Imagine waking up to a flood of breaking news notifications on your phone. Groggily, you tap on one of the notifications to see what the commotion is about and are confronted with the first of many such shocking headlines: “WAR ON AMERICA: China Launches Devastating Surprise Attack.” Stunned but certain this must be some kind of prank, you quickly scan the opening paragraphs and are dismayed by what reads like an all-too-real account of a sweeping, sophisticated, and premeditated attack on the U.S. by China over land, sea, and air. Casualties number in the tens of thousands, the wounded easily numbering at least three to four times more. How would you feel in the face of such a sudden and brutal affront on your reality? If historical attacks against the U.S. on domestic soil are an indication, it would be a confused combination of shock, disbelief, fear, and anger, soon to be joined by grief, a sense of collective solidarity with your fellow citizens, and a burning desire for retribution.
This is an unsettling scenario to imagine and, fortunately, there has been no such direct attack by China against the U.S.—or, at least, not a kinetic one. But what if there were an attack comparable in size, scale, and human cost but massively distributed across time and space and carried out with such exceptional stealth and subterfuge so as to evade the emotional reactions and tactical responses that an otherwise more obvious, direct, and concentrated attack would undoubtedly cause? Based on research that my colleagues—Guido Verbeck, Lance Hunter, Monty Philpot, Karen A. Reyes-Monroy— and I have conducted, we strongly suspect that this is the case. While no missiles have been launched, no bombs dropped, no artillery fired, there is absolutely a weapon that is being used, as we speak, that is taking American lives in the tens of thousands, destroying communities, and weakening U.S. society, economy, and infrastructure. That weapon is fentanyl. And the aggressor is China.
While there is broad consensus that fentanyl is a profound national security crisis, and not just a public health crisis, of the highest order, there is not a broad consensus regarding the degree to which this national security threat involves a tangible aggressor exercising a deliberate and overt attempt to use the fentanyl crisis as a form of irregular warfare.
Let’s start with what we know for certain. Much of the fentanyl in the U.S. comes in from Mexico via drug cartels, but the chemical ingredients for making it are manufactured and sold by chemical companies in China. While, unfortunately, this fact can be politicized by government officials, it is not a political statement per se but simply objective fact. Technically, it is not China or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself that is selling fentanyl precursors to Mexican cartels but criminal groups in China. However, and this is key, the Chinese government has long been aware that this is happening, and despite a string of surface-level legislative actions (e.g., class-wide scheduling of fentanyl and its analogues in 2019, passing new laws in 2024 that supposedly tightened control), it has done little to actually mitigate the problem. “Regulating” a class of chemicals is not the same as enforcing those regulations. The reality is that China’s actions amount to PR stunts at best, and it is deeply complicit in its domestic fentanyl industry. At worst, it may be actively orchestrating the crisis as a form of irregular warfare against the U.S.
With its massive surveillance apparatus, China has demonstrated a clear ability to wage war against controlled substances when it wants to, evident in its aggressive crackdowns on meth and even something as relatively innocuous as CBD. It is therefore hard to see China’s feet dragging over fentanyl as anything other than a deliberate choice. In April of 2024, a bipartisan U.S. House committee published a report citing evidence that the CCP subsidizes the companies that manufacture and export fentanyl precursors. These companies can also apply for tax rebates and other incentives. These are clearly not the actions of a government that wants to crack down on the criminal networks operating within its borders. And why would it want to? The CCP directly receives economic benefits from this illicit activity. Even more insidiously, money laundering activities by the groups selling the fentanyl precursors to drug cartels have been directly linked to Chinese government officials and elite members of the CCP.
This leads us to two disconcerting possibilities. First, in addition to the economic benefits, a highly plausible reason for China’s neglect of the fentanyl problem is that it is a devastatingly effective way to weaken the nation that it sees as its primary adversary, the U.S., since it is “the country most capable of preventing the CCP from achieving its goals.” Strategically, pretending to do something about the fentanyl problem without actually doing anything significant would be a clever move of passive hostility. While this has not yet been proven as an objective fact, it is nevertheless an increasingly accepted theory.
The second, far more troubling possibility is that this is more than just passive hostility and the CCP is actively advancing the fentanyl crisis as part of a campaign of “unrestricted warfare.” It is not so far-fetched to think that China may have learned painful lessons during the Opium Wars—in which British-backed opium exports addicted tens of millions of Chinese people, significantly weakened societal structures, and increased the nation’s vulnerability during conflict—and is now using the same playbook against the U.S. While this is disturbing to contemplate, we cannot afford to ignore or downplay its possibility and respond accordingly.
What would such a response look like? This would require a separate, longer discussion beyond the scope of the current topic. But it would at the very least require the U.S. to develop a better understanding of, and competency in, irregular warfare. Despite its vast, sophisticated systems and methodologies in conventional warfare, when it comes to irregular warfare the United States woefully lags behind its aggressors. The reasons for this are many and complex—again, beyond the scope of our current discussion—but given our biggest adversaries’ clear preference for the tactics of irregular warfare, and the human toll of such warfare which can rival that of conventional warfare, the U.S. must invest the same level of commitment and resources into becoming proficient at irregular warfare just as it historically has for conventional warfare. The purpose would not be to escalate conflict but for self-defense since a nation cannot effectively defend itself against tactics that it does not understand.
We do not need to be certain about whether China is actively, deliberately flooding the U.S. with fentanyl or if it is simply a case of willful neglect that conveniently happens to work in their favor. Either way, the outcome is the same: the fentanyl crisis is causing devastating harm to the U.S. and China is aware of this. And yet, at best, they are continuing to let it happen or, at worst, strategically causing it to happen. Either way, we must treat it as what it is, a form of irregular warfare, and devote the same attention and focus to it that we would with any overt act of conventional warfare.