Republican Senator McCormick: Misjudged China 25 Years Ago, Now America's Most Severe Security Threat

US Republican Senator Dave McCormick stated in a speech that 25 years ago the US made a wrong bet on China's motives and intentions, believing that trade would make China free and friendly. However, Beijing turned America's goodwill into leverage to challenge the United States. He pointed out that in 2017 Trump broke the old consensus by defining China as an adversary, and that America's dispute is not with the Chinese people, but with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the most powerful totalitarian regime in the world. He mentioned the various human rights abuses committed by the CCP and emphasized that the US-China competition is a generational struggle, and diplomacy must be built on the basis of strength.

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So let me begin with this. 25 years ago, we bet wrong. We bet wrong about the motivations and intentions of our primary adversary. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, Washington made a bipartisan bet that trade would make China a closer friend, would make China free.

And over time, Beijing has turned that faith, that good faith that we showed them, into leverage.

And it's used that leverage to outbuild us and challenge America in many ways.

Now, something happened in 2017.

In 2017, President Trump broke the old consensus and finally called China what it is, an adversary.

Now, to be clear, our dispute is not with the Chinese people.

It's with the Chinese Communist Party, the most powerful totalitarian regime on earth and the gravest threat to our security since World War II.

It's committed genocide in many parts of China.

It's jailed Pastor Ezra Jin and other religious leaders, and it sentenced Jimmy Lai to 20 years for running a newspaper.

And Xi Jinping wants nothing less than to supplant America as the world's superpower.

And the AI revolution, which I'm sure we'll talk about today, is accelerating this competition between the United States and China, and it's increasing the stakes.

This is a generational fight, just as the Cold War was.

And then, as now, leaders should talk, as President Trump and Xi Jinping did at the White House last month. We need to talk.

We need to keep these open channels of communication, but diplomacy only works from a position of strength with that in mind let me end where i began at the dmz the people on both sides of that line when you're standing there there's a bright line where the armistice sort of holds the two sides in check and the people on both sides of that line share a language and a history thousands of years but 70 years ago both of some people were extraordinary. Today, the whole family is extraordinary. Including in the new future, other people are extraordinary. America is good, we must be extraordinary, we must be extraordinary, we must have problems, but America is good, because it is good.

The world of the worlds of the world, and this matter is accounted for by us, friends and friends all over the world of the worlds, like Japan and South Korea, this generation must account for freedom and democracy, rather than the Chinese Communist Party. We can account for this battle, we must account for this battle, to trade for the world of the worlds of the world. And our goal is to be able to rely on new output capacity into national power and national power into an enduring American leadership in the world