Former Congressman Mike Gallagher, in today’s Wall Street Journal, notes that “American strategy [relative to China] lacks a guiding principle.”

I’d go one step further and say that America has tactics to deal with China but lacks a strategy. (Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, noted that “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”) Bypassing necessary nuances of implementation for brevity now, a simple summarizing noun, “attenuation,” should guide an American strategy to confront threats that emanate from the People’s Republic of China and originate from the Communist Party of China (CPC).

America should direct and coordinate a China strategy with freedom seekers around the world. That strategy should aim to attenuate—diminish, erode, reduce, shrink weaken—CPC capabilities to oppress people anywhere.

Attenuation, as a strategy, should focus not on “China,” not on “the Chinese,” but on the Communist Party of China explicitly.

For immediate effectiveness, an attenuation strategy would focus on reducing CPC access to capital then quickly move on to eroding its appearance of legitimacy.