If the Biden administration wants to get serious about China and its influence on the fentanyl crisis, it should "crack down on the border" and arrest some of the Chinese drug mules to disrupt the networks, retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata told Newsmax on Sunday.
Commenting on Secretary of State Antony Blinken's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Tata told Newsmax's "Wake Up America," that there were five points discussed. "I guess the AI thing was the only interesting point that they want to discuss, and I think it's so China can understand what we're doing and try to steal more of [it]."
China, he added, is "not an honest broker here."
"For Blinken to get taken to the woodshed like he did during this conversation, I think, only reinforces the incompetence of the secretary of state from the United States," said Tata.
Blinken said that he spoke with Xi about U.S. concerns over China's support for Russia and the invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan and the South China Sea, human rights, and China's production and export of synthetic opioid precursors used in the manufacture of fentanyl.
The secretary said after the meeting that the White House found potential evidence of election fraud being committed by the Chinese.
Robert Wilkie, also appearing on the program, commented that the Biden administration doesn't refer to China as an adversary or an enemy, but a "challenge."
"This administration started off its tenure when the secretary of state was humiliated on our own soil when his counterparts started reading back Joe Biden's speeches about this nation being irredeemably racist and the cause for most of the world's problems," Wilkie, a former undersecretary of defense and secretary of Veterans Affairs, commented. "The only thing this secretary of state could do is say we have to do better now."
But had that been former Presidents Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon, the response would have been that the United States was not "going to be lectured by a nation that's murdered 100 million of its own people since 1949," said Wilkie.
Meanwhile, Wilkie said that his greatest concern is not only fentanyl and the open U.S. border, but that the Biden administration is being distracted by Ukraine and the Middle East and disregarding China's activities in the Indo-Pacific region.
Tata also discussed the recently passed foreign aid bill that includes a provision that could lead to the ban of TikTok in the United States if ByteDance, its Chinese-linked owner, if it does not divest itself of the company.
"It's important to understand how pervasive Chinese collection on all of us is every day, all day," Tata said. "It's targeted, and they use this information to conduct influence operations."
However, TikTok is allowing people to make money, Tata said, adding that he thinks there is a solution for the social media site if it can be separated from China.
"I'm not sure that that's possible but, certainly, there are a lot of businesses that rely a lot on TikTok," he said. "I'm concerned about being able to single out a single social media company and make it go away. How far down the road is X from all of that, formally Twitter? I'm not sure of everybody's intentions here."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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