Gov. Doug Ducey and Amb. Robert O’Brien: American States and Cities Must Meet the CCP Threat to Our Way of Life

Citizens for Free Enterprise CEO and Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Ambassador Robert O’Brien, former National Security Advisor for President Trump, today published an op-ed in Fox News detailing how state and local governments need to stand up to the rising threat posed by Communist China.

Below you will find excerpts from the article, which can be viewed in its entirety here.

Fox News: 4 ways American states and cities can meet the CCP threat to our way of life

Governor Doug Ducey and Ambassador Robert O’Brien
12/18/2024

With the 2024 elections behind us and power in Washington, DC determined, it’s time to turn our collective focus to the greatest external threat to the American way of life: Communist China. The sheer scale of the Chinese military and economy, as well as the unrelenting determination of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to displace American global leadership presents the United States with an enormous challenge.  While much due attention is paid to Indo-Pacific flashpoints like Taiwan and the South China Sea, it is a mistake to underestimate the ongoing contest on our home soil where China seeks to undermine us from the bottom up as much as from the outside in.


While the federal government is the tip of the spear in our national defense, state and local governments have an important role in securing the homeland, increasing resilience against CCP efforts, and preparing for a future conflict that we hope never comes. In fact, following President Trump’s election in 2016, the CCP used a “subnational” engagement strategy to resist Trump’s federal agenda through states, a strategy that continued through Biden’s term.



As National Security Advisor, Ambassador O’Brien was briefed daily on the malign domestic activities undertaken by the CCP.  Shockingly, Governor Ducey, the two-term governor of Arizona, was never once briefed on the broad, systematic, and perilous state-level CCP operations that disrupt our domestic security. This disconnect must end.  To thwart the CCP’s subnational pursuits, the organizations State Armor and Citizens for Free Enterprise Action developed a state threat assessment with help from nearly a dozen of the country’s leading security experts to provide state and local elected officials with a roadmap to protecting our interests.


There are four primary directions in which the CCP is infiltrating America at the state and local level. China is actively targeting our people and institutions, our economic and financial assets, our physical infrastructure and our critical supply chains. Each of these issues requires state-level solutions that complement federal policies.

The CCP’s coordinated strategy to infiltrate and undermine U.S. society is not hypothetical, nor is its military threat to the free world. State and local officials must lead through this gathering storm by leveraging their unique authorities in our federal system to protect their states and municipalities. It is past time for CCP influence operations to be severed, states’ finances and supply chains to be protected, and land and critical infrastructure shielded from CCP control. If states fail to act, we will all be vulnerable to the grave harm the CCP is preparing to launch upon American interests and our democratic partners around the world.