Over the past several years, the preponderance of discussions regarding China has focused on its threat to Taiwan and its increased military capabilities. As China has developed its military power at an almost exponential pace, it has also quietly established economic, political and military relationships with many countries around the globe. Virtually no regions have been overlooked. Has the U.S. watched these relationships develop, or have we slept through the alarms? Another recent wake-up call for the U.S. is China’s brokering the establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They are rivals in the Middle East, a region where the U.S. has long wielded military, political and economic influence. China’s ability to negotiate such an agreement signals China’s geopolitical power ― and a clear lessening of American influence in the region. The Chinese action is a significant diplomatic achievement that legitimizes China. It also ensures a more stable environment economically for China ― a necessary ingredient in the export of oil necessary to fuel China’s economic engine. China’s brokering of the Saudi-Iran deal is just a foreshadowing of the challenges the U.S. faces near and long term. Its Belt Road initiative is the centerpiece of President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy ― a massive $1 trillion global infrastructure program undertaken 10 years ago by making investments in 150 countries. What should concern every American and our leaders is how China has positioned itself globally. With a powerful and capable military, China can augment that military power with economic power and influence.

Rescuing Russia commits Beijing to, according to the Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans Pritchard, “guarantees a world historical confrontation with the democracies and the international economic system.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Mr. Xi is preparing to open the military and economic spigots. It may be part of a diplomatic ruse to persuade the weaker players in the anti-Putin coalition - Germany, France and Italy - to urge peace talks before Mr. Putin suffers more defeats on the battlefield. Yet it is still a dangerous play. The CCP after Mao has always been cautious. Many within its leadership see the partnership with Mr. Putin as hurting China’s image and risking Beijing’s future economic development. Under Mr. Xi, the economic revolution wrought by Deng Xiaoping is over, replaced by the rebirth of massive, inefficient state economic enterprises. Mr. Xi has misjudged the power of the West and put China on the wrong end of high-tech economic sanctions that China has no internal means of overcoming. The combined navies and merchant services of the West still control the energy and mineral shipping lanes that China must use to survive. Through his questionable decisions, he has awakened a slumbering Japanese military giant and forced the Philippines and other more passive neighbors to seek the protection of a U.S.-led alliance. The hard men in the Forbidden City know their communist history and remember what happened when Nikita Khrushchev’s adventurism forced his ouster by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964. I suspect that many of them are studying up on that lesson and understand that if the Putin dalliance fails, Mr. Xi might be its greatest casualty.

In some quarters of the professional foreign policy establishment, a notion is taking hold that a rising China is destined to become the world’s dominant power and that the best hope for America is to “manage national decline.” This view is heartily endorsed by Chinese President Xi Jinping. In a 2021 speech celebrating the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Xi boasted of how the party had “transformed the future of the Chinese people and nation.” Now, “China’s national rejuvenation has become a historical inevitability,” he said. For all of Mr. Xi’s chest-thumping, however, China is not invincible, nor is its path to dominance preordained. Mr. Xi might be on the verge of making a strategic mistake that could cost him his dictatorship. Mr. Xi has two choices: Let Vladimir Putin fall or prop him up and risk an economic war with the West that China cannot win. Neither choice is palatable, and the budding disaster is of his own making. Mr. Xi also pledged his regime ? already reeling from COVID-19 and Western technology sanctions ? to economic and political war with the U.S. and the West. But Mr. Xi cannot win an economic war with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, no matter how much globalization has tied the world economy together. He fears the fall of Mr. Putin’s gangster state and the emergence, still a long shot given Russian history, of a pro-European government in Moscow ? an event that by itself would end Mr. Xi’s plans to rewrite the global playbook by destroying the American-centered democratic and rules-based order.

China’s rulers also know they will hugely benefit if a global energy system led by the U.S. ― the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbons ― transitions to one led by China ― the dominant player in renewable technologies, rare earth minerals, and components used in the electric vehicles that the Biden administration is spending taxpayer dollars to bribe the auto industry to sell and consumers to purchase. Those vehicles will require vast amounts of electricity that can’t be generated by renewables alone. Currently, only 3 out of 100 cars in California are EVs. Yet the state recently asked owners for “voluntary electricity conservation” because demand for electricity was exceeding supply. This column began by pointing out that energy policy is national security policy. But, as Ms. Shaffer noted in her lecture, for many European and American leaders, energy policy has become instead “a subset of climate policy.” The purpose is to virtue signal. That’s why you’ll see them boast that their policies “address” climate change. Anyone paying attention knows these policies won’t stop or even slow climate change. If we want to reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, there’s a simple way: Use more natural gas and nuclear power. Why do most climate activists reject both energy sources? Current American and European policy ― attempting to eliminate hydrocarbons and force a transition to renewables ― is weakening national security, causing serious economic dislocations, and making people poorer. That’s the most important lesson of the energy crisis. European and American leaders are refusing to learn it.

Most Western leaders seem oblivious, nodding along as U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres insists that a “climate time bomb is ticking.” Thanks to Mr. Guterres and other alarmists, 60% of people living in wealthy countries think climate change “is likely to bring an end to humanity,” as Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, recently wrote. “This is not only untrue,” he added, “it is also harmful because it makes people embrace bad policies.” Mr. Lomborg has estimated that if every nation “fulfills every promise” made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, the reduction in temperature rise will be 0.17 degrees Celsius. That would make no difference whatsoever. “To fulfill the promises, the United Nations says, annual reduction by 2030 would have to be eleven times what we managed to achieve when the world ground to a halt during the Covid lockdowns. That is hardly realistic.” Meanwhile, Germany and other European nations have been buying and burning more coal - the most polluting hydrocarbon - to make up for the oil and gas they no longer receive from Russia. China is building about one dirty coal-fired plant every week - more than the rest of the world combined. Pollution and carbon dioxide emissions from those plants will vastly exceed any emissions reductions Americans and Europeans can possibly achieve. China already accounts for more than a quarter of all global carbon dioxide emissions. True, Beijing is also increasingly utilizing solar and wind power. But that’s to augment hydrocarbons rather than replace them - a sensible policy.

Energy policy is national security policy. So when political leaders get energy policy wrong, they get national security policy wrong. An obvious example: Germany for years eagerly increased its dependence on Russian oil and gas. German diplomats thought they were implementing a clever strategy: “We’re making Putin dependent on our money!” Then, just over a year ago, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Russian hydrocarbons stopped flowing to Europe. But it’s not imperialism alone that’s to blame for what Brenda Shaffer calls the world’s “worst energy crisis since World War II.” In addition to relying on Russia for a strategic resource, she explained, German energy policy for almost a decade has aggressively promoted solar and wind power while disinvesting from hydrocarbons. This has led to “the collapse of many energy-intensive industries in Europe.” President Biden has adopted similar policies. His Inflation Reduction Act has had no impact on inflation. Instead, it provides enormous subsidies for “renewables.” The cost to taxpayers, according to a Goldman Sachs estimate, will be a stunning $1.2 trillion over 10 years ? funds that will not, obviously, be available for strengthening national security at a time of intensifying threats and challenges. Mr. Biden’s energy policy disregards a basic fact: For industrialized economies to function when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, there must be what Ms. Shaffer terms a “baseload or a stable source of energy.” Currently, only hydrocarbons or nuclear power can provide that.

The Six Party Talks - the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China and Russia - ended in 2009, after some progress in dismantling the North’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, when the North would not permit nuclear monitors to leave Yongbyon to inspect non-declared suspect nuclear sites. After the June 2018 Singapore Summit and the failed February 2019 Hanoi Summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the situation with North Korea is more dangerous now than ever. The possibility of accidental conflict using tactical nuclear weapons should be apparent to all. And morally, for the 25 million people in North Korea, helping with food and medicine must be an immediate imperative. Currently, for the U.S., South Korea and Japan, the dialogue with North Korea has ceased. China and Russia have a close and allied relationship with North Korea. One would hope, at least for China, that they would encourage North Korea to return to talks with the U.S. or with the nations of a reconstituted Six Party Talks. That could be the beginning of a process to get North Korea to halt further nuclear and missile tests in exchange for sanctions relief and the beginning of a process that will take many years, for complete and verifiable denuclearization, in exchange for a path to normal relations and the infusion of foreign direct investments into North Korea for economic development purposes. Any resumed dialogue with North Korea should and must include a discussion of human rights and the need for North Korea to make substantial progress on the dire human rights situation in the North. Indeed, this is the time for China to work with the U.S. on the North Korea issue; to show to the world that this can lead to greater security in East Asia and the world.

The domestic situation in North Korea is bleak. Food and medicine are in short supply, with concern that people will die of starvation, as was the case in the 1990s when over 1 million people died of hunger. In Hyesan province, there were reported demonstrations ? something rare in North Korea’s police state ? demanding food. The North’s three-year lockdown due to COVID-19, the scarcity of fertilizer, and bad weather compounded with Pyongyang’s unhelpful decision to close many private markets, contributing to an estimated crop of 4.5 million metric tons, way below the minimum of 5.7 million metric tones needed for food survival purposes. North Korea is a dangerous nuclear weapons state with significant domestic economic issues: food scarcity, a dearth of medicines and therapeutics, and a backward health care system. The nuclear and humanitarian situation in North Korea requires immediate attention. The U.S. has had 30 years of negotiations with North Korea, all to no avail. In fact, the situation has progressively worsened. The Agreed Framework in 1994 attempted to address the nuclear issue with North Korea. Still, the discovery of North Korea’s clandestine Highly Enriched Uranium program for nuclear weapons put an end to the Agreement in 2002. The Six Party Talks with North Korea, hosted by China, produced a seminal joint statement in September 2005 that committed North Korea to complete and verifiable dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and programs in exchange for security assurances, economic development assistance and the provision of two light water reactors, for civilian energy, when North Korea returned to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear weapons state.

The joint statement of the Xi Jinping-Vladimir Putin summit expressed concern about the situation on the Korean Peninsula. That was an understatement. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are a threat to the region and the world. And China and Russia are doing nothing to address this nuclear threat. On March 15, North Korea successfully launched a road-mobile Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile that was reportedly capable of reaching distances as far as 15,000 kilometers (over 9,320 miles), the largest road-mobile ICBM in the world. This was the second ICBM launched by North Korea in 2023. North Korea also recently launched two cruise missiles from a submarine platform and numerous short-range and hypersonic missiles. This year, North Korea has launched 14 ballistic missiles, quickly catching up to the nearly 100 missiles it launched in 2022. As North Korea displays its ballistic missile prowess, what we’re not seeing is the incessant production of nuclear weapons. Conservative reported estimates credit North Korea with between 40 and 60 nuclear weapons; a recent Rand report said North Korea could have almost 250 nuclear weapons by 2027. Also of concern is North Korea’s new preemptive use policy for nuclear weapons. If there is an imminent or perceived imminent attack on its leadership or command and control, North Korea will use its nuclear weapons pursuant to its first-use nuclear doctrine. Indeed, North Korea’s recent “nuclear counterattack exercise” during the annual U.S.-South Korea “Freedom Shield” joint military exercise was a statement from the North that it is prepared and willing to use tactical nuclear weapons against targets in South Korea.

Hydrogen technologies bring countless benefits to consumers, communities and our environment. For starters, hydrogen has the capacity to decarbonize a broad spectrum of industries, especially those traditionally hard-to-abate sectors like transportation, building heating and cooling, and chemical and industrial product processes. Further, it has zero emissions at end use, and its ability to store energy in gas or liquid form for long periods of time provides reliable primary and back-up power. Since it can be generated from a variety of sources, including renewables, hydrogen is a strong complement to intermittent solar and wind. Hydrogen is an innovative and equitable clean energy technology, one that is accessible to all. As an example, hydrogen for consumer mobility offers a fueling experience much like today’s traditional car, and a hydrogen refueling station that is placed within a community is open to anyone who needs it. A growing domestic hydrogen economy will benefit the entire U.S. economy. A recent study from the Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability journal concluded that “growth in the hydrogen and [fuel cell] sectors of the U.S. economy will lead to vast new employment opportunities as businesses expand to serve growing markets and to meet new clean and sustainable energy requirements.” Some studies found that, if scaled up, hydrogen can account for nearly 20% of global energy demand by 2030 and generate $140 billion in revenue annually, while adding 700,000 U.S. jobs in the next decade. We understand that as we transition to hydrogen as an energy vector, we can also transition it to renewable production, making it a true zero-emission fuel for the future.