China has tentatively agreed to curtail sales of fentanyl to Mexico and other Latin American nations.
For three decades, Beijing sent the raw product to Latin American and Mexican cartels. The gangs then processed and disguised the toxic brew as less lethal narcotics and prescription drugs for export. The cartels laundered the profits with additional Chinese help, along with the feigned ignorance of the Mexican government.
Since 1999, imported fentanyl-laced drugs have killed approximately 600,000 Americans through addiction and accidental overdoses. That number nears the death toll of all Americans killed during the Civil War. …
… For nearly half a century, over the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump’s first, and Biden administrations, Americans more or less came to accept that more Americans would die from fentanyl than were lost in all foreign wars in U.S. history. If China really does comply with its agreement, and the cartels cannot find alternate sources of raw product, then Trump might become the greatest savior of American lives in U.S. history.
So why did the Chinese government agree to these tentative agreements, given that no prior president has been able to stop the Chinese fentanyl supply chain or to tariff its goods without fearing a destructive trade war?
Trump dealt from a position of strength, here and abroad, in a way that prior presidents did not. He had permanently destroyed the half-century-long utopian fantasy of Wall Street investors and left-wing dreamers that the more concessions China received, the more it would become affluent, powerful, and politically Westernized. That toxic narrative had insisted that an emerging consumer and reformist class would inevitably democratize the country as the ossified Chinese Communist Party died on the vine.
Instead, the opposite happened.
China stole Western technology with impunity, manipulated its currency, made a mockery of copyright and patent laws, and spread its Belt-and-Road imperialism. It did indeed become affluent and powerful, but also arrogant.
