Sebastian Gorka did not mince words Monday when discussing China’s role in America’s fentanyl crisis. In a blistering interview with The Post’s Miranda Devine on the “Pod Force One” podcast, President Trump’s White House counterterrorism director argued that Beijing’s role in flooding the United States with fentanyl precursor chemicals amounts to something far more sinister than ordinary drug trafficking.
In Gorka’s view, it resembles modern warfare.
“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 ahead of Trump’s state visit to Beijing this week. “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? Some people say fentanyl is the slingshot.”
The comparison reaches back to the two 19th-century Opium Wars, when Britain and France forced China to accept massive opium imports that devastated Chinese society and fueled widespread addiction. In recent years, some Republicans and national security hawks have increasingly used that historical parallel to argue China may now be using fentanyl as a strategic weapon against the United States.
Gorka fully embraced that framing.
“We have one nation, China, that is providing the precursors to those weapons of mass destruction,” he said, referencing President Trump’s previous designation of fentanyl as a WMD-level threat.
“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.”
The scale of the fentanyl crisis gives that rhetoric political power. According to CDC data, fentanyl has killed roughly 403,000 Americans over the last seven years. The synthetic opioid, often mixed into heroin, cocaine, counterfeit prescription pills, and party drugs without users’ knowledge, can kill in amounts as small as a few grains of salt.
“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,” Gorka argued. “That’s war by other means.”
China has repeatedly denied responsibility for the epidemic, insisting the crisis is fundamentally America’s domestic problem. Chinese officials have long argued Beijing has cooperated with U.S. authorities on narcotics enforcement and export restrictions.
“Fentanyl is America’s problem,” China’s foreign ministry said previously. “The Chinese side has carried out extensive anti-narcotics cooperation with the United States and achieved remarkable results.”
Still, tensions over fentanyl remain a major flashpoint in U.S.-China relations, especially for Trump, who has repeatedly hammered Beijing over chemical exports tied to the illegal drug trade. Early in his second term, Trump imposed a sweeping 20 percent tariff on Chinese goods specifically tied to fentanyl concerns before later reducing the rate after Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly pledged additional cooperation.
The Supreme Court later struck down those fentanyl-related tariffs alongside Trump’s broader reciprocal tariff structure, forcing massive repayments to businesses that had paid the duties. Trump has not yet announced a replacement penalty structure.
Meanwhile, the death toll remains staggering even as overdose fatalities have recently declined from their peak. Nearly 39,000 Americans still died from fentanyl overdoses during the most recent 12-month reporting period.
Unlike many public health crises, fentanyl has disproportionately devastated working-age Americans, particularly adults between 35 and 45. The economic and social fallout has rippled across the country, eliminating hundreds of thousands of workers from the labor force while leaving families shattered and communities overwhelmed.
The victims have crossed every demographic line imaginable — from celebrities like Prince and Mac Miller to small-town teenagers who thought they were taking prescription pills or recreational drugs.
For Gorka and others inside Trump’s orbit, that destruction is not merely collateral damage from global narcotics trafficking. They increasingly frame it as a strategic assault that weakens America socially, economically, and politically from within.
