The recent furor surrounding Lionel Messi‘s absence from a soccer game in Hong Kong provides a striking illustration of China’s deep-seated ideological paranoia and a tendency toward political schizophrenia. At the heart of this controversy lies the Chinese Communist Party‘s profound suspicion of the international community, rooted in a belief of a pervasive and coordinated conspiracy aimed at undermining the communist government. This mindset propels the Communist Party to interpret even the most minor incidents as evidence of a grand scheme against it, often leading to exaggerated and absurd reactions that serve to justify its paranoid worldview - and its aggression and belligerence. On Feb. 4, the Argentine-born international soccer star Lionel Messi was in Hong Kong with his team, Inter Miami, for a match with a Hong Kong team. Mr. Messi, however, stayed on the substitute bench throughout the game due to what the visiting team’s doctor described as an injury. The disappointed Hong Kong fans discovered that Mr. Messi nevertheless played for 30 minutes in a soccer match in Tokyo a short while later. Suddenly, this minor sports incident involving Mr. Messi has been seized upon by the Chinese government’s extensive propaganda machine as a symbol of an alleged vast international conspiracy. Mr. Messi‘s decision not to play in Hong Kong has been construed as a move orchestrated by myriad forces, each with its own historical and ideological significance to China. First, the reaction to Mr. Messi‘s absence cannot be disentangled from the Chinese leaders’ profound loathing of the recent political developments in Argentina.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, is believed to be lurking in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Gaza Strip. I’d wager that Mr. Sinwar is pondering four options. Option 1: He can wait, betting that President Biden will pressure the Israelis to accept a “cease-fire,” a deal that would allow him to rise, praise Allah for victory, resume ruling Gaza, and prepare for the next round of atrocities. Option 2: The Israelis let Mr. Sinwar go into exile, say in Algeria, in return for his release of hostages. He may be giving serious thought to that way out. Option 3: “Martyrdom in the way of Allah.” To jihadis everywhere, Mr. Sinwar would be a hero and an inspiration. Mr. Sinwar is not fighting for a Palestinian state. He is fighting for the extermination of the Jewish state and its replacement ― “from the river to the sea” ― by an Islamic emirate, a jewel in the crown of the mightier-than-ever caliphate that is to come. For Mr. Sinwar, a “two-state solution” would solve nothing unless it provided an improved platform from which to launch Oct. 7-style attacks. Hamas has amassed an enormous arsenal, which is why, four months after Oct. 7, Mr. Sinwar’s fighters are still firing missiles and shooting Israelis. Mr. Sinwar has fourth option. He could emerge from the depths, surviving hostages in tow, and order his troops to cease firing. That would save the lives of many in Gaza, both his comrades in arms and those serving as Hamas pawns. But that option, I’d wager, is the one Mr. Sinwar is least likely to choose.

It has been about 80 years since the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, a bloody struggle against Japan that cost thousands of Americans their lives. Today, Congress is poised to squander their sacrifice for freedom by granting China a opportunity to severely undermine America’s security position in the Pacific. At issue are three long-standing, bilateral Compact of Free Association agreements between the United States and the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau. In exchange for modest financial assistance, each agreement grants the U.S. strategic denial rights and defense exclusivity with these nations. Strategic denial rights allow the U.S. to unilaterally block the Chinese, or any other military, from entering the countries covered by the compacts. Exclusive defense rights allow the U.S. to access compact waters and to construct military sites on the first and second island chains. These facilities could prove critical in a possible defense of Taiwan or in protecting and resupplying our Japanese, Korean and Filipino allies in the event of a conflict with China. Failing to renew the compacts leaves the U.S. less safe and raises major doubts about America’s ability to fund its key priorities and support its key allies in the Indo-Pacific. To nobody’s surprise, China is ready to pounce if the compact provisions expire. To avoid handing China a major strategic victory, Congress must find a way to fund the compacts. Time is not on America’s side. There may be no other agreement in the world that matches the value that these three Pacific states offer the United States.

The U.S. and Israel will be forced to fight wars on multiple fronts against a growing tide of pro-Palestinian world opinion. Large masses of Palestinians in the U.S. will launch protests designed to turn American public opinion against Israel. Russia loves this Iranian gambit because it distracts the U.S. from the Ukrainian theater. China loves it because it forces the U.S. military to fight a multifront war at sea and on the enemy’s turf, far from American soil. This further reduces the probability America will intervene if Mr. Xi makes his final move on Taiwan. Such a Taiwan invasion may indeed be Step 3 of the plot. If the U.S. continues to drain the Pentagon’s arsenal at current rates and spreads its troops and fleets thin around the world, it will not be able to credibly respond in a timely manner 7,000 miles away to a Chinese armada crossing the Taiwan Strait backed by thousands of Chinese missiles on the mainland and hundreds of nuclear-tipped Chinese submarines in the East and South China seas. Meanwhile, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will be as happy with this plot. “Rocket Man” will be raking in hard cash, selling weapons. As a final part of this plot to destroy America, China will send thousands of military-age men across the unsecured Mexican border into the U.S. Iran will likewise swarm Islamic terrorists through Mexico into the U.S. These sleeper cells can be awakened at any time to help deliver the coup de grace. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea will use their formidable cyber warfare capabilities to destabilize America’s presidential election aiming at the defeat of the one man who might eventually stop them: Donald Trump.

Suppose China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un got together to plot the destruction of America. How might these dictators and evildoers proceed? Putin might offer as Step 1 a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Putin knows that President Biden will immediately support Ukraine with massive military and financial aid. This, in turn, will begin to strategically drain the U.S. military’s arsenal of democracy while driving America further into its increasingly crippling debt. Of course, any zeal for Ukraine will fade in the long run, both in an America fed up with foreign wars. In the short run fellow plotter China, along with nonaligned countries such as India, will buy enough oil to fund Mr. Putin’s war machine. China will, of course, use its veto power to shield Russia from any interference by the U.N. Security Council. Mr. Xi knows a successful Russian invasion, unhindered by U.N. opprobrium, will make it much easier for him to invade Taiwan. Step 2 of the “box America in” plot might involve an Iranian attack on Israel via proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. This attack would come at a decent interval after Russia’s Ukraine invasion, when the U.S. is starting to feel both the financial pressure of funding Ukraine and the physical drain on its dwindling arsenal of missiles, tanks, bombs and ammunition. After an initial Hamas attack, Hezbollah will begin attacking from Lebanon, stretching out Israeli forces. Iran will then task the Houthis with disrupting Red Sea shipping and thereby further strain America’s Middle East fleet while Iran itself will escalate its terrorist attacks on U.S. bases in the region.

So, let’s start being intellectually honest with ourselves and seeing the world as it is rather than how we wish it were. We are facing more significant threats to U.S. national security than ever. We ignore them at our own peril. We’ve learned that failed efforts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan were the equivalent of a black hole for our limited staff and budgetary resources. We should focus on realistic objectives ruthlessly in line with our national security interests, such as supporting our allies when they fight terrorists, deter aggressors, defend free trade and punish barbaric military aggression such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And we and our NATO partners should enable and leverage allies around the world as “force multipliers” to deter emerging security threats, making it clear to would-be aggressors that they would pay too high a price if they attacked. The alliance of tyrants has us in their crosshairs because nothing scares Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and their cronies more than those who stand up for the principles of liberty and democracy. Many nations share our commitment to free trade and internationally respected borders, but without our leadership and commitment to defend our common values, those allies will be no match against dictators who seek to do us harm. Winston Churchill, who united Britain and the West in a common cause against dictators, would undoubtedly be ringing alarm bells over this new, 21st-century threat to liberty, the defense of which requires deterring and defending against dictatorships.

After the World War 1, the majority of Americans wanted to be left alone. In the interwar period, the U.S. pursued a policy of isolation. Benefiting from geographic separation from Asia and Europe and blessed with benign neighbors to the north and south, the U.S. enjoyed two decades of relative peace after the conflict ― until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's subsequent declaration of war. Today’s mood in America is reminiscent of that interwar period. After spilling so much blood and treasure in the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans understandably want to avoid becoming entangled once again in world affairs. Two great oceans still protect us. But just as in the 1920s and 1930s, storm clouds have gathered on the horizon. This century’s axis of tyranny ― China, Russia, Iran and North Korea ― wants to divide the world into spheres of influence that they can control. They may be long-term strategic rivals among themselves, but today, they support one another with military equipment, and a robust exchange of intelligence on their adversaries, principally the U.S. They seek to dominate and, when deterrence fails, attack vulnerable neighboring states with an eye toward dominating the global economy. That’s why China is militarizing and laying claim to the South China Sea, through which $3 trillion worth of global commercial goods pass each year. Iran is using its Houthi terrorist proxies in Yemen to undermine freedom of navigation through the Red Sea, which accounts for 10% of world trade.

Both in Beijing (where they enjoy the home court advantage) and abroad, China’s intelligence services will conduct intrusive surveillance of foreign companies and their employees, steal as much information as possible, and recruit agents to gain long-term access to the companies’ inner workings. U.S. companies must factor in these threats when assessing the risk of doing business with Beijing, and let’s keep in mind that this is not a fair fight. China is bringing the full force of its massive spying apparatus to target U.S. firms. Companies that risk doing business with Beijing should ensure their employees have a secure channel based in the U.S. for reporting technical attacks. Employers should report concerns to the FBI and request briefings from the U.S. intelligence community to counter China’s scrutiny. Savvy businesses reduce their vulnerability with secure routers and servers, digital firewalls, sophisticated data encryption programs, and a robust “insider threat” program to help unwitting employees who require training and thwart malicious employees with ill intent. But China has extraordinarily sophisticated spying capabilities, which means companies operating there should assume Chinese intelligence will have access to anything they say, write or store on their computers. Even American firms operating in the U.S. should not assume that geographic distance affords them significantly more security. Companies must wall off their intellectual property and other sensitive information to prevent unauthorized disclosure to China. It is Mr. Xi’s police state that is altering the calculus of doing business with China.

There is arguably no greater contrast between the free and open U.S. democracy and Mr. Xi’s top-down dictatorship than in the comparison between how each system allows its citizens to access information and how each allows them to engage with one another. Now in his unprecedented third term after amending the Chinese Constitution, Mr. Xi continues to place loyal party cadres in the country’s top bureaucratic posts and to spy aggressively on enemies at home and abroad. His goal is to transform China into the world’s dominant military and commercial power through an aggressive foreign policy designed to eliminate any economic or technological dependence on the West. In China, there is no free and open exchange of ideas, no room to dissent from Mr. Xi’s uncompromising Communist Party line, and no free market where individuals can make their own decisions and pursue their own innovations. That’s why Mr. Xi must rely on his powerful intelligence services to steal valuable Western intellectual property, which China desperately needs but is incapable of developing on its own. And now U.S. companies are squarely in the crosshairs of China’s Big Brother intelligence apparatus. This past April, the National People’s Congress updated the country’s anti-espionage law to require that Chinese citizens report any suspicion of espionage to security agencies. U.S. businesses must now assume all Chinese nationals will cooperate with their country’s intelligence agencies ― because they have no choice. This is the new reality about doing business with Chinese companies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping demands unquestioning obedience to his dictatorial regime. Mobilizing his police state to control China‘s population and commit human rights atrocities, most notably against the Uyghurs, Mr. Xi has imposed an Orwellian level of ideological domination over the state unmatched since Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Deliberately concealing the outbreak and severity of the COVID-19 virus, Mr. Xi - whose real power flows from his position as head of the ruling Chinese Communist Party - demonstrated that his tyrannical government bureaucracy exists only to defend his regime’s security, no matter the human cost at home or abroad. In early January 2020, health officials in Wuhan were insisting that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission or any signs of doctors becoming sick. In fact, the disease was already spreading rapidly. Projecting a false image of absolute state control by suppressing dissenting voices, China did not reveal any human transmission of the virus until Jan. 22, 2020 - even though we now know that alarm bells were ringing in Wuhan by the end of 2019 over the growing coronavirus caseload. Communist Party minders assigned to every institution made sure that doctors who tried to warn of the dangers were arrested for “illegal activity.” To this day, Mr. Xi‘s China continues to block any real investigation of the virus’s origin and refuses to publish accurate data. The COVID-19 fiasco, which resulted in so much unnecessary illness and death, was an outward manifestation of China‘s lethal, centrally controlled autocracy.