If one could subsume and take over and corrupt the greater foreign power from within, there's no need for a massive bloody conventional war.
For many years it was sold to the American people that we were 'changing' and 'softening' the CCP regime by engaging with it, trading with it, shipping key US national security infrastructure to China.
Well...surprise...that wasn't what was really happening.
What was happening was we were being massively infiltrated and had become the targets of CCP infiltration/influence operations simply staggering in their scope and depth.
Far from influencing China, China was influencing us.
Gaining control of the US government at the federal [and many state/local levels as well] took decades of careful maneuvering and bribery, blackmail and iron-fisted arm twisting behind the scenes.
And the influence operations don't chiefly involve bribing formerly honest politicians to look the other way. They moved past that stage long ago.
By the 1990's they were handpicking the candidates for us all because they had become fully immersed within the US election systems at all levels by that point.
For many years it was sold to the American people that we were 'changing' and 'softening' the CCP regime by engaging with it, trading with it, shipping key US national security infrastructure to China.
Well...surprise...that wasn't what was really happening.
What was happening was we were being massively infiltrated and had become the targets of CCP infiltration/influence operations simply staggering in their scope and depth.
Far from influencing China, China was influencing us.
Gaining control of the US government at the federal [and many state/local levels as well] took decades of careful maneuvering and bribery, blackmail and iron-fisted arm twisting behind the scenes.
And the influence operations don't chiefly involve bribing formerly honest politicians to look the other way. They moved past that stage long ago.
By the 1990's they were handpicking the candidates for us all because they had become fully immersed within the US election systems at all levels by that point.