In the mid-1970s, former Governor Reagan sought the help of his fellow members in a group called the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) made up of national security practitioners, retired military commanders, experts on the Soviet Union, business leaders and other patriots. Their goal was to develop a new strategy, not to appease or even contain the “Evil Empire,” but to destroy it.
In 1980, “the Gipper” ran for the presidency with this strategy as an important plank in his campaign platform. When he received an overwhelming mandate for the policies he dubbed “Peace through Strength” and for rolling back the USSR, he entrusted their execution to more than thirty members of the Committee. And the rest is history.
A new Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) was founded in 2019 by a team akin to the original CPD’s. It is led by Chairman Brian Kennedy and Vice Chairman Frank Gaffney and tasked with playing a similar role with respect to the even greater peril to this nation and the rest of the Free World posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Over the past five years, the CPDC has, through public education and policy advocacy, sought to raise the alarm about the CCP and the mortal peril it represents.
Specifically, the Committee has successfully: characterized the pre-kinetic “Unrestricted Warfare” the CCP has waged against the United States for four decades and the “friends” here who have helped it succeed; identified the damage thus done and the prospects for still worse to come – i.e., an increasingly likely shooting war; and prescribed specific actions that must be taken to defeat the Chinese Communist Party, hopefully as Ronald Reagan did the Soviet one, without firing a shot.
These tasks have been advanced by generating and bringing to bear a formidable intellectual arsenal in the War of Ideas. Thanks to the enterprise of its small staff and highly talented membership, the CPDC team have generated to date: nearly 200 hour-long webinars; myriad interviews, podcasts, other videos, articles, documentaries, point papers and recommendations authoritatively depicting the threat posed by the CCP and what the United States must do to counter and defeat it; and seven outstanding books by Committee members and allies.
The CPDC stands ready to help those in government undertake long overdue and urgently needed redirection of U.S. policy towards the Chinese Communist Party. The chances for effecting this sea-change will greatly improve if the American people are informed, engaged and enlisted in support.
The Institute for the American Future is committed to helping the Committee on the Present Danger: China build on its record to date and dramatically intensify its efforts to take down the CCP.