China is using fentanyl in a chemical war against America
Fentanyl is the synthetic opioid driving America’s public health crisis. Its cheap price, widespread use, addictive quality and deadly effect make it more dangerous than other narcotics classified by the DEA.
It is, ultimately, a chemical. And it’s being used as a weapon in China’s 21st-century Opium War against America.
President Donald Trump’s 12-day, five-nation Asia tour is focusing on North Korean nukes and international trade. In Beijing, however, he planned to address China’s fentanyl production and distribution, an industry that fuels what the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission calls “China’s deadly export to the United States.”
Drug abuse is inherently a demand issue, but there is an international supply part to the drug equation that stretches from China’s bot- tomless fentanyl manufacture to its bulk shipping of the deadly white powder into global markets. If Trump can get China to constrain its cheap supply, he might significantly reduce the problem.
And if any government can control its nation’s industry, it is the one in Beijing. China already uses its authoritarian state structure to control the movement of people and ideas within its country with stunning efficiency.
China is more passive, however, when asked to act responsibly or confront threats to the United States that are otherwise perceived as serving Beijing’s strategic interests. North Korea is an example.
North Korea developed its nuclear capacity with China’s acquiescence, if not outright support and blessing. Why? Because the Kim clan has provided the Chinese a strategic tool to leverage against the U.S. Pyongyang’s nukes make China indispensable to any Korean Peninsula negotiations and future.
Fentanyl is the nuclear narcotic that is killing thousands of Americans today and another example of China’s two-faced approach. The chemical, known as “China Girl” or “China White” on the street, may have some Chinese victims, but its true value is as a profitable opiate export that also destroys American communities and roils the U.S. political landscape. Drug exports have allowed for the establishment of new Chinese-run drug cartels and distributors within the United States while untimely and tragic American deaths are recorded daily, as highlighted by the president when he declared the opioid crisis a “public health emergency.”
China has a deep and visceral understanding of how an Opium War can convulse a nation and collapse an empire. After all, it happened to them in the 19th century. Chinese call it their “Century of Humiliation.” Now the tables have turned. China has absorbed the Century of Humiliation’s lessons of stealth attack and economic power and applied them globally.
Given China’s authoritarian tech and police state tools, Xi Jinping’s monopoly power gives him extraordinary abilities to monitor and manage domestic criminal activity. Since China already easily and regularly arrests bloggers, VPN users, artists, protesters, and other innocents, it can certainly find and disrupt criminal cartels cooking up deadly street drugs for sale in America.
If not, then the United States needs to take an even more aggressive stance against China. It must be recognized that China’s new opium war, combined with her cyberattacks on American infrastructure and information, is further tearing at the increasingly fragile fabric of American society, institutions and competitiveness.
Trump needs to align America’s regional allies and lay out a tough approach to both North Korea and the drug war being waged against America’s people.
President Xi must be made to understand that with Chinese fentanyl, America is under attack and a chemical weapons red line is being crossed.
Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at Central European University and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.