White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka accused China of intentionally fueling America’s fentanyl epidemic as part of what he called a modern-day “Opium War” against the United States.
In an interview Monday with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine ahead of President Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing, Gorka said China is using fentanyl to weaken America from within.
“They see our city on a hill as the newest version of the British Empire, and it is now payback time for the Opium Wars,” Gorka said. “Many have said that, and I think there is something to that.
“This is about how do you take down a Goliath? What is the slingshot?” he added. “Some people say fentanyl is the slingshot.”
Gorka pointed to China as the primary source of chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl, which has ravaged communities across the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“We have one nation, China, that is providing the precursors to those weapons of mass destruction, which the president has designated as such,” he said.
“This isn’t recreational drugs causing accidental deaths; this isn’t something to do with the empty souls in America. This is a targeted killing of Americans,” Gorka continued.
“When you are flooding millions of pills into America disguised as recreational drugs like ecstasy, but in fact each one is a lethal dose of fentanyl, that’s not the regular drug problem,” he added. “That’s war by other means.”
Republicans and national security experts increasingly have compared the fentanyl crisis to the 19th-century Opium Wars, when Western powers forced China to accept opium imports that led to widespread addiction and social upheaval.
According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl exported primarily from China has killed roughly 403,000 Americans over the past seven years.