China has a word for how it measures its place in the world — and right now, by its own accounting, it’s losing.
Beijing measures global influence through what it calls comprehensive national power: a running calculus of military reach, economic leverage, and strategic alliances that tells leadership whether China is advancing or retreating on the world stage.
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, has been using that doctrine to track the Trump Administration’s moves — and by his read, the numbers are moving sharply against Beijing.
“Venezuela — a close Chinese ally — essentially neutralized. Iran on its back heels,” Schweizer told Laura Ingraham Tuesday night. “When it comes to the correlation of forces — the comprehensive national power — China is on its back heels.”
The losses, he argued, aren’t just diplomatic. They’re a live-fire demonstration that Chinese military hardware doesn’t work. Iran deployed advanced air defense systems supplied by Beijing. American and Israeli aircraft flew through them anyway.
“Those advanced air defense systems that the Chinese sold the Iranians were useless against American and Israeli aircraft,” Schweizer said. For Beijing, that’s not just an embarrassment — it’s an advertisement to every client state watching.
Now Cuba is in the frame.
Schweizer endorsed Marco Rubio’s stability-first position: no military action needed. The Díaz-Canel regime, he argued, is already in a death spiral of its own making — a government that promised to fight to the bitter end will instead find itself fighting its own people. And unlike past moments of Cuban crisis, Beijing isn’t riding to the rescue this time.
“The Chinese government is not going to bail them out,” he said flatly.
What concerns Schweizer more than Cuba’s fate is Washington’s reflexive flinching. Senate Republicans, he noted, have been signaling reluctance to move aggressively, with Majority Leader John Thune saying he’d prefer the regime fall “organically.”
Thirty House Democrats signed a letter this week urging the administration to rule out any invasion.
To Schweizer, both moves represent the same strategic error.
“If you are negotiating with a tyranny — which is what the Cuban government is — the last thing you do is take things off the table,” he said. “It’s a classic example of stupidity on the part of Republican leadership and partisanship among Democrats.”
His model for how this should work is the broader Trump approach — what Schweizer describes with a Cold War-era phrase once applied, only partly correctly, to Mikhail Gorbachev.
“They once said of Mikhail Gorbachev that he has a nice smile and iron teeth,” Schweizer said. “Well, Gorbachev wasn’t quite that tough and didn’t deserve that moniker. Donald Trump does.”
The Ingraham segment closed with a question Schweizer answered without hesitation: Should China be allowed to build manufacturing facilities in the United States to soften the tariff standoff? Trump had hinted in a Bret Baier interview that tariffs could be reconsidered if Beijing invested on American soil.
Schweizer called it a terrible idea. Trump has already succeeded in pulling European and Japanese capital into the country, he noted — there’s no strategic need to hand China a lifeline when it’s already looking for one.
“Xi is looking for something from Donald Trump — he’s looking for a lifeline,” Schweizer said. “I think Trump should continue to smile, but show those iron teeth to Xi. That’s the best strategy.”
Watch the clip above.
