Western political leaders can’t suffer China’s developmental policies designed to steal business models and intellectual property and transfer them to Chinese domestic competitors. It doesn’t help that Beijing invested enormous national treasure into a military purpose-built to drive the West out of Asia and destroy U.S. armed forces while expanding at the expense of America’s Asian allies and partners. It is unfortunate that Beijing was not as attentive or generous in building a world-class public health system as it has been to building world-leading arsenals of rockets, warships, satellites and offshore naval air stations. America’s grievances in its Chimerica marriage have been building for decades, and Beijing has been indifferent to pleas to change, to respect international norms, to eschew coercive expansionism and to stop filching the fruits of innovation. The CCP’s response has been to fabricate mythological histories to justify expansionism. The CCP saw the West’s attempts to welcome it into the community of advanced economies and normalize its behavior as attacks on the CCP’s dictatorship and set out instead to bend international rule sets to its interests. In coming years when nCoV is behind us, and it will be behind us, its greatest lasting impact may be that it was the moment when the West realized it can live without the CCP in its house. China will soon fully recover and expect to resume life as before, but its relationship with the West may be over. It will come back but find doors locked. The advanced democracies know what the CCP is, know they can live without it, and nothing Beijing does may change their minds.

The 2019 new coronavirus (nCoV) originating in the geographic center of the People’s Republic of China breaks our hearts for the suffering of the Chinese people. It was revealed that Chinese medical system is inadequate and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is incompetent and corrupt. Other nations are concerned about their own well-being and are taking stock of economic consequences as they close potential vectors of the disease emanating from China. Western nations are reconsidering their relationship with the PRC after nCoV. The integration of the U.S. and Chinese economies ― “Chimerica” ― has come to resemble an intolerable marriage. The United States thought it was partnering with China, but found itself hooked up with the controlling and expansionist CCP. Xi Jinping’s dictatorship thieves Western intellectual property, invades its universities with propaganda institutions and coercively attempts to censor the free speech of Westerners from corporate leaders to sports figures to cartoonists. The West endured years of Beijing’s promises to change. Developed nations were already learning they can live without the CCP in their economies. The 2015 stock market crash in China and only China annihilated narratives that Western and Chinese stock markets are inextricably linked. Beijing has been unable to manipulate the United States using its holding of Treasuries as a lever, if anything damaging itself more for its efforts. Manufacturers are working through the issues of establishing supply lines outside of China. Western corporate leaders find it difficult to rationalize dependence on a country with a legal system politicized when not corrupted, in an economy suffering from capricious property rights and thuggish local authorities.

Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy, counts 33 canned or scheduled for disciplinary review since Jan. 24. Firings have persuaded others to do as little as possible to avoid making mistakes and being sacked themselves. These malign incentives reinforce others: China’s officials, for years, have been cautious, hoping to avoid decisions that would attract the attention of Mr. Xi’s ruthless “corruption” investigators. At the moment, censors are scrubbing the Twitter-like Weibo site of reports that Chinese officials were taking Red Cross surgical masks for themselves. Perhaps the real Red Cross scandal, however, involves the mountains of aid boxes that are not being delivered because the government is not functioning well. The breakdown of local governance ? and not just in Wuhan ? suggests that China’s model, despite what Director General Ghebreyesus said, is definitely not worthy of emulation by anyone. Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania said the Wuhan epidemic “proves again how utterly wrong Marx was.” Communism, as Marx said, may know the answers to the great questions of history, but no one at the moment is asking Xi Jinping, who had himself crowned “people’s leader” in December, about them. People are asking him to save their lives. Unfortunately, Mr. Xi is not doing a very good job of meeting his fundamental responsibility. He can make grand pronouncements, as he did on Jan. 20 when issuing his first words on the epidemic, but his commands ? “put people’s lives and health first”? are not substitute for solutions.

Superiority?” Beijing’s response, of course, would have been unnecessary if the party had not suppressed news in December. The first known patient inflicted with the 2019-nCoV virus became ill on Dec. 1. Chinese officials spent almost all that month scrubbing news of the mysterious respiratory disease. The first official announcement was made on Dec. 31 as was a police announcement of the investigation of eight Wuhan doctors for “spreading rumors.” Officials then spent more than half of January ignoring the epidemic or downplaying its severity. For instance, on Jan. 19, when it was evident an epidemic was sweeping the city, Wuhan officials held a public banquet for 40,000 families in an attempt to set a world record. Then, the regime rallied itself. As images of people collapsing in Wuhan streets and corpses littering hospital floors circulated on social media, Beijing immediately began throwing full resources into the fight against the disease. Yet, the image of totalitarian competence, pushed by the Communist Party and the WHO, is now breaking down. For one thing, Wuhan’s mayor damned his own political system. On Jan, 27, Zhou Xianwang publicly said he could not disclose the coronavirus epidemic because he was waiting for authorization from higher-ups. The problem is even more fundamental that Mayor Zhou lets on, however. Ming Xia of the City University of New York told me that there is now “wholesale paralysis” of the Chinese government. Officials fighting the epidemic are being fired on the spot for supposed incompetence. Gone is the health commission chief of Huanggang city, near Wuhan.

Xi Jinping has disappeared from public view. The general secretary of the Communist Party and the president of the Chinese state was not on the front page of People’s Daily, the regime’s most authoritative publication. China Central Television’s Evening News broadcasts were also Xi-free. As the widely-followed Bill Bishop wrote in his Sinocism site, “Now is not the time for the people’s leader to disappear from the view of the people.” Mr. Xi’s reluctance to lead visibly shows, among other things, one of the weaknesses of China’s political system. That system, as it has fought the coronavirus outbreak, has gone into full totalitarian mode in recent days. About 60 million people are now under some type of local travel restriction; men in biohazard gear are patrolling with automatic rifles in Wuhan, the epicenter. State media boast workers built a hospital in the stricken city in 11 days. Media in China speak with one voice: that of the Communist Party. Social media censors are obsessive, thorough and speedy. Many have marveled at the speed of state action. Among the cheerleaders is the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. China News Service, run by the Communist Party, reported that Mr. Ghebreyesus, during a meeting with Mr. Xi in Beijing on Jan. 28, said that China was “winning the admiration of the world.” “The speed and extent of the Chinese mobilization is rarely seen in the world,” he is reported to have said. “This is the superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries.”

It can begin in the Philippines by re-leasing the Subic Bay port for the support the U.S. Navy will need to undertake its future mission in the South China Sea. The U.S. Navy’s fleeting presence in the region has to date been ineffective. Freedom of navigation operations have failed to silence China’s preposterous claim to the South China Sea or halt its unlawful presence and activities in the region. A new U.S. naval base in Southeast Asia is logistically critical to the implementation of a new “Trump Doctrine” and psychologically imperative in projecting America’s power to China. The nations of Southeast Asia, independently or collectively, will not do anything to challenge China out of fear. So, it is for America to take action, with the help of its historical allies, to preserve freedom of the sea (which is in every nation’s national interest) as well as the rights and privileges the nations of Southeast Asia enjoy under international law. Failure to do so will mean the Communist Party prelates will make the rules in the South China Sea. America’s lawmakers seemingly do not recognize what the president and the admirals already know: America is at war with China. The U.S. Congress and Senate should take heed of the words of George Kennan, who headed the U.S. State Department planning staff at the beginning of the first Cold War: “We should cease to talk about vague and ? for the Far East ? unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” Kennan’s advice is as good now as it was in 1948. President Xi Jinping understands straight power concepts.

According to today’s Communist Party prelates, China must regain its status as the “Middle Kingdom,” which implies its superior role as the center of the world. China’s objective is really not much different than the Empire of Japan’s objective of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” the imperialist concept created and promulgated for occupied Asian populations. The history of the Middle Kingdom is also the basis for China’s illegal claim to the South China Sea. It goes something like this: Because Chinese merchant ships sailed the sea lanes of the South China Sea and encamped on its islands for a thousand years, the entire South China Sea is Chinese territory. This is like a businessman who’s been traveling the highway from the suburbs of Connecticut to New York City to work for a number of years and stopping at gas stations along the way claiming ownership of the entire State of Connecticut. President Xi Jinping, through the admiral, sent a chilling message to the other South China Sea claimants which have no significant naval or air capability relative to China (Vietnam, comes to mind), and which have no security alliance with America. Simply by goading one of these claimants into a battle, China could test its naval and air capabilities against a beatable opponent in a limited war and thereby become the de facto superpower in the China Sea. This hypothetical is much more likely to become reality and, therefore, the one which must be prevented. Where the new “Trump Doctrine” begins is not as important as that it must begin now. If not in Cambodia by engaging Cambodia’s ascendant military leaders to stop China from gaining a military foothold in Cambodia, it can begin in Vietnam by entering into a bilateral security alliance to stop China from attacking Vietnam as in the above hypothetical.

In December 2018 Chinese admiral Lou Yuan, deputy chief of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, did propose - in a public setting - using hypersonic missiles to sink two U.S. aircraft carriers as China’s strategy for solving tensions over the South China Sea. And, notwithstanding the debate among U.S. naval officers and specialists in weaponry and naval architecture and wargame designers, the missiles do appear to work, the Chinese having successfully test fired them somewhere in the South China Sea in November 2019. The admiral’s reasoning for this sneak attack a la Pearl Harbor may not be completely unsound either. As for his statement in support of the plan - that America is too weak to fight, the Japanese held the same belief in 1941. Enough said. But, his analysis that America has no strategy to thwart China’s unlawful presence and activities in the South China Sea and its designs to gain military concessions from Southeast Asian nations, is largely correct. The Chinese have been testing America for a reaction to their military ambitions in the region since the Obama presidency when they seized the disputed Scarborough Shoal from America’s treaty ally, the Philippines. Today, they intimidate other South China Sea claimants from pursuit of navigation, fishing and oil exploration activities. Perhaps more concerning than his proposal is the objective the admiral shares with Chinese President Xi Jinping: Resurrecting the traditional hierarchical Asian paradigm in which China acted as the center of a tributary system of levy-paying vassals whose relative power was starkly inferior to China’s.

In August 2012, the Taiwan Central Bank signed a currency agreement with its Chinese counterpart which enables greater development of the Taiwan economy. China is not only now Taiwan’s number one destination for foreign direct investment, but China introduced a package of 31 incentives to attract Taiwanese companies to the mainland, offering tax breaks and subsidies for high-tech companies, research grants for academics. It promised to allow Taiwanese companies to bid for government infrastructure projects, even those involved in China’s development plan in southern Asia and the Middle East. Taiwanese Vice Premier Shih Jun-ji cast it as an effort to undermine Taiwan’s economy. “China’s attempt to attract Taiwan’s capital and talent, especially high tech and young students, has clear political intentions,” he told a press conference introducing eight countermeasures designed to keep investors and their money at home. Bilateral trade between China, including the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao, and Taiwan reached $181 billion in 2017, up from $35 billion in 1999. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, accounting for more than 30 percent of the island’s trade. More than 93,000 Taiwanese companies have invested in the mainland since 1988, though outbound investment to the mainland declined for its third consecutive year in 2017. Reciprocal mainland investment in Taiwan is rising, but at a slower rate. China and Taiwan have also agreed to allow banks, insurers and other financial service providers to work in both. Taiwan’s closer economic links to the mainland pose unique challenges, with political differences remaining at a time when China’s economic growth is slowing.

Beijing’s targets in the Indo-Pacific and closer to home in the Caribbean and Latin America generally share the same characteristics: Poor when compared to the GDP of the 50 states, underdeveloped and generally forgotten. All sorts of basic infrastructure and other improvements are built or promised. Think hospitals, schools, highways, ports and airports. Some are freebies; others involve loans that will never be repaid. Moreover, as independent countries they have full voting privileges at the United Nations. This in and of itself is worth every yuan. The Solomon Islands, one of Queen Elizabeth II’s “other realms and territories,” became the most recent example. It ended diplomatic recognition of Taiwan after China promised $500 million in funding. Closer to home, Panama with the strategically important Panama Canal ? another former U.S. territory ? and the Dominican Republic, which voted for U.S. annexation in 1869 during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, have also aligned with Beijing. In addition to tariffs against China the president has also dispatched senior administration officials, including cabinet secretaries, and military leaders to the territories and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific. Mr. Trump even hosted a historic White House summit with heads of state from the island-republics. The administration rightly understands that U.S. hegemony is at stake, if the flag isn’t flown over the American Lake. But merely flying the flag or even levying tariffs isn’t enough. Washington must up its game. It should start with a revival of the Monroe Doctrine. There also needs to be a re-examining of the relationship with the islands and their individual political status.