Communist China isn’t hiding its ambitions. Beijing wants to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. It flies spy balloons over our country, runs influence operations, steals technology, pressures neighbors, menaces Taiwan, and builds missiles and ships meant to drive America out of the Western Pacific.The Pentagon’s newly released National Defense Strategy puts the People’s Republic of China at the center of the threat picture. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth frames the task in blunt terms: “peace through strength,” including a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific so that China can’t “dominate us or our allies.”China won’t ‘take over the world’ in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.That doesn’t mean the United States and China are “destined for war.” China’s weaknesses cut against that. It lacks the kind of soft power that makes alliances easy and coercion unnecessary. Outside its borders, China inspires far more fear than admiration. Demographic collapse also looms. The one-child policy left China facing an aging population and a shrinking workforce.None of that makes Beijing harmless. A declining regime can still lash out. It can still intimidate neighbors, manipulate markets, and exploit American openness. It can also run influence operations in plain sight — through front companies, academic partnerships, lobbying, investment vehicles, and the slow capture of key choke points in tech and infrastructure.That calls for something Washington too often refuses to do: enforce rules like a serious country.Start with basic counterintelligence hygiene. Aggressively investigate covert foreign influence. Enforce FARA. Protect sensitive research. Tighten screening around critical supply chains. Treat strategic industries like strategic industries. Strip Chinese “paper Americans” of their citizenship and deport them.This is where internal discipline matters as much as external posture. A national strategy collapses when parts of the bureaucracy slow-walk it, freelance against it, or treat it like optional guidance.Consider the recent ouster of Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater. She was in charge of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division until last month. But she butted heads repeatedly with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Their disagreements slid into insubordination. Slater allegedly lied to Bondi on national security matters that appeared to help China.RELATED: Iran, China, and Trump’s ‘art of the squeal’ White House via X Account/Anadolu via Getty ImagesFor example, Slater opposed the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquisition of Juniper Networks, which national security experts say is essential to combat Chinese tech dominance. Blocking the deal would have hurt U.S. industry and helped Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Happily, the administration overruled her and approved the deal.Washington can’t run a serious China policy with internal sabotage, bureaucratic drift, or officials acting like they answer to a different set of priorities.The same standard applies to national security decisions in the tech arena. If competition with Huawei and China’s tech ecosystem matters — and it does — then Washington should evaluate mergers, procurement, and infrastructure policy through that lens, not just through abstract theories divorced from geopolitical reality. America needs to win the next generation of networks, not regulate itself into strategic dependence.China won’t “take over the world” in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.Peace through strength isn’t a slogan. It’s a posture: defend critical systems, enforce the law, remove vulnerabilities, and stop treating strategic competition like a seminar topic. The first step is simple and unglamorous: clean up our own house, then face Beijing with the seriousness the moment demands.