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.[1][2] He quotes a Congolese diplomat: “You promise us democracy. The Chinese promise us food. You can’t eat democracy.”[3] 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.”[4][5]
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.[6][7] 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.”[8]
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.[9] 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.[10][11][12]
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.[13] 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.[14][15] 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.[16]
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.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19][20]
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.[21][22] 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.[23] 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.[24][25]
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.[26][27] 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.”[28][29] 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.”[30][31][32]