Aside from his support for the Navy’s worse-than-useless littoral combat ship, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) is excelling as chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Both Gallagher and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), deserve credit for their bipartisan effort to protect the nation from China.
Considering the range of threats that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime poses toward the United States and its interests, the committee’s workload is heavy. Still, the committee’s work this week centered in New York City. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi met with Wall Street executives concerning their investments in China. The committee wants American companies to divest from certain areas of the Chinese economy.
US SHOULD HELP THE PHILIPPINES REPLACE THE BRP SIERRA MADRE
Many on Wall Street don’t like this. Krishnamoorthi told Semafor that “he heard one participant remark that ‘if we don’t invest in these companies, somebody else will.'” That statement speaks volumes about how many on Wall Street see restrictions on their investments in China — namely, through an opportunity cost versus national security prism.
Underlined by CEOs such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Intel’s Pat Gelsinger, too many American financial and corporate leaders believe that their maximization of Chinese profit should come before national security. In contrast, Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi rightly believe that no U.S. company should be helping the People’s Liberation Army improve its means of sending young American sailors to watery graves. Unfortunately, that is what we are talking about here. The Chinese want U.S. funding in their tech sector (as BlackRock and others provide) and access to American technology (as Intel and others such as Nvidia and Qualcomm provide) in order to improve their means of spying on, stealing, and both figuratively and literally sinking U.S. interests. (Google “DF-27” and note that the U.S. Navy is dancing on very, very thin ice when it says it can protect its carriers from PLA anti-ship ballistic missiles.) It’s intolerable when close allies such as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron support Chinese ambitions in this regard. It should be unconscionable for Americans to do so.
What does the committee want to do about it?
Well, Gallagher wants sectorwide restrictions on U.S. investment in sensitive areas of the Chinese economy. Krishnamoorthi supports a more targeted approach. Regardless, they’ve shown impressive unity in seeking productive outcomes.
Indeed, the committee’s positive focus extends well beyond Wall Street. At a Council on Foreign Relations event on Monday, for example, Gallagher noted how the intractable U.S. government bureaucracy is also a major problem.
Referencing the AUKUS nuclear submarine accord between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., Gallagher noted, “We have no closer alliances than that which we have with the Aussies and the Brits. And yet we still have outdated roadblocks to cooperation in the form of ITAR, International Trafficking in Arms Regulation, that make it exceedingly difficult to share human beings and knowledge and technology even with allies with whom we share sensitive intelligence. Breaking down those barriers strikes me as an obvious thing we could do this Congress.” Krishnamoorthi agreed, observing that “it’s crazy because there’s a large AUKUS caucus. And yet people can’t act. And that’s kind of the sclerosis which generally has beset Congress.”
Again, Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are hitting the nail on the head. International Trafficking in Arms Regulation has utility in terms of preventing U.S. technology from falling into Chinese and Russian hands. But the U.K. and Australia are not the United Arab Emirates and Germany. They can protect U.S. secrets. It should thus be a no-brainer for Congress to carve out an ITAR waiver for the U.K. and Australia. If not, we might as well give up on pretending that AUKUS is even a thing. And we might as well give up on maximizing the deterrence of Chinese aggression in the Pacific.
The top line is clear, however. Even if many in Congress now see their duty as beginning and ending with the service of partisanship, these two members are showing that patriotism and bipartisan cooperation can sometimes still intersect in Washington. Wall Street and Beijing might not like it, but Americans should.
