The Boiling Moat: Can Taiwan Stay Afloat? Matt Pottinger on the Future of Taiwan

Transcript

Bill Whalen:

It is Tuesday, June 25th, 2024, and welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe. I'm Bill Whalen. I'm the Hoover Institution's, Virginia Hobbs Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. I'm not the only Hoover fellow who dabbles in podcasting, and on that note, I suggest you go to the Hoover Institution's website, which is hoover.org. Click on the tab. At the top of the homepage, it says Commentary head over to where it says multimedia, and there you'll see a listing of audio podcasts, about a dozen and all, including this podcast, which is at the top of list because I endeavor to get the top talent at the Hoover Institution. Today's podcast being no exception. My guest today is Matt Pottinger. Matt Pottinger is a Hoover Institution, distinguished visiting fellow, and a former senior staffer at the White House's National Security counselor, where he somehow survived during the brutal regime of one H.R. McMaster.

That's a joke. As Matt, good General, who's a colleague of ours here at Hoover is a good egg. Prior to his White House service, Matt Pottinger is a reporter based in China working for Reuters in the Wall Street Journal. He also fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Matt's here today to discuss a Hoover Institution press book he's edited on the topic of China at deterrence. It's titled The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan. It's release date, it's today, July 1st. It's out right now. You can order it at the Hoover Institution's website. I believe it's also available at that giant e-tailer named after river in South America. Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Pottinger:

Bill, it's great to see you. Great to be with you, and hopefully, yeah, H.R. Is probably off paddle boarding somewhere, so he won't have heard your vicious attack on him just now.

Bill Whalen:

We joke about this constantly 'cause H.R. McMaster is a three star general and he is the antithesis of any ideas people might have about generals being stuffed shirts. He is just a very kind gentleman. He's just down to earth, humble, fun, just a great guy to be around. I bet you enjoyed your time at the White House with him, Matt.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, he's also a great leader and strategic thinker and a historian, so we were really, really lucky to have him as a national security advisor when he was there. It was great.

Bill Whalen:

Okay, let's talk about the book, Matt. Let's begin with the title, The Boiling Moat. Explain what The Boiling Moat is.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, so the book originated first as a discussion that I was having with Larry Diamond, another Hoover Institution colleague, about what are the key lessons that we should have learned from Ukraine and that Taiwan can learn from Ukraine so that we avoid an even worse catastrophe than the one that's already unfolding in Europe if Beijing were to impose a blockade or even more kinetic acts of war to try to coercibly annex Taiwan into subjugation. The Boiling Moat was a term that we came up with from an old Chinese historical reference. Kwai Tong was a statesman who during the Han Dynasty a couple thousand years ago, advised that even strong armies should avoid attacking strong points that have metal ramparts in boiling moats. We like the image of a boiling moat. Sometimes people talk about a porcupine strategy for Hong Kong or rather for Taiwan, it was too late for Hong Kong, but that if Taiwan were like a porcupine, you wouldn't be able to devour it without choking on it.

In fact, the feature that is more important is really the moat of the Taiwan Strait as the obstacle that if only Ukraine had had 100 miles of ocean between it and Vladimir Putin's Russia, we might not have ever ended up in the situation we're now facing with this very bloody conflict in Europe. That is the moat that we're referring to. We think that the Chinese maritime capability is the center of gravity of a Chinese strategy, whether to impose a quarantine or a blockade or an invasion, they're going to need to actually use their navy.

If you can put that navy at risk, which we think you can put the Chinese navy at risk, even though China has more naval vessels than even the US Navy now, those beautiful expensive ships can be brought down at relatively cheap cost. That's one of the other lessons that we've seen where by some measures, about 25% of Russia's Black Sea fleet has been sent to the bottom by Ukraine using relatively asymmetric, in some cases, very innovative, almost homemade sorts of weapons that make the best of new commercial technologies using AI and the rest. Basically, jet skis, remote-controlled jet skis that have been able to take out big, very expensive warships. The Boiling Moat is the key feature for deterring this conflict.

Bill Whalen:

We have a lot of fellows here at Hoover and a lot of people affiliated with Hoover, Matt, who have experience with China and Taiwan. These are people with military backgrounds like yourself and journalism backgrounds, we have people of academic backgrounds, military, so forth. How did you decide who would make the cut here?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, it was a mix of people whose work I was already familiar with and people, and it even worked with in a few cases like Ivan Kanapathy who contributed a couple of the chapters about things that Taiwan needs to do. There were several Marines, myself included, who came in. It was almost accidental. I discovered their writing before I even knew many of them were Marines, but found that they had combat experience or experience in some cases at senior levels of the Marine Corps, and then others who I just think have been standout speakers like Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the role that Europe needs to play in helping deter China. Anders Fogh Rasmussen was the NATO Secretary General. He contributed a chapter at the end of the book about Europe's roles. It was really people who had real world experience. We have a former Colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces who was a combat vet from the 2006 campaign in Southern Lebanon, and came with me to visit Taiwan and had very good advice for Taiwan about how to structure their reserve forces, for example.

It was people who were national security practitioners in particular, and then some others who were also, scholars, and several of them were both at once. Elaine Luria is until recently a member of Congress from Virginia. She had also been a surface warfare officer in the US Navy. We're really lucky to have had the contributors that we had. Mark Montgomery was the J-three. He was the operations officer for Indo-Pacific command as an Admiral in the US Navy before he went on to work on Capitol Hill and then at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies doing great work. These were people that I thought had practical and realistic input.

Bill Whalen:

All right, let's talk about two things in the book that caught my interest, Matt. First one is, what militarily does Taiwan need to do to try to deter China here? I'm thinking in terms of weapons systems, missiles, mines, rockets, drones, and if you look at Taiwan, is it again, is it similar to what Hitler had with the Atlantic wall? In other words, could Taiwan turn itself into a fortress that could not be invaded?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. Hitler had a much tougher job trying to defend the European coast against the eventual D-Day invasion that came because in large part, Rommel who he'd put in charge of that defense, didn't know where the attack was going to come. There was a huge amount of just an expansive set of potential landing places. Even then it was a very difficult task for the allies to bring thousands of ships and hundreds of thousands of armed men across, and it required, of course, air superiority. Taiwan is not going to be able to achieve air superiority, but it can deny China air superiority so that it's a bit of a stalemate. Taiwan has far fewer beaches that China could land on. There aren't many ports that China would be able to take that are big enough for them to be able to really mount an effective invasion.

Taiwan geography works even more to the advantage of the defender in this case than it did in the case of the third Reich. The mountains on the east side of Taiwan in particular make a landing there. There's only a couple little places where they could potentially land. This is very much doable. The types of Ivan Kanapathy spends some time in his chapters writing sort of a shopping list of things that he thinks Taiwan needs to double down on, but being a good marine planner, Ivan thought that it was only fair also to say what some of the things are that Taiwan would ultimately have to divest itself of. We were just in Taiwan together last week, Ivan and I, talking with President Lai, the new Taiwan president, as well as with his Minister of National Defense and other key cabinet officers in this new Taiwan cabinet where we shared some of those views.

Bill Whalen:

Okay. The second thing that caught my attention, Matt, Grant Newsom writing in your book, he talked about Japan and what he talks about is the need for Japan to prepare in his words, "physically and psychologically." Can you expand on that? What the Japanese need to be thinking about?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. So Japan has made these great strides just over the past couple of years. Prime Minister Kishida has really been implementing the agenda of his earlier predecessor, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was tragically assassinated, but what Abe had wanted to do it, but what Kishida has actually been able to put into place is a pledge and significant momentum to double defense spending in Japan over a period of five years to about 2% of GDP, which is the NATO standard that most NATO countries now have met, which is fantastic.

What Grant is really looking at is some of more of the sort of the software, in the sense of what does the public need to do, what is the relationship between the military and the civilian society that they protect in Japan? There are a lot of disconnects that we think need to be addressed only and really only can be addressed through courageous political leadership. Japan, ever since the end of World War II, the military in Japan, it's not even called the military, right? It's called the Japan Self-Defense Forces have been fairly narrowly scoped. They're very much out of sight and out of mind in Japanese society. I was stunned to learn just on a recent trip to Japan that Japanese servicemen and women aren't even allowed to wear their service uniforms in public. They can't board a train or public transport wearing their service uniforms.

That's sort of a metaphor for the bigger ship that needs to take place. They need to really raise the stature of the military. They've been missing their recruiting goals, as has Taiwan, as has the United States, by the way. It's sort of raising the stature, incentivizing people to serve and reconnecting the Japanese public with the military, these very brave young men and women who are ultimately, going to be the line of defense that protects Japan from aggression.

It also means much more realistic training. It means better training between the different Japanese services. The Japanese Navy is probably the furthest along in terms of its comfort level operating with the United States Navy, but once you get to the Air Force and then more than that to the ground forces, they don't train all that well together with their own services, much less with the United States and even more remotely with Taiwan. We are talking about some of the things that need to take place in terms of better training, making more infrastructure available to Japan's military as well as to the US military in the case of a crisis. Also, helping the Japanese public come to terms with the idea that civilian infrastructure, hospitals, air strips that are not currently military air strips, highways are going to have to be put in service of a war in the event that China does attack Taiwan.

Bill Whalen:

I'm curious, Matt, how did the Japanese people square this with their past?

Matt Pottinger:

Look, the Japanese people are an extremely well-informed population, right? Japan is famous for having some of the highest, maybe the world's highest newspaper readership in the world. I can't remember if it's the Yomiuri Shimbun that has more circulation than probably every American newspaper combined or something like that. I mean, people do read, but they're not challenged by their leadership to really grapple with the unpleasant conversation that needs to happen if people are going to sort of start getting their minds around what it would take to fight a war. Because if you can get the population around the idea of what that might look like and what is expected of them as well as of their military and of their government, the less likely it is that they'll have to fight a war in the first place. That's the paradox of deterrence. You have to show that you're ready and willing to fight a war in order to lessen the odds that you ultimately have to do that. That's why we quote George Washington who spoke a lot about that when he was president.

Bill Whalen:

All right, Matt, let's talk about the year 2027, which keeps popping up in stories that you read about the Chinese/Taiwan situation. 2027, in this regard, it's called the Davidson Window, and I believe this is in reference to a Navy Admiral who testified in Congress in 2001, had talked about China having essentially a six-year window to move on Taiwan, so 2027 became the target. It also came up with Bill Burns, though, the CIA director who went on TV in early 2023, and said that President Xi had instructed the people's Liberation army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. There's that year again. Are you a 2027 fan yourself?

Matt Pottinger:

The good news is 2027 isn't actually an explicit target date for executing an invasion. The bad news is it could come sooner than 2027. We don't know for sure. It's not even clear whether Xi Jinping has yet made a decision of that magnitude on when to strike, but what Admiral Davidson was certainly right about, I mean, he didn't just pull that number 2027 out of thin air. What he was reflecting was a very real goal that Xi Jinping has given the People's Liberation Army to be ready to strike by then. That's the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Red Army, which later was named the Liberation Army, the People's Liberation Army. This is the centennial goal is to have the capability to attack. They may be ahead of schedule in terms of creating the capacity that they believe they need to successfully invade Taiwan.

That doesn't mean that Xi Jinping is going to go before or on 2027. He may go later than that. I think that we should be humble about the fact that we don't have a very good record of predicting when aggressors are going to attack their neighbors. We weren't very good at predicting that the Taliban was going to collapse the government of Afghanistan as quickly as it did, or that Vladimir Putin was really going to go forward with a full on invasion or that Hamas and its backers in Iran were going to attack Israel on October 7th last year. We need to be humble about this. We are not mind readers, but we should take very seriously the statements that dictators make because often they do signal what their intentions are.

I think that was true of Vladimir Putin even in advance of his full blown invasion. I think it's also true with Xi Jinping. I think that Xi Jinping has made clear that he desires to, in his word, solve the Taiwan question on his watch. He's 71 years old, he's probably going to be in government as the top leader for life, but I sense impatience on the part of Xi Jinping. I think we're already in the window for a catastrophe, potentially.

Bill Whalen:

What is exactly the difference between Xi and Putin when it comes to ambitions on other countries is will we say that Putin is a little more rash than Xi is? Is Xi more premeditated, more thoughtful?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. I think that they both have very similar goals, these revanchist Imperial goals. They want to want to, in Putin's case, reconstitute old borders from early Soviet times before Stalin made an agreement that Ukraine would really be a separate country. In the case of Xi Jinping, it is inheriting the goals of their KMT foes, Chiang Kai-shek, who was the one who wanted Taiwan and mainland China to be part of the same empire. By the way, Chiang Kai-shek also wanted to subsume Mongolia. The Chinese Communist party has never controlled Taiwan. Taiwan has only rarely been under the control of rulers in Beijing, and usually it hasn't been all of Taiwan that was under that control. It was actually a foreign dynasty, the Qing dynasty in, I believe it was in the 1680s that took control of Taiwan or parts of Taiwan for a time. This is really an expansionist sort of goal on the part of Xi Jinping.

In terms of his temperament, I think he is a more calculating, a less reckless gambler than Vladimir Putin has turned out to be. That's good. It means that deterrence is a live concept in his mind, right? He's not going to fight no matter what and no matter what the consequences. If that were the case, he probably would've attacked a while ago. I think we should be focusing deterrence really on him. He is the key decision maker, and no one can veto him. He's the one who's really going to make this decision. Deterrence is really a psychological exercise in eroding Xi Jinping's sense of optimism about what he could achieve in war that he couldn't achieve peacefully, or it's really convincing him that war is going to be far more costly for him than is worth it.

Bill Whalen:

That timing and life and podcast is everything, and in this case, our timing is not ideal in this regard. There is a presidential debate coming up in a couple of days. We're recording this on Tuesday, the 25th. Trump and Biden will have debated by the time folks are listening to this. Foreign policy is going to be included in that debate, Matt, and I, just off the top of my head, I'll throw possibly four things that they could end up arguing over. One is obviously Israel and Hamas, what to do there. The second's going to be Ukraine and Putin. The third might be the future of NATO, Matt, because that's a very open question for Donald Trump. Then finally, if Trump doesn't bring up the Afghanistan withdrawal, the really botched Afghanistan withdrawal, then he has committed debate malpractice. That's at least four items right there to bring up. The question would be if Taiwan somehow finds its way into this 90 minutes of insults and brickbats and arguments, and two people going at it. My question to you, Matt, is this, you're a former journalist, as I mentioned in the introduction. If I put you in the middle of that debate and allowed you to ask a Taiwan question, a China question to Donald Trump and Joe Biden, what would you ask them?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, well, I would ask Joe Biden, why not acknowledge that the United States is in a Cold War with the People's Republic of China? Given all of the evidence, first, in terms of statements of intent on the part of Beijing going back well before even Xi Jinping came to power. Now, that you also have Xi Jinping as the number one backer by the admission of the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, China is overwhelmingly the number one supporter of the war in Ukraine. Tony Blinken also said that Beijing's support may have altered the course of the war, that it's doubtful that Russia would've been able to stay in the war as long as it has, but for the support from Beijing. Given that Beijing is effectively waging proxy wars against European countries and backing Iran in its proxy wars against Israel, why is it that we're pretending that we're in this sort of manageable, somewhat friendly, but competitive relationship where we, according to the Secretary of the Treasury, we want to actually expand our trade ties with China according to the Biden Treasury Department.

Why not just call this what it is? Because one of the great benefits of doing that is that you can mobilize the American people. Once you tell the American people, you stop confusing them by saying, "We want you to do business with China, but we also want to compete with China." Let's just make this simple. I think that with President Trump, my question for him would be on in terms of Beijing's role backing clear adversaries of the United States, including Putin, including Maduro in Venezuela, including the Ayatollah and his terrorist regime in Iran, and including of course, Kim Jong-un, who President Trump's met with three times. In light of that, what would be the strategy that you would pursue that acknowledges the ways that all of these countries are now tied together in what I would call an axis of chaos? Chaos is the word Xi Jinping uses to describe the biggest trend in the world today. He says the world is marked more by more than any other trend as having chaos. He seems to view that, in fact, he said that the trends are on China's side. What would be President Trump's way of dealing with the totality as well as with the individual actors who are working against American interest right now?

Bill Whalen:

Okay. Well put. We know that Putin enjoys discord. We know the Russian government enjoys introducing discord to American elections. The government in China bat the government in Taiwan. They're looking at this election. Are they rooting for these candidates? Is there one they prefer to the other? Do you think?

Matt Pottinger:

You mean in Beijing's case?

Bill Whalen:

Yeah. Look, these two Beijing and Taiwan are looking at our election.

Matt Pottinger:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Bill Whalen:

Both if they have a favorite in the race.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, look, I mean, I was talking to our colleague, Neil Ferguson just yesterday, who was commenting that people in Beijing who interlocutors there saying, both of these presidents are hostile to Beijing. I think that Beijing fears President Trump more than it fears President Biden. It's seen that it's been able to get away with a proxy wars against US interests. It's been able to get away with information warfare. It's been able to continue getting away with a waging chemical warfare in the form of its subsidized and sponsored trade in fentanyl and the chemicals that poison tens of thousands of Americans to death every year and ruin communities here. I think that they will view President Trump as more unpredictable and someone who's more willing to enforce red lines. Where I think President Biden has created special problems for Beijing, has been in belatedly, even though deterrence failed under President Biden, I don't believe that deterrence had to fail under President Biden, but it did.

Nonetheless, President Biden has been strong in backing resistance against Russia winning this war. He could do a lot more. If President Trump can show that he can negotiate at the same time as fighting, the Chinese call this talking while fighting. It's more useful. President Trump has said that he intends to try to negotiate with Russia, but if he can fight more effectively than the Biden administration has been able to do on behalf of Ukraine, while simultaneously pursuing talks, that's going to have a better chance of succeeding, in my view, than us merely providing just enough to keep Ukraine alive, but not enough to actually start rolling back the Russians. I think we should be doing more.

Bill Whalen:

Matt, this would be a good moment to explain to our listeners what exactly the United States obligations are to Taiwan in terms of treaty partnerships, but then also, let's segue from that, Matt, into the thought of China doing something to Taiwan that is not a direct military invasion, what you and the military like to call gray zone tactics.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah. Well, look, our commitment to Taiwan is actually more legally has a stronger legal basis than our support for Ukraine does. Neither country, neither Ukraine nor Taiwan is a treaty ally of the United States. Ukraine's not part of NATO. We don't have a defense treaty anymore with Taiwan, but what we do have is the Taiwan Relations Act, which was strongly supported, both at the time that it was passed more than 40 years ago, and up to today. This law states that any aggression by China towards Taiwan would be a matter of grave concern for the United States, and it obligates the United States to provide for Taiwan's defense, at least to provide articles, arms and munitions and the like for Taiwan's defense. That is actually a stronger both legal and traditional of obligation that the United States has. It still leaves the president with discretion on whether or not to commit US forces in the event that China attacks. President Biden has gone farther than any president in stating four times now on the record, that he would commit US forces. I think that US presidents should maintain that standard and not back away from it, but your second question was?

Bill Whalen:

Gray zone tactics. The question-

Matt Pottinger:

Oh, gray zone.

Bill Whalen:

The question would be this, what if Xi Jinping channels his inner JFK and decides to launch a quarantine against Taiwan?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, sure. Exactly, so look, a blockade is an act of war. That's not a gray zone attack.

Bill Whalen:

Is there a difference between a quarantine and a blockade, Matt?

Matt Pottinger:

Yes. Yes, and so a quarantine is, like President Kennedy employed rather than committing an act of war by blockading Cuba, what he did was he said it's an action to stop certain contraband in the form of nuclear missiles from being shipped by the Russians to Cuba to threaten the United States. That quarantine was successful in that it did turn Khrushchev blinked and decided that he would pull back. The United States through in a sweetener by saying we would pull back intermediate range missiles from Europe that had been targeting the Russians. If he hadn't blinked, it would've been very difficult for the US to enforce that quarantine without using force and actually having to escalate from a gray zone, from the gray zone to the red zone, I mean, to actual conflict. I think that we should be very mindful. I think that there's a high probability that Beijing starts to experiment with short-term duration quarantines, and continually be pushing the envelope to become more aggressive in threatening air and shipping traffic to and from Taiwan.

If countries Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and others have the will to run those blockades, which I think we must have, Beijing isn't going to be able to do very much. I mean, a big tanker or a container ship cannot be stopped by Chinese warships or Coast Guard vessels unless they're willing to open fire on those ships and actually go to war. I don't think Beijing is going to want to go to war unless it's confident that it's ready to go all the way and to invade Taiwan. This is going to be very dicey in ways that the Cuban Missile Crisis will remind us of. I mean, we'll be reminded of that crisis by the sorts of risky steps that I think China is preparing to undertake, but we shouldn't check it out in my view. We just need to learn to adapt to increasingly aggressive gray zone activities and not panic.

Bill Whalen:

Would a quarantine map be a prelude to an invasion or would the Beijing's thinking being that a quarantine would in and of itself topple Taiwan?

Matt Pottinger:

I suspect that a blockade would be the prelude to an invasion. A quarantine would be something that Beijing can pull back from. It can move forward a little bit. It can adapt it. It can plausibly deny that it was moving towards a blockade, but if Beijing goes further to actually enforce a quarantine with the use of force, I think that we should assume that they are moving towards, they're really moving up the escalation ladder in ways that would require a major response on the part of Free Nations. Major response, not just hoping that things kind of work themselves out. At that point, we need to be moving troops probably into Taiwan itself to try to deter Xi from going even further up the escalation ladder.

Bill Whalen:

We know that Xi and the government in Beijing views Taiwan as a province that should be reabsorbed. I'm curious, since you've been to Taiwan recently, what the view is from Taiwan looking out, did the Taiwanese people, did they see themselves as Chinese? I ask this because there are multiple generations on that island. There are people on that island who fled from mainland China, so I imagine they still identify as Chinese, but if you're younger of a generation, you were born on the island, do you consider yourself Chinese necessarily?

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Taiwan has got such an interesting history. You've had people who have transplanted themselves to Taiwan from mostly from Fujian province and from Guangdong province starting a few hundred years ago when Taiwan, for a little while, was actually Portuguese colony. The Portuguese invited Chinese farmers to come settle in Taiwan to build up an agricultural industry there, but you had a lot of people who had been in Taiwan a whole lot longer than that, and were not of Chinese heritage. People who had come from various Pacific islands and from Southeast Asian sort of heritage and had settled a long, long time ago on Taiwan. If you look at some of the polls like [foreign language 00:34:33], it's one of the major universities in Taiwan has done this regular series of polls going back decades now that looks at this question of identity. What it's found is that there's been a reversal over time from plurality people who view themselves first as Chinese and only secondarily, as Taiwanese, or view themselves as Chinese and Taiwanese.

Now, what you've seen is that the number of percentage of people who consider themselves just Chinese is a minority, and the number that consider themselves to be both Chinese and Taiwanese remains a large sort of middle. Then the number of people who consider themselves only Taiwanese has grown over time and now, outnumbers the number of people significantly who consider themselves merely Chinese. Now, that doesn't mean that Taiwan is bolting for [inaudible 00:35:33] independence, think that the Taiwanese people are very pragmatic. They like what they've got going, which is an elected, a system of government where they get to elect their leaders. They get to elect their representatives. They have the rule of law, they have free speech, they have freedom of religion and freedom of association, and they've also got a terrific economy. People complain that the economy's, they want it to do better, of course.

Really overall, the quality of life, the standard of living is excellent in Taiwan. Even though the wealth gap is growing in Taiwan like it is practically everywhere, it is actually a much better [inaudible 00:36:15] coefficient than we have in the United States, and much, much better than what exists in nominally communist China just across the Taiwan Strait, where there's a much worse wealth gap that has taken hold there. Taiwan is a paradise in a lot of ways, and people don't want to provoke an unnecessary confrontation with Beijing and are really willing to try to maintain the status quo. The problem is not on the Taiwan side of the strait. The problem is with Xi Jinping, the dictator in Beijing, who is very clearly trying to change the status quo. I don't believe, no US President in the last 40 years has tried to change the status quo. The leaders in Taiwan are not trying to do so. It's really the problem we're facing is a fundamental changing of the game by Beijing to try to force Taiwan to become an annex of the People's Republic of China.

Bill Whalen:

I ask that, Matt, because if you look at history, when you look at when smaller countries were attacked by larger powers, the smaller countries fall back in part on national identity as a rally force. Zelensky, I think, has done this quite effectively, with Ukraine. I'm curious as to what national identity the Taiwan people would see for themselves.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, I mean, the people of Taiwan aren't going to just be bullied. They don't want to provoke a crisis, but they're also not going to allow Beijing to impose its totalitarian system on Taiwan. I think that people will rally behind their leadership if they sense that Beijing is trying to impose its will. You've seen that in, it's incredible. You've seen the Democratic Progress, the DPP, Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan that now has just won its third presidential election in a row. We've not seen any party win three elections in a row in Taiwan until now. I think that's an expression in part of people's view, that the DPP is not going to make a deal with China that effectively and fundamentally subverts those attributes of Taiwan society that I was just speaking about. It's democracy, it's rule of law, it's freedom of speech and other freedoms.

Bill Whalen:

You mentioned our Hoover colleague, Neil Ferguson, I should say, Sir Neil Ferguson. He was knighted.

Matt Pottinger:

Yeah, I forgot to congratulate him yesterday. I had not realized that. He's just been knighted. It's fantastic.

Bill Whalen:

Well, the next Goodfellows in mid-July, he'll be congratulated. There'll be some good-natured ribbing, I think as well.

Matt Pottinger:

That's great.

Bill Whalen:

Neil may be the first person to come up with Cold War 2 or Cold War 2.0, depending on what you want to call it. Here's my question to you, Matt. If you are looking at China absorbing Taiwan, if China were to do that, would Taiwan become Hong Kong II?

Matt Pottinger:

Well, look, I mean, if China tries to just annex Taiwan forcibly, we're looking at a great power hot war in a direct one. No, we will graduate very quickly from Cold War II to something more like World War III. Yeah, I don't see a solution here that looks like Hong Kong, the Hong Kong situation. Because the people of Taiwan, unlike the people of Hong Kong, enjoy a full-blown democracy right now. The people of Hong Kong enjoyed something very, very special in that it was a much freer society than exists on mainland China. They did have freedom of speech and freedom of association. They weren't allowed to ever elect their top leader, not under British colonial rule, nor under the period that followed it after it reverted to Chinese sovereignty, but Taiwan's different. Taiwan is a society that has won after a long period of autocratic rule. It won its free society and its democracy and people irrespective of how they vote. I don't know anyone in Taiwan that wants to give that up.

I don't see sort of a one country, two systems model having credibility under Xi Jinping in light of his subversion of the basic law in Hong Kong and his overt tearing up of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which had called for guaranteed high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong for 50 years. That's gone. China, a handful of years ago, held up that treaty and said, it's now just a relic. It's a piece of paper. They basically denied the meaning of that treaty that they had signed with the British. Beijing does have a lot of credibility right now with things like one country, two systems.

Bill Whalen:

Two more items, Matt, then I'll let you go, and I sure appreciate your being generous with your time today. The first, I'm a fierce connoisseur of baseball. I just watch way more baseball than I should be. I've noticed something unique this year, Matt, in that during games between innings, I keep seeing ads for a website called Buildsubmarines.com, and this is the idea of building more submarines in America. It's good for jobs, good for the economy, blah, blah, good for our defense, but this takes us, Matt, to AUKUS, A-U-K-U-S. AUKUS September is the three-year anniversary of AUKUS. That's Australia, the UK, and the US, and a trilateral security partnership. That's a long-winded way of saying that we're going to help the Aussies build nuclear submarines. We spend a couple minutes explaining the significance of AUKUS, but also as we look around the Pacific as if we look at Australia, we look at Japan, we now look at the Philippines, which has become a hot spot with what's going on with Thomas Scholes. What do our friends in the Pacific need to do in terms of ramping up their military?

Matt Pottinger:

Well, AUKUS is several things. It has several pillars in addition to the pillar on submarines. I think AUKUS was a credit to the Biden administration and to Kurt Campbell, who is now Deputy Secretary of State, who sort of led the negotiation on that. Look, nuclear subs take a long time. This is complicated. We don't have a lot of capacity right now for building the subs we need to make. I think we're working through this. It's not surprising to me that this is not getting fixed with just a snap of the fingers, but if the political will remains as I hope it will, I think we're going to figure this out. But AUKUS has pillars that have to do with greater defense industry, interoperability and capacity building between the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States that I think we're beginning to step out on. We need to really pick up the pace there in light of what's going on in Ukraine.

I mean, the Ukraine current phase of the war actually came after the AUKUS agreement had been announced by those three countries. When the facts change, so must our plans. I think we need to really accelerate our ability to build missiles and autonomous systems, whether they are drones or they're surface maritime drones or underwater drones. We've really got to get hustling on this stuff because these technologies exist. They're proven, even the homemade variety, if you could call it that, that Ukraine employed is proven to be formidable, and we've got to stay ahead of the curve in ways that impose costs on PLA war planners. What they're doing around the Philippines right now is really an effort to discredit the United States as a reliable partner by saying, "Look Philippines, we can take at will from you. We can take offshore islets that don't have intrinsic geo-strategic value, but have enormous symbolic value if China is simply to take them."

That's why it's amping up this activity around the Philippines. It wants to show that the United States cannot protect the Philippines. That's why it's incumbent upon the Biden administration to be there for the Philippine people and for President Marcos when they call on us to be there for them, as provided for by our defense treaty with the Philippines. They are, unlike Taiwan and Ukraine, this is a mutual defense treaty country with a long, long history with the United States going all the way back to our defeat of the Spanish at the end of the 19th century. We've got to be there and we cannot let China come in and seize at will. If that means that we have to muscle in more, and it means we have to do airlifts using US support. I hope we do that.

Bill Whalen:

Matt, what about the Ford deployment of American power? What I'm thinking is this, it's a long transit time. If you send a submarine from Pearl Harbor to the South China Sea, even longer for a carrier coming from San Diego or Yokosuka, Japan, we have a Subbase in Guam, I believe, but it's a tender, I don't think it's no on the part of a Pearl Harbor operation. We used to have a base in Subic Bay. Do we need to build more bases now closer to China?

Matt Pottinger:

Well, we have an agreement called ECFA, which is sort of an enhanced agreement that gives the United States the ability to rotate in and out of an even larger number of Philippine bases, and we can work to improve those bases so that they're useful to Philippines military, as well as our own when we are invited to be there. Yeah, I think that staging more equipment in the Philippines can be an almost explicit tit for tat for all of the bullying that China's doing right off the coast of the Philippines right now. We can say, "Look, they're going to be costs associated with this. If you're going to bully the Philippines like this, then the Philippines might allow the United States to stage more military equipment that would be useful to both us and Philippine forces in the event that we have to use them to defend the Philippines or maybe even to defend Taiwan and Japan and others." I was really glad to see President Biden host President Marcos and Prime Minister Kishida just several weeks ago in Washington. That's sort of a new format, a new trilateral that we should keep building on. We need to impose costs. Every time Beijing insults the sovereignty of one of its neighbors like the Philippines, there have to be costs associated with that, including military costs.

Bill Whalen:

All right, let's close with the words of one Matthew Pottinger who wrote in this book, The Boiling Moat, the following quote, "Since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, the benefits of Israel's Warrior ethos have been on display again as Israelis have unified, despite bitter political domestic differences to wage a war with the story Hamas." Matt, let's look at the United States of America as we approach America's birthday now and the Warrior ethos. We have a country that's very divided over this war in Israel. We have a country that has divisions over this war in Ukraine. How does this country react if there is hostilities between China and Taiwan? In other words, does this country have a Warrior ethos to fall back on?

Matt Pottinger:

We do have a Warrior ethos, and I think that H.R. McMaster has written eloquently about it. I'm of the view, and there aren't a lot of people who are with me on this yet, but I'm of the view that we should bring back mandatory national service, and some of that service should include an option for serving in the US military. I think that we can provide an option for whether if you were doing compulsory national service in the US military, you can have a choice about whether you want to serve in combat arms or in the even larger part of the US military that supports the combat arms specialties. You don't have to be an infantryman if you don't want to, but you should have the option of becoming an infantryman or a tank officer and what have you. I think that we need to bring back national service.

I think that what we're seeing on campuses, including at Stanford, is a sign that young Americans have grown distant from the founding roots and ideals of this country. I think that they're falling prey to some pretty flaky ideologies that they're going to wake up someday and they're going to say, "What the heck was I smoking when I showed up for that protest at Stanford or at Columbia?" I think that part of the answer is actually calling on citizens to be citizens. Part of being of citizenship includes national service for at least a portion of our young people. I think that the benefits to our military, benefits to other institutions in American life will be there, but also, those young Americans will benefit from that participation and from what they learn by having to actually serve something bigger than the small ideas that have captivated them on TikTok for the next 10 minutes.

Bill Whalen:

Okay, and finally, Matt, we talked about 2027, but take us through the rest of 2024. What are you looking for the rest of this year in terms of the China-Taiwan saga?

Matt Pottinger:

Well, what Taiwan, having just inaugurated their new president in May, what Beijing is doing in response is amping up gray zone activities like you were talking about. To make it a little more specific, what they're amping up are what Beijing calls the three warfares. This is legal warfare, this is psychological warfare, and this is public opinion warfare. These are ideas that go back to a 1998 book written by a couple of People's Liberation Army senior officers called Unrestricted Warfare, where they said that China should pursue war against the United States. That includes those three warfares, legal, psychological, and public opinion warfare, but also, chemical warfare in the form of fueling a drug epidemic and also, these types of gray zone activities. What Beijing is doing now, Beijing, by the way, the People's Liberation Army adopted the three warfares. They didn't explicitly adopt chemical warfare through drug addiction into their doctrine.

I think that that is what Beijing is carrying out covertly. At this point, we should not even consider it covert anymore. We know according to this congressional report that came out a few months ago, that Beijing is actually funding and subsidizing the drug trade into the United States. In the case of Taiwan, I'm not sure if drugs have factored into this yet, but definitely the other three warfares have. What they're doing is they're trying to create a psychological sense of futility by encroaching more and more closely to Taiwan's on its shores, but they're also hosting opposition politicians to Beijing, and some of those opposition politicians are using the same talking points that Beijing uses to criticize the elected government in Taiwan. That's a form of legal warfare. It's a form of public opinion warfare, and of course, they're using TikTok and Xiaohongshu, which is called Little Red Book, another new app that is making inroads. They're using those to try to win public opinion warfare in Taiwan.

Bill Whalen:

All right, Matt, we're going to leave it there. Congratulations on the book. Thank you ever so much for putting it together for your stewardship on that. I'd like to thank you for your service to your country and wearing a uniform, serving in the White House, and really like to thank you also, Matt, for all the great work you do for the Hoover Institution. It's a pleasure to have you all board.

Matt Pottinger:

Thanks, Bill. Thanks for everything you do, and thanks for having me today.

Bill Whalen:

Thank you, sir.

You've been listening to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe. If you've enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our show. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram, and X feeds. Our X handle is @HooverInst. That's spelled H-O-O-B-E-R-I-N-S-T. I mentioned our website, beginning of the show. That is Hoover.org. While you go there, I recommend you sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, which keeps you updated on what Matt Pottinger and his colleagues are up to that's emailed to you weekdays. The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, you can get it now at Amazon, the Hoover Institution's website for the Hoover Institution. This is Bill Whalen. We'll be back soon with the new installment of Matters of Policy and Politics. Until then, take care. Thanks for listening.

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