China is preparing for war, so America needs to do the same.

Dan Gelernter warns at American Greatness:

We should prepare for war. Churchill called preparation for war “the sole guarantee of peace”. Instead, Biden touts maternity flight suits. We indulge in ludicrous fantasies of a “fair” military based on the premise that real wars don’t happen anymore. What message does that send enemies who plan to use their armies for actual fighting?

We are headed to war again. We are pointed at war right now. America’s weakness will bring us there. The hour is already late—we have allowed the Chinese navy to grow larger than our own.

But there is still time. We can strengthen ourselves. We can confront Russian and Chinese encroachments on international rights and territories now. Or we can immolate and destroy another generation, as a sacrifice to our own self-serving short-sightedness.

Or we can put President Trump back in the White House.

Christopher Roach warns even more strongly – also at American Greatness:

China is not our friend. Since the Clinton Administration, and through the Bush and Obama years, American policy proceeded as if trade and cultural ties would work automatically to liberalize the Chinese. Instead, these ties have enriched and strengthened China, allowing it to build first-class infrastructure, a robust economy, and a substantially more capable military in a mere 30 years’ time.

Simultaneously, these policies have hollowed out our own industrial base, rendering most of our industries, including the tech sector, dependent on Chinese inputs. In the name of efficiency, we have lost resilience, jobs, and independence.

The prospect of a military confrontation with China is now closer than it was at the beginning of this process. Along with its rising confidence and capability, China has advanced a self-serving and novel view of its authority, asserting sovereignty and rights of exclusion deep into the South China Sea.

The United States, for over 100 years, has viewed itself as a maritime power, enforcing freedom of navigation so that the world may benefit from trade and secure sea lanes. China’s expansive view of its rights threatens these expectations and sows the seeds of a potential military conflict.

Just as trade wars can become real ones, conventional military victories threaten to escalate into nuclear wars, not out of ruthlessness, but out of fear and confusion about an adversary’s intent.

In dealing with China, America would do well to ensure no conflict with China goes nuclear. There seems no reliable way to guarantee this under the conditions of conventional war. Under these circumstances, the United States should reconceive its regional objectives to avoid such conflict altogether.

One way of avoiding such conflict is to continue the focus on economic matters. Ideally, this would mean continuing the Trump-era policy of disconnecting our fortunes from China as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration’s watchword appears to be reversing every Trump policy reflexively.