The 5 Huge Chinks in America’s Armor That Our Enemies Can Exploit

Yes, America is the world’s only superpower, but Americans should have realized how vulnerable our nation is after 9/11. Perhaps for a time, we did. A lot of people have, justifiably in many ways, given George W. Bush flack for how the wars he launched in Iraq and Afghanistan played out. However, strategically, one of the things he was trying to do was draw the terrorists into conflicts with American soldiers overseas, rather than having them focus their efforts on launching attacks at civilians in America. For the most part, that strategy worked.

There were other lone wolf attacks, but nothing approaching 9/11 has happened on American soil since then while an awful lot of terrorists ended up dead in the deserts of the Middle East. However, beyond that and some annoying security theater in the airports, America doesn’t seem to have learned much else long-term from 9/11.

Meanwhile, there are terrorists that still want to kill Americans, Iran hates our guts and is moving toward nuclear weapons, China views us as a rival and has its greedy eyes on Taiwan while we’re currently openly using Ukraine as a proxy to bleed Russia, which undoubtedly isn’t making them very happy with us.

Furthermore, there are a virtually unlimited number of groups and nations that would like to see America brought low either because they hate us, think it will directly benefit them or generally would like to move up one spot in the global pecking order. If you’re the biggest, toughest, richest nation that sits on top of the totem poll, everybody wants things from you, but no one loves you.

Despite what happened on 9/11, many people foolishly think that because the United States has a nuclear arsenal and the strongest conventional forces, no one would dare attack us. Although it is unlikely that say Chinese forces are going to invade California or that we’re going to get into a conventional military battle with Russia over Alaska, America has increasingly developed weaknesses and vulnerabilities that our enemies are well aware of and can exploit under the right circumstances. As you read these, keep in mind that all the nations and groups that want Americans dead are well aware of these issues. If you’re an American, you should be as well.

1) Open borders: The Democratic Party in our country wants the border wide open so millions of illegals will flow in to potentially vote for the Democrats down the road. There are a multitude of problems with this and one of them is that if the border is open to illegals, it’s also open to murderers, rapists, pedophiles, career criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, and foreign agents. For example, here’s a statistic you may not be aware of:

The Joe Biden regime has overseen a surge of over 140,000 Chinese illegal aliens since fiscal year 2021, most of them military-aged men.

Pretty interesting, huh? Now consider this:

An illegal Chinese migrant was arrested in California after sneaking onto a military base and refusing to leave, heightening fears Beijing spies are trying to infiltrate sensitive sites in the U.S.

There have been more than 100 instances in which U.S. military bases were infiltrated by Chinese nationals over the last several years.

How many of those 140,000 illegal aliens from China that are here are government agents? It could be hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. It’s not an exaggeration to say that several hundred well-trained men, acting in small groups and targeting vulnerable spots and crowds could kill tens of thousands of people and do trillions of dollars’ worth of damage in a few months if they were so inclined. They could also practically shut down significant parts of the American economy by targeting a relatively small number of pipelines, parts of the energy grid, transformers, and nuclear plants.

Imagine parts of the country plunging into darkness for weeks or perhaps even months. Well-coordinated strikes over a couple of days by say 100 enemy agents could certainly make that happen. Would China do something like that if we got into a shooting war over Taiwan? Maybe – and who says China is the only group here? Heck, one day someone may even cross our border with a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon capable of killing millions. Why fire it at us from your nation, when you can walk it right across the border, anywhere you want in the United States, and set it off, potentially without us even knowing who did it?

2) Debt: Owing as much money as the United States does is an increasingly large vulnerability. Like a boulder rolling downhill, as the interest we have to pay on the debt accumulates, it becomes harder and harder to pay it off without inflating the currency into oblivion. Eventually, we will get to the point where we don’t have a lot of economic flexibility and have to decide whether to dramatically cut our biggest expenses like Social Security, Medicare, and Defense, default on our debt, or dramatically inflate our currency. The smart bet is on option 3. Also, the bad news is that we’re already very much in the danger zone:

The more debt we accumulate, the more we become dependent on foreign nations to finance it and the closer we move to a day when there’s no longer enough faith in the dollar for it to remain the world’s reserve currency. Nations that are hostile to us can speed this process along by moving to alternatives.

In fact, they’re already trying to do just that, although the dollar doesn’t seem to be in danger of losing its reserve currency status in the near future:

The BRICS nations, comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are looking to establish a new reserve currency backed by a basket of their respective currencies. The potential currency, while still under review and development, would allow these nations to assert their economic independence while competing with the existing international financial system….South Africa's BRICS ambassador, Anil Sooklal, has said as many as 40 countries have expressed interest in joining BRICS….For decades, the US dollar has enjoyed unparalleled dominance as the world's leading reserve currency. According to the US Federal Reserve, between 1999 and 2019, the dollar was used in 96 percent of international trade invoicing in the Americas, 74 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, and 79 percent in the rest of the world. In April 2022, the US dollar was used in 88 percent of currency exchanges. Additionally, the dollar is used for the vast majority of oil trades, and it was just under 60 percent of all foreign currency reserves held by central banks in the first half of 2023. And due to its status as the most widely used currency for conversion and its use as a benchmark in the forex market, almost all central banks worldwide hold dollars. Although the dollar's reserve currency share has decreased as the euro and yen have gained popularity, the dollar is still the most widely used reserve currency, followed by the euro, the yen, the pound, and the yuan.

Once we lose that reserve currency status – and it seems likely we will within the lifetimes of many people reading this article, it may take decades for us to right the ship economically and our time as a super-power will be over.

3) Losing control of critical parts of the supply chain: During COVID, many Americans got their first taste of what life might be like if the “just in time” shipping system started to break down. However, for most of us, that may have just meant toilet paper and hand sanitizer were in short supply for a while. No big deal, right? However, did you know we’re reliant on other countries for computer chips? Rare metals? Life-saving drugs? What happens if we get into a war with China and we’re relying on China for rare metals used to produce the missiles we’re firing at them? How about drugs?

“Medicines can be used as a weapon of war against the United States,” Rosemary Gibson, a senior adviser on healthcare issues at the bioethics-focused Hastings Center and co-author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine,” told lawmakers last month. “Supplies can be withheld. Medicines can be made with lethal contaminants or sold without any real medicine in them, rendering them ineffective.”

A watchdog report last month by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and a recent congressional hearing warn that China hopes of surpassing the United States as the world’s biggest producer of pharmaceutical products.

Last year, China accounted for 95 percent of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 91 percent of U.S. imports of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of U.S. imports of acetaminophen, 40 to 45 percent of U.S. imports of penicillin and 40 percent of U.S. imports of heparin, according to Commerce Department data.

In a letter to health chiefs last year, Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley cited reports claiming 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients are produced overseas, mostly in China and India.

We’ve started taking some baby steps in the right direction in stockpiling key metals and pharmaceuticals, as well as building plants so we can make our own chips, but we’re likely to be very vulnerable in that area for quite some time.

4) Polarization: It’s no secret that the Left and the Right in America absolutely detest each other, and that the Left has successfully managed to pit all sorts of groups of Americans against each other. However, what many Americans do not realize is that foreign powers have already begun actively taking advantage of this via social media. Sure, people know Russia played some games during the 2016 elections, but there are many countries with social media armies out there surreptitiously influencing what Americans think.

Even setting aside TikTok, which could be fairly considered the biggest and most successful psyop in history, many countries have countless agents on websites like X (Twitter) working to change the perceptions of Americans. It’s probably not even all that hard to do if you control botnets with tens of thousands of accounts, which nations like China, Russia, Iran, and many others do.

You amplify divisive voices. You pretend to be a member of one group who likes incredibly offensive sentiments about another group to make it appear popular. You abuse voices of reason. You cheer on insanity. Next thing you know, you are shaping perceptions.

Controlling what’s perceived to be popular and unpopular can swing elections, change perceptions of nations, cause people to lose faith in their institutions, and influence the behavior of tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of people. This is a glaring weakness and undoubtedly, our enemies have already done much more damage to our country via these channels than we know, and they will continue down this path. They don’t need to fight us militarily if they can disable us morally, spiritually, and turn us against each other.

5) Softness/lack of production capacity: These may seem like unrelated topics but think back to what happened in America after Pearl Harbor. After a huge military setback, Americans flocked to join the military (over 16 million served), and not only did we rebuild our own fleet, but we also supplied much of the gear that Britain, the Soviets, and our other allies used:

In the three years following the Battle of Midway, the Japanese built six aircraft carriers. The U.S. built 17. American industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war: 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, and two million army trucks. In four years, American industrial production, already the world's largest, doubled in size.

We simply no longer have the capacity to do either of those things anymore. As a practical matter, it’s hard to imagine the United States fielding such a large military again even though our population is roughly 2.5 times bigger.

Americans have not only become a very soft people, but we’re also not as patriotic or fit as we once were. Along similar lines, we simply do not have the production capacity to pump out the mountains of equipment we did in the forties. As a matter of fact, even with other nations helping, we’ve struggled to make enough equipment to supply Ukraine in their war against Russia:

More than a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. plans to increase production of key munitions have fallen short due to shortages of chips, machinery, and skilled workers.

Arms makers have added factory shifts, ordered new equipment, and streamlined supply chains to boost output of Javelin antitank missiles, artillery shells, guided rockets, and much more, which Ukrainian forces are firing by the thousands at the Russian invaders.

Years of stop-start Pentagon funding for munitions led companies to close production lines or quit the industry, while output of many components and raw materials moved overseas. Defense Department chiefs estimate the decline will take five or six years to reverse.

While it’s entirely true that our military philosophy has changed to one that values quality over quantity, if there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that unexpected losses happen and a nation’s ability to recover from a surprising defeat can ultimately spell the difference between victory and defeat.

As a practical matter, America is no longer all that adaptable. If we had some sort of military disaster, we wouldn’t be able to replenish equipment and manpower fast enough to replace any sizable losses. Our military could go from seemingly invincible to crippled, undermanned, and undersupplied in a hurry if we ever have a significant setback.

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