Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz argued during an interview on investigative report program "Zooming In" that U.S. security policy toward China has for decades been based on "hope."
Gertz said the conventional wisdom that China would reform itself in response to international trade was fundamentally mistaken. Host Simone Gao asked how leaders have formed policy toward China, and Gertz said it is based on hope rather than evidence.
"You can’t build a national security policy based on hope, and that is what they did in hoping that trading with China would bring about a more peaceful, a more democratic, more open China," he said.
Gertz described how China has posed a threat to U.S. interests for years and business leaders deluded themselves into thinking trade would moderate the Chinese communist government.
"I have been sounding the alarm on what I call the China threat for many years," he said. "I have argued since the beginning that the fundamental approach to China has been mistaken. And that approach has been, partly, that if the United States trades with China, then that trade with China, that this trade and business interaction will have a moderating influence and will ultimately result in the evolution of China from a communist state to a democratic state."
He said this idea goes back to the 1980s and is deeply flawed.
"That assumption has been the underpinnings of American policy for more than 30 years, going back to the 80s, and it has proved to be fundamentally false," Gertz said. "We have not seen a moderating of China. We have not seen an evolution toward a democratic system; in fact, we have seen just the opposite."
China under President Xi Jinping has grown more repressive, while the government has continued to antagonize the U.S. by stealing key technologies.