Second, we all love to talk about shared threats to humanity which we should be able to work with our geopolitical enemies to resolve. ![]() party (again, I’ve been guilty of it!) will unnecessarily hinder our ability to resolve important issues that transcend partisan politics. Knee-jerk rejection of whatever comes from the mouth of someone from the other U.S. But a reflection on what’s already happened should teach us a few lessons moving forward.įirst, as much as Republicans and Democrats cannot stand each other-as well as the millions of Americans who cannot stand either of them-we are still a free country, while China is totalitarian. Knowing where the virus originated matters in many ways, but it won’t change the facts that the People’s Republic’s leaders are unreliable liars, and that our intelligence agencies are unprepared for dealing with the threat they pose. We should expect more of this so long that we are dealing with a totalitarian China. If history is any guide, this was not out of cynicism, but hubris, fear, and a totalitarian instinct for lying and secrecy-all stemming from paranoia that their power would be threatened. Instead of helping the world prepare for the horrors to come, Chinese authorities were doing everything to exacerbate it. It contemptibly cracked down on whistleblowers, manipulated the World Health Organization (WHO)-whose director ascended to the position with China’s backing-withheld information, and destroyed viral samples. ![]() In 20, the Chinese government was trying to hide the then-epidemic from the world. A major reason we knew little about the virus and its epoch-defining potential was that the intelligence agencies were neither paying attention, nor capable of collecting the necessary data and information. We will never know whether the coronavirus could have been contained at the time, but the world did little to jump ahead of the virus by quickly moving to shield itself from transmission and develop treatments and vaccines. Meanwhile, China was engaging in deception, lies, and coverups-because that is what paranoid totalitarians do. In late 2019, COVID was still a mostly localized epidemic. Second, it is hardly controversial to say that the Chinese government’s leadership is comprised of a bunch of untrustworthy actors. intelligence not have found a way to eavesdrop on those discussions? So Americans must ask why it is-after being told that China is the great challenge of the coming decades-that we are so clueless about the internal dealings of the Chinese government? Certainly, over the past three and a half years, Chinese politicians have discussed COVID and its origins substantially-it is unfathomable that such a monumental issue went undiscussed. ![]() National Security Community Is Getting Wrong About China What all have in common is that they have low confidence in their conclusions. This problem is manifested in two ways.įirst, some intelligence agencies have concluded that the COVID leak likely came from the lab, while others have rejected that estimate. While it’s great that the intelligence community is investing in SIGINT, that’s no substitute for human intelligence. government has far fewer people on the ground than it used to, but many more at their desks hacking enemies and deciphering signals picked up from satellites. The spread of the internet and the digital era shifted the focus of the intelligence community to signal intelligence (SIGINT). The quantity of intelligence agencies, however, does not match the quality. It’s but one of 18 intelligence agencies, all overseen by the White House’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). ![]() Something in the Department of Energy’s report that surprised many Americans is the fact that the department has its own intelligence agency. It took three years for us to collectively admit something that should have not been controversial: If there’s a virology lab somewhere, if the government of that country is tyrannical, secretive, and paranoid, and if there is an epidemic in that area, it is possible that we are dealing with a human conspiracy, not undercooked bat steak.īut that we still can’t tell where the virus came from-and that we knew little about it when it arrived in the United States-opens us to national security vulnerabilities and realities we must acknowledge. Lost in the partisan fights over where the virus originated (which we will not know for certain for a long time, if ever) is our continued overarching national security vulnerability. Stop Being a Jerk About Nikki Haley’s Name
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