Re: Josh Rogin at the Washington Post recently wrote a piece on the Trump administration’s China hawks. The latest episode involves current national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien giving a speech in Arizona widely seen as the harshest anti-CCP statement a senior U.S. official has given in recent memory.

Since the election is only several months away, I think now is a pretty unfortunate time to predict whether these speeches are mere political positioning or preambles to more meaningful, actionable policies.

But I can see the logic behind these moves: “wolf warriors” and those doing CCP propaganda and foreign influence work have dug a massive hole for themselves to jump in without any real backups or plans to come out of the hole—even though their initial intention might be to tilt the balance in their favor by taking advantage of the pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, hawk-eyed China hawks and political executives inside the Beltway saw these shoot-oneself-in-the-foot stumbles as a godsend for them to introduce to the mainstream many of the hardline policy stances they have long yearned for. Regrettably, not all of these stances may lead to policies that align well with the U.S. strategic approach to the PRC or the effects that the approach is trying to achieve (the economic loss and brain drain resulting from restricting visas for Chinese students come to mind).

Having said that, those policies aiming for the development and control of critical future technologies should ALWAYS be given the top priority and deserve rigorous planning and analysis, because I believe this is also the area that the “single authority” and his small group of underlings/advisors are betting on in the long run (so it renders many of the recent IR talks such as the one by Yuan Peng of less importance or relevance).