The excerpt from opinion article below was written by John Ratcliffe & Cliff Sims for Fox News
We have achieved a rare moment of political consensus in Washington, D.C. that China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pose the greatest threat to U.S. national security.
However, Silicon Valley and Wall Street have continued fueling the rise of the CCP with massive investments and commitments to bolster China’s economy, while eschewing their patriotic duty to take similar steps here at home.
In the absence of moral courage from America’s financial elite, we need a regulatory framework to protect our nation and its people from China’s ambitions to subjugate the world to its authoritarian model, and from the rise of American oligarchs who view themselves as citizens of the world, rather than citizens of the country that made their success possible.
In recent days, journalists uncovered that Apple CEO Tim Cook secretly struck a $275 billion deal with Chinese authorities “promising Apple would do its part to develop China’s economy and technological prowess through investments, business deals and worker training.”
The socially conscious Mr. Cook once opined that “human rights is about…treating people with dignity and respect” and declared that Apple is “about changing the world” and “you don’t do that by staying quiet on things that matter.” But Mr. Cook and Apple have been conspicuously silent about the CCP’s mass surveillance state and the ongoing genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
In another example of the moral depravity of some American business tycoons, billionaire Ray Dalio dismissed a question about Beijing’s human-rights abuses by asking if he should also look at America’s “own human-rights issues.” He continued this absurd line of moral relativism by shrugging off China’s policy of “disappearing people” who disagree with the regime, saying, “that is their approach, we have our approach.”
These two darlings of the American business world are emblematic of a broader sentiment in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. They believe that doing business with the CCP simply means more opportunities for growth, or as Mr. Cook naively put it, “world peace through world trade.”
However, while it is unreasonable to expect financiers and business leaders to play the role of morality police across the planet, China is a unique and undeniable case. The intelligence we consumed daily in our roles in the U.S. government made it clear that the CCP is the only regime with both the intent and resources to destroy the American model of free people and fair trade that has proliferated around the world in recent decades, lifting billions of people out of poverty along the way.