In the shadow of President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding electoral victory last week, President Joe Biden will hold one last meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping on Saturday at an international summit in Peru to push for “stability, clarity, [and] predictability,” in the words of a White House official. But one expert argues that the Biden administration has allowed China to gain an unprecedented amount of control and influence over the U.S., which a second Trump administration could profoundly disrupt.

A Washington Post report observed on Tuesday that the president-elect’s appointments signal “a sweeping shift toward a hard-line approach,” including Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as national security adviser, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as Secretary of State, and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as ambassador to the U.N. “The potential selection of [Rubio and Waltz] indicates that the Trump administration will likely push hard on the CCP and sharpen its tool kit to counter China’s increasing influence in the Indo-Pacific,” a senior analyst at the Asia Society Policy Institute remarked.

In addition, John Ratcliffe, whom Trump appointed to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “has been a strident critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has called for China to be penalized for the extermination of Uyghur Muslims and investigated for covering up the origins and outbreak of COVID-19.”

During Wednesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Gordon Chang, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, welcomed the appointments as an overdue sign that the U.S. will once again confront China’s continued pattern of hostile actions on the world stage.

“[W]hat [Trump] is doing is he’s saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you. ‘I’m not going to take someone that you’re happy with. I’m going to put this in your face,’” Chang insisted. “And this is important because it shows Beijing that they no longer own the American political system. In 2020, there [were] throughout China all these people who were saying, ‘Now we can once again control outcomes at the highest levels of the American political system,’ because they then felt that they did own the Oval Office. No longer.”

Chang went on to contend that U.S. economic policies targeting China could be very effective in weakening the communist regime’s global influence.

“President Trump during the campaign said that he was going to impose tariffs of at least 60% across the board on Chinese goods,” he noted. “That is critical for China because Xi Jinping, who has turned his back on consumption as the only sustainable basis for the Chinese economy, now needs to export because that’s his only way to rescue a grim situation.”

As Chang further explained, Xi’s regime is attempting to hide China’s current economic crisis.

“It’s not growing at the 4.6% pace that they claim for the third quarter,” he pointed out. “It may not even be growing at all. But even if it were growing at 4.6, it’s not growing fast enough to pay back Chinese debt. And right now, China is having its 2008 downturn. President Trump comes along at a critical moment for China, with those tariffs basically denying a good portion of the U.S. market to Chinese goods. It means Xi Jinping may not be able to save his regime. That means Trump can win without firing a shot.”

As to the argument made by some economists that tariffs on Chinese goods will hurt the U.S. economy, Chang begged to differ based on past history.

“You get a lot of experts in New York and Washington who say, ‘Oh, the American people will pay [for] those tariffs.’ The 2018 tariffs that President Trump imposed, we know that China picked up 75 to 81% of the cost of it,” he noted. “They absorb the cost of those tariffs because they needed continued access to the U.S. market. Right now, China needs our market more than they did in 2018. … [E]ven before Trump takes the oath of office, China is driving down the value of its currency in anticipation of those Trump tariffs. In other words, China is already paying for Trump’s tariffs.”

Chang also pointed to how an increasing number of American manufacturers are exiting China and returning to the Western hemisphere. “I think it’s a good thing that we start getting manufacturing out of China and either back into the United States or into our hemisphere. If we put it into our hemisphere, we stabilize Central America. That means no more migration through Mexico to the southern border, because you create jobs, you create stable relationships, you create families. All sorts of good things happen.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins concurred, noting that U.S. economic policies toward China that include tariffs have the potential to weaken the military capabilities of the communist regime and “could have a positive domino effect on many things. It deals with national security. It deals with the economy [as well as] manufacturing.”

“[It’s an] across-the-board win for the United States and for freedom,” Chang agreed. “You know, Reagan brought down the Soviet Union. Trump with these tariffs could bring down communist China.”