[CLIP] Col. Grant Newsham on CCP Chemical Warfare and China’s Greatest Strategic Vulnerability

It is as clear a case of chemical warfare as you will find. What it is is China provides about 99% of the fentanyl precursors, the raw materials, that go to Mexico and then get turned into pills and moved into the United States. Fentanyl killed about 70,000 Americans last year, and that's Americans of all types. And in the entire 12-year Vietnam War, only 55,000 Americans were killed. So in one year, America lost 70,000 people, many of these of military age. And this is just ones who died. There's the walking wounded, the effects this has on families, societies. The cost of dealing with and trying to treat these people are immense. Some figures are over a trillion dollars, depending on where you look. But think about it. You've effectively launched an attack on your main enemy. You're killing, taking what amounts to a couple divisions of troops off the battlefield every year, and nobody does anything. You get away with it. So this is really setting us up for the day that a shooting war actually starts, or just may not even be necessary. Fentanyl, the chemical warfare, ties in to economic warfare, because it's very hard. America needs workers. Well, if a lot of them are drug-addled, well, it gets hard to... It's just one example. It's very hard to find people to actually work in the factories if you do start one up. Also, there's a psychological warfare aspect of this, because by getting so many influential Americans convinced that they have to be in the China market, convinced that they need to make money from China, and also convinced that we need China's help with fill-in-the-blank North Korea, climate change, transnational crime, that as a result of that, we've tied our hands and will not take on China on the fentanyl scourge that is killing just tens of thousands of us every year, and it's not stopping. In 2018, Donald Trump did speak with Xi Jinping about it, and Mr. Trump declared it was a game changer, and of course nothing changed. But Xi Jinping even told him, look, you've got a drug problem, I don't, and they could stop it anytime they want, but they're glad to have it go in to the U.S. So I was going to say that multiple administrations have been, quote, working with China on this issue, right? You're saying they can stop it anytime they want. So not everyone would agree with you, not everyone would believe it's that simple. How could that be possible? Well, here's a test. I would suggest to anybody who wants, go to China, and go not from your hotel, and go on a walk, and if you see a picture of Xi Jinping, take out your Sharpie and draw a mustache on it, and see if the Ministry of State Security is waiting for you before you get back to your hotel, or five minutes afterwards. The level of control that China has over that society is immense, and Orwell couldn't have dreamed of it. What you find actually when, I used to do a lot of work in the organized crime field, Asian organized crime in particular, and you always found with the Chinese organized crime that it tracked back to the security services, to the Chinese military, to the Chinese Communist Party, always. And you look at the, this has just been a huge win for the Chinese to cause us this much harm, and to get us to think China can't do anything about it. You know, I've heard all, I've heard the excuses, well, it's local officials, and the central government doesn't know what they're doing. And once again, that suggests you don't really know how China works. I've heard that, well, the police, their hands are tied, otherwise they would crack down. Well, the police do whatever they want. And the other good one is that, well, the guys that make it, they just rejigger the formula, so it's not illegal. And as if in China that the law actually matters, the law is what Xi Jinping says it is. It is to say that China could crack down on this if it wanted, but I would suggest it doesn't because it's just been wildly successful in killing us. I don't know why you would stop if your enemy is not wise enough to stand up for himself. I really want to talk about solutions. As we finish up, to this one specifically, what would we do? One other thing that just occurred to me, you did mention how the CCP might use climate change. In the U.S., there's many that believe that it's an existential threat. We have to work with the Chinese Communist Party on this. If we don't, well, basically, we need to make all sorts of concessions for this purpose. And so how do you view that? Is that another tool of war fighting? It's incredibly effective, too. China is very sensitive, for example, to its human rights record, where it's just an absolute atrocity. And you have, say, the climate czar, John Kerry, saying, human rights don't matter. The only important thing is climate change. So we're not going to talk about this with the Chinese. We need their help. And I mentioned North Korea, transnational crime, even though so much of the transnational crime has a Chinese role in it. But also North Korea, what they're doing is actually very much in line with what the Chinese want. But you have the Americans in particular thinking, well, China doesn't want, they want what we do, and we don't want to pressure them, don't want to get them mad. And it's hard to see how you're going to win a war or win this fight with the PRC if you're thinking like that. And you've got to hand it to them. Some days you almost don't know what to say, but what do you do about it? Certainly we need to do something different than what we're doing and have been doing. But you apply pressure where it's really going to hurt. And you apply it almost asymmetrically, from a different direction. And one example of this is the, I cover it in the book, is that the Chinese government is absolutely dependent on convertible currency, US dollars. Without it, they really can't fund their military or even their economic growth. They want to fund the Belt and Road Initiative. Well, you've got to pay in US dollars or something like it. So everything they want to do, they have got to find the dollars somewhere. And that can be by manufacturing things in China, selling them overseas. It can be Wall Street pumping in tens of billions a year into the Chinese economy, which is just a godsend to the Chinese Communist Party. America's business class, the foreign direct investment it puts into China, it's sending in the convertible currency that they're using to build their economy, build their military, their so-called comprehensive national power. So that doesn't get nearly the attention that it deserves. They haven't got half the foreign currency they need to pay all of the things they owe. You saw the American investor Mark Mobius just note the other day that he wasn't allowed to take his money out of China. Welcome to discovering gravity. This has been the case forever in that system. So there's a shortage of convertible currency. So here's what you do. You take the biggest and even not the biggest Chinese financial institutions and you cut them off from the US dollar network. Start with the People's Bank of China, revoke its license to operate in the US for six months. That would get some attention. Additionally, many, if not most China's elite have assets overseas. They don't have enough confidence in their own system or its future. So they put it in places like America, Britain, England, Singapore, Australia. And ideally, they get a relative out there with a green card, a residence permit. And we should be seizing bank accounts, cancelling residence permits of their relatives and also publicizing this to high heaven. The Bloomberg's did some excellent reporting around 2013 on Xi Jinping's family overseas wealth. They knuckled under and spiked the stories. That's how sensitive it was. But that is a way you can apply pressure so that it matters personally, feel a personal effect at the high end of China's ruling class. Also, go after them on the human rights front nonstop, every day, as I say, nonstop. But we don't seem to do that. And those are things that the Chinese Communist Party is very vulnerable to. Just a few ideas there. And you can see none of those involve shooting. But these are forms of pressure that you can apply if you identify what the key weaknesses are.