WASHINGTON—Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts published two op-eds this week on two of the major public policy issues facing the United States.  

In an op-ed for Fox News, Roberts highlights how President Joe Biden’s weak response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sends a message to America’s greatest geopolitical foe, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that the United States under this administration’s leadership is not one to be taken seriously: 

“Five decades of diplomatic engagement with China, and three of open trade, should leave us with no illusions about the CCP’s ambitions or its ruthless pursuit of them. … China is in this fight. The United States still isn’t. And President Biden’s waffling weakness on Ukraine is only further emboldening them. Consider how China has undercut the economic sanctions against the Russian economy through new oil and gas deals. It is past time for the United States to take CCP at its word and treat it like the dangerous strategic rival it is.” 

Roberts also lays out a clear roadmap for policymakers to follow in protecting American interests and holding the CCP accountable for its aggression and evil on the world stage:     

“All members of the CCP and other Chinese nationals should be barred from national-security-related research funded by federal contracts and grants, as well as from owning land near U.S. national security facilities. Americans should likewise be barred from investing in any firms connected to China’s military or surveillance state. 

 

“We should resurrect the China Initiative, the Department of Justice’s highly effective project targeting Chinese espionage that President Biden has just ended. We need to hold the CCP’s leaders and lackeys accountable for their atrocities, from whatever happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019 to the ethnic cleansing of China’s Uighur minority. 

 

“American CEOs, too, should be made personally liable if their businesses knowingly provide technological assistance to Beijing’s human rights abuses. Additionally, Chinese media outlets and official spokesmen should be booted from American social media. Injecting CCP propaganda into America’s domestic political debates represents Big Tech at its worst. 

 

“Diplomatically, we need to stop negotiating meaningless climate treaties and nuclear arms control agreements that bind us and our allies, but let China continue to produce carbon and warheads to their hearts’ content. We also must start building a permanent, China-resistant economy via strategic economic disentanglement.” 

Read the op-ed here: Biden's weakness in Ukraine-Russia conflict has only further emboldened China in a new kind of war 

Together with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Roberts wrote a commentary for Fox Business on the historic inflation rates causing immense suffering and hardship for millions of Americans across this country. The blame for these economic woes lie squarely with Washington, they write: 

“Congress has pumped more than $6 trillion in COVID relief into the U.S. economy, while the Fed injected $4.7 trillion into financial markets. Congress authorized almost $2 trillion of this ‘relief’ in 2021, long after most of the country had largely returned to normal, when even progressive economists warned it could trigger inflation. … For all the president’s promises about raising taxes only on the rich, all Americans pay inflation’s ‘hidden tax’—at the gas pump and checkout counters, in utility bills, rents and car payments. The cost of living in 2021 grew faster than wages, so despite all those trillions we spent in ‘relief,’ and despite soaring costs to employers and small businesses, American workers have less purchasing power today than they did a year ago.”  

Read the op-ed here: How Washington can end the inflation crisis it created