Authored by Benjamin Weingarten via RealClearWire,
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 - with face masks, gloves, and other basic protections in high demand - Chinese leaders threatened to plunge America into the "mighty sea of coronavirus" by withholding essential medical supplies in retaliation for measures such as the U.S. travel ban on visitors from China.
The threat, issued through a Chinese Communist Party organ, brought into stark relief China's strategy to subdue would-be foes by rendering them reliant on its exports for life's necessities - prompting a pledge from U.S. policymakers to address supply chain issues that made the country vulnerable to a hostile power.
Six years later, despite a raft of initiatives - including tariffs, made-in-America requirements, and the makings of a responsive U.S. industrial policy embraced by the Biden and Trump administrations - America's effort to reduce dependence on China in pivotal sectors has been slow and faces a slew of challenges.
Headlines heralding the decline in U.S. imports from China to levels not seen since the depths of the pandemic mask the fact that America's chief rival continues to control chokepoints in supply chains that provide urgent military assets, key technologies, and important medicines.
The Chinese government recently demonstrated its ability to weaponize critical sectors when it responded to U.S. tariffs by restricting exports of rare earth materials and magnets that are critical to American defense systems and weapons. War-gamers have indicated that the control over those supply chains may become paramount should China invade Taiwan or engage in other hostilities that might draw an American military response. Some estimates have indicated that such a struggle could wipe out 10% of global GDP - albeit damaging China and the U.S. alike.
Some experts say the major stumbling block is the private sector, which remains at odds with policymakers in tilting away from China, and has long relished its large market and cheap labor pool. Isaac Stone Fish, the CEO of Strategy Risks, a China-focused business risk analysis firm, told RealClearInvestigations that "Despite all the tough talk," and economic and geopolitical tensions, his firm's analysis shows that dozens of major U.S. companies have increased their engagement with China during 2026.
To treat supply chain threats as an economic problem and leave it to be addressed by free enterprise - rather than as a national security challenge requiring whole-of-society mobilization - is a fatal error, according to Leland Miller, a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission member.
"[A]s long as you allow market dynamics to dictate what the U.S. is doing...you're going to lose," Miller said.
China's Commanding PositionThe Trump and Biden administrations have both highlighted the significance of the supply chain challenge to our national security, economic security, and public health. These include China's commanding positions in:
To attain these positions, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission wrote in its 2025 annual report, "China has deliberately pursued a strategy of expanding production and deepening global dependence on Chinese exports while reducing its own reliance on imports. This strategy builds on decades of industrial policy that led to a concentration of supply chains in China and undercut competitors by flooding global markets with subsidized, underpriced goods."
China's tactics in pursuit of this strategy have ranged from government subsidies and currency manipulation to intellectual property theft and industrial espionage, forced labor, and product "dumping at artificially low prices - and, as it has increasingly been met with resistance, export controls."
Tariffs and StockpilesThe tariff regime, enacted during the first Trump administration and mostly continued under the Biden administration, is one key tactic the U.S. government has used to counter China's playbook. Other policies have included directly stockpiling critical resources; securing strategic sectors through fostering international alliances and public-private partnerships; permitting reform; trade enforcement actions; incentives for re-shoring; and export controls.
"This is a whole-of-government effort across key industry sectors including critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, autos, steel, aluminum, and copper," White House spokesman Kush Desai told RCI. "Hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment commitments across these sectors reflects how the administration's long-term agenda continues to bear fruit."
Still, experts remain concerned that the U.S. is ill-equipped to solve the complex problem.
Ideally, experts say, the U.S. government would comprehensively map the supply chain risks and work with all relevant stakeholders to mitigate them. The Trump administration has focused in particular on rare earth minerals and artificial intelligence technologies. Similarly, the Biden administration laid out a number of areas of concern from batteries to biotech as detailed in its Quadrennial Supply Chain Review. And, to varying degrees, both administrations attempted to coordinate their risk-mitigation efforts with foreign governments and the private sector.
Yet experts lamented that the government lacks the information necessary to comprehensively identify and attack supply chain vulnerabilities - rendering policies to date "ad hoc," according to Meg Reiss, a former national security staffer on Capitol Hill and founder of SolidIntel, which uses AI to identify supply chain risks.
Leland Miller, who was appointed to the USCC by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, told RCI that the U.S. still has to do a lot of foundational work to to "map the [various] supply chains" and to identify "the vulnerabilities."
Miller pins the slow progress to the lack of data from an often resistant private sector.
USCC Vice Chair Mike Kukien, an appointee of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, concurred, asserting that "anytime Congress has attempted to wade into this space of...pulling information out of the supply chain, the first people to come and bang on your door and say, 'Don't do it,' is industry."
Pushback From BusinessCompanies argue that identifying areas where they are reliant on China and transitioning operations elsewhere would threaten their business models. They also claim it is costly and onerous to collect information on the multiple tiers of suppliers on whom they rely, and in some cases, they lack the wherewithal to do so. For its part, China has sought to impose costs - including ending market access - on companies that cooperate with supply chain transparency efforts.
Miles Yu, who served as principal China policy planner on strategy at the State Department during the first Trump administration, identified "Wall Street and Silicon Valley globalists" as influential opponents of Washington's efforts to combat China's supply chain chokepoints more broadly.
The task is further complicated by China's efforts to avoid Trump's tariffs by routing their products through more U.S.-friendly countries as a workaround.
"China's ability to sort of hide its hand from a manufacturing perspective, unless there's a real attempt to do country of origin work, is pretty strong," Joshua Hodges, a former senior director at the National Security Council, told RCI. "And you're seeing that in the defense industrial complex. You're seeing it in cell phones. You're seeing it really in any place where there are parts of a supply chain that have become commodities."
Miles Yu concurs. "[T]oo many opportunistic allies and partners in EU and Asia [are] not in sync with Washington," as well, making grappling with the global nature of the problem even harder, he said.
On the U.S. side, basic problems of coordination within the government threaten even the most comprehensive effort to take on the supply chain challenge. The National Defense Authorization Act is perhaps the seminal bill aligning the executive and legislative branches on China policy. Reiss notes that "the way...the legislative cycle works," when it comes to mitigating supply chain risk, "everything's based on NDAA timing."
Should one NDAA cycle pass in which vulnerabilities go unaddressed, then remedies will not be included for the next "year and a half for beginning implementation, much less being fully implemented. So the timelines start becoming significant if we don't have movement."
Bright SpotsDespite their bearish conclusions, experts did note some bright spots. Stone Fish called tariffs "the biggest forcing mechanism yet - high enough costs might finally do what politics couldn't. But China controls critical minerals that American factories can't do without, so escalation cuts both ways."
Miller noted that tariffs may be an effective defensive tool for protecting industries under attack from a China that often floods the market with goods to undercut foreign competitors. Tariffs, he says, should be used to ringfence critical sectors as their participants shift to alternative suppliers and rebuild their domestic production capacities. "But you can't just throw around a tariff wall and expect industry to miraculously develop domestically as a result of that," he says.
Miles Yu has a more sanguine view. He said that in the areas of defense, automobiles, and telecommunications services, the U.S. has been making progress on mitigating supply chain risk from China. And he believes that prohibitive tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, automobiles, including electronic vehicles, green products, and "enhanced SEC scrutiny" on publicly traded Chinese companies in the U.S. have borne fruit. Conversely, he argued that pharma and bio product restrictions remain wanting.
While concerned about the lack of strategic coherence in America's risk mitigation efforts to date, Reiss hopes that efforts from the Defense Department reflect increasing strategic discipline. She cites, for example, initiatives out of the Office of Strategic Capital - which has backed domestic processing of rare earth minerals - as positives.
In the long term, Miller says, the U.S. only has to modify, not reinvent, the supply chain. "It's not that we have to go back and figure out where every single input to every single supply chain is," he says. "We have to make sure that enough of it comes from outside of China... so that China doesn't have a stranglehold over any particular supply chain no matter what happens."
In the interim, in the wake of the May 2026 summit between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the American side touted China's stated commitment to "address U.S. concerns regarding supply chain shortages related to rare earths and other critical minerals," as well as "prohibitions or restrictions on the sale of rare earth production and processing equipment and technologies."
Still, the conflict between the two nations continues. Earlier this month, the Department of War added nearly two dozen Chinese companies to its blacklist. In apparent response, Chinese authorities imposed trade restrictions on dozens of U.S. defense companies, including barring exports to two American rare earth producers.
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/24/2026 - 23:40A troubling pattern appears to be emerging.
In a recent foiled terror plot targeting UFC Freedom 250 at the White House, authorities said the suspect of an underground network, led by an illegal alien ringleader, planned to use suicide drones and a sniper team against "capitalist elites." Separately, Rebel News described the Montreal shooter earlier this week as an "antisemitic Communist."
While the cases appear separate, both point to a broader concern: revolutionary and radical-left rhetoric is increasingly bleeding into real-world violence, with younger and younger extremists resorting to violence targeting wealthy individuals or even right-leaning political figures.
Earlier this week, Rebel News released the full 104-page manifesto of the "antisemitic Communist" shooter, who was killed after shooting and killing a Montreal police officer in a Jewish neighborhood, killing a local suit seller, and leaving behind a manifesto railing against capitalism and law enforcement, among other things.
"Be unflinching, go forth, and KILL THEM ALL!" Seth Hatfield, the shooter, wrote in the manifesto.
Rebel News pointed out, "He was an antisemitic Communist."
He was an antisemitic Communist.
Read the Montreal murderer’s full, 104-page MANIFESTO here:https://t.co/Msvx6IvaUz
Why is that important? Just days earlier, news broke in the US that Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, an illegal alien, was the ringleader of a foiled terror attack targeting "billionaires" and "capitalist elites" at UFC Freedom 250 at the White House.
Both incidents, whether an actual attack or a plot, appear anti-government, anti-elite, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary in nature. None other than Hasan Piker, a prominent figure around the Democratic Socialists of America, has echoed revolutionary rhetoric to millions of his online followers: kill capitalists.
"Yeah, kill them! Kill those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude."
Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:
“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”
Democrats are campaigning with him. pic.twitter.com/YiZxGgRkgc
The radical pattern of behavior emanating from the left appears to be fostered in the far-left NGO sphere, with possible linkages abroad, as we have detailed in Cuba, China, and Europe.
🚨🧵 MAJOR BREAKING: German government has been grooming DSA leaders for over a decade, and nobody noticed? 🇩🇪
Last night, Darializa Avila Chevalier — endorsed by NYC-DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) — beat a five-term incumbent to win New York's 13th congressional… pic.twitter.com/UtXDQRSDJf
These revolutionary movements seek to destroy the West from within, throw wrenches into the capitalist machine, and, more importantly, as we have seen play out time and again, resort to violence.
The FBI failed to address the rise of the revolutionary left, the NGO sphere, and foreign connections because, under the Biden-Harris administration, the agency was preoccupied with investigating white Catholic families.
Latest reporting to catch up to speed:
Democrats are facing a watershed moment as parts of the party descend on a new political framework: anti-capitalist, anti-West, and anti-America.
Even the globalist at The Atlantic had to admit...
In low-turnout elections, far-left DSA-aligned candidates are gaining power city by city, raising the risk that the Democratic Party has been hijacked.
BREAKING: Rep. Espaillat concedes. Mamdani-backed socialists have officially gone 3/3 and won all of their respective Democratic primaries for U.S. House in New York tonight. Their positions are some of the most extreme & far left Dems have seen:
Darializa Avila Chevalier… pic.twitter.com/Fal1lHmair
In just a few decades, the "old-school Democratic Party" has partially shifted from a party rooted in working-class economics, labor, and Main Street concerns ...
... into one increasingly shaped by anti-capitalist rhetoric, pro-globalist, pro-illegal-alien, Islamists, and a growing revolutionary socialist-Marxist presence.
On CNN NewsNight, Brad Todd bluntly says the Democrat Party has become the "Democratic Socialist Party of America," embracing antisemitism, confiscation, and anti-capitalism — while noting Hakeem Jeffries is a big loser.@BradOnMessage: “The Democratic Party now is the… pic.twitter.com/KUJ0sfW7k8
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 24, 2026Hakeem Jeffries has a problem.
Tyler Durden Wed, 06/24/2026 - 23:15