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warfighting capabilities.” He writes, “Every year, more than 300,000 Communist Chinese nationals attend U.S. universities or are hired at U.S. national laboratories, innovation centers, incubators, and think tanks.” Huawei, “an instrument of Chinese military espionage,” is now partnering with UC Berkeley on research with “important future military applications.” China is also engaged in what Warren Buffett calls “conquest by purchase,” as it uses revenues from its trade surpluses “to buy American real estate, companies, and financial assets.” In sum, Navarro believes our current trade policy enriches our allies and adversaries while hurting us, weakens our industrial base while strengthening China’s, and shortchanges “Main Street manufacturers and workers.” Such non-reciprocal “free” trade is slowly undermining our capabilities and our freedom.

Asmall component of trade policy involves the Export-Import Bank, and Jennifer Hazelton and Veronique de Rugy debate its merits in Chapter 23. In support of the bank, Hazelton writes, “EXIM provides financing only when the private sector will not.” She says, “Export credit is a strategy weapon in China’s whole-of-government approach to enhance its global power.” China provided an estimated “$500 billion in export credit” in 2018, “approaching in that one year the total amount of financing EXIM has provided in its 90-year history.” Hazelton argues that when large American companies can get a loan from EXIM rather than having to meet the demands of export credit agencies in Europe or elsewhere, it helps American small businesses, too. She writes that the U.S. “would be foolish to abandon this field of play.”

Opposing the bank, de Rugy writes, “EXIM operates in effect as a protectionist agency that picks winners and losers in the market by providing political privileges to firms that are already well-financed.” She denies it promotes exports and argues it hurts small businesses, which often have to compete against large businesses that are able to get the loans. She writes that it also helps foreign companies, such as state-run China Air, that buy U.S. exports from American companies such as Boeing. The bottom line, she says, “is that the Bank should be abolished.”

In Chapter 21, former assistant secretary of commerce Thomas F. Gilman describes the Department of Commerce as dominated by career staff who are uninterested in implementing the President’s priorities. The department clearly needs far more political leadership, including at the Census Bureau, as Gilman notes. The Census Bureau, unlike much of the federal government, has a constitutionally required mission. Yet the 2020 Census was at least somewhat compromised by overly risk-averse COVID policies that prevented census field representatives from going door-to-door for much of that year. The Census Bureau’s website, one of the worst in the federal government, buries crucial statistics where only academics or advocates are likely to find them. In addition, Gilman writes that a new Administration should ensure that the Bureau of Economic Affairs, also housed at Commerce, “conducts its statistical analysis in a consistent and objective manner.”