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Victoria Coates — vice president at the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation — was blunt on Sunday: Beijing is sharpening its tools, and too many Americans just aren’t seeing the blade. She pointed to new polling that should wake up anyone who thinks this is someone else’s problem; then she urged allies to stop kidding themselves about defense budgets and readiness.
Generational blind spot on Beijing?
The Reagan Institute’s summer survey that Coates cited shows a clear, stubborn generational divide: older Americans are worried about Beijing’s reach, younger Americans are markedly less so. Yet the issues driving broad concern — fentanyl flowing across the southern border, Chinese spying and data collection, land purchases near sensitive sites, theft of U.S. technology — aren’t abstract. They translate into dead kids, compromised research, weakened factories and neighborhoods with fewer good jobs.
TikTok, campuses and the information battlefield
Coates warned that information operations — yes, including platforms like TikTok — are shaping how a generation understands the world. Young people get their worldview through short clips and influencer trends; that’s a perfect terrain for soft-power narratives and persistent doubt about American institutions. The practical consequence is simple: if a critical mass of tomorrow’s voters and technologists sees China as benign, we lose the political will to secure supply chains, harden research campuses, and fund counter‑intelligence where it actually matters.
NATO’s 5% and the price of readiness
On the policy front Coates pointed to NATO’s new 5 percent defence-investment benchmark as the scale we should be talking about — not warm words. Hitting something like 5 percent of GDP by the timeframe agreed at The Hague means more ships, more cyber defenses, stronger missile defense, and funding for domestic resilience against influence operations. That’ll cost money and political capital; it also means allies stop freeloading on American resolve while Beijing spends like it’s building an empire, not a trading partner.
Here’s the blunt truth: you can’t be ambivalent about a competitor that’s competing intentionally across military, economic and information lines and then expect to keep the advantages we inherited. If a generation grows up thinking the biggest threats are only online arguments and cafeteria politics, who’s going to sign off on the hard choices — spending, screening investments, regulating platforms — when they matter most? Are we willing to trade short-term comfort for long-term vulnerability, or will we teach the next generation to recognize the danger and do something about it?
