Israeli intelligence services have delivered a devastating and highly impressive blow against Hezbollah, the Iranian terrorist proxy based in southern Lebanon.
On Tuesday, Israeli security forces detonated small numbers of explosives they had planted inside Hezbollah pagers when they were being made in Western Europe months ago. The terrorists use this old technology to make them less vulnerable to attack. Splendid irony!
Then, on Wednesday, Israel blew up explosives hidden in portable radios. Nearly 20 Hezbollah operatives were killed over the two days, and thousands more were wounded. The operation softens up the Islamist killers in preparation for Israel to mount military action to end Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel, which have rendered 60,000 Israelis homeless for the past year.
Inflicting serious damage on a terrorist organization should be celebrated. But the Israeli method has the additional benefit of being a warning that the United States should be wary of continuing to rely on Chinese supply chains for critical goods in our economy.
Much has been reported on China’s effort to secure dominance over minerals in our supply chain. But Hezbollah’s plight underlines the specific risk of sabotage of technical devices.
Take the ubiquitous iPhone. Despite Apple being an American company, key components of almost every iPhone, including the battery, processor, and camera, are made in China. While China does not have access to Apple’s source code, or at least so it is believed, the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance over the country’s private sector affords it great latitude of action.
Secretly sabotaging tens of millions of iPhone batteries so they overheat on command may seem far-fetched, but it is doable. The risk of malevolent Chinese action with these devices or other technical goods must be considered a real possibility.
China is also a major supplier of broadcasting equipment, computers, and office machine parts. All these products are sabotage threats. Huawei offers an instructive example. Riven with technical “backdoors” that allow vast espionage and sabotage activities, Huawei’s telecommunications network has fortunately been restricted from access to the U.S. market. But the same cannot be said of U.S. allies, such as Hungary.
The U.S. has repeatedly detected aggressive Chinese efforts to build backdoors into our infrastructure network. Its “Volt Typhoon” hacking group, for example, has been caught laying traps in American water and power systems in Guam and elsewhere. These traps could be detonated to cut off Americans from critical supplies during a war.
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The U.S. cannot afford to allow our most powerful and determined adversary to keep providing us with goods we rely on to keep our economy functioning, our lights turned on, and our society stable.
Whether it is Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump who takes office on Jan. 20, the next president should act quickly with Congress to secure our economy and people from China.