As the sun rises on a new Trump-era geopolitical chapter, Washington confronts a defining choice: Will America view the People’s Republic of China and its regnant Communist Party through the rose-colored lens of transaction and diplomacy, or will it soberly recognize Beijing as America’s foremost geopolitical adversary in a multigenerational cold war?

The stakes could not be higher, and the answer ought to be simple. We should stop treating China with kid gloves — as a spirited economic or diplomatic competitor — and start treating it as the existential challenge to the American republic and the American way of life that it demonstrably is.

In June, federal prosecutors in Michigan charged multiple Chinese nationals with conspiring to smuggle dangerous biological pathogens into the United States for use in American university research laboratories. The case centered on Fusarium graminearum, a fungus widely classified as a “potential agroterrorism weapon” because of its ability to ravage crops and cause serious harm to humans and livestock. Prosecutors alleged that the defendants received funding from the Chinese government and brought the pathogen into the U.S. for ostensible “lab work” at the University of Michigan. As if the University of Michigan needed to use smugglers to acquire research materials.

This should have triggered alarm bells for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear: Chinese researchers allegedly attempted to slip biological threats past U.S. borders under the guise of legitimate scholarship. The implications are chilling. In a world still scarred by the devastating COVID-19 pandemic — which, lest we forget, originated in Wuhan, China — we cannot afford to dismiss biohazard incidents like this as anomalous. What’s more, in November additional charges were brought in Michigan against a third Chinese national in connection with similar smuggling allegations.

This is part of a pattern of deep, yearslong subversion on American soil. How quickly many have forgotten that in 2023, federal agents discovered a Chinese biolab in California. As confirmed by testing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Select Agents and Toxins, the biolab contained at least 20 potentially infectious agents — including HIV, malaria and COVID-19. And when the issue isn’t biological warfare, it’s information warfare — including the abundance of Chinese Communist Party-supported Confucius Institutes that have long proliferated as hubs of Chinese agitprop on American university campuses, as well as chronic attempts at corporate espionage and potentially vast surveillance and manipulation of Americans through TikTok and other means.