“This is like 1939.” That’s how author and lawyer Gordon Chang describes to the Sun the current world order, increasingly shaped by an ambitious Communist China while an unprepared America falters in leadership. “Historians are going to look back at us and say, ‘How could Americans not see what was coming?’”

Three separate wars merged into World War II. The battles brewing across three continents today could merge into a bigger conflict, Mr. Chang, who worked at Shanghai and Hong Kong for nearly two decades, says. “When you try to manage wars instead of trying to win them, these wars can spread very fast.” As the title of Mr. Chang’s 2023 book puts it, “China Is Going To War.”

China is helping Russia expand its weapons manufacturing as President Putin continues war with Ukraine, senior Biden administration officials say. China is a top trading partner of Iran, which provides critical funds, weapons, and training for Hamas. In North Africa, China is bent on extracting critical energy resources in Niger as American troops prepare to withdraw from their counterterrorist stronghold there.

The new foreign aid law is a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough to prepare America for “a global struggle,” Mr. Chang says. America’s policy toward China, he advises, should be to “prepare for war” by ending trade, investment, and technical cooperation. He even advocates for closing their consulates, stripping their embassy staff down to the ambassador, and expelling their banks.

More dovish foreign policy analysts would say that this approach raises, rather than reduces, the risk for America. When President Trump turned to protectionist trade policies in 2019, Beijing declared a “people’s war” on the United States. Mr. Chang, asked by the Sun whether his policy suggestions would provoke retaliation from the People’s Republic, said, “How do we think that we defend ourselves with no cost?” 

The alternative, Mr. Chang says, is to become a Chinese colony. “This is worse than the Cold War. Russians didn’t kill Americans in the tens of thousands every year.”

The People’s Republic, along with Mexico and increasingly India, is a lead source for fentanyl and related substances trafficked into America, the House select committee on China said in April. The drug has killed more than a quarter of a million Americans since 2018, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “The president is morally responsible,” Mr. Chang says. “He has an obligation to stop this, and he has openly facilitated it.”

The cost of a potential war with Beijing could have been minimized, Mr. Chang says, if we had acted five years ago. “Through misguided China policies, we have put ourselves in a position where every course of action going forward is risky and dangerous. And the most risky and dangerous course of action of all is continuing the policies that got us into this position in the first place.” 

Mr. Trump granted a temporary waiver of his government-wide ban on contractors using Huawei and other Chinese-made telecommunications equipment, even though he had deemed them national security threats. Under President Biden, Chinese universities and research institutes have acquired Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips through resellers, despite a block on the sales of such technology to the People’s Republic. 

A sense of delusion, or wishful thinking, or however a China hawk might describe it, appears to be bipartisan. “You have conservative Republicans who consistently propagate CCP positions, not because they’re Communists, but because they do not believe that national security considerations should affect our trade policies,” Mr. Chang says. “We just don’t have an adequate perception of the danger.”

Another geopolitical moment could describe the current one: the lead-up to 9/11. In 1993, a follower of Osama bin Laden killed six Americans in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. “We were determined not to listen until he killed 2,977 in one day,” Mr. Chang says. “China is much more powerful than Osama bin Laden ever was, and can exterminate the American population.”

For the People’s Republic, though, the year is more like 2008. Even if their gross domestic product is growing at the 5.3 percent rate as they claimed for the first quarter of this year, the country is struggling to produce enough output to service the debt they’ve accumulated. Now, Mr. Chang says, is the time for America to act. “China right now is in a very vulnerable position. They need us more than we need them.”