“It’s déjà vu all over again,” baseball great Yogi Berra once told us.

In the 1930s, U.S. companies were supplying Japan with the steel and petroleum it needed for its fighting against China. That policy continued even after the conflict escalated into a full-scale war and after the Japanese murdered between 100,000 and 200,000 helpless Chinese military prisoners and civilians and raped tens of thousands of Chinese women in the 1937 Rape of Nanking.

Under its isolationist policy, the U.S. felt the nation had no business at all in the international conflicts developing around the world. All went well until the end of the decade when Japan, facing a scarcity of resources, a growing population, and an economic depression at home, moved into southern Indochina - a source for rice, rubber and tin - and then the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.

President Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States on July 26, 1941, which effectively cut off Japan’s access to U.S. oil. Ironically, Japan had used some of the steel imports from the U.S. to build up its air fleet - the same planes that attacked us at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Fast forward eight decades to our time and we can see how the U.S. is once again being played on the international stage, this time by the world’s largest consumer market - China.

Two years ago Victor David Hanson, commentator and military historian, warned how a Chinese-dominated future poses a grave danger to the world. In his column he explained how corporations, all competing for lucrative markets of television viewers, tech consumers and students, get rich outsourcing their factories to take advantage of its cheap labor.

The hypocrisy from human rights advocates and environmentalists is obvious and it’s sickening.

“Loud human rights lions in Europe turn into kittens when it is a question of Chinese organ harvesting, forced abortions and sterilizations, and the jailing and execution of dissidents,” Hanson wrote, and “American environmentalists demand a radical shutdown of the current fossil-fuel-based U.S. economy but say little about greenhouse gas emissions from China, the biggest polluter in the world by far.

“Outspoken NBA athletes and hip Hollywood celebrities damn the Second Amendment, curse their president and boycott states they find politically incorrect. But they become abject cowards when it comes to China,” Hanson observed.

Two years ago, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy could not get Democrats to join a bipartisan task force to study a broad range of China-related issues, including the economic threat to our government, efforts to gain the technological advantage, and China’s role in the origin and spread of COVID-19. On board with the task force plan was Pennsylvania Congressman Guy Reschenthaler, who advised us how China was stealing American intellectual property, violating international trade laws, exporting illicit fentanyl into the U.S., and committing human rights abuses. He also tweeted that China is our greatest geopolitical adversary, but you wouldn’t know it based on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s actions.

The U.S. House of Representatives, he said, shouldn’t be propping up communist Chinese suppliers.

With the entire auto industry pivoting to electric vehicles, the world is going to need a lot more batteries. And it’s no secret that China dominates the supply chain. The communist regime is doing everything it can to continue ruling the global market, from the semiconductor chips to the massive batteries essential to electric vehicles.

Victor David Hanson told us two years ago that there was never evidence that China wished to end communism, other than to allow some market reforms designed to strengthen its dictatorial rule and its influence overseas. Far from a newly rich China becoming Westernized politically, he said the West and the rest of the world are more likely to become politically repressive like China.

That gloomy scenario he predicted is unfolding before our very eyes.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.