The deadly virus that is eating the world is postmarked “Chinese Communist Party” (CCP), and it has already caused more disruption than the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession.

The CCP virus is threatening lives and economies all over the globe. Social distancing and sheltering in place are necessary to slow the spread of the novel pathogen, but they also make a sharp slowdown in economic activity inevitable.

As the global economy craters, the gap between the haves and have-nots is accentuated, as the well heeled pack their bags and escape to safer locations such as the Hamptons and Palm Beach. The limitless resources of the 1 percent ensure they will never go hungry or lack for medical care, even in a pandemic.

In the meantime, ordinary people are panic buying, standing in long lines to stock up on toilet paper, facing financial instability and trying to make ends meet while being told we are all in this together. Mostly, they remain sequestered at home, apart from the occasional pilgrimage to the grocery store, pharmacy, or package store. The CCP virus has crushed the economy and shut down much of American life.

March 19 was the first day on which the CCP reported no new locally transmitted cases of the pathogen since the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan. The CCP congratulates itself on its extraordinary containment measures, limiting the movement of millions of people, and rapid medical response. Will wonders never cease?

The CCP is working hard to scrub its own culpability and turn this crisis into an opportunity. Its leader Xi Jinping now acts as the charitable godfather, dishing out money, medical supplies and equipment to convince the world they are not responsible for the global public health crisis and economic chaos.

The CCP is painting China as a success story and as a friend in a time of dire need. This was after the CCP spread disinformation about the virus, claiming that American soldiers brought the virus to Wuhan last October when they attended the Military World Games. There is no evidence to support this accusation. The CCP is engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to persuade the world they are a model global citizen worthy of trust and respect.

As they say in the Wuhan wet market, famous for its bat soup, this doesn’t smell right.

In the past few weeks, while the rest of the world was busy battling the pandemic, the CCP erected new military bases on reefs in the West Philippine Sea that are claimed by the Philippines, according to Esquire Magazine. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, an intergovernmental organization located at The Hague in the Netherlands ruled unanimously that the CCP’s reclamation activities in the West Philippine Sea were illegal. The Court recognized the Philippines sovereign rights to the contested areas. China ignored the ruling, continues aggressive actions, and stands by its sweeping claim to almost the entire South China Sea.

The CCP plays by its own rules and does so with impunity. A March 20 report by China’s Zinhua news website says the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully established two new “research facilities” on the Kagitingan Reef and the Zamora Reef. According to the Zinhua report, these “research facilities” are to study coral reef ecosystems, vegetation ecology, and freshwater conservation.

Of course, these reclaimed islands are equipped with military facilities, including missile systems, naval harbors, and runways to accommodate fighter jets and other aircraft. The CCP is hoping the world will overlook the military angle as it focuses on the global public health crisis.

While the short-term focus is the battle against the coronavirus, the international community should not ignore the existential threat presented by the CCP. This global crisis will last a long time, but not forever. Democratic governments must fundamentally rethink their relationship with the CCP and stop treating them with kid gloves.

Editor’s note: This was first published in The Patriot Ledger Dec. 5, 2014.

Early in 1941, the government of resource-poor Japan realized that it needed to seize control of the petroleum and other raw material sources in the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and the Malay Peninsula. Doing that would require neutralizing the threat posed by the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

The government assigned this task to the Imperial Navy, whose combined fleet was headed by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. The Imperial Navy had two strategic alternatives for neutralizing the U.S. Pacific Fleet. One was to cripple the fleet itself through a direct attack on its warships, or cripple Pearl Harbor’s ability to function as the fleet’s forward base in the Pacific.

Crippling the U.S. fleet would require disabling the eight battleships that made up the fleet’s traditional battle line. It was quite a tall order.

The most effective way to cripple Pearl Harbor’s ability to function as a naval base would be to destroy its fuel storage and ship repair facilities. Without them, the Pacific Fleet would have to return to the U.S., where it could no longer deter Japanese military expansion in the region during the year or so it would take to rebuild Pearl Harbor.

It soon became apparent that the basics of either strategy could be carried out through a surprise air raid launched from the Imperial Navy’s six first-line aircraft carriers. Admiral Yamamoto had a reputation as an expert poker player, gained during his years of study at Harvard and as an Imperial Navy naval attaché in Washington. He decided to attack the U.S. warships that were moored each weekend in Pearl Harbor. But in this case the expert poker player picked the wrong target.

The Imperial Navy’s model for everything it did was the British Royal Navy. Standard histories of the Royal Navy emphasized its victories in spectacular naval battles.

Lost in the shuffle was any serious consideration of trying to cripple Pearl Harbor’s ability to function as a forward naval base. So it was that, in one of history’s finest displays of tactical management, six of the world’s best aircraft carriers furtively approached the Hawaiian Islands from the north just before dawn that fateful Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, launched their planes into the rising sun, caught the U.S. Pacific Fleet with its pants down and wrought havoc in spectacular fashion. On paper at least, this rivaled the British Royal Navy’s triumph at Trafalgar.

But so what?

The American battleships at Pearl Harbor were slow-moving antiques from the World War I era. As we know, the U.S. Navy already had two brand new battleships in its Atlantic Fleet that could run rings around them. And eight new ones the navy was building were even better.

More importantly, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers weren’t at Pearl Harbor. American shipyards were already building 10 modern carriers whose planes would later devastate Imperial Navy forces in the air/sea battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.

Most importantly, as the sun set on Dec. 7 and the U.S. Navy gathered the bodies of its 2,117 sailors and Marines killed that day, all-important fuel storage and ship repair facilities remained untouched by Japanese bombs, allowing Pearl Harbor to continue as a forward base for American naval power in the Pacific.

So in reality, Dec. 7 marked the sunset of Japan’s extravagant ambitions to dominate Asia. Admiral Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy’s other tradition-bound leaders chose the wrong targets at Pearl Harbor.

The dictates of tradition are usually the worst guides to follow when it comes doing anything really important. After all, if they survived long enough to be venerated, they’re probably obsolete.

The United States has gotten China wrong for the better part of four decades. Politicians, policy makers, academics, businessmen, and others naïvely assumed that China’s communist totalitarian system would evolve toward democracy and freedom. These elites did not understand that engaging with the 94 million-member Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is like having unprotected sex.

It is only recently that those who control the commanding heights in the United States have given due regard to the reality that CCP-controlled China, which regards democracy as an existential threat, is a menace to American’s security and prosperity. The reasons why are apparent from China’s activities in the South China Sea.

If there is to be a great power military conflict in the future, it will most likely involve a rising China challenging a predominant America. The list of China’s strategic initiatives is lengthy; everything from becoming a world leader in science and technology to economics and business to military might. The U.S. now faces a rising power, a confident, ambitious country that wants to supplant America’s role as the current global hegemon.

This goal is demonstrated by China’s actions in the South China Sea, which is strategically important to China’s goals and is one of the battlefields on which the competition between China and the United States will play out.

The South China Sea is a part of the western Pacific Ocean and borders southern China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. More than $5 trillion in trade flows through it, roughly 30 percent of all global maritime trade. A major shipping route, the sea also accounts for about 10 percent of the world’s fisheries and a potentially significant amount of oil and natural gas deposits.

As the region’s link between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the South China Sea is a vital trading and military route for the countries that surround it as well as for larger Asian economic powers, including Japan and South Korea. The country that controls the South China Sea has a strategic advantage in the region and a huge influence over global seaborne trade.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CCP, claims all of the South China Sea — lock, stock, and oil barrel — as sovereign territory. He backs up his claims by building aggressive military installations on existing islands, dredging new islands out of the sea itself and building airfields, “missile defense systems” and harbors that are essentially naval bases.

China bases its claims to the South China Sea on historical records from the Zia and Han dynasties that are thousands of years old. It is unlikely that Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea will stand by while China exploits them. The United States, as an ally of Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, could be drawn into disputes surrounding these claims. It is worth noting that actions by China’s maritime forces aimed at the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea are another area of concern.

Following an appeal by the Philippines that China’s actions violated the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in 2016 that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights, while also finding that there had been several violations of the obligations set out in the Convention.

China refused to accept the court’s ruling and has continued militarization of the artificial islands with impunity. This is an expression of China’s newfound military and political power and its might-makes-right approach to international affairs. China’s expansion in the South China Sea is equivalent to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014.

America should not try to contain China unilaterally, but rather assemble a broad coalition with nations including India, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to confront, resist, and sanction China in the same way as it partnered with NATO and others to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, said in his memoir that covering Washington was just a matter of sitting in grand marble halls waiting for someone ever more important to come out and lie to you. One could easily make the case that this happens with considerable regularity in state houses and city halls throughout America.

If people think politicians can get ahead without untruths, they’re lying to themselves. Politicians have always had a distant relationship with the truth. They have always lied, are constantly lying, and will always lie. It no longer matters if statements have any basis in reality. Get over it.

Some political lies can lead to unnecessary war. Still others conceal illegal behavior. What matters is firing up your supporters and getting reelected. They promise heaven on earth, and when they can’t deliver, they spin, evade, manipulate the numbers and knowingly engage in falsehoods.

President Trump’s self-serving whoppers are overwhelming and are memorably labeled as B.S. The President’s body of falsehoods is singular in its multiplicity. He may be an outlier, but he is hardly unique in deliberately saying something untrue. The truth about lies is that politicians have always told them. Of course, the exception being America’s first President, George Washington. He could not tell a lie, unlike most politicians who cannot tell the truth.

Trump is not the only one lying. Recall a number of prominent presidential lies. Some are as egregious, such as when President Obama told the American public over and over that “if you like your health care plan you can keep it.” Better still, the many falsehoods President George W. Bush told in the run-up to the Iraq war, which were very damaging to the United States. Or when President Clinton shamelessly said in 1998, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

Then there was President George H. W. Bush’s “Read my lips, no new taxes.” And of course, “People have got to know whether or not their President’s a crook. Well, I’m not a crook” by President Richard Nixon. Truth tellers in politics are an endangered species. Polling data shows politicians among the least trusted actors in society.

But do the American people care about the veracity of what politicians say. Or do they simply want to hear “their truth”? People have a tendency to view information familiar to them as the truth and search for other information that reinforces their beliefs. Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, calls it “cognitive bias” – we tend to avoid those facts that force their brains to work more.

People live in their own social network bubble in the digital world. They go on the internet to search for information that confirms their convictions. They know more but understand less, dividing into hostile tribes. They see the world as a battle between left and right, each living in separate worlds.

They fish in different information streams. Politicized media outlets and online social networks put out completely different representations of the truth. Extreme partisanship is not a new problem. George Washington warned about the dangers of it in his Farewell Address in September 1796.

With social media, lies have the capacity to spread faster than ever before. It is a cheap and easy way to disrupt political discourse. After all, birds of a feather flock together. These days, anybody with a Twitter account can throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks and for how long.

You would be right to conclude that Machiavelli would, with a few exceptions, have a lot to learn from public figures in the age of post-truth politics. The country is beset with tribalism, having forgotten the American forefathers’ motto “E pluribus unum,” which is imprinted on every coin in hopes of avoiding the United States becoming a nation of immigrants divided into tribes.