China is a nation that shamelessly and regularly steals our intellectual property, costing us as much as $500 billion annually and posing a national security threat to our nation.

China is a nation that has actually built entire islands in the South China Sea, in international waters, where none existed before, and claims those islands are now Chinese territory. They have built military bases and airstrips on those islands.  This has gone virtually unopposed by the United Nations.

China bribes our politicians and businessmen, in a sort of communist  corporatism that serves only China and the greedy recipients of those bribes. The Clintons and Gore are no strangers to this.

China plants student spies in our technology development sector and in technical and Ivy League universities, buying and bribing their way in and paying as much as $6.5mm per student, displacing qualified American students.

China has killed 60 million of its own people under Mao, has eliminated many of its female children, has oppressed, tortured and killed many Falun Gong, Shaolin Buddhist monks and nuns, and Muslim minorities, persecuted Christians.

Just 20 years ago, when President Xi was a mid-level communist government apparatchik on his way up, China greased the treads of its tanks with the guts of 10,000 innocent Chinese university kids, leaving a bloody mound of human chopmeat and twisted bicycles in Tiananmen Square. They hid the photos from the media and censored all foreign and domestic reports.  The most we saw in Western media at the time were the famous pictures and video of a brave Chinese man with two shopping bags, playing chicken with a tank in the square.   We never saw the dead students.

Based on these egregious acts, what level of integrity can we actually expect from China in their trade and diplomatic dealings?

Based on this history, the John Wayne Diplomacy President Trump is practicing seems exactly the right approach to dealing with such dictatorial Marxist nations as China. Donald Trump has read them correctly. In one hand he holds an olive branch of peace and lucrative trade, in the other, a dragon harpoon. They get to choose. As the Sifu in the famous Kung Fu series starring David Carradine used to say, “choose well, grasshopper”.

The Chinese communist elites see themselves as superior to us in every way. If we don’t show a firm hand and create a powerful disincentive, they will manipulate and walk all over us.

If the dragon continues to breathe fire and cause widespread destruction, we must let them know we can and will shoot it out of the sky. They would surely do the same to us at their earliest opportunity.  In fact, they have been attempting to do so surreptitiously for decades.