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As you might recall, we wrote a month or so ago about how Mitt Romney is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Communist China. Today, we write about Rick Santorum's Quisling moment. Like Mitt Romney, Santorum started out his career labeling himself a progressive, distancing himself from Ronald Reagan, working closely with unions and pushing other liberal legislation.

In his later years, Santorum referred to liberal fellow Senator Arlen Specter as his mentor and even endorsed him against a conservative primary rival "because it will further the causes in which I believe and because it's in the best interest of my state." Obviously, those would be liberal interests. Specter led the controversial charge for amnesty in 2006 despite a precedent-setting uproar by Americans who made history with the sheer volume of calls to the capital switchboard made to register their abhorrence of the legislation Specter championed. Instead of acquiescing to the will of the people, however, Specter marched up to his lectern on the Senate floor, pounded it with his fist and declared, "The will of the Senate will prevail!" Specter was soon removed from office, but Santorum continued to have nice things to say about him.

Enter Rick Santorum 2012, candidate for Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces, champion of contraceptive bans and backward Taliban-style rules for women - the obvious over-compensation for his liberal past. All of this would be as comical as a goofy sweater-vest were it not for the real damage his voting record as Senator has done, is doing, and will do to our survival national security interests.

To wit, Santorum voted in 1997 to allow the sale of supercomputers to China, whose military leaders have repeatedly sworn to destroy us, make war on us, and to literally "exterminate" our entire population. Maybe if Santorum had spent less time distancing himself from Reagan and Gingrich in the 1980s, he would have learned something rather important: giving your enemy the technological advantage is suicide. In recent years, China's fastest supercomputers surpassed our own for the first time in history, and by 2010 were an astonishing "47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine". Make no mistake: this alone disqualifies Santorum to be Commander-in-Chief.

Our strategic advantage has long leaned on technology, given our comparatively small force size vis-à-vis China or the former Soviet Union. China's army alone is roughly the size of our entire population. Imagine that force size equipped with modern weaponry that far exceeds our own. That is defeat and the end of America. Rick Santorum voted for that.

Clearly, Santorum has failed to comprehend the strategic consequences of his actions, as the recent outcry over his outspoken opposition to manned space flight and a return to the moon demonstrates.  Former Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney and current national security advisor to Newt Gingrich Stephen Yates rightly eviscerated Santorum's childish, out of touch, and ultimately suicidal space policy:

I am deeply concerned that Senator Santorum so easily relinquishes space development to the Chinese and Russians.

American success in space is not only about being the first to develop a station on the moon. It is just as much about the explosion of math, science, engineering and national security technology that will launch America into a new age of innovation and prosperity.

We owe it to ourselves to set grandiose goals and then achieve them. It is the American way.

As with Romney and Huawei (and many of his other failures), Americans might be more forgiving if there were some serious evidence of enlightenment; however, in the case of both Romney and Santorum such an opening of the mind has not transpired and both candidates continue to represent an indirect but existential threat to American national security.



H/T to @MissLiberty on Twitter for the heads up on Santorum's pro-China voting record and for the China supercomputer tech links.

Related:

China's Supercomputing Goal: From 'Zero To Hero'

Rick Santorum's Voting Record

Middle East Quarterly: Russian and Chinese Support for Tehran

China Plans Manned Moon Mission

China's Challenge at Sea

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

UPDATE for yesterday's post: As it turns out, Mitt Romney as governor was a wholly-owned subsidiary of China. Rep. Duncan Hunter, member of the House Armed Services Committee excoriated Romney in 2008, advising voters then to steer clear of a pro-China Romney. To this date Romney has failed address the problem, demonstrating further how unserious a candidate he is for Commander-in-Chief - although there's very lttle anyone could say to save himself from the inevitable disqualification this type of footsie with a hostile regime that has called for "exterminating the US population" brings.



From Newsmax, 2008:

"As the founder of Bain Capital, Governor Romney has an obligation to utilize his influence within the company to terminate the proposed merger between 3Com and Chinese defense contractor Huawei," said Hunter. "In light of China's refusal to port several American naval vessels last week, it is increasingly more important that American military technology be protected from foreign companies, such as Huawei, that are closely aligned with the Chinese government."

Hunter refused to endorse Romney in 2008 for this specific reason.

"This proposed deal, which Governor Romney can work to terminate should he choose to do so, is unpatriotic and damaging to national security," continued Hunter. As further detailed in a resolution introduced in the House of Representatives, Huawei has close ties to the military of communist China and allegedly aided Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. 

As mentioned yesterday, "Huawei [is] linked by the Pentagon and other key figures in national security as an espionage front group of Beijing's Ministry of State Security (MSS)." In 2007, the tech-industry news site Cnet noted that Huawei is run by a former PLA officer by the name of Ren Zhengfei.

Meanwhile, Ren has gone about building Huawei into a success story disregarding the usual corporate niceties. In 2000--three years before the WMD craze got us all nutso about taking out Saddam--the CIA accused Huawei of secretly selling a communications system to Iraq. In the final report of the Iraq Survey Group, Huawei and two other Chinese companies were singled out for carrying out "extensive work in and around Baghdad"--mainly telecommunication switches and the installation of fiber-optic cable.

The article goes on to mention Romney's involvement:

[...]Friday we learned that Bain Capital is paying $2.2 billion to acquire 3Com. Part of the deal involves China's Huawei Technologies, which will acquire a minority stake in 3Com.
And, oh, by the way, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor running for the Republican presidential nomination--he headed Bain Capital for 14 years.
Six degrees of separation. In this case only 2--but who's counting.

In a later interview with Fox News, Hunter went farther and told Chris Wallace, "I think Mitt Romney's a no-go for that reason alone".



A note of disclosure: As a Newt guy, I'm not telling you to vote for Newt, although he is the best candidate on national security and I do recommend you do; however, I think as long as you stay away from Romney, Huntsman, and Paul, your choice will not be a candidate who potentially does direct damage to our national security interests. I personally think Newt would agree with the principle that one of the most important things we can do as Americans is to keep more bad actors out of the White House.

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. He currently serves with the Newt Gingrich campaign as Texas Chair for Students with Newt (posts at Blogbat are personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the campaign). Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009 and misses the irradiated sushi at his favorite sushi haunt Itsu. He hates the Turabian style format.

So GE is finally meeting with the Pentagon to discuss tech transfer concerns on China. About time. The fact GE does any business with the regime should draw into serious question the prospect of future contracts with the Department of Defense, to say nothing of technology transfers which should be treated as criminal.

We should never forget the incestuous relationship between Democrat administrations, corporate cronies, and the Chinese regime, with quid pro quos such as we saw in the 1990s with PLA generals who donated to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign. But none of the last four administrations has dealt with or even truly acknowledged the reality that China was fighting a cold war against us whether we wanted them to or not. Part of what is needed is a president who will take a page from the Reagan playbook and severely curtail technology and tradecraft access by the regime.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon released its annual report on China, and you know it's bad when a Democrat administration finally admits a communist regime that is seeking to destroy the US is actually seeking to destroy the US. Of course, it is also rather shameful that the Bush 43 administration did little to counter the Chinese aggressor, either. In fact, the same year as the 9/11 attacks, China hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole 20 terabytes of data. "If the information had been on paper, they'd have needed a line of moving vans stretching from the Pentagon to freighters docked 50 miles away in Baltimore harbor just to haul it away." As an aside, both this cyber attack and 9/11 occured two years after the 1999 publication of "Unrestricted Warfare" by two PLA officers detailing the use of cyber warfare, terrorism, and other asymmetrical methods to destroy the US.

But even if we gained the upper hand in the cyberwar, how secure would our classified information, corporate secrets and patents be? The regime has made it no secret it uses nationals abroad to spy. Again, common sense serves well: a totalitarian regime that controls every aspect of its people's lives and information flow would let its people freely travel abroad? As with the Soviet Union, those who are permitted to travel are presumed to be those who loyally represent the interests of the regime. At present there are literally thousands of Chinese nationals in the US working ostensibly as students. Naturally, responding to this threat is of the imperative. That's never a perfect process, but it means that most Chinese nationals in the US should be considered hostile. Thus, we should also drastically limit the number of PRC nationals permitted in the US under any circumstances, while at the same time reverse the trend in recent years, which has been to reject those seeking asylum. Part of a good strategy also involves helping China to become a peaceful partner one day, and that means regime change to a stable, peaceful, liberal electoral democracy.

Some might suggest that calling for severely curtailing access by Chinese nationals to the US is a bit harsh. They might also argue that the US benefits more than it is harmed by their presence. So we think. There's a trade-off for everything and unfortunately, this is the case as well. There are certainly quite a few Taiwanese who'd love a shot. The reality is that China has stolen billions from the US in terms of technology and trade secrets as well as military secrets which may one day cost actual lives. Any short term gain proffered by their inclusion is also muted by that gain being passed back to the PRC, which effectively nullifies any advantage. Again, we are not talking about friendly competitors but strategic enemies, as was the case with the Soviet Union. And in the case of China, an enemy whose military leaders have already called for the extermination of the entire US population through use of WMD - if achieved, the greatest genocide in human history.

So we must bar those who are from enemy regimes. China does not allow those it thinks are hostile to its regime to travel outside its borders but instead only permits those to study abroad it thinks will act in its interest. In the long run, the US benefits more greatly from not having its technology siphoned off by a hostile regime and used against it. There are plenty of places in the world from which we can invite students and research partners. We can also invite Chinese officials to defect. But we cannot allow the regime access to our sensitive areas, which unfortunately, due to the nature of Sino intelligence, is a pretty wide swath of academia and S&T (science and technology).

Think about that 10,000 students working on behalf of an enemy regime. We don't benefit. They give us candy laced with poison. The same can be said for poor cyber security. Whatever is gained in the short run in terms of efficiency is lost many times over down the road. Communist China is our enemy and a threat to our vital national security interests. Secrecy is an art we must relearn in order to win the new cold war with this illegitimate regime. It's unfortunate, but the reality is it's just the way the cookie has to crumble. If we want to see Chinese nationals studying in this country again, we'd better get to work helping with regime change over there.

There are a good many things we all want, but as adults we must accept reality on its terms and then find a way to change it to our liking. The path to changing this reality lies not through pretending it does not exist but through a host of proactive policies both defensive and safely humanitarian in that part of the world to bring it about. No one seeing a truck approaching steps out into the road in front of it to get run over; instead he waits for the truck to pass and then he can safely cross the street. And we'll have to wait, but that is the price of the win-win. How long we have to wait will of course greatly depend on what kind of administration we have next.

Martin is a master's student in national security studies and is the executive director of Samizdat International, a genuine human rights concern. Martin undertook his internship with the London-based Henry Jackson Society in the summer of 2009. He hates the Turabian style format.