Americans have some sense of how close the world came to a large-scale nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But today’s lapdog press has failed to tell the public how close the deep state dragged us to the jagged edge of conflagration through its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
Only after Joe Biden — and the autopen — left the White House last year did the New York Times tell some of the story. That account, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” drawn from hundreds of interviews with military and intelligence officials, revealed what the deep state tried to conceal: just how perilous the global American military empire’s proxy war with Russia became.
Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness.
The escalation of the empire’s provocations and Russia’s evolving nuclear doctrine turned into a deadly pas de deux. “The unthinkable had become real,” the Times reported. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.”
Now the Times has provided another look — fresh evidence long withheld — of the deep state’s efforts to subvert the Nixon White House. The essay, “Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now,” by reporter James Rosen, details a 13-month Pentagon spying operation against Nixon’s National Security Council.
Bristling at “policies they abhorred” — including détente with the Soviet Union, Vietnamization, Nixon’s China opening, and a reduced military share of federal spending — the deep state went straight to work.
Under orders from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer and others, a Navy enlisted man spied on the National Security Council, rifling through Henry Kissinger’s and Alexander Haig’s briefcases and desks, copying and stealing classified documents. “Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into NSC wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized.”
In all, an estimated 5,000 documents were delivered to the top brass.
Nixon learned of the Joint Chiefs’ espionage. The newly revealed material is evidence that, as Rosen writes, “Watergate had not arisen in a vacuum.”
Many informed people know that the deep state panicked when John F. Kennedy tapped the brakes on the Cold War. Among some, it remains an article of faith that his peace initiatives led to his assassination. In the Nixon case, Rosen writes, the lead federal investigator said what he was uncovering felt like “Seven Days in May,” the novel and film about a coup to stop a president pursuing détente.
It’s a mistake to think the deep state belongs only to history — to figures like Allen Dulles, the CIA chief who helped lead the subversion of Kennedy, or the Pentagon brass in this new Nixon account, or, even more recently, to John Brennan at the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom lied to Congress about deep-state activities.
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Without number are the lesser officials and petty bureaucrats who serve the deep state. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer in Trump’s first term, is one such. Instrumental in the effort to impeach Trump, Vindman testified before Congress that he was alarmed that the president was “promoting a false and alternative narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”
The “views of the interagency”? What is an interagency? By what constitutional means and process of deliberation does it arrive at its consensus? Who are its members? Whom do they represent, and how are they selected? Is there a vote — secret or otherwise? By whom? Does it require a plurality or a majority? Who profits from its decisions? Where can citizens find the rules by which it must abide?
By any other name, Vindman was talking about the deep state — which I detail in my new book, “Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole” — as the executive arm of the global American military empire. Operating without rules, it is, as Arthur Schlesinger described the CIA to Kennedy, “a state within a state.” Its only consensus is the growth of the empire.
Like the mythical Augean stable, the deep state is a foul mess of illegality, waste, and corruption that has lingered for decades. Tasked with cleaning it as one of his 12 labors, Hercules knew better than to try to clean it bit by bit, shovelful by shovelful. Instead, he diverted rivers to wash away the overwhelming mess in a day.
Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness. The renewal of our free and prosperous republic awaits a diversion from our imperial trajectory. It awaits America coming home — and ending its global military empire of lies.
Seven recently uncovered pages from Richard Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony indicate that the former president was undone by a coup d'état contrived by the deep state, a theory previously argued by Tucker Carlson and Roger Stone.
In June 1975, Nixon testified before the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and a couple of members of a federal grand jury. A portion of Nixon's 297-page transcribed testimony was previously sealed, considered too incendiary to share with the rest of the grand jury. While most of the transcript was released by the National Archives in 2011, a seven-page segment remained withheld.
'The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own.'
Last week, the New York Times published a guest op-ed from reporter James Rosen detailing the contents of those seven pages for the first time.
The newly uncovered portions of Nixon's testimony revealed that he became aware in December 1971 that Navy Yeoman Charles Radford had secretly copied roughly 5,000 classified National Security Council documents, including documents nabbed from the briefcase of Henry Kissinger, who was then national security adviser. Radford then shared those documents with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
Kissinger went on to become Nixon's secretary of state in 1973.
"Yoeman Radford was Kissinger's top notetaker. He had been with Kissinger on his secret trip to Paris when we were trying to end the war. He had been on all of those trips and had been the notetaker and knew what Kissinger had said and what the other side had said," Nixon testified.
He stated that Radford "broke down" when he was given a polygraph.
"He cried ... and virtually admitted his guilt," Nixon said.
"The reason that we couldn't prosecute and wouldn't was that if we did, he then would expose and could expose these highly confidential exchanges we were having to bring the war in Vietnam to a conclusion," Nixon explained.
Nixon believed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed his foreign policy, including his goal of ending the Vietnam War, and Radford's spying might undermine and sabotage these policies.
Nixon's testimony revealed that he had initially wanted to pursue charges against those involved in the spying efforts, but ultimately chose not to publicize the incident to protect sensitive operations and the military's reputation.
He called it a "can of worms" that was not worth opening, urging prosecutors not to probe the affair deeply. Prosecutors agreed.
"The Joint Chiefs' spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times," Rosen wrote. "The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the 'deep state.'"
The pages unearthed by Rosen support previous claims from Carlson and Stone that Nixon was the target of a successful coup attempt from deep-state actors.
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"He was the most popular president, by votes, which is the only way we can measure, in his re-election campaign. And two years later, he's gone, undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI, and a bunch of CIA employees," Carlson stated during an April 2024 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast.
During an August 2024 episode of "The Tucker Carlson Show," he said, "In retrospect, it looks very much like a kind of coup against a sitting and enormously popular president."
Stone previously wrote two books discussing the coup against Nixon, "Nixon's Secrets" in 2014 and "Tricky Dick" in 2017.
"Basically, [what] you have here is the deep state, which Nixon's testimony now proves exists, spying on Richard Nixon for the same reasons that they spied on Donald Trump. For the same reasons they invented the Russian collusion hoax as their rationale for the FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his aides," Stone stated during a Sunday episode of his podcast, "The Roger Stone Show."
Stone referred to the takedown of Nixon as a "government-engineered coup d’état."
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The FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation is confirmation that the left sees conservatives as enemies of the state and is fully intent on treating them as such.
Arctic Frost began in April 2022, with the approval of Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, along with Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In November 2022, newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith took over the probe. Smith declared he was focused on the allegations of mishandling classified documents, but Arctic Frost shows he was much more ambitious. He helped turn the investigation into an effort to convict Donald Trump and cripple the Republican Party.
The report indicts Smith for failing at lawfare, not for the lawfare itself.
It was revealed last month that by mid-2023, the FBI had tracked the phone calls of at least a dozen Republican senators. Worse still, with the imprimatur of Justices Beryl Howell and James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Smith issued 197 subpoenas targeting the communications and financial records of nine members of Congress and at least 430 Republican entities and individuals.
The organizations targeted were a “Who’s Who” of the American right, including Turning Point USA, the Republican Attorneys General Association, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and the Center for Renewing America.
Not content with active politicians, these subpoenas also went after advisers, consulting firms, and nonprofits. One subpoena targeted communications with media companies, including CBS, Fox News, and Newsmax. Normally, a telecommunications company should inform its clients and customers about subpoenas. But Howell and Boasberg also ordered nondisclosure orders on the dubious grounds that standard transparency might result in “the destruction of or tampering of evidence” — as if a U.S. senator could wipe his phone records or a 501(c)(3) could erase evidence of its bank accounts.
The scale and secrecy of Arctic Frost are staggering. It was a massive fishing expedition, hunting for any evidence of impropriety from surveilled conservatives that might be grounds for criminal charges. One can see the strategy, typical among zealous prosecutors: the threat of criminal charges might compel a lower- or mid-level figure to turn government witness rather than resist.
But Smith had an even grander plan. By collecting financial records, he was trying to establish financial ties between those subpoenaed and Trump. Had Smith secured a conviction against Trump, he could then have pivoted to prosecuting hundreds of individuals and entities under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. This would have led to asset freezes, seizures, and further investigations.
Smith laid out a road map for crushing conservative organizations that was supposed to be implemented throughout a prospective Biden second term or a Harris presidency.
Fortunately, voters foiled Smith’s efforts.
The meager coverage of Arctic Frost thus far has compared the scandal to the revelations of Watergate. But the comparison doesn’t hold. Arctic Frost involved significantly more surveillance and more direct targeting of political enemies than the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 and 1974 managed to expose.
Setting aside campaign finance matters and political pranks, the most serious crimes the hearings exposed pertained to the Nixon administration’s involvement with break-ins and domestic wiretapping.
In the summer of 1971, the White House formed a unit to investigate leaks. Called the “Plumbers,” this unit broke into the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, who was the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Transferred over to the Committee to Re-elect the President at the end of the year, the unit then broke into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex. The hearings exposed the burglars’ connection to CRP — and to the White House.
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The administration also authorized warrantless wiretaps. From May 1969 until February 1971, in response to the disclosures of the secret bombing of Cambodia, the FBI ran a 21-month wiretap program to catch the leakers. This investigation eventually covered 13 government officials and four journalists. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover submitted the wiretapping authorizations, and Attorney General John Mitchell signed them.
As a matter of optics, it was the surveillance of the members of the media that provoked the scandal. Since they were critical of the Nixon administration, it looked like the administration was targeting its political enemies. As a criminal matter, the issues were less about the actions themselves, as it was at least arguable that they were legal on national security grounds. Instead, it was more about the cover-up. When these wiretaps came up in the hearings, Mitchell and others deceived investigators, opening themselves up to charges of obstruction of justice.
One aspect revealed during the Watergate hearings could be compared to Arctic Frost. The hearings exposed extensive domestic spying that preceded the Nixon administration. The tip of the iceberg was the proposed Huston Plan of June 1970, which became one of the most sensational pieces of evidence against the Nixon administration. Named for the White House assistant who drafted it, the Huston Plan proposed formalizing intelligence coordination and authorizing warrantless surveillance and break-ins.
Nixon implemented the plan but rescinded it only five days later on the advice of Hoover and Mitchell.
Who were those Americans who might have had their civil liberties affected? It was the radical left, then in the process of stoking urban riots, inciting violence, and blowing up government buildings. The plan was an attempt to formalize ongoing practices; it was not a novel proposal. After Nixon resigned, the Senate concluded in 1976 that “the Huston plan, as we now know, must be viewed as but one episode in a continuous effort by the intelligence agencies to secure the sanction of higher authority for expanded surveillance at home and abroad.”
For years, ignoring the statutes that prohibited domestic spying, the CIA surveilled over three dozen radicals. The military and the Secret Service kept dossiers on many more. The FBI operated COINTELPRO, its surveillance of and plan to infiltrate the radical left, without Mitchell’s knowledge. And as the Senate discovered, “even though the President revoked his approval of the Huston plan, the intelligence agencies paid no heed to the revocation.” This was all excessive, to say the least.
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Watergate helped expose a far larger and longer surveillance operation against left-wing domestic terrorists. Comparing this to Arctic Frost suggests that the shoe is now on the other foot: the state regards right-wing groups as equivalent to domestic terrorists. Once, the national security state was abused to attack the left. Now, it’s abused to attack the right. This is hardly an encouraging comparison.
There’s a third reason that the comparison to Watergate doesn’t hold. In the 1970s, abuses generated a reaction. The Huston Plan, for instance, was squashed by the head of the Department of Justice. Controversial surveillance plans wound down eventually. Wrongdoing was exposed, and the public was horrified, worsening the people's growing mistrust of government. Lawmakers passed serious reforms to rein in intelligence agencies and defend Americans' civil liberties.
Survey today’s landscape, and it doesn’t look like there will be any similar reaction. If you’re a conservative staffer, activist, contract worker, affiliate, donor, politician, or lawmaker, you’ve learned about the unabashed weaponization of the federal justice system against you without the presence of any crime. What’s even more disturbing is that this investigation went on for 32 months, longer than Mitchell’s wiretaps.
During that time, no senior official squashed the investigation, and no whistleblowers leapt to defend conservatives. There wasn’t a “Deep Throat” leaking wrongdoing, as there once was in Deputy Director of the FBI Mark Felt. There weren’t any scrupulous career bureaucrats or political appointees in the Justice Department or elsewhere ready to threaten mass resignations over a legally spurious program, as happened to George W. Bush in the spring of 2004.
No telecommunication company contested the subpoenas, as happened in early 2016 when Apple disputed that it had to help the government unlock the iPhone of one of the terrorists involved in the December 2015 San Bernardino shootings. Neither bureaucrats nor corporations are coming to the rescue of the civil liberties of conservatives.
Public opinion won’t help, either. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) has called for “Watergate-style hearings.” But they wouldn’t work. Watergate was a public-relations disaster for the presidency because it spoke to an American public that held its government to a moral standard of impartial activity. Television unified this audience while also stoking righteous fury over the government’s failure to meet that standard.
The hearings were effective only because they reached a public sensitive to infringements of civil liberties and hostile to the weaponization of the state against domestic targets. But 2025 is not 1975. Even if one could unite the American public to watch the same media event, televised hearings on Arctic Frost wouldn’t bring about a major shift in public opinion. In fact, many voters would likely approve of Arctic Frost’s operations.
For one part of the country, lawfare happens and it’s a good thing. Jack Smith’s lawfare does not embarrass or shame the left. If anything, he is criticized for insufficiently weaponizing the law.
To date, the largest exposé of his methods to reach the legacy media, published in the Washington Post, criticizes Smith for prosecuting Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents in Florida (where the alleged crime occurred) rather than in the District of Columbia. It’s an impressive investigative report, assembling aides and experts to showcase Smith’s mistake. Left unstated is the answer to the naïve question: If the offense was committed in Florida, why was it a mistake not to pursue the case in D.C.? Because that was the only district where Smith could guarantee a favorable judge and jury.
To the conservative mind, most Americans still believe that protecting civil liberties matters more than attacking one’s enemies.
The report indicts Smith for failing at lawfare, not for the lawfare itself. In this environment, where lawfare is already taken for granted as the optimal strategy to defeat the enemy, exposing the details of Arctic Frost is like publicizing the Schlieffen Plan's failure in 1915 and expecting the Germans to be ashamed enough to withdraw. They already know it didn’t work.
Exposing the plan won’t change anything. The election of Jay “Two Bullets” Jones as Virginia’s attorney general is an indication not only of the presence of a fanatic at the head of Virginia’s law enforcement but also of what a good proportion of the Democratic electorate expects from the state’s most vital prosecutor. His task is to bring pain to his enemies.
The 1970s saw the abuses of the national security state generate a forceful public reaction. That turned out to be a rare moment. Instead of a pendulum swing, we have seen a ratchet effect. The national security state has acquired more weapons over the intervening decades, and the resistance to it has grown weaker. This has hit conservatives hardest, because many still imagine that our constitutional culture remains largely intact.
To the conservative mind, most Americans still believe that protecting civil liberties matters more than attacking one’s enemies. From that point of view, American politicians operate under electoral and self-imposed restraints that will impel them to take their opponents' due process rights seriously or risk being shamed and losing elections. But these restraints are now ineffectual and hardly worth mentioning.
Unlike in the 1970s, there will be no cultural resolution to the problem of lawfare. The problem will only be solved by political means: using power to punish wrongdoers, deter future abuses, and deconstruct the weaponized national security state.
When you’re presumed to be an enemy of the state, the only important question is who will fight back on your behalf.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at The American Mind.
“I’ve taught people a lot about China,” says President Donald Trump. “China and the threat it poses to America.”
The president is guiding me on a brief tour of his Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago.
“China has been ripping us off for many, many years, and nobody ever did anything about it,” says Trump. He went on:
Whether it was because they were intimidated, or whether it was for other reasons, China has taken advantage of us, and we, through corruption or incompetence, have allowed that to happen. We have been losing hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars to China over a period of many years. A steady stream of $500 billion a year and more in the trade deficit alone. Our wealth has been shattered.
Secret Service agents follow the president as he checks in with aides. I meet one woman who unfurls a 30-yard-long printout of all the emails sent to Trump in the last 24 hours. “They’re all Americans writing President Trump to thank him for what he’s done,” she says.
Americans chose him, among other reasons, to defend them from China and a predatory U.S. ruling class whose ties to the Chinese Communist Party had become the source of its wealth, power, and prestige. Trump had identified the problem decades before his 2016 run for president.
“Though we have the upper hand, we’re way too eager to please the Chinese,” he wrote in his 2000 book “The America We Deserve.” The book continues:
We see them as a potential market, and we tend to curry favor with them even at the expense of our own national interests. Our China policy under Presidents Clinton and [George H. W.] Bush has been aimed at changing the Chinese regime by incentives both economic and political. The intention has been good, but it’s clear to me that the Chinese have been getting far too easy a ride.
What it looked like on the ground for working Americans was ruin and misery. But according to the men and women Americans elected to protect their peace and advance their prosperity, there was nothing to be done about it. Even the president of hope and change said he was helpless when it came to China.
President Barack Obama was referring to Trump when he said, “When somebody says [...] that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal. Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have?”
Returning the jobs to America that the ruling class had exported to China was the core promise of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The truth was plain to see: Beijing hadn’t outplayed the top lawyers that White House after White House sent out to negotiate against the Chinese; the U.S. establishment had just sold out America. It was to the advantage of the movers and shakers from Capitol Hill and Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, media and the fashion industry, and they didn’t care how it hurt their countrymen and elevated foreigners.
So middle-class Americans hired an outsider who promised to take on China. Trump moved quickly. He invited Xi Jinping, the president of the People’s Republic of China and the general secretary of the CCP, to meet him here at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017.
“Until the China virus came, I liked and greatly respected Xi,” Trump says. “I got along with him very well. But they had this slogan, ‘China 2025,’ and I said to him that it’s a very unfriendly term. I said, ‘I really don’t like that term because you’re basically saying that you’re going to dominate us by 2025, and I don’t believe that’s going to happen.’”
Half a year after their U.S. meeting, Trump visited Xi in Beijing and described it in a speech he gave a few days later in Vietnam:
I recently had an excellent trip to China, where I spoke openly and directly with President Xi about China’s unfair trade practices and the enormous trade deficits they have produced with the United States. I expressed our strong desire to work with China to achieve a trading relationship that is conducted on a truly fair and equal basis.
The current trade imbalance is not acceptable. I do not blame China or any other country — of which there are many — for taking advantage of the United States on trade. If their representatives are able to get away with it, they are just doing their jobs. I wish previous administrations in my country saw what was happening and did something about it. They did not, but I will.
From this day forward, we will compete on a fair and equal basis. We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of any more. I am always going to put America first the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first.
“We had 164 million people working,” Trump tells me. He considers it one of his greatest achievements as president — to get Americans jobs.
“We had everybody from every segment doing well — poor, rich, middle class, it didn’t matter. African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, women, men, people with degrees from MIT and the Wharton School of Finance, people [who] didn’t have a high school diploma. There wasn’t one group that wasn’t doing great. Welfare was way down. Everything was going good. Food stamps were down because people had great jobs and they were happy; they were thrilled.”
It was evidence that Trump had kept his word. Returning the jobs to America that the ruling class had exported to China was the core promise of his 2016 campaign.
In office Trump and his aides came to understand that this meant taking on a vast network of American elites keen to protect their relations with China, a multigenerational matrix of public- and private-sector interests from the political, corporate, and cultural establishments that occupied the space carved out more than a half-century ago by Henry Kissinger when he served as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. With his secret trip in 1971 to prepare for Nixon’s historic visit, he opened China to the world again — Kissinger was the Marco Polo of the globalism era.
“Henry Kissinger was a smart man,” says Trump. In October 2017, he visited Trump in the Oval Office. “Mr. President, I didn’t expect this opportunity,” said Kissinger. “It’s always a great honor to be in this office, and I’m here at a moment when the opportunity to build a constructive, peaceful world order is very great.”
“He wasn’t helpful or unhelpful,” Trump says of Kissinger, who died in November 2023, revered as one of the “wise men” of Washington. “But he loved China. He loved China for a reason.”
Kissinger became the model for the new American establishment, a network of political, corporate, academic, cultural, and media elites that profited personally from the US-China relationship.
The opening to China was celebrated by the foreign policy elite as well as the cultural establishment, high and low, from sports to high art, including an opera called "Nixon in China" and a famous series of Andy Warhol paintings of Mao Zedong. Nixon later came to reconsider the wisdom of the opening to China. But for Kissinger, it became the cornerstone of his historical legacy as a statesman and then as a corporate leader.
His post-government career coincided with the rise of globalism, the new world order that saw national borders and even national sovereignty as hindrances to free trade. China, with an enormous pool of cheap labor, often slave labor, was seen as the centerpiece of the new system. And as the statesman who opened China to the West, Kissinger became the model for the new American establishment, a network of political, corporate, academic, cultural, and media elites that profited personally from the U.S.-China relationship.
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They made money by doing business with China, by opening doors for others to profit there, too, and by paving the way for China to enter what they euphemistically called the rules-based international system. The result, according to forecasts delivered by U.S. policymakers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, would be China’s eventual democratic evolution.
Instead, Beijing’s techno-autocracy rubbed off on American elites. Thus, what they meant by “international system” was just a series of political and economic arrangements through which communist elites became further entrenched, thanks to the money they and their U.S. partners accumulated on the back of Chinese labor and at the expense of the American workforce.
Kissinger became the role model for a networked U.S. elite regularly scrambling to hide China’s depredations from plain view and thereby protect their riches while avoiding blame themselves. Whether it was after the People’s Liberation Army air force brought down American planes in the South China Sea, or Trump declared a trade war with the PRC, or the PLA lied about its role in a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, turned millions more into paupers, and left the U.S. economy in ruins, the former top diplomat stepped forward to make Beijing’s case.
He built communist China the biggest and costliest lobby in world history, consisting of the ruling establishment of the most powerful country in world history. Everyone on the inside was in on it. All they had to do was make sure China stayed open for business.
In the early 1980s, Kissinger started Kissinger Associates, a consultancy whose roster over the years included former secretaries of state, treasury, and energy, national security advisers, ambassadors, and CIA officers.
Kissinger managed to avoid having to register as a foreign agent because even though he lobbied openly on behalf of China for 40 years, he wasn’t paid directly by the Chinese. Rather, he drew his income from the major U.S. industries that he vouched for in Beijing, under the tacit agreement that in return for access to China, they would make the calls and demand the meetings with D.C. lawmakers and the White House to lobby for China. It’s a loophole that serving U.S. officials never dreamed of closing, since they saw it as a useful paradigm to pursue their own post-government ambitions.
The list of former officials from Democratic and Republican administrations who have run strategic advisory firms, managed think tanks, or otherwise emulated Kissinger to profit from promoting U.S. ties with China reads like a “Who’s Who” in Washington of the last half-century, comprising both Democrats and Republicans. The list includes President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a former Kissinger aide; President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, also both former Kissinger aides and then employees; Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright, his Defense Sec. William Cohen, and his national security adviser Sandy Berger; George W. Bush’s Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick; and former President Barack Obama aide and President Joe Biden aide Kurt Campbell; as well as Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and CIA Director William Burns.
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To support the industry he built to advance the U.S.-China relationship, Kissinger curated the intellectual apparatus to ensure that his heroic version of the opening and all that came after dominated the narrative as the mainstream account. Centers and institutes were named after him, like the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States and the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University; chairs bear his name at the Library of Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as fellowships given at Johns Hopkins and Yale.
Kissinger’s central role as éminence grise of the U.S.-China relationship made him something like a dark-mirror version of Gandalf, the sage wizard in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, who guides a band of searchers on their quest. Except, where Gandalf’s charges were tasked with destroying a ring of absolute power that corrupted all who touched it, Kissinger’s charges — corporate titans, Wall Street bankers, leading politicians, university presidents, sports stars, and Hollywood moguls — wanted the ring of power forged in the Middle Kingdom for themselves.
Naturally, they became corrupted by it and brought devastation and ruin to their own country. Because Trump’s mission was to break the spell Kissinger had cast, the forces from every sector of the political and corporate establishment that over two generations had coalesced around it fought back. They joined China’s long war against America.
It’s not surprising that China turned its weapons on Americans immediately after the revolution. Washington had supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces against Mao, and Mao won. To contain the spread of communism, the U.S. fought PRC allies in Asia, where the Chinese killed and aided in the killing of 37,000 Americans during the Korean War and more than 58,000 in the Vietnam War.
The long war against America continues, through subtler means. The Chinese are responsible for the manufacture and distribution of fentanyl, which is illegally pushed across our southern and northern borders and typically kills as many as 75,000 Americans yearly. More than 1 million Americans died during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated with a leak from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, where the PLA runs biowarfare programs.
Leaders from the political, corporate, cultural, academic, and media establishments have gotten rich by making China rich.
Though no evidence confirms that the pathogen was leaked intentionally, China’s lies about COVID’s origins, lethality, and transmission are evidence that Beijing opportunistically used it as an instrument in an information warfare campaign to weaken its Western rivals, primarily America.
China’s depredations are typically ignored thanks to the efforts of a well-funded propaganda machine. Beijing pours money into various American intellectual institutions, including universities, think tanks, and media. It also pays U.S. academics directly, as well as social media influencers on all the major platforms, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, to smear America and dismiss reports of China’s human rights abuses of its own population, particularly minority groups such as the Tibetans and Uyghurs. The CCP also cultivates ties with subnational actors, including American minorities, mostly but not exclusively African-American, as well as state and local governments, to undermine U.S. interests.
But far and away the most powerful asset deployed by the PRC is what I call the China class, leaders from the political, corporate, cultural, academic, and media establishments that have gotten rich by making China rich. Virtually all of what the PRC now makes, from state-of-the-art high tech to advanced military hardware, has either been stolen by them or transferred to them by American elites in exchange for future favors.
China’s leaders, from Mao to Xi Jinping, are typically credited with raising hundreds of millions of peasants out of poverty — an economic miracle like nothing before it, say admirers. But the reality is that it was the policies of the Chinese Communist Party that plunged the Chinese into misery and poverty in the first place.
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It wasn’t Beijing that built China’s prosperous new middle class. The Chinese are hardworking and intelligent people, but the type of people who have risen to the top of the communist regime have crawled over corpses to get there — over 70 million Chinese killed under Mao alone. It was America’s political and corporate elite, the China class, who, largely through trade and financial instruments, made this murderous regime what it is today — a peer adversary of the country they call home. And they did it to augment their own wealth, power, and prestige at the expense of impoverishing the American middle class.
The China class appeared at first to be a random assortment of personalities from various industries and institutions who seemed to have little in common, outside the fact that the newly elected president excoriated them. But Trump’s resolve to take on China, and his relentless attacks on them, gave the elites collective self-awareness, or what Marxists call class “consciousness.” Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public- and private-sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes, and consumer habits, but also the same center of gravity, the U.S.-China relationship.
Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent became lucid under the light of Trump’s scorn and the reciprocal scorn of the elite who loathed him and the Americans who elected him to fight on their behalf.
A decade ago, for example, no one would have put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album. But there they are, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing. Miramax Films and Harvard’s Kennedy School? They both produced propaganda that assisted the PRC’s rise to global primacy. The Black Panthers and Goldman Sachs? Both hitched their fortunes to Beijing’s ascendancy.
Some did warn about the dangers of China. Labor unions were against admitting China to the World Trade Organization. In 2000, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called “the fevered rush to admit China to the WTO a grave mistake.” And four years later, the AFL-CIO submitted a petition, arguing that China’s labor practices, including the suppression of workers’ rights, were unfair trade practices that harmed American workers.
Human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and pro-Tibet activists swam against the tide of pro-China sentiment. Sometimes they were joined by famous celebrities, like actor Richard Gere, and even U.S. policymakers, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who, as a young California congresswoman, attended a rally at Tiananmen Square two years after the 1989 massacre there and waved a banner in support of the victims of the PLA’s depredations.
The type of people who have risen to the top of the communist regime have crawled over corpses to get there — over 70 million Chinese killed under Mao alone.
U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), who ran for president in 1988 and 2004, opposed granting China permanent normal trade relations status, also known as most favored nation status, because it would hurt American workers, while ignoring China’s human rights abuses. “Only when there is real progress that addresses our concerns,” he said, “PNTR should be granted.”
One of the most vocal critics of U.S. trade policy was Ronald Reagan’s onetime deputy U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer. “Giving China most-favored-nation treatment for trade,” Lighthizer said, “was a tragic mistake.” Lighthizer served as U.S. trade representative during Trump’s first term and provided perhaps the most critical piece in Trump’s China policy.
And there was Trump himself. “I think we need to take a much harder look at China,” he wrote in 2000. He was critical not only of China’s trade practices but also its human rights abuses — and he knew the corporate establishment was protecting China:
There are major problems that too many at the highest reaches of business want to overlook. There is, as I mentioned, the human-rights situation. Abuses included torture and mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, and arbitrary and lengthy incommunicado detention. Prison conditions remain harsh. The government continues severe restrictions on freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, privacy, and worker rights. All public dissent against the party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention, or house arrest.
He had pinpointed the source of corruption in our elite, the reason for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats to our peace. But even he was surprised to find how bad it was when he first came to office.
“They’re partners with China on virtually everything,” Trump tells me. “I mean, they just drop to their knees when China speaks. I’ve never seen anything like it. And they may be afraid of China. It’s not just business. It seems like they’re afraid of China.”
Among other things, they’re afraid of forfeiting the financial benefits. “I know one man who was very opposed to China,” Trump says. “All of a sudden, he comes in and he’s talking to me, and I said, ‘Whoa! What happened?’ He’s talking so positively about China. I said, ‘I’ve never seen anybody go from being so brilliantly against something to being so brilliantly in favor of it.’ I said, ‘They’re paying you, aren’t they?’ He said, ‘Yeah, they paid me a ton of money.’ They pay people a fortune.”
Even if it wanted to, the China class can’t cut itself off from its life source. “It’s like a fix,” says Trump. “And China knew that I was willing to get off the fix. It’s like drugs.”
So they fought Trump on China. They fought him on trade and the tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods during his first term and again when he tariffed China at the start of his second term. And they fought him on national security issues related to China. They fought him when he ordered restrictions on travel from China after a virus swept out of a city hosting a Chinese government lab funded by America’s biodefense czar, Anthony Fauci, in the fall of 2019.
COVID was the real-world manifestation of a decades-long truth; the metaphor employed to describe the relationship merging U.S. and Chinese elites had come to life: China’s communist party had poisoned America. The pandemic dramatized just how profoundly the relationship had transformed the country’s ruling class, now employing the same tactics as the CCP and mirroring its cruelty.
COVID became an instrument to demoralize Americans and imprison them in their homes; lay waste to small business; leave them vulnerable to rioters free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans deserved the hell that the elite’s private-sector militias like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and the FBI and other intelligence services had prepared for them.
U.S. political and corporate elites used the pandemic to disintegrate American norms, including election laws that were unconstitutionally altered to favor a candidate whose financial ties to CCP elites were uncovered a month before the election. But like Communist Party censors, dozens of U.S. intelligence officers arranged with social media platforms and prestige press outfits to block reports of Joe and Hunter Biden’s corrupt relations with Chinese officials.
The election of Biden represented the hegemony of an American ruling class that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against its own countrymen. To those most dispirited and demoralized, it resembled the installation of an occupation government ruling on behalf of a hostile power. With Trump gone, there was nothing impeding the political and business establishment from restoring its cozy relations with Beijing and accelerating the betrayal of American sovereignty.
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During a trip to Vietnam in September 2023, Biden explained: “I don’t want to contain China.” He continued: “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”
It was a far cry from Trump’s Vietnam speech nearly six years earlier, when he asserted he would pursue the interests of the voters who made him president. Biden was most concerned to soothe Chinese anxieties — and U.S. donors with a portfolio staked to China’s success. “It’s not about isolating China. I want to see China succeed economically,” he said. “We’re not looking to hurt China. ... We’re all better off if China does well. ... We’re not looking to decouple from China.”
He immediately began rolling back Trump initiatives to keep China in check. For instance, he ended the Trump Justice Department’s China Initiative to root out CCP espionage. After the PRC’s foreign ministry complained that it was racist, Biden compliantly shut it down.
And he made Americans more vulnerable to China. When Biden reversed Trump’s border policy, among the millions who entered illegally were large numbers of PRC nationals who, according to a former U.S. intelligence official, are attached to a special PLA unit.
With America’s borders open, fatal overdoses of fentanyl peaked at over 112,000 deaths. Other drug problems got worse, too. Chinese gangs with ties to the PRC government are responsible for much of America’s illicit marijuana trade. Chinese organized crime, say Oklahoma law enforcement authorities, has “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States.” According to one report, Chinese mobsters “illegally [move] money overseas for the Communist Party elite and spy on and intimidate Chinese immigrant communities.”
And the Biden administration failed to secure the drugs that keep Americans alive. The pandemic showed how reliant America had become on Chinese-made pharmaceuticals, with the United States importing $2.1 billion in pharmaceutical products. After Biden had three years to reshore pharmaceuticals, by 2024 imports had more than tripled, with the U.S. spending more than $7.8 billion on drugs manufactured in China.
In the early winter of 2023, a PRC spy balloon entered U.S. territory over Alaska. After a week during which it traversed the continental United States, it was shot down off the South Carolina coast. The fact that it was carrying U.S.-made technology, including a satellite communication module, sensors, and other sophisticated surveillance equipment, only underscores how American corporations prioritize profits over national security. It also showed how China controlled an administration led by a president whose family had clear ties to Beijing.
America’s political and corporate elite, largely through trade and financial instruments, made this murderous regime what it is today — a peer adversary of the country they call home.
As president, Biden continued to make the Chinese richer and Americans poorer. He revoked tariffs worth $8.5 billion that Trump imposed on Chinese solar panel manufacturers. One study showed that Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — legislation pushing the climate agenda — showed that Chinese manufacturers could earn up to $125 billion in tax credits. Further, by hiking energy prices to satisfy climate ideologues and lobbyists, Biden made the United States less competitive and China stronger by comparison.
On the national security front, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan gave China Bagram Air Base, a listening post where the United States kept tabs on Beijing’s military activities. “We would have kept Bagram because of China, not because of Afghanistan,” says Trump. “This is one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.” Biden, says Trump, damaged the U.S. alliance system to help China.
“Their stupidity with Saudi Arabia was unbelievable,” he says of his predecessor’s White House. Trump had defended the Saudis when he was pressured to relinquish the decades-long relationship with the world’s top oil producer. But he fought back: Saudi Arabia kept oil prices low, which is good for global markets, and invested in the United States, which is good for American workers.
“They treated Saudi terribly,” Trump says of the Biden team. “They pushed them right into the hands of China.”
While Riyadh flirted briefly with Beijing, Saudi Arabia did not realign with the Chinese — or else it would have risked not only the long-standing alliance but also one of the pillars of the post-World War II order that has made the United States the wealthiest, most powerful country in world history.
Because of the Biden administration’s recklessness, many began to wonder if the United States was on the verge of losing its dominant position. After all, the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is owing among other things to the arrangement Washington policymakers made with the Saudis at the end of World War II: The world buys American bonds and invests in U.S. real estate because the United States is the chief guarantor of security around the world, a large component of which is making sure that Persian Gulf oil gets safely to market.
Among other dangers in that strategically vital region is the anti-U.S. terror regime in Iran, which has joined forces with China and Russia. “Biden forced China and Russia together, and now they have Iran,” Trump tells me. In March 2024, the three conducted joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman. “How could Biden have let so many things get so bad?”
From Trump’s perspective, the long line of American presidents dating back over half a century are all responsible for the carnage.
When Trump first took office in 2017, he was hopeful that his administration could force some distance between Beijing and Moscow, but Trump’s domestic opponents made that impossible. The Hillary Clinton campaign’s dirty trick, smearing the 2016 GOP candidate as a Russian agent, was retooled by Obama’s spy chiefs and turned into a weapon to undermine Trump’s presidency.
With false allegations of Trump’s ties to Moscow, the “Russia collusion” narrative had effectively become an instrument to redirect the public’s attention away from China, Trump’s priority. Russiagate protected China and its U.S. partners from scrutiny and prevented Trump from shaping a more comprehensive foreign policy to deal with the threat from Beijing. Instead, says Trump, Russiagate “put us into a hostile environment with a powerful country.”
Who knows if the Trump team would have succeeded in isolating China with a U.S.-Russia partnership, but the Russia collusion narrative obstructed the policy of the man elected to conduct U.S. foreign relations.
“We might have had a good relationship with Russia,” he says. “Russia has very valuable land with minerals and things that we could have used, and we have things that they were desperate to have. And I said to Putin, ‘You probably know.’ And he said, ‘I do know without you even saying it.’ He said, ‘It’s virtually impossible for you to do anything with us.'”
From Trump’s perspective, Russiagate was a geopolitical disaster with the final bill yet to come. “One of the things that I learned very early on from a lot of very smart people is don’t let Russia and China get together,” Trump says. But the Americans fighting Trump helped force them together. “They pushed Russia to China.”
That formula is an inversion of how the U.S.-China relationship began more than 50 years ago, with Kissinger’s secret July 1971 trip to Beijing to prepare the ground for Nixon’s state visit. Nixon and Kissinger set about leveraging China against the Soviet Union. They called it “playing the China card,” but it was among the worst bets American leaders ever made, for their strategic gambit evolved into the devastation that Trump was elected to repair.
From Trump’s perspective, the long line of American presidents dating back over half a century are all responsible for the carnage.
“They were all really bad,” Trump says of his predecessors’ records on China. “But Richard Nixon is the one who opened up China. It was a terrible mistake. A lot of people praise him for opening up China. But I think they’re stupid people, too. It was a very bad day for the United States. He let them in, and other people let China take advantage of us.” There were other presidents who followed and other presidents who allowed the rape of the United States to go on and on. But it was Nixon and Kissinger who initiated it.
“The worst thing Nixon did wasn’t Watergate,” says Trump. “It was allowing China to take advantage of this country. He and Kissinger are the ones who opened up China. And it was a terrible mistake. It didn’t have to be this way.”
This is the story of the U.S. ruling class’ deadly pact with China. It shows how the career of one man, Henry Kissinger, shaped the world as well as the country we live in today. And it’s the story of the man twice elected to undo Kissinger’s spell. Trump and Kissinger, antagonist and protagonist, are the two poles around which this epic account of the last 50 years of American politics, culture, and society revolves.
Editor’s note: This essay has been adapted from Lee Smith’s new book, “The China Matrix: The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact” (Center Street).
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