Those crafty Communist Chinese haven’t fought a land war in nearly half a century, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t actively engaged in warfare.

It’s just that the conventional kind is so unappealing to the ChiComs. As the great and ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu stressed, the real Art of War is to defeat one’s enemy without even fighting him. This is why, as author Peter Schweizer writes in Blood Money, every Chinese officer, soldier, and sailor has since 2006 been required to study Sun Tzu’s classic tract. And it’s why China continues to go after our nation’s “soft underbelly,” why it uses terms like “disintegration warfare” to whip us without even having to fight us.

Take our fentanyl crisis, for example. It’s been “funded, organized, logistically facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party,” as Blackwater founder and geopolitical strategist Erik Prince put it, “as an absolute ‘f*** you’ from the CCP against the West for the Opium Wars of the 1840s,” which were caused in part by Great Britain’s smuggling of the highly addictive drug from their Indian colonies into China. Indeed, the first chapter of Schweizer’s book is just that: “The New Opium Wars.”

It’s perhaps unclear why the ChiComs would extract revenge against the U.S. for the transgressions of the British crown, but here we are. China has been literally murdering Americans by the tens of thousands by continually manufacturing and shipping the component parts of fentanyl to Mexico, whose drug cartels then disguise it within other drugs and smuggle it across our southern border, there to be ingested by unknowing Americans who end up dead.

In 2023, fentanyl killed more than 112,000 Americans. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, “The result over the last decade is more dead Americans from fentanyl than the total number of all U.S. soldiers lost in the wars of the twentieth century.”

Think about it: Fentanyl has killed more Americans in the last 10 years than we lost in both the trenches of World War I and the twin theaters of World War II.

The cost in terms of human carnage is, of course, incalculable. How does one place a dollar amount on a particular human life — that of a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a daughter, a son?

Still, a new study tries to give us a sense of the monetary loss. As Fox News reports:

The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the executive office that advises the president on economic policy, on Friday released a study detailing that the opioid epidemic cost the U.S. $2.7 trillion in 2023 when considering costs related to loss of life, loss of quality of life, loss of labor force productivity, crime and costs to the healthcare system.

That’s an enormous number, even for an economy as large as ours. And it argues for action that was sorely missing during the Biden administration, when Chinese spy balloons sailed across our skies and directly over our strategic sites with utter impunity.

The good news, I suppose, is that fentanyl deaths in the U.S. have declined now for 12 straight months. As CBS News reports, “Around 70,655 deaths linked to opioids like heroin and fentanyl were reported for the year ending June 2024, the CDC now estimates, falling 18% from the same time in 2023.”

Health experts are unsure what’s behind this steady decline — it could be the greater availability of overdose-reversing Narcan or better access to addiction medications. But it could also be due to something far more grim — the so-called “depletion of the susceptibles,” meaning that the ChiComs are simply exhausting the supply of potential drug overdosers. In any case, 70,000 is still an unconscionable number of deaths.

Donald Trump gets it, and he’s slapping tariffs not only on China but also Mexico and Canada, whose failure to secure our common borders has allowed the fentanyl plague to run rampant. Trump’s critics are decrying these tariffs, complaining that they’ll jack up the price of their Corona, their Modelo Especial, their avocados, and their maple syrup.

Still, the study argues that the enormous cost of the opioid epidemic “dwarfs even pessimistic estimates of the effects of tariffs.” So maybe we can suck it up for a spell. Maybe we can find a domestic beer to drink, or maybe we can dip our chips into salsa instead of guac — you know, until we’ve got a handle on this disintegration warfare thing.