OPINION:
In the quiet corridors of Washington, where intellect and influence often merge, a revelation has surfaced that pierces the civility of diplomacy. China’s use of academics for espionage is not new; it is simply one of the world’s oldest deceits dressed in scholarly robes.
What emerged from the case of Ashley J. Tellis — a former U.S. foreign policy adviser and expert on Indian and South Asian affairs who was arrested and charged this month with retaining national defense information — only strips away the illusion that such infiltration was ever absent from South Asia. It was always there, unprosecuted and unspoken, sheltered by China’s reach and wealth.
Mr. Tellis was no fringe figure. He helped design the India-U.S. alliance, which sought to balance China’s rise, and was long considered a voice of strategic wisdom. Yet investigators reportedly found thousands of classified pages — top-secret intelligence on airpower and defense strategy — at his home in Virginia. If authenticated, the discovery is not a scandal but a rupture. It exposes the frailty of institutions that once guarded America’s secrets.
Chinese analyst Mao Keji called Mr. Tellis’ arrest the end of America’s “strategic altruism” toward India, a weakening empire turning inward. He misreads the moment. Under President Trump, America does not trade in altruism; it trades in resolve. Where others saw friendship, Mr. Trump saw vulnerability. Where others preferred polite fictions, Mr. Trump demanded exposure. His instinct was that national security begins not at the border but within the bureaucracy, where loyalty can erode quietly under the glow of influence.
Mr. Tellis served for decades as a policy sage at the State Department, at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and in the think tank world. His access was vast. For Beijing, such a man would have been invaluable.
I met Mr. Tellis at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2022. He was seeking to speak about China’s strategic expansion in Sri Lanka, an issue I explore in my book “Teardrop Diplomacy.” He never got back to me. At the time, I assumed it was institutional politics. Now the silence feels heavier. If his loyalties were divided, my analysis of Chinese penetration in the Indian Ocean may have struck too close to home. The gatekeeper was protecting not debate but deception.
Mr. Trump’s critics often call his methods abrasive, his tone populist. Yet beneath the noise lies a rare clarity: an understanding that moral decay often hides behind intellectual sophistication.
India faces this same fog. As scholar Harsh V. Pant observes, China’s next offensive lies not on battlefields but in minds. Even as relations thaw, Beijing cultivates voices within India’s civil society, think tanks and digital spaces. Espionage today no longer requires spies in trench coats; it requires professors, consultants and algorithms. Chinese embassies fund research, offer fellowships and shape narratives that favor Beijing’s ambitions.
For Washington, this means the age of innocence has ended. Every institution — academic, diplomatic, technological — is now a potential front. Mr. Trump grasped this earlier than most. His skepticism toward global institutions and his insistence on accountability were derided as nationalism. In hindsight, they appear prescient. He understood that a superpower collapses not through invasion but through infiltration, when the guardians of truth prefer comfort to vigilance.
If the allegations against Mr. Tellis prove true, the implications will be profound. They will shake the credibility of think tank diplomacy that has long mediated the Indo-Pacific dialogue. They will remind allies that loyalty to the United States is not symbolic; it is sacred. They also will send a message to China’s sprawling networks of influence: America, under strong leadership, still knows how to defend itself.
China will continue its quiet conquests, building friendships through grants, rewriting narratives through media and shaping desires through technology. The Tellis affair, whether a matter of spycraft or tragedy, forces Washington to confront the seductions of prestige and access that have weakened its moral core. It reminds us that freedom decays first in the mind, when truth becomes negotiable and betrayal a mere career hazard.
Mr. Trump’s detractors see him as divisive. Yet in moments like this, his clarity cuts through illusion. He has exposed the myth that governance and morality can be separated.
The deeper lesson is urgent: Nations fall when they lie to themselves. America cannot remain a beacon of freedom if it tolerates deception in its own house. Mr. Trump’s call for accountability, stripped of political noise, is not partisan but moral. In an age where the line between scholar and spy has blurred, his insistence on loyalty is the last defense of meaning itself.
China’s reach is long, but truth has its own endurance. The West must rediscover what it once knew: that liberty is not a gift but a daily discipline. Discipline begins with the courage to expose what others choose to ignore. Only then will the silence beneath the alliance give way to the sound of a nation awake.
• Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is executive director of the South Asia Foresight Network under the Millennium Project in Washington.
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