Going into the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) seemed to have something of a lead on his Republican counterpart, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). The Minnesotan came out slightly ahead in favorability polls, whereas the Ohio senator is more than 10 points underwater. It seems that Democrats’ efforts to label Vance “weird” and extreme are working to at least some extent.
But Walz, like his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, remains in many ways a total cipher to voters. From his perch in St. Paul, he has advanced one of the most progressive agendas of any state governor in recent memory, but he has somehow managed to build a reputation as some kind of a dispositional centrist. If Republicans want to overcome his folksy Midwestern appeal, they will have to reveal his flawed record to a wider audience.
When it comes to national security, Walz is weakest on perhaps the most important question facing the United States: competition with the Chinese Communist Party. From his earliest days as a public figure, Walz has advocated a mealymouthed detente with the CCP — a position very much out of touch with the great body of voters who are increasingly wary of the Beijing regime. By resurfacing his record and public statements, conservatives have an opportunity here to clearly define Walz as weak on China and put forward arguments for the stronger foreign policy most of the public favors.
Walz’s relationship with China began in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when he traveled there to teach a high school English course. The program he worked for was sponsored by Harvard University, but all the content was reviewed and approved by CCP censors. By Walz’s own account, he fell in love with the country and returned many times throughout the 1990s. Like Vermont senator and ardent socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT) traveling to the Soviet Union with his new wife at the height of the Cold War, Walz even took his bride to China on their honeymoon.
One would think that Walz’s exposure to the terror and tyranny of the CCP at that historical moment may have at least turned him into an ardent anticommunist, but nothing could be further from the truth. In a 1991 interview with his hometown paper, the Nebraska Alliance Times-Herald, he heaped praise not just on the Chinese nation but also on Chinese communism as an ideology and system of governance. Walz explained that he told his American students once he returned home that socialism really just “means that everyone is the same and everyone shares,” rather than highlighting the brutal repression inherent to the system. This bizarre praise for totalitarian ideology is doubly shocking because Walz wrote his master’s thesis on genocide studies. Walz is the kind of man who should understand the tragedy of Chinese communism and the pain it has inflicted on countless millions. Sadly, he seems to have simply looked the other way and shut up his ears to the screams.
Walz even went so far as to work with CCP officials to arrange trips for students to China, not entirely unlike the sort of work done today by the highly controversial Confucius Institutes. Walz and his wife founded a company to facilitate these trips, according to the Washington Free Beacon. They only closed it down in 2007, when Walz was first elected to Congress. As State Armor founder Michael Lucci has recently pointed out for the Washington Examiner, these trips, many undertaken while Walz served in the National Guard with a security clearance, raise a host of thorny questions about how compliant he has been with U.S. intelligence security standards.
It should be clear, though, that Walz’s affinity for the CCP was not simply a mere indiscretion from a young teacher. As recently as 2018, while he was serving in the House of Representatives, the Minnesotan was an advocate of closer ties with the totalitarian regime. “Our relationship with China is too complicated to be reduced to a single issue,” he said in one statement explaining why he was willing to push for cooperation despite human rights abuses in the CCP’s genocide of the Uyghur minority. And in 2016, then-Rep. Walz said in an interview that “I’ve lived in China, and as I’ve said, I’ve been there about 30 times” and therefore he does not “fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship.”
As governor of Minnesota, Walz also took steps to strengthen the ties between his state and the CCP. The Washington Examiner has reported, for instance, that he backed a medical research center in Minnesota with connections to the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology. He often met with CCP officials at the state Capitol in St. Paul and released various statements praising the regime and highlighting the friendliness between the Minnesota government he leads and “senior Chinese officials.”
Perhaps most importantly, though, Walz worked overtime to bind together the Minnesotan and Chinese economies. In 2019, for example, Walz strongly advocated a new trade deal with China and explained he undertook a journey to China that fall to “assure them that we’re prepared to deliver.” And under his watch as governor, the Minnesota State Board of Investment committed more than $900 million in funds to Chinese companies. Walz’s economic record is, without question, a total rejection of the growing consensus in Washington and around the country that American leaders should decouple the U.S. economy from China’s.
Given all this context, voters should see Harris’s decision to name Walz as her running mate as a flashing signal about how their administration would handle China policy. Far from openly confronting the CCP’s aggression, economic malfeasance, or human rights abuses, a Harris-Walz administration would likely pursue a new detente with the regime. Its policy would not be peace through strength but rather peace through capitulation.
In fact, Harris’s choice of Walz should disappoint voters because it is a break from positive trends in national security issues. For some time now, Americans have been growing wary of the CCP: Over 81% said in a recent poll that they have a negative view of China, a number that has been growing steadily since before even the pandemic. Responding to these changes in public sentiment, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have been working together to find ways to get tough on the CCP. From reining in Chinese influence on social media and fighting against predatory Chinese economic practices to finding new ways to outcompete the CCP in the tech race that defines this new cold war, so much of the hawkish China policy coming from Congress has been moving the country in the right direction. A Vice President Walz, however, would be a massive step backward.
In another sense, though, voters should not be surprised at all that Democrats are going soft on foreign policy. Despite taking certain steps that have pleased backers of the China hawk consensus — maintaining Trump-era tariffs and voicing support for Taiwan, for example — the Biden administration has largely focused on ways to cooperate with the CCP rather than outcompete it. It has refused to invest in the serious military buildup necessary to restore deterrence, and it has largely refused to take steps to reassure allies in East Asia that the United States is actually prepared to defend them should the CCP’s aggression target them next.
Walz’s long romance with China is the perfect illustration of why liberals are incompetent to address these vital national security issues. Rather than seeing the thugs of Tiananmen Square as the tyrants they are, too many Democrats view them as possible partners. The system Walz described in 1991 as “everyone is the same and everyone shares” is better understood more simply as autocracy. Some liberals, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, may fantasize about “being China for a day” to overcome their domestic opposition, but these impulses are utterly foreign to the American tradition of self-government. Patriots should be horrified at those kinds of statements, whether they come from East Coast media elites or Minnesotan vice presidential candidates.
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Voters are weary of both weakness on the Left and isolationism on the Right. Polling shows they are looking for leaders who will be serious about national security and work to contain threats from adversaries such as the CCP, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, or the ayatollahs in Iran. Walz’s weakness on the issues presents a unique opportunity for Republicans to reset and rebrand as the true party of national security.
The Republicans’ response to Democrats’ weakness on national security ought to aim at tapping into their Reaganite heritage. The best way to answer the indecisiveness of the Biden administration, the inexperience of Harris, or the naivete of Walz is to return to the old verities the conservative movement always used to advance. Republicans won the Cold War because they knew appeasement was a path to conflict, not peace. That lesson remains true today.
Michael Lucchese is the founder and CEO of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.