Ryan said. “Let’s finish the exercise: Who else benefits from a canceled Polish army base?”
“Maybe it’s not about the Polish army base. Maybe it’s really about us,” Adler said.
Ryan nodded, always the college professor. “Agreed. Go on.”
“And the list of people who stand to benefit at our expense is a mile long.”
“And who would you say would be at the top of that list—besides the Russians?”
“The Chinese, no question,” Burgess said.
“Exactly.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President. I’m not following. How would China benefit from killing this deal?”
“You want the short answer or the long one?” Ryan grinned.
“I think you’d be disappointed if I didn’t say ‘both.’”
“The short answer is the BRI.”
“And the BRI is . . . ?” Arnie asked.
Adler jumped in. “The Belt and Road Initiative. It’s China’s comprehensive infrastructure plan to link two-thirds of the world’s population and half of global GDP with new roads, rail, and shipping arteries stretching north–south from New Delhi to Murmansk and east–west from Shanghai to Lisbon. Think of it as a modernized version of the ancient Chinese Silk Road.
“Of course, the Chinese will kindly loan participating countries the billions of dollars those countries will need for mostly Chinese firms to come and build that infrastructure at usurious rates.”
“Unlike us, who spend ourselves into oblivion giving stuff away,” Arnie said.
The President nodded grimly. “It’s the China Dream—the means by which the Chinese Communists plan on achieving global hegemony.”
“How will cheap diapers and alarm clocks do that?” Arnie asked.
“How much of your European history do you remember from college?” Ryan asked.
“Not as much as the guy with the Ph.D. in history who taught the subject at the Naval Academy, I suspect.”
“The ancient Persians dreamed of an empire stretching from Asia to Europe, and they would have pulled it off, were it not for a few stubborn Greeks. Fast-forward as far as you want to—Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Stalin. They all tried it as well. Nothing would be more powerful or destabilizing than a united Eurasian landmass. It’s Mackinder’s Heartland Theory: Whoever rules Eurasia rules the world. American security policy for the last hundred years has been designed to keep that from happening.”
“The Chinese certainly don’t have the military means to do so, at least not yet,” Burgess said.
“But they do have the economic means,” Ryan said. “And the will. What did Lenin say? ‘A capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with’? BRI is a very clever and profitable way for China and Russia to unite against us, right under our noses, with most of the West European globalists cheering them on.”
Ryan leaned forward. “And just maybe at least one U.S. senator.”
“And so we’re back to Dixon,” Arnie said. “Right where you wanted us to be.”
“Yes, I see it now,” Adler said. “Maybe not her, directly, but her husband—what’s his name?”
“Aaron Gage,” Ryan said. “Founder and CEO of Gage Capital Partners. His firm has made a lot of money doing business with the Chinese.”
“He’s made a lot of money doing business with everybody,” Arnie said. “He and Dixon are multimillionaires, thanks to him.”
“You have a problem with millionaires, Arnie?” Ryan asked with a smirk. He was a one-percenter himself.
“Not with millionaires who earned it the old-fashioned way in the private sector before they got into politics,” Arnie said.
“So we think she’s fronting Chinese legislation to benefit her husband’s firm?” Burgess asked.
“She wouldn’t be the first. This whole town stinks of legal nepotism,” Ryan said. He was referring to the dozens of siblings, children, spouses, and other relatives who actively lobbied the Hill—though never their family members directly, in order to avoid the strict letter, if not the spirit, of the law.
“Money rules this town,” Arnie said. “The average senator needs to raise fourteen, fifteen thousand dollars a day, every day they’re in office, just to pay for their reelections.”
“This isn’t just about campaign finance,” Ryan said. “It’s about the whole damn system. The sweetheart contracts to family members, the revolving doors between elected offices and corporate boardrooms, the donations to family charitable trusts. Lobbyists who become staffers, staffers who become lobbyists. I read the other day that nearly half of all ex-senators and nearly a third of ex–House members become registered lobbyists—and a whole bunch more of them aren’t registered as such but still work the cocktail circuit. It’s all perfectly legal, but legal corruption is still corruption, especially when it’s the lawmakers themselves who make this stuff legal. I hate it, and it’s why Congress is becoming less functional every day.”