GAME CHANGER? Patel Just Scored a Big Win With China

Just back from China, FBI Director Kash Patel announced today that the Communist country will work with the US on stopping the illegal flow of fentanyl precursors. "Effective immediately," he said, "essentially President Trump has shut off the pipeline that creates fentanyl, that kills tens of thousands of Americans."

"This was the first time an FBI director has been to China in over a decade, and received an audience with his counterpart to address this matter directly," Patel said at a press conference in Washington. "Thanks to President Trump's direct engagement with President Xi, the government of China committed fully to my engagement there... at a level never seen before."

While various agencies have been "fighting hard," as Patel put it, "to seize and stop drug traffickers, we must attack fentanyl precursors, the ingredients necessary to make this lethal drug."

Patel said Beijing agreed to proscribe all 13 precursors, along with seven other chemicals used in the manufacturing process. According to recent reports, about 84% of fentanyl precursor chemicals seized by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2021 were traced back to China. A House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition study found last year that “companies in China produce nearly all of illicit fentanyl precursors."

If Beijing does as promised, Patel said, "we would suffocate the drug-trafficking organizations' ability to manufacture fentanyl in places like Mexico."

Chalk up another big win for President Donald Trump's aggressive foreign policy negotiations. Combined with the Pentagon's (ahem) kinetic actions against high-speed drug-smuggling boats from South America, we might just see a real reduction in smuggling and manufacturing operations.

And while I hate to correct Patel during this moment of glory, "tens of thousands of Americans" is a gross understatement.

Since 2000, more than a million Americans died from drug overdoses, the majority of which were due to opioids like fentanyl. About one-fourth of those deaths occurred just in the last five years, with the crisis going into overdrive during the COVID insanity years of 2020-21.

But I'm trying not to get too excited about the news, at least not yet. Patel boasted today that "these substances are now banned [in China], and they will no longer be utilized by the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations... to make this drug."

Were it only so simple.

Previously, the Biden administration put on a decent show of trying to get China to cooperate, but those efforts never amounted to much. The deal Patel got is much better — at least on paper — than anything Biden got Beijing to agree to. But so long as precursor sales hurt the US and enrich Beijing, it's difficult to believe that China will do much more than do a better job of hiding where the precursors originate.

Still, unlike the previous administration, Trump 47 does much more than just talk about the fentanyl crisis.

Maybe War Secretary Pete Hegseth could ask if US Seventh Fleet in Pacific has a few missiles to spare.

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