The most newsworthy political campaign commercial of 2022 may be the one recently released by Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Ohio.

“It is us versus China,” Mr. Ryan says. “Capitalism versus communism. I’m not backing down, are you?”

He adds: “Americans can never be dependent on Communist China. We need to build things in Ohio by Ohio workers.”

That message was denounced as racist. 

The chairman of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Victory Fund, Shekar Narasimhan, declared that the ad “stirs up a racist pedagogy vis-à-vis China and makes Americans of East Asian descent vulnerable to attack.” The organization called Mr. Ryan’s ad “rife with sinophobic rhetoric.” 

A Democratic congresswoman from New York, Grace Meng, asked Mr. Ryan to take the commercial off the air. 

Republicans don’t want to cede the China issue to Democrats like Mr. Ryan, either. Senator Rubio, Republican of Florida, has been taking an increasingly hard line on the topic. Mr. Rubio, who is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, greeted the nominee to be general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency, Kate Heinzelman, with a statement that said since President Biden took office, “we’ve now processed a number of nominees, not just to the intelligence community but to other agencies, who have at some point done work on behalf of either the Chinese Communist Party [or] Chinese entities directly linked to the Chinese state. I understand people don’t like it characterized as such, but that is what it is. And anyone who understands the nature of the threat posed by China understands that’s what it is.”

Mr. Rubio went on to describe what he called a “pattern” in which highly credentialed executive branch personnel leave for international corporate law firms. “At that firm, despite having held positions in government which he or she should have [learned] the true nature of the threat from China, and all the ways they seek to influence American policy, they end up representing or doing work on behalf of some state-controlled entities in China, representing them generally on matters such as helping them understand U.S. law,” the senator said.

He bemoaned “how difficult it has become to find highly qualified and credentialed individuals to serve who haven’t at some point in the private sector interacted with Chinese Communist Party-linked entities, because that’s just the nature of the challenge that we face from China.… This is really a commentary on our U.S. international-based law firms and how their business model in many ways is now enabling and supporting the soft power and the subversive efforts of CCP-controlled entities.”

Mr. Rubio also joined with two other Republican senators, Tommy Tuberville and Tom Cotton, to press the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board to steer clear of certain investments in China. 

“Do you commit to voting to ensure that no federal employee retirement funds go to any Chinese firms that undermine U.S. national security?” their letter asked Mr. Biden’s nominees to the board. 

The senators wrote that they were “deeply concerned by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board’s history of voting to invest federal employees’ retirement savings into China-based companies, including firms involved in the Chinese government’s military, espionage, human rights abuses, and aggressive industrial policy designed to undermine U.S. industry.”

At this point, America’s economy is so deeply entwined with China that a clean break seems far-fetched. With inflation nearing 9 percent, asking Americans to swear off cheap Chinese-made goods could be politically perilous. 

These things can change quickly, though. It wasn’t that long ago that Senator Schumer was appearing with President Putin to promote Russian gasoline in New York. Now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with the link between fossil fuels and climate change, have altered the politics and the policy. 

When, during the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney named Russia as a foreign policy threat in 2012, President Obama mocked him: “A few months ago when you were asked, what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia — not Al Qaeda, you said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

The Russia and China cases aren’t exactly alike. Russia’s economy is smaller than China’s, and it is less significant to the U.S. 

There is a key similarity, though: Both Russia and China are rated “not free” by Freedom House. Until that changes, both governments are threats to their own people, to their neighbors, and to America. 

Recognizing that and saying so — as Messrs. Ryan and Rubio have been — isn’t racist. It’s realistic.