President Joe Biden wants to extend the New START arms control treaty with Russia for an additional five years.

I have questions.

With Russia’s long history of arms treaty violations (INF, Open Skies, original START, BMD, among others), what’s the value of extending this one or having a new arms control treaty with Russia? They can’t be trusted to honor it.

New START—and any other weapons control treaty, especially those involving nuclear weapons—does not include the People’s Republic of China. The PRC is actively modernizing and expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal, along with hardening its missile arm and increasing its mobility. What’s the value of any arms control treaty that does not include the PRC? Related to that, the PRC has repeatedly demonstrated its economic agreement unreliability since its accession to the WTO. On what basis would Biden think the PRC would be more reliable on military agreements, assuming Biden wants to include the PRC in one?

Our economy is so much stronger than Russia’s, and it’s still stronger than the PRC’s. We defeated the USSR with an openly done arms race—which also produce a broad range of technology advances of considerable value to our private economy. Why is Biden reluctant to engage in another arms race and once again defeat the rump USSR that is Russia and defeat the PRC?

Biden won’t answer these questions. Almost as bad, the press won’t ask them of him.

The People’s Republic of China has once again reached into American businesses to control what they do.

This time, it was the proposed acquisition by Cisco Systems of Acacia Communications, both of which are American companies. The PRC condescended to approve this acquisition—subject to certain conditions the PRC dictated.

The PRC also is actively interfering with the American company Applied Materials’ proposed acquisition of Kokusai Electric Corporation, a Japanese company.

Earlier, the PRC interfered with, to the point of blocking, a merger between Qualcomm, an American company, and NXP Semiconductors NV, a Dutch company.

A question that the Biden administration must answer: why do we allow an enemy nation—the PRC—to have veto authority over American business’ decisions such as mergers and acquisitions?  I’m not sanguine that the administration will even take on the question, much less answer it in any way favorable to our businesses.

Related to this is why Europe’s nations, the European Union, or Asian nations cede similar authority over their businesses to the PRC.

None of us need the PRC market that badly, especially since the non-PRC Asian markets are readily available, as are those of South America and Africa—the latter two which could easily lose much of their own government graft with the greater economic prosperity that would result from greatly increased trade and business penetration.

These are private companies making these decisions, to be sure. The PRC, though, isn’t only dictating how those companies must operate within its border–a right of any nation–the PRC is dictating how those companies must operate anywhere in the world. The PRC’s vetoes of mergers and acquisitions are global.

In aggregate, such companies’ desperation to do business in or with the PRC at the expense of acceding to the global diktats of our common enemy threatens the security of each of our nations.