WASHINGTON, D.C.— In May 2019, after decades of “unrestricted warfare” against the United States, the Chinese Communist Party declared a “People’s War” on this country. At long last, on February 21, 2025, an American president fought back, effectively declaring a state of financial war on our most dangerous “foreign adversary”: the Chinese Communist Party.
On that day, President Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum to relevant Cabinet officers and agency heads directing them to take sweeping actions to implement what he dubbed the “America First Investment Policy.” Highlights of that policy[1] [1] as laid out in that memo include the following:
The Threat
- “Economic security is national security. The PRC does not allow United States companies to take over their critical infrastructure, and the United States should not allow the PRC to take over United States critical infrastructure.”
- “PRC-affiliated investors are targeting the crown jewels of United States technology, food supplies, farmland, minerals, natural resources, ports, and shipping terminals.”
- “The PRC is also increasingly exploiting United States capital to develop and modernize its military, intelligence, and other security apparatuses, which poses significant risk to the United States homeland and Armed Forces of the United States around the world.”
- “Related actions include the development and deployment of dual-use technologies, weapons of mass destruction, advanced conventional weapons, and malicious cyber‑enabled actions against the United States and its people.”
- “Through its national Military-Civil Fusion strategy, the PRC increases the size of its military-industrial complex by compelling civilian Chinese companies and research institutions to support its military and intelligence activities.”
- “Those Chinese companies also raise capital by: selling to American investors securities that trade on American and foreign public exchanges; lobbying United States index providers and funds to include these securities in market offerings; and engaging in other acts to ensure access to United States capital and accompanying intangible benefits.”
- “In this way, the PRC exploits United States investors to finance and advance the development and modernization of its military.”
Policy
- “The United States will reduce the exploitation of public and private sector capital, technology, and technical knowledge by foreign adversaries such as the PRC.”
- “The United States will establish new rules to stop United States companies and investors from investing in industries that advance the PRC’s national Military-Civil Fusion strategy and stop PRC-affiliated persons from buying up critical American businesses and assets, allowing only those investments that serve American interests.”
- “The United States will also use all necessary legal instruments to further deter United States persons from investing in the PRC’s military-industrial sector.”
- “It is past time for American universities to stop supporting foreign adversaries with their investment decisions, much as they should stop granting university access to supporters of terrorism.”
- “…The 1984 United States-People’s Republic of China Income Tax Convention… along with the PRC’s admission to the World Trade Organization and the related undertaking by the United States to accord unconditional Most Favored Nation treatment to goods and services of the PRC, led to the deindustrialization of the United States and the technological modernization of the PRC military. We will seek to reverse both those trends. United States investors will invest in the future of America, not the future of the PRC.”
- “To protect the savings of United States investors and channel them into American growth and prosperity, my Administration will also:
(i) determine if adequate financial auditing standards are upheld…;
(ii) review the variable interest entity and subsidiary structures used by foreign-adversary companies to trade on United States exchanges…; and
(iii) restore the highest fiduciary standards as required by the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974, seeking to ensure that foreign adversary companies are ineligible for pension plan contributions.”
President Trump properly included Hong Kong and Macau along with mainland China in these strictures, as he did other “foreign adversaries” – specifically, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro.
The Committee on the Present Danger: China has, from its inception six years ago, championed the sorts of actions recommended by America’s foremost financial warfare strategist and practitioner, Roger W. Robinson – who helped Ronald Reagan use such techniques to take down the USSR – and endorsed last Friday by President Trump. The Committee looks forward to working to monitor the expeditious implementation of the America First Investment Policy directive and to thwart predictable efforts by the CCP and its friends on Wall Street and other “captured elites” in the Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the tech sector and the media to frustrate Mr. Trump’s vitally needed initiative.
The CPDC also applauds legendary Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo for her two, hour-long and path-breaking Fox Nation specials entitled “Underwriting the Enemy” (Seasons 1 and 2). Her programs powerfully illuminated the magnitude of the danger posed by U.S. investors’ enabling of the CCP’s military build-up on a scale unseen since Adolf Hitler’s prior to World War II and its other threatening activities. These include: China’s efforts to colonize most of the world; Tiktok’s addicting 173 million Americans with its subversive content; the PRC’s bastion-building in the South China Sea; and its preparations to lay exclusive claim to the moon and its resources in the strategic High Frontier.
[1] [2] Emphasis added throughout.