Chairman Gallagher's Speech to the Young America’s Foundation 2023 Reagan Forum in Washington, D.C.
Click HERE for full speech.
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We are the good guys.
Those five simple words are a radical statement these days.
Much of the media and academia in our own country have set out to convince you that the United States is a neo-colonial, racist hellscape with no moral authority to lead the free world.
It’s telling that Chinese Communist Party propaganda often just poorly regurgitates woke talking points. And while self-criticism is a vital part of democracy, we can’t lose track of the fact that we are the good guys.
President Reagan understood that better than any modern President. He was the foremost evangelist for faith in the goodness of the American people, especially when compared with the inhumanity of Marxist-Leninist regimes. Veteran diplomats clutched their pearls when Reagan called the Soviet government evil, but what other word could you use to describe the murder and starvation of tens of millions of their own citizens?
Reagan denied any moral equivalence between our two systems. To win the Cold War, Reagan knew he had to win the ideological war–to show that the contest with communism was not just about two different ways to organize economies, but about an existential struggle for individual freedoms against totalitarian oppression.
Our generation of leaders needs to relearn the lost art of ideological warfare–we need to communicate to the world not just how we win, but why we must win. We may call this a “strategic competition” but this is not a polite tennis match. The most fundamental human rights and freedoms are at stake.
Will we be free to learn the truth, speak our mind, practice our religion, and assemble peacefully?
Will our rights as individuals be respected? Will we be seen as human beings with inherent dignity and worth?
The Chinese Communist Party does not recognize the inherent value of an individual. It believes that people are pawns that exist to serve the Party elite.
A world fashioned in the CCP’s image is not one Americans would want to live in, and frankly, it’s not the world anyone wants to live in, if they are not forced.
President Reagan made an observation about the Soviet Union that applies equally to China: “Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.”
The same dynamic plays out today. The CCP seizes its citizen passports, especially in Xinjiang and Tibet, and clamps down on visas for the rest of the country.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees have come to the United States. None go the opposite way.
The CCP even establishes police stations around the world to hunt those who have fled their borders. They spend more on internal security than on their military. Like the Soviet Union, their guns point inwards first and foremost.
An iron law of human nature is that, on the margins, people move towards freedom and away from authoritarianism.
Ideological warfare is about making sure people know the genocidal, techno-totalitarian truth about the Chinese Communist Party.
At every opportunity, U.S. policymakers should highlight the cover-ups in Wuhan, the tyranny of Xi Jinping’s Zero-Covid policy, the broken promises in Hong Kong, the forced separation of children from families in Tibet, and the concentration camps of Xinjiang.
These human rights abuses, and the all-pervasive surveillance state that enables them, are not accidents but rather the logical conclusion of the regime's ideology.
Ideological warfare means making sure people know WHAT is at stake— so they understand, clearly, vehemently, WHY we must win.
This is what Reagan understood — and in 1977 he described an equally simple goal to end the Cold War: “We win and they lose.”
To win, he argued in a national security directive upon entering office, “U.S. policy must have an ideological thrust which clearly affirms the superiority of U.S. and Western values of individual dignity and freedom, a free press, free trade unions, free enterprise, and political democracy over the repressive features of Soviet Communism.”
His vision challenged the prevailing consensus that the Soviet Union was a permanent part of the landscape
He understood that only by articulating what, fundamentally, was at stake, and by challenging the basic legitimacy of the Communist Party could the United States win the competition, and thereby ensure the survival of the free, open and prosperous world.
To wage a Reagan-style ideological offensive against China’s communist government, the United States must first promote its values and track record–not be embarrassed by them.
America’s values — and it’s record spreading freedom and prosperity – are an indispensable public diplomacy asset that China’s Communist leaders cannot hope to match.
Just look at the Korean peninsula for proof of how America’s friends thrive while China’s most ardent allies languish in poverty.
As Reagan was fond of arguing, even former adversaries, once incorporated into the American-led international community, have prospered economically and politically. Pax Americana has led to prosperity, enormous gains in life expectancy, and individual freedoms around the world. All the CCP has is a growing reputation for debt traps, economic coercion, and regional bullying.
Secondly, the United States can make it more difficult for the CCP to use emerging technologies to control and repress its people.
Taking a page from the Reagan administration’s emphasis on blocking the transfer of sensitive technologies to the Soviet Union, Congress could take up legislation that would block U.S. exports from supporting party-directed firms such as Huawei and ZTE, and deny
sales of critical technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The private sector should chip in, too. Silicon Valley should exclude technology partnerships with Chinese entities that are likely to exacerbate human rights abuses and promote the party’s surveillance state.
Finally, U.S. policymakers must differentiate between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party.
Just as Reagan sympathized with Soviet citizens against the system that oppressed them, the United States must make it clear it has no quarrel with the people of China. Rather, we are on their side.
This means protecting Chinese Americans and Chinese dissidents living in the United States from the long arm of CCP espionage, intelligence, and police services. Our country must remain a haven from persecution, not a hunting ground for authoritarian regimes.
The CCP has made it clear that their vision for the Chinese people is the same as their vision for America and the world.
This isn’t speculation. According to President Biden’s speech at the Naval Academy, Xi Jinping told him this directly: “in the 21st century,” he said, “autocracies will run the world.”
That’s not the future we want.
And, for the time being, it’s still up to us to decide. But it won’t be up to us much longer. Our policy towards the People’s Republic of China over the next ten years will determine what the next hundred years will look like.
The Biden Administration has taken some constructive actions with regards to our competition with China–export controls on semiconductor technology and military basing agreements with allies in the Pacific jump to mind.
But they aren’t waging the ideological war we need–and their reluctance to confront China based on human rights and American values is leading them to pursue diplomatic engagement at any cost.
The problem is that the more you wring your hands over whether you’re provoking a Marxist-Leninist regime that has no respect for international rules, the more you incentivize that regime to act “provoked” at the most insignificant slight.
President Reagan understood this. “If some of you fear taking a stand,” he said, “because you are afraid of reprisals…recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last.”
This is a message the Biden Administration seems to have missed.
In order to restart talks derailed by the Chinese spy balloon, or the “silly balloon” as President Biden now calls it, the administration sent high-level State Department officials to Beijing on June 4th, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, handing the CCP a massive propaganda victory and insulting the millions of Chinese who risked their lives that day to stand up for their freedoms.
That is how you wage ideological surrender, not ideological warfare.
And what were the fruits of these talks? President Biden predicted a “thaw” in our relations. Well, just last week the WSJ reported that China had inked a multi-billion dollar deal for Cuba to host a CCP military intelligence base 90 miles off the coast of Florida. So much for the President’s predictions…
The famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn may have put it best: “The very ideology of communism, all Lenin’s teachings are that…if you can take it, do so. If you can attack, strike. But if there’s a wall, then retreat. The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.
Reagan was like Solzhenitsyn’s wall: firm, self-assured, and resolute in the face of Communist threats. Perhaps he was most firm in his conviction that American freedom was our most precious possession and worth fighting for.
In his farewell speech, he spoke of our country as “the shining city on the hill’ and said “I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.”
That was President Reagan’s much more eloquent way of saying the five words I started this speech with: We are the good guys.
And make no mistake: we’re going to win.