Red flag warning | Power Line

Last month I wrote briefly about Senator Tom Cotton’s book Seven Things You Can’t Say About China on its official date of publication in “Seven Things You Can Say About Tom Cotton.” Now Professor David Garrow, author of Rising Star and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bearing the Cross, reviews the book for the Washington Free Beacon in “Red flag warning.” Professor Garrow writes:

Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has authored a slender book that punches so much above its modest weight as to make a reader envision some skinny teenager—and Cotton is reportedly 6’5″—taking down Muhammad Ali or, in this case, obese Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

His multigenerational Arkansas roots aside, Cotton is no rube. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and then, in 2002, of Harvard Law School, Cotton left a remunerative law practice in 2005 to enlist in the U.S. Army before going on to serve two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne, earning a Bronze Star. ’Nuf said.

Cotton’s been a U.S. senator for almost a decade now and has most distinguished himself as an outspoken opponent of the Chinese Communist Party. This book distills his powerful and insistent indictment of the CCP’s looming danger to the United States, and in so doing he rings a prescient warning bell as to what America’s future likely will hold.

Cotton’s title encapsulates the seven threats he believes the CCP poses: above all military—”China is preparing for war”—but also economic, political, and cultural. Cotton has read very widely in the scholarly and journalistic literature on China, and this energetically written, richly documented book is a political tour de force that should be read by all of his congressional colleagues and by every Trump administration policymaker.

I’m sure Professor Garrow intends no offense with reference to “[h]is multigenerational Arkansas roots.” It is at least in part on account of his multigenerational Arkansas roots that Senator Cotton is no rube. See, for example, Charles Portis’s True Grit, featuring one Mattie Ross of Yell County, from which Senator Cotton originally hails. Readers like me may find Professor Garrow’s almost entirely admiring review of interest.