China as economic threat
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China as economic threat is John Kiriakou's framing that China endangers the West economically rather than militarily. Flush with cash, it has "essentially been able to buy friends all around the world" while the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year on weapons and cannot build nice roads, bridges or bullet trains. He quotes a Congolese diplomat: "You promise us democracy. The Chinese promise us food. You can't eat democracy." Militarily, he notes, China has one aircraft carrier to America's 24 and one foreign base (in Djibouti), and does not invade its neighbors as the U.S. does, echoing an Onion headline he found true: "China content to sit back and watch US destroy itself."

Kiriakou points to Greece as a European example of the same pattern: desperate for money after its 2008 economic collapse, Greece sold the ports of Piraeus, the biggest cargo port in the world, Thessaloniki, and Iraklio (Chania) to China, a decision he calls a "really terrible" one that has left China now effectively controlling the Greek economy. He quotes a Congolese diplomat making the same point about the developing world more broadly: "You know the difference between you and the Chinese? You promise us democracy and the Chinese promise us food."

Kiriakou traces this soft-power reach to specific deals: China built a refinery in the Caribbean, one of only two places in the world, alongside Texas, able to process Venezuela's unusually high-sulfur crude, buying influence with an oil-rich but sanctioned state. He argues China's history of expansionism is thin, the annexation of Tibet, a brief 1970s border skirmish with Vietnam, occasional friction with India, and that it maintains only one overseas military base, in Djibouti, which it shares with the United States; that a smaller Chinese population would actually raise per-capita GDP, since roughly 10% of the population already generates most of it.

On Taiwan, Kiriakou says the U.S. interest is less about the island itself than pressuring the mainland and protecting Taiwan Semiconductor, which supplies most of the world's microchips. Under the one-China policy adopted during the Carter administration, the U.S. keeps an "interest section" rather than an embassy in Taipei, and currently sails two aircraft carrier battle groups through the South China Sea, a move Kiriakou calls a provocation against China rather than a response to any Chinese threat. A U.S.-China war, he says, would be "highly technological", dominated by unprecedented cyberattacks disabling banking and internet access on both sides, with nuclear exchange as the ultimate danger.

Kiriakou connects this to the credibility of U.S. sanctions policy more broadly: after the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal in 2017, its own sanctions law required the Treasury to sanction Britain, France, Germany, and Japan for continuing to trade with Iran, which the U.S. did not enforce, a failure he says made America look weak. He has given a concrete example of Chinese sanctions-evasion infrastructure at the consumer level: in Hong Kong, he found most merchants would not take Mastercard or Visa, instead using a "Panda Card" that, unlike the U.S. networks, routes payments through Shanghai rather than New York and so escapes U.S. sanctions enforcement. He has described the same workaround under a different name, the "Octopus card", used by shopkeepers in China who told him plainly that Mastercard and Visa transactions "go through New York and... make us liable for sanctions," while Octopus "go[es] through Shanghai" and sidesteps American enforcement entirely.

Kiriakou has also pointed to a darker dimension of Chinese influence abroad: a Chinese espionage network of "illegals", Chinese nationals living undercover with ordinary jobs, was uncovered operating in Australia, not against traditional defense targets but against Chinese nationals deemed insufficiently pro-Beijing, including threats and beatings and, in one case, threats against family members still in China. On military reach, he has recalled visiting the U.S.-French Camp Lemonnier base in Djibouti in 2011, split by a fence with the French on one side; the same base, he says, is now split between the U.S. and China. Despite this, Kiriakou does not believe China intends to invade Taiwan, arguing that if Beijing wanted to invade it would already have done so while the U.S. is distracted by Iran, comparing it to Russia's own satisfaction at American distraction from Ukraine, and has cited an Onion headline, "China has changed its official policy to just sit back and watch the American government collapse on its own," as capturing how it feels.

On the economic ledger itself, Kiriakou argues the U.S. cannot sustain its current course: the Pentagon alone costs a trillion dollars a year against a roughly $35 trillion national debt growing by two trillion dollars annually, while PricewaterhouseCoopers spent years trying and ultimately failing to audit the Pentagon's budget. He credits Richard Nixon, not Bill Clinton, with first opening U.S. trade relations with China, Nixon was the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country, the origin of the phrase "only Nixon could go to China." He predicts that a unified BRICS currency will eventually emerge and severely damage U.S. economic dominance, not within five years, but eventually, and expects combined BRICS GDP, currently below U.S. GDP, to draw even within a decade, ushering in what he calls "the Chinese century."

The standard-of-living argument

On John Kiriakou's programme in 2026, the economist Richard D. Wolff offered an alternative account of why China has become the designated adversary. In his telling, China is "the most dramatic story of a standard of living going up for the working class that we have anywhere in the world over the last half century," and the anxiety among American leaders is that as Americans learn what has been delivered to Chinese workers they will grow "increasingly dissatisfied with what has not been delivered to the working class of this country." He put that ahead of the territorial question: it is "much more important than anything having to do, for example, with the little island of Taiwan."

Wolff also placed China at the end of a sequence he dates to the jet aeroplane and the internet, which together let employers supervise workers in Shanghai as easily as in Cincinnati and so close American plants for wages a third or a tenth as high, and he told Kiriakou's audience that those jobs "are not coming back."

What the recipients found out

Kiriakou has described the disillusionment setting in among countries that took Chinese terms. He met the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Washington and relays his account: the Chinese arrived with very generous ideas of aid, and it turned out that "the Chinese have to take ownership of everything."

He uses Greece as the case he knows best. A serious and prolonged economic crisis forced the sale of ownership in major ports, and the Chinese now hold them. What was presented as an improvement in Greek,Chinese relations and a boost to the Greek economy he reads differently: "The Chinese intend to stay there forever... maybe not militarily, but economically."

He extends the point to raw materials, noting that most of the rare-earth mines in Africa are being worked by the Chinese, with the implication for semiconductors and advanced technology that follows.

On how they manage it, Kiriakou declines the flattering version and offers a colder one. Told the Chinese are smarter than the Americans, he answers: "I don't know if they're smarter. They're more methodical." The Belt and Road effort, he notes, has been running for decades, pursued deliberately and quietly, "They don't hold it in our faces like we do military sales."

The record he reads, and the confrontation he questions

Kiriakou pairs a disclaimer with an argument. "I''m not a fan of the Chinese government, of course, but the Chinese do not, with very specific exceptions, have a history of imperialism. They took Tibet, absolutely. They have fought border wars with the Indians, they have fought border wars with the Vietnamese. But they don''t go around the world invading other countries." On that reading he expects Beijing to offer mediation in conflicts rather than entry into them.

He also argues the direction of fear in the region is misread in Washington: "it was the Chinese who were attacked by the Japanese ... it''s the Chinese that are more worried about what the Japanese might do to them than the reverse." His verdict on the resulting policy is a question: "why we''ve decided to confront the Chinese like this in the South China Sea of all places ... I just don''t get what the end game is." Cooperation, in his account, was the road not taken, "rather than to work constructively with the Chinese, we decided to ... pivot to Asia."

The resupply argument

Asked by John Kiriakou in April 2026 whether Iran could survive the war economically, the economist Richard D. Wolff answered by way of geography and manufacturing capacity. Iran and Russia share an immense coastline on the Caspian Sea, an internal ocean, and Tehran sits close to it: anything Iran needed that was bombed, "The Russians put it on a boat and in in a day and a half, it's done. It's in Iran."

Behind Russia he placed China. Russia had shown in Ukraine that it holds "limitless amounts" of missiles and drones, and if it ever ran short it shares thousands of miles of border with a country whose manufacturing base, he quoted Paul Krugman for the comparison, "is larger than that of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany combined." China, he said, "can produce missiles and drones forever," and ship them easily to Russia, which can ship them easily to Iran.

The conclusion he drew is the one he repeated as the programme's cold open: "Picking a fight with Iran at this time means that the United States, which they know, is basically having a war with Russia and China. And that's not a good idea because those societies are equipped to fight a lot longer than the United States, given everything we've seen in previous wars that these countries have gotten involved in. Bad choice, bad timing."

See also

- Permanent wartime economy
- Russia-Ukraine war origins
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
