FORGOTTEN FACTS ABOUT U.S. AND CHINA: Do you remember which U.S. president condemned his predecessor for being too soft on China, then opened the candy store of U.S. military and digital technology to Beijing?

Writing in The Federalist, Chuck DeVore remembers:

“It was during the Clinton administration, in the heady days of the American hegemony in the post-Cold War world, that the process of accelerating technology transfer to China began in earnest.

“In 2000, at the urging of Silicon Valley, the Clinton administration relaxed regulations to allow the People’s Liberation Army to purchase high-speed U.S. computers capable of simulating nuclear explosions — without an export license or security review.

“But in many ways, strengthening the PRC had already begun a few years earlier when Western corporations, under the thrall of the emergent Chinese market, began to transfer technology to China as a Chinese precondition for access to their markets. One illustrative example of this was the rise and fall of Lucent Technologies, a spin-off from AT&T, and the subsequent rise of China’s Huawei.”

Devore extends the same kind of rigorous analysis to Clinton’s successor, too, in a bracing assessment of how the U.S. policy “clerisy” has profoundly bungled foreign policy for more than two decades.