.

The United States foolishly believed that we could normalize relations with these brutal ChiComs, grant them most favored trade status, and allow them entry into the global economic community in an attempt to change their behavior. The ChiComs only saw this as a weakness and an opportunity. China realized that the United States did not defeat the Soviet Union militarily, but rather economically. Yes, our military posture, capability, capacity, readiness, and will enabled the economic collapse of the USSR as they held onto failing socialist economic policies. China recognized that they could stay communists but use free market capitalism as a means to create economic dependence of the West … due to our hunger for cheap goods.

Over the ensuing years, China has grown economically while maintaining its global belligerence and human rights violations. They are still the ChiComs. And much like a tick inserts itself into its host, so has China inserted itself into the global economy, gorged itself on our economic blood, and infected us with disease. And yet we, save for the four years of the Trump administration, have done nothing. The ChiComs have stolen countless amounts of our intellectual property and demanded forced transfers of technology from businesses seeking to operate in China.

Chinese dominance is extending worldwide — from the Panama Canal to ports in the Caribbean and to former areas of U.S. influence like Afghanistan, where the Chinese are exploiting natural resources to corner the market on material for batteries for those electric vehicles American leftists love so much. Then there’s the Chinese spyware known as TikTok, and other infiltration of the U.S. that the Biden administration belatedly or meekly countered. So, what to do? West offers some suggestions:

We must immediately begin restoring our supply lines, especially medical, from China to America, or to real allies in the Pacific rim. We need to establish a NATO like collective security organization in the Pacific. We should start expelling any Chinese nationals who have ties back to the CCP, and I mean students, professors, and businesses. We should recover lands bought by ChiComs. You can bet they would not allow me to purchase a parcel of land in China. We need to stop allowing China to dictate to us our foreign policy; that means open and normal relations with Taiwan. Heck, I wish we had more joint economic endeavors with Taiwan, especially in the areas of technology and chip development. And lastly, we cannot continue to watch the ChiComs outpace us in Maritime military growth, but that is what’s happening. Our Navy is focused on pronoun use while China is focused on aircraft carriers and missiles … along with fortifying islands and claiming waterways.

It does not take a China expert to see what is happening — just some common sense and guts, both of which are lacking in this compromised Biden administration. Xi Jinping knows weakness when he sees it, and it is occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Naval Observatory. The ChiComs know that they have two years of free reign, and they will use that advantage.

Read the whole thing here.