Webinar | WestPac: Engage With America’s Allies, Not Our Mortal Enemy

WestPac: Engage With America’s Allies, Not Our Mortal Enemy – and Theirs, the CCP
The Take-aways from the Tripartite Summit, and Next Steps

The Western Pacific has gotten some welcome attention this week with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addressing a joint session of Congress and summiting with President Biden and their Philippine counterpart, Ferdinand Marcos. Unfortunately, the needed display of allied solidarity and professed resolve in countering the Chinese Communist Party’s intensifying aggression throughout the region has been undercut by two realities.

First, a very contrary message was communicated immediately before the events in Washington this week by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s latest appeasement tourism in Beijing. Her message of Team Biden’s determination to “engage” with the CCP is a seriously fraught one to be communicating even as the CCP’s forces are routinely assaulting Philippine vessels and penetrating Japanese airspace and waters – as they are those of a fourth strategically critical, but uninvited, regional partner: Taiwan.

At a time when Team Biden is actively betraying its most important ally in the Mideast, Israel, there is no room for signaling that America is determined to undermine any others by “engaging” with the CCP.

Second, in the course of his address to Congress yesterday, Prime Minister Kishida urged Americans to overcome “an undercurrent of self-doubt [about our role in a] world [now] at history’s turning point.”

Actually, what millions of us are doubting is the quality of our leadership at such a moment. The retiring chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rep. Mike Gallagher, warned this week that we’re in “a new Cold War” with the CCP, declaring, “Rather than denying the existence of this struggle, Washington should own it and win it.”

For his part, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer just announced that he will (finally) be launching next week a series of hearings in connection with his panel’s ongoing investigation into the CCP’s political warfare here. (The Committee on the Present Danger: China is proud that two of its distinguished members, Brigadier General “Rob” Spalding, U.S. Air Force (Ret.) and Colonel Grant Newsham, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.) will be among its expert witnesses.)

There’s an elephant in the room, however, that has yet to be formally acknowledged, let alone corrected: As another of the CPDC’s members, retired CIA spy Sam Faddis, has observed, in the lexicon of recruiting and running agents, President Joe Biden would be characterized as “a controlled asset of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Obviously, we can’t win a cold war, let alone the now-looming hot one, with a leader whose loyalty and conduct we have plenty of reason to doubt.

This CPDC webinar takes stock of the state of America’s alliance relations and vital interests in the Western Pacific against the backdrop of these and other factors that dangerously imperil them. 

Moderator:

- Frank Gaffney, Founder and Executive Chairman, Center for Security Policy; Vice Chairman, Committee on the Present Danger: China, co-author, “The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World”

Panelists:

- Cleo Paskal, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Indo-Pacific at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; consultant, Network for Strategic Analysis; board member, International Board of Advisors of the Global Counter-Terrorism Council; taught at Defense Colleges in the United Kingdom, India, and Oman
Topic: “What Happened at the Tripartite Summit – and What Must Happen Next?”

- Col. John Mills, U.S. Army (Ret.), Former Special Operator specializing in Psychological Warfare; former senior official responsible for Cyber Policy in the Office of Secretary of Defense; author, “War Against The Deep State,” and “The Nation Will Follow: Firsthand Experiences Fighting the Deep State and the Action Plan for the American Citizen”
Topic: “The Strategic Environment in WestPac and What We Must Do to Rectify It”

- Col. Grant Newsham, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), Former Military Attaché in Embassy Tokyo; former Foreign Service Officer; longtime business executive in the Western Pacific; Senior Fellow, Center for Security Policy; Author, “When China Attacks: A Warning to America”
Topic: “Forward Deployed: The Gathering Storm in the Pacific, the View from Japan”

- Dr. Bradley Thayer, PhD, Director for China Policy, Center for Security Policy; columnist, “American Greatness”; co-author, “Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure”
Topic: “Fighting and Winning the Political War the CCP is Waging in WestPac, and Beyond”