My Washington Times Review Of 'Deceiving The Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive For Global Supremacy'

The Washington Times published my review of Bill Gertz’s Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy.

Back in 1971, when I was a teenage sailor serving on the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War, I recall when a Communist Chinese minesweeper came dangerously close to the carrier as we sailed from “Yankee Station” off the coast of North Vietnam to the Philippines.

The Chinese warship was adorned with oversized white propaganda banners in Chinese, so most of the American sailors couldn’t read them, but our captain had an intelligence officer translate the banners. The captain announced over the ship’s public address system that the banners read, “Down with U.S. Imperialism,” “Down with Nixon” and “Down with U.S. Navy war criminals.”

The captain informed us that he had sent the Chinese a message in response to the banners, “Since you are so down with everything, up yours!”

The Chinese made no secret that America was their avowed enemy in 1971, and according to Bill Gertz’s “Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy,” we remain their avowed enemy today.

Mr. Gertz, a Washington Times national security columnist and author of several books on intelligence, the military and national security threats, offers a sobering look at the growing threat from Communist China and its ambition to replace the United States as the world’s No. 1 military and economic power in the world.

In “Deceiving the Sky,” a follow-up to Mr. Gertz’s “The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America,” which was published in 2000, Mr. Gertz notes that for more than 20 years, a willful blindness had descended over both Democratic and Republican administrations that operated on a false assumption: They believed that by simply conducting business with China, the Communist Chinese would eventually evolve into a free market and democratic system.

“Today, however, the failure of that decades-long policy has resulted in an expansive hard-line Communist regime headed by a supreme leader with unchecked powers matching those of Mao — General Secretary Xi Jinping,” Mr. Gertz writes. “The new leader who took power in 2012 has ruled with an iron fist and made Communist ideology the centerpiece of a Chinese drive for world domination, not just China.”

How that failure came about is the subject of “Deceiving the Sky.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/20/book-review-deceiving-the-sky/