Reagan-Era Official Reveals How the US Opened the Door for China's Exploitation

Reagan-Era Official Reveals How the US Opened the Door for China's Exploitation

Reagan-Era Official Reveals How the US Opened the Door for China's Exploitation

In this special episode, we sat down with Michael Sekora, founding director of the Socrates Project within the Reagan White House. In part one of this special series, we'll explore what the Socrates Project was, what lessons we can glean from the Reagan era, and how the Chinese regime was able to achieve a fast rise on the global stage.

Sekora noted: "One of the differences between China and the United States ... is that what their objective is—their national objective—is something which they believe in as a long-term objective. So even if there's a minor downturn in the economy, they'll continue pushing the objective of becoming the dominant superpower. In the United States, as we change administrations, slogans change, things like that come and go. It's not going to change in terms of China. So as we continue to decline, China may hit a couple of bumps, but I don't see them pulling away from their main national objective, which is very detrimental to the United States."

And as for China's rapid rise as a superpower, Sekora noted: "it wasn't that the U.S. conscientiously assisted. But as we determined in the Socrates Project, the United States shifted from technology-based planning to finance-based planning. And that shift is what opened the door for China to just accelerate tremendously. What the difference is, in finance-based planning, the whole foundation of decision-making is optimizing the funds, maximizing profit, whatever. In technology-based planning, the foundation is exploiting the technology more effectively than the competition in order to generate a true competitive advantage, which then dictates the funds, the manpower, the natural resources, and what have you. So when the U.S. is doing finance-based planning—which is an anomaly because we, the United States, was built on technology-based planning—it basically left us totally open and vulnerable to their technology-based planning. And then you take into consideration that China realized that, China took advantage of that in order to lull America and into a false sense of security. And basically, China had an open door in terms of technology exploitation in the United States and around the world."