The China Threat: From TikTok To Taiwan

>> Andrew Roberts: Joining me today on Secrets of Statecraft is my guest, Mike Gallagher, republican congressman from Wisconsin. Mike Gallagher, you're the Republican congressman for Wisconsin's 8th district and have been since 2017, which includes Green Bay, of course. And I see, aren't I, that you're wearing a Green Bay packers top, is that right?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: That's correct, my entire wardrobe is effectively Green Bay Packers. I mean, as an owner of the team, and Green Bay is unique in its ownership structure, I feel like I have to support my investment.

>> Andrew Roberts: I've actually watched the Green Bay Packers at Green Bay, I have to say that Brent Favre, or was it Brett Favre?

He was on the other side. He was playing against the Green Bay, so he got booed. When he turned up onto the pitch, it was quite an extraordinary event, really.

>> Mike Gallagher: It doesn't surprise me. He went to go play for the Vikings, but it was interesting when he came back and had his number retired, everyone forgave him.

And it was a beautiful ceremony, actually. So he was a legend, I mean, that was my quarterback growing up. I mean, it's always gonna be far from me.

>> Andrew Roberts: All of these Americans always have a second act, don't they? And they're happy ending. So that's a good news.

You have a Ba from Princeton, PhD from Georgetown. You've served for seven years in active duty in Iraq in the US Marine Corps. On one occasion, you took over a team led by Matt Pottinger, who is a past guest on this show. So I don't want this to seem too incestuous, but nonetheless, that is a hell of a coincidence, I think.

And today you're chairman of the house select committee on competition with the Chinese Communist Party. So can we start off there? Nikita Khrushchev famously said of the West, we will bury you. Do you think it's the ultimate ambition of the Chinese Communist Party to bury us?

>> Mike Gallagher: I think it's their ambition to displace us as the world's superpower or render us irrelevant on the world stage and rework the global system in their image.

And in fact, in their latest meeting, Putin and Xi explicitly talked to each other about the opportunity to make changes unseen in a century. And really destroy the US led global order and rebuild something that favors their system. So I've described this differently, and maybe even more provocatively, as she's not gonna come out and say, yes, we wanna bury the United States of America.

But he talks about the inevitable demise of the American led Capitalist system and the triumph of Socialism as he understands it and the endurance of the party. This Leninist organization, this vanguard party that's ushering in the this new era. It's sort of like physician assisted suicide, for lack of a better term.

They're happy to expedite our self destruction while pursuing salami slicing tactics in their own region. But the end state is a system in which China is the dominant power. It's like China becomes, rather than being Jupiter in the region and globally, which it is right now, it becomes the sun around with which everything else orbits, if that makes sense.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And in order to do this, it makes perfect sense to me. In order to do this, they need to expel the United States from Southeast Asia, don't they? How are they going to go about doing that in the shorter term before this, as you say, socialism, as he sees it, before this marxist leninist concept of making China central?

What's the shorter term attempt?

>> Mike Gallagher: I think it starts with Taiwan. Let me caveat that by saying, in light of the tension we're seeing in the second Thomas Shoal with the Philippines. There could be an incident there that ignites into a broader conflict in the region throughout the first and second island chain.

But it seems most likely to me that the way in which they shatter the us alliance system in the Indo Pacific is by taking Taiwan. Now, you'll say Taiwan is not a formal treaty ally, yes, that is true. But by taking Taiwan, they would render our ability to fulfill our extant treaty commitments with Japan and the Philippines in particular, pretty much null and void.

And you have textbooks for mid level PLA officers talking about taking Taiwan as a way of interfering with Japan's supply line. So I think it's really interesting that in the West sometimes we tend to look at this, particularly if you work on Wall street or in sort of corporate America.

And you think, well, surely Xi Jinping wouldn't actually do something as foolish as trying to invade Taiwan. It would be incredibly difficult, I mean, this is an island with hellacious topography. It would be incredibly costly for him in terms of lives lost and what it would do to the global economy, which is all true.

But I think one thing we've learned in the wake of Ukraine is that if sort of a dictator tells you that they're interested in doing something, you should probably take that seriously. And Xi repeatedly keeps telling us that he intends to reunify Taiwan with the mainland, to use his phrase, by force if necessary.

And even if it were to cost him a lot of lives and a lot, and force his citizens to endure a lot of economic misery. I wonder if he wouldn't be willing to bear the cost. And the other final thing id say is we tend to forget that systems like these are far less sensitive to casualties than a system like ours.

That was certainly one of the lessons of the korean war. Now, granted, China then looks a little bit different than China today, but I think its still fair to say, to paraphrase a friend of mine or a current Stanford scholar or an amastro. That if you went to Xi Jinping and you gave him the choice if you can have Taiwan, but it's going to cost you your entire navy, he would take that choice ten times out of ten.

So I think it starts with Taiwan, and American leadership in the region ends if China is able to take Taiwan.

>> Andrew Roberts: And we can see from Ukraine, of course, that totalitarian states can take much higher losses than Democratic ones. That's already starting to show in Ukraine, it's always been true throughout history, I think you're absolutely right.

How would it play out? Do you see a blockade and then an invasion? Or do you see a sudden one bright fire morning, the People's Liberation army just being taken over onto the sort of beaches of Taiwan? What would you see this as? War game it for us.

 

>> Mike Gallagher: I confess I've spent most of the last seven years in Congress focused on, let's say, the high end scenario. Which would be a military invasion, an amphibious assault leading to a military takeover. And I focused on that because it is sort of the most dangerous course of action from the PLA, and therefore it makes sense for us to plan against it.

We need to have a military that's capable of denying such an invasion. But in my most recent trips to Taiwan, I've left thinking that we need to be paying more attention to the blockade scenario. As well as the kind of hybrid scenario, which is they seized an outlying island like Kinman.

And that could be part of a blockade, by the way, and what that would mean. And one thing that I'm struck by is that even as we have a. We sort of have a theory in place or a war plan that's on the shelf that we could reach for if they pursued the military scenario.

I don't think a similar plan exists for the blockade scenario. There's also little thinking that's been done about the sort of economic and financial escalation. In a way, there has been thinking on the conventional and nuclear escalation. And therefore, I think, even as we maintain strategic ambiguity on the nature of our military response, though the military knows sort of what it would be.

We should have clarity on the economic punishment we would impose if they pursued a blockade or some sort of hybrid strategy. That being said, I think there's little empirical support for the idea that economic punishment alone could deter a totalitarian power like the CCP. Economic sanctions can help a deterrent strategy, but they can't be the foundation of it.

And so everything must be built on the foundation of american hard power. Which is why, to go back to where I started, we need to be thinking most rigorously about the military invasion scenario, because in all the war games I've played, that would also likely involve the american homeland.

We may not be hit with a kinetic weapon, but we could be hit. Our critical infrastructure could be hit with a cyber weapon. And you just have to assume that Las Vegas rules would not apply, that what happens in Taiwan would not stay in Taiwan.

>> Andrew Roberts: And how quickly does the US get involved, literally, from the first minute of a blockade, say, even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with America, it obviously does?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Yeah, I think it all depends on whether. I mean, in a blockade scenario, I think there would be lag time, we would debate it. And I worry quite seriously about whether this president or a subsequent president would interpret the blockade accurately as an act of war and then respond forcefully enough.

And even if Americans started to feel the economic pain from a blockade, I worry about the signal they would send to american politicians. And it appears to me we're kind of in one of these sort of isolationist turns that we go through periodically in american history. And I worry that the signal politicians would be getting is not worth it.

What do we care? I would vehemently disagree with that, not only for the economic importance of Taiwan and the fact that if China were able to take over Taiwan and its semiconductor manufacturing capability in particular, it could hold the rest of the world economically hostage. Also for the military reasons I laid out before in terms of our ability to fulfill treaty commitments.

But finally, though we've had this sort of bruising debate about what is the nature? What role should democracy promotion play in American foreign policy. And actually think we should be somewhat skeptical about it being a core component of American grand strategy. There's something fundamentally different in my mind with defending an existing and flourishing democracy from the threat of authoritarian aggression.

And even though Taiwan is not a treaty ally and we maintain ambiguity about whether we would defend them. In my opinion, if we don't stand for that, I'm not sure what we stand for. And I think there would be just incredibly corrosive, if not debilitating impact on the rest of our credibility globally if we didn't come to Taiwan's defense quickly.

That's the other logistical point here, right? I mean, it's pretty far away, there's a lot of water.

>> Andrew Roberts: Exactly, the other point I was gonna make is that there are two types of blockade, aren't there? There's the naval blockade, and then there's where planes are still allowed to come in.

So 80% of the semiconductor industry can carry on it. You basically carry on for as many months as it takes until Taiwan runs out of energy and then later food, or you have the full air and naval blockade, in which case all of this is sped up much, much faster.

You say you've wargamed these. How do these two types of blockade work out?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, I think in the first one, you outline the energy resources are what I'm most concerned about. And by some analysis, Taiwan would only have the ability to last for three weeks or three to six weeks.

And in part, they've had a version of our own counterproductive energy debate here in America, where they've moved away from nuclear energy, and as a result, their reserves are very brittle. And I really worry about our ability to resupply them or allow for some creative resupply in the event of the first scenario you lay out.

That's something that the current Vice President and President elect said when I was there really haunts me to this day. Which is that as we attempt to turn Taiwan into a porcupine. Which is the euphemism for arming them and allowing them to pursue asymmetric defense and giving them harpoon missiles and all this stuff.

One cannot swallow a porcupine, that is true, but one could easily starve it. And I think that could play out over the course of weeks and months, and we wouldn't have a forceful response on the latter scenario. An all out blockade in multiple domains. Navy leadership has said they're pretty confident about their ability to counter a blockade or disrupt the blockade in that scenario.

I'm not as confident, in part because our Navy continues to shrink. And our responsibilities in other theaters, Europe and the Middle East, continue to grow more demanding. And on the current trajectory, our Navy's about to go from 290-ish to about 279 at the worst possible point in 2027.

And so, therefore, our capability to disrupt a CCP blockade is going down. And in a theater like that, where it's a lot of water, you need a bigger navy and a bigger air force, those are our two priority forces. And these things don't seem to be getting bigger.

And we're having a big, brutal debate about defense spending right now, and I don't think we're investing enough to arm ourselves before it's too late.

>> Andrew Roberts: And also, if you're making a porcupine, the porcupine's got to sort of come towards you. Why hasn't Taiwan got full scale military conscription?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: This is a great question. I will give them some credit. Under President Tsai's leadership, they've moved from a four month conscription to a year long conscription. And they're trying to incorporate very realistic training, learn lessons from the Israelis in particular in terms of having the mindset that every citizen needs to have in order to be on a war footing.

I've kind of come away from this with an unsatisfying answer, which is, I think a lot of it is just cultural at this point. It's almost like, as a product of Taiwan's success democratically, economically. I wonder if there isn't some complacency militarily that flows from that, and there's just not the same sense of vigilance as a result.

Maybe that's unfair to our friends in Taiwan, but if you look at Ukraine, for example, I think part of the reason that they were so successful early on in repelling the russian invasion is because this wasn't their first rodeo, right? I mean, they had been invaded in 2014, and it was that sort of minor incursion, to borrow a phrase from President Biden.

That almost inoculated their body politic from the threat, and allowed them to be more vigilant. I'm sure you could go back and you, as a historian could go back decades before to explain sort of the resilience of the Ukrainians. Whereas you have to go back many more generations on Taiwan until you get to KMT, military conflict with the CCP.

I mean, I guess you could say the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis was in the 90s, but that was a different sort of thing. And then you'd have to go back to the 50s for crisis 2 and crisis 1.

>> Andrew Roberts: Moving on to universities, we've had a scandal in Britain about University College London, several of their professors there being dangerously close to China in that they have, first of all, huge numbers of Chinese students.

But also in really sensitive areas of defense capability, they seem to be essentially giving China, or at least teaching their Chinese students, things about very sensitive defense capabilities that might well be extremely dangerous for the west in later years. Are you worried about this aspect of Western universities just getting far too close to the CCB's military structure?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Yes, I mean, we've had any number of incidents here domestically in America that prove we should be concerned about it. In the Trump administration, they tried to impose a PLA affiliated researcher ban, because the universities just don't have the requisite levels of research security. And the universities will say, and they have a point, well, we're university, right?

We're not the FBI. We need the government to help us, right? And part of the genius of what China does to us from an espionage perspective is there is the MSS, which is the KGB equivalent. And yet it hasn't sort of penetrated the minds of your average American in the way the KGB did, in part because our entertainment industry refuses to make movies about it.

And there's not all the spy novels and things like that. But there's also the United Front Work department, which is a much more subtle combination of traditional espionage, economic coercion, and also gets to the third thing, which corrupts American universities, which is that they take a lot of money, foreign donations, from China.

And often these donations are masked by a innocuous-sounding nonprofit that then has ties to the United Front Work Department. And your individual Chinese student tends to be very lucrative for a university relative to other populations. So I think greed explains a lot of this, as well as maybe the fairest thing you could say to American universities that you're just not equipped to really suss out, okay, who's actually affiliated with the PLA, who's a well-meaning Chinese researcher?

I do think we need to have some sort of ban on PLA-affiliated researchers. I think we need to be more forward leaning in terms of the expertise the government provides to universities, as well as demanding more from them in terms of their own research security. A final thing that just worries me in light of all the antisemitism we've seen on American campuses is, it seems to me, my daughters are three in one, so we have to figure this out in the next ten years before I have to think about sending them to university.

It's like we are paying these universities to propagandize our own children against America and the west in a way that is very beneficial for China. I'm not saying the CCP is behind that, but nonetheless, it seems to be happening. And we're just not sending these kids equipped into the world with the right skillset and just a baseline level of patriotism that we need them to have.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Couldn't agree more. It's very true in Britain as well. And naturally, your mention of young people brings us onto TikTok. You have brilliantly described TikTok as digital fentanyl. But we see with regard to the Chinese and indeed Russian-owned, sometimes, social media outlets, a genuine danger being posed.

And we're seeing it now, aren't we, in the Gaza situation, where TikTok has no fewer than 11 times more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli memes that go out. What can be done about that?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, the bill that we're likely to vote on this week would force a divestiture. And really, the core concern with TikTok is not the dumb dance videos or just the addictive nature of the app.

It seems unusually addictive. But you could lobby the same criticism against Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, etc. The basic problem is the ownership structure. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is a Chinese company. ByteDance is proven repeatedly that it is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. So beyond the app's ability to track your location, steal your data, understand your browsing history, spy on journalists, the real threat is how it could be used as an instrument of propaganda.

And this threat becomes particularly acute because most young Americans use TikTok as their source of news. So we have to ask ourselves this question, whether we want a hostile foreign adversary to control the dominant news platform in America. I think this would be a bad idea. You could probably come up with what the cold war equivalent of this would have been.

Therefore, the prudent approach in my mind going forward is to separate TikTok from ByteDance for, say, sale, and then TikTok can continue as long as the company has full control of its own algorithm and it's not owned by a hostile foreign adversary. And that is what we're trying to achieve with this bill.

I have to say that the term digital fentanyl is not one I created, it's one I stole from FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, though the fact that I'm credited with it gives me some joy. And one of the few positives of being in politics is you're sort of allowed to plagiarize with impunity and you don't get punished for it.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: We've got an amendment coming up in the House of Lords which is going to, hopefully, if it passes, I'm certainly voting for it, going to ban foreign governments from owning major British newspapers and magazines. This is because the UAE wants to buy the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator Magazine.

And a lot of us in parliament don't think that that's a good idea. Have you got anything along those lines in America?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, we have precedent for preventing foreign adversary ownership of traditional media, which makes a lot of sense. Furthermore, we have precedent in the antitrust context for breaking up ownership or changing ownership structure without endangering freedom of speech, right?

If freedom of speech were implicated in a case like this, then by that logic, the breakup of Bell in the 80s would have been one of the worst things to happen to the First Amendment in history. And yet precisely zero First Amendment cases were brought as a consequence of changing those ownership.

So I think as long as we retain a narrow focus on foreign control of our media, I think this is something that's not only sensible for our body politic, but also defensible in court. And previous efforts to do this were too broadly drawn and therefore did not survive legal and practical challenges.

So we're really trying to thread that needle. I'm very heartened to hear that the House of Lords will be voting on that. And I certainly see parallels to the effort we're taking in America on TikTok.

>> Andrew Roberts: And as I mentioned earlier, TikTok is wildly pro-Palestinian. Where are you on the idea of a Gaza ceasefire?

It seems that if the IDF does not go into Rafah and essentially take out those last six or so battalions there, wouldn't that just be a recipe for a reinvigorated Hamas trying to do the same thing as they did on 7th October sometime down the line?

>> Mike Gallagher: I agree with that, by the way, your House of Lords comments makes me realize I should have been calling you Lord Roberts from the start of this, my apologies.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Please call me Andrew, Mike.

>> Mike Gallagher: Your lordship. I should have bowed at the beginning with respect you've earned. Yeah, to me, the first and most important task is to destroy Hamas, render it incapable of threatening Israel in the future, and then we can talk about a ceasefire and this and that.

But until you've accomplished the military objective, I'm not sure you're going to forge a durable political resolution to the situation afterwards. And I can't help but think these efforts to foist a ceasefire onto Israel despite Israel being asked to do things that I'm not sure any military and modern history has been asked to do in terms of minimizing casualties.

Even our own military in Iraq and Afghanistan will not only undermine the military objective, but are themselves a function of progressive politics here domestically. And I think a premature ceasefire will help Hamas, it will hurt Israel and achieving that objective of destroying Hamas has to be our North Star for the time being.

And constructing this humanitarian port, as the president is ordering the United States military to do, makes little sense to me. And I have yet to see an explanation for how this is gonna improve the situation other than trying to improve President Biden's situation with this progressive base of voters.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, will it help him, even with those voters, if Hamas start to attack Americans who are building the bridgehead? I mean, it's perfectly possible that that could happen, isn't it?

>> Mike Gallagher: It's a huge risk, but I'm not even sure that that would help with those voters, which is why the president should abandon this idea of, that he needs to play to his base to get reelected.

I think he missed a huge opportunity in the State of the Union last week to have a more centrist message. And I think your average American is not, like it gets what's going on here, which is that we have a genocidal death cult in the form of Hamas trying to kill as many Jews as possible.

And there can be no moral equivalence between these two entities, and that the region is safer, and indeed was safer, the more we fostered a close relationship with Israel, our foremost ally in the region. As well as then built on the foundation of the Abraham accords to forge a closer relationship between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states, foremost among them Saudi Arabia.

This was really the source of the chaos during the Obama administration in particular was sort of Obama's pursuit of a new equilibrium in the Middle east, built on this idea that we were going to balance our traditional allies against Iran. And thereby achieve a better equilibrium, as opposed to building off our traditional alliance structure as a way to roll back Iranian influence in the region.

The pursued equilibrium produced disequilibrium and death, along with the pullout, precipitous pullout from Iraq. And now we're seeing sort of a zombie form of Obamaism in the Middle east. And there are those in the democratic party that fundamentally think our traditional allies, particularly Israel, are the source of the problem.

And are sort of the underlying cause of resentment that fuel terrorism and chaos in the region.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you in 2020 supported the killing of Kwazem Soleimani, and I think, were proved absolutely right on that. But overall, what do you think about the overall threat from Iran and by which I mean on the bigger scale even than Gaza?

I want you to ruminate, if possible, about the Hezbollah threat, the Houthis, Iranian backed militias in Syria and so on, what can be done about them?

>> Mike Gallagher: A slightly roundabout answer to your question, I'm now reflecting on my career now that I'm near the end of it in Congress.

And I find myself thinking that, I started off trying very hard to be, like, a sophisticated foreign policy national security analyst. And really, I was an aspiring Arabist wannabe, Lawrence of Arabia when I studied Arabic in the Middle east, and all this and everything is endless nuance and blah, blah, blah, blah.

I think the more sophisticated I've gotten, the less sophisticated I've gotten, which is that I've arrived at this place where whether it's Iran or China or Russia, you should just take them seriously on their own terms and try to avoid mirror imaging at all costs. And if the Iranian regime repeatedly says they wanna wipe Israel off the map, we should probably take that pretty seriously.

Particularly as they continue to funnel their resources and sanctions relief into their terrorist operation, whether it's Hezbollah, which, by the way, Hezbollah's arsenals of precision fires dwarfs anything Hamas has. And it's similarly situated under civilian populations, which means they built all these human shields. And if Israel gets decisively engaged on its northern front with Hezbollah, they're gonna have to somehow dismantle what is kind of the largest military base in the world, in southern Lebanon and parts of Syria.

So I think, therefore, our regional strategy has to be built on what I alluded to before, which is a rollback strategy. We have to not only reimpose maximum pressure economically against Iran by having a sanctioned strategy that works. But also, be willing to take Hezbollahis and IRG Quds, force commandos and Houthi rebels off the battlefield wherever they threaten Americans and our allies.

And what weve lacked recently is a credible military deterrent in order to give life to our diplomacy and our economic strategy. And the last time we had it is after what you alluded to before, which is when we killed Qassem Soleimani, there was all this fear of a response by Iran.

And sure, they lobbed some missiles at our positions in Iraq, they didn't kill anyone, they actually accidentally, tragically took out one of their own aircraft. But other than that, deterrence largely held because the Iranian regime feared us and they feared the president's next response. And restoring that fear and restoring that credible military deterrent is the foundation, has to be the foundation of our entire regional strategy, or Iran will continue to threaten Israel's very existence.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Do you worry that only the British have helped you in these airstrikes against the Houthis, the French, the Germans, no one else has stepped up to the plate apart from us, what does that tell you?

>> Mike Gallagher: Yeah, I think I can interpret it in a couple different ways, well, yes, I'm very worried about it, right?

Because I would, to paraphrase a person, to paraphrase a person well, Churchill, the only thing harder than fighting with allies is fighting without them, right? I mean, we're stronger when we have a, when we lead a coalition, whether I understand it, I don't know, is a separate question.

I mean, there could be like a version of the same progressive politics infecting the various european countries. Or I wonder if the real wedge issue, that's a growing wedge issue between us and Europe is China, right? And certainly, when it comes to Germany, this has been a huge problem for our bilateral relationship, they just have a fundamentally different view of China.

Certainly, Macron's recent trip to China, which I thought was embarrassing, suggests that there's a huge rift between us and France on China. And where it affects the Middle east is, I think the CCP has obviously, I think, is supportive of the efforts by Iran and its proxies to disrupt the American alliance system in the region and cause as much chaos and pain for- For us as possible, in part to distract from their regional and global ambitions.

And I worry, I guess, at a broader level about the increasing fissures between us and our allies when it comes to China, cuz that's gonna make doing anything very difficult. I remember being at the Munich security conference a few years ago and then Vice President Pence said something to the effect of, we can ensure the defense of the West if our allies are dependent on the East.

And he may have meant it as a sort of shot across Germany's bow with respect to Nord Stream 2, but you also could have interpreted it as a shot across their bow with respect to China. It also fell flat in the room, cuz our European allies didn't wanna hear about it at all.

So I worry about that broader phenomenon.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you're seeing the same thing, aren't you, a bit with regard to Macron, and Schultz, and others in Ukraine. You were in favor of the F16 jets being sent to Ukraine. But now, we've got a stalled bill in Congress, as you say, you're not standing again, so you can speak very freely about this.

Do you think it's going to pass?

>> Mike Gallagher: I like to think I've spoke freely even when I was standing, but-

>> Andrew Roberts: Sorry, yes, absolutely, even more freely.

>> Mike Gallagher: That's right, that's right. I did think I would be like, there would be this big relief for liberation. It's just my life's been more busy since I announced.

But I think we'll eventually pass something. But I'm very worried that the closer we get to the 2024 election, it's gonna make doing anything very difficult. And I'm in favor of continued lethal support to Ukraine. Obviously, no one is giving Ukraine a blank check. Nobody gets a blank check.

It's got to have oversight, it's got to have inspector generals, etc., etc., all the usual caveats. In large part not only because I think defending Ukraine's territorial integrity from Russian aggression is important. Degrading the Russian military is in our interest and revitalizing NATO and hardening NATO is in our interest, but also because I think we have a huge opportunity to completely rebuild and restore the arsenal of deterrence in America.

Weapon systems that are relevant in Ukraine are also relevant in the Middle East and in the Indo-Pacific. And for too long, we've put these long range precision fires and critical munitions on minimum sustaining rates of production. And now, the modern battlefield in Ukraine has revealed that we need to move to maximum production rates, fix our foreign military sales process.

And that's probably the best thing we can do, not only to help the Ukrainians in the short-term, but to enhance near term deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, near term, cross strait deterrence with respect to Taiwan. The final thing I'd say is that I do believe that the outcome in Ukraine is at least correlated with deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.

And particularly since Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have a no limits partnership, I think if we fail to help the Ukrainians, it would send a signal of weakness to Xi Jinping and the Chinese communist party that might convince them they have an ability to take Taiwan and get away with it.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: So there's a chance this bill's not gonna pass and the borrowed Ukrainians are gonna be 60 billion or so short.

>> Mike Gallagher: Yeah, that would be a bad outcome. One thing I propose as a compromise is if the money in the bill for the Indo-Pacific is actually insufficient, right?

It's about $5 billion spread across the whole region. So could you rebalance it in a way that gets Ukraine what it needs, at least for the next six months, while also giving more money to our priority theater and our more stressing national security challenge, which is preventing a PLA invasion of Taiwan?

The other idea which I've proposed is that the Pentagon, usually, at least for the last decade, fails to spend about $10 billion. So this is money we give them, it's appropriated, but it goes unspent. And what happens when it goes unspent is it goes back to the treasury.

It sits in abeyance. It's frozen for five years, and then it evaporates. So by some estimates, we've lost $125 billion of purchasing power in the Pentagon. So if you just had gave the Pentagon the authority to re-program that money and apply it to critical munitions that are relevant in Ukraine, and Taiwan, and in the Middle East, and you give them certainty over the course of the next five years that they could do that.

That would allow for the revitalization of our munitions industrial base that I'm talking about. So there's all sorts of creative ways forward. We just can't let the politics of the moment corrupt like a sober assessment of the geopolitics and our long-term interests.

>> Andrew Roberts: And then looking at G7, would you be in favor of those 300 billion of frozen Russian assets sitting at the moment in Brussels, in Euroclear to be given to the Ukrainians?

First of all, obviously, morally, there's no question that that's the right thing to do, especially in the aftermath of the death of Alexei Navalny. But also the arguments against it have been comprehensively demolished by Rob Zoellick, the former president of the World Bank in an article recently in the FT.

And it would mean that were President Trump to be elected in November, you've essentially got four or five years of cash there that the Ukrainians could have. What is stopping the Biden administration from pushing that through, in your view?

>> Mike Gallagher: All I've heard is there are concerns about the legal precedent it sets.

I don't understand those concerns. I admittedly not a lawyer. I mean, I think that's a feature, not a bug of my existence. But that is the only argument I've heard. I've tried to understand it, I don't. But certainly from a moral perspective, as you reference from just a geopolitical perspective, from a financial perspective, it makes so much sense that we can't let the concerns.

I don't wanna dismiss the concerns such as they exist or if there actually is a legitimate argument, but I've tried and failed to understand the presidential argument.

>> Andrew Roberts: Also, now you're not standing again. You've done some thinking, haven't you, about how Congress itself could be improved, about how much time they spend, congressmen spend in the House and so on, as opposed to back in their constituencies?

Could you just say a little bit more about that? I'd also be interested to know what you're gonna do next.

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, I've always been fascinated by congressional reform, though my primary focus is national security. My hobby is studying the institution and historically why it's sort of evolved.

And I think the story of the modern Congress is that in the 70s, you had all these Watergate Babies get elected, because there's incidences of corruption among committee chairman. There was, of course, the problems with the Nixon administration. So the Watergate Babies come in and they try and do a good thing, which they try and clean up Congress.

They try and clean up the committees and get these corrupt committee chairs out of the way. They pass the National Emergency Act, they pass the Budget Impoundment and Control Act, the modern steering committee emerges. All of this is like, well, the war powers resolution claw back the authority of the executive branch.

All of it backfires. In some cases immediately, in some cases slowly, and it results in a modern Congress which has power tightly concentrated at the top of the institution, in the speaker's office and in the steering committee. And, by the way, the broader power dynamics are that Congress is surrendering its constitutional power to the executive branch, which is crazy to think.

If you reanimated James Madison, he would think that's impossible. We were concerned about the opposite. We thought that Congress was gonna suck everything into its impetuous vortex to steal a frame or phrase. So you have an increasingly powerless institution, where power remains is concentrated at the top. All of this makes your average member more likely to channel their ambition into social media and tv bomb throwing as opposed to committee work.

So my whole theory is that you need to devolve power back down to the committees. You do that by changing the overall committee structures, combining the authorizing committees and the appropriations committees, thereby fixing our broken budgeting process. But you can also do things like simply changing the congressional calendar.

Cuz right now we fly in on a Monday, we fly out on a Thursday, we fly back all the time. Nobody gets to know each other, there's no personal relationships. Simply going two weeks on, two weeks off, working a five day week, would improve our productivity. And then I have some crazier ideas on how to reduce the dominance of fundraising for reelection.

Because it is true that members tend to spend most of their time worrying about getting reelected as opposed to doing the job they're currently doing. And that's a huge problem for our ability to function.

>> Andrew Roberts: You're ridiculously, ludicrously young at the age of 40. What are you going to do next with your post political life, or at least your post congressional life?

 

>> Mike Gallagher: I had a senator text me something nice, hey, we're sorry to lose you, blah, blah, blah. And I just responded, yeah, it's time for me to focus on my music career. And he didn't respond, so I'm laughing every day thinking he thought I was serious, and I just let it ride.

So I need to actually come out with a rap album or something like that. You know, for me, I've always wanted to have the type of career where I would primarily be in the private sector and then do stints of service in the national security world. I hope I can do that.

And so I'm trying to figure out the balance, but I'd love to continue to write. I do a lot of writing. I'm a failed academic at heart. I'm sort of a political scientist, like a historian at heart who is trapped in a political science department. And so in any scenario, I'd love to be able to have a platform where I could write about national security.

And what I'm most attracted to is sort of historically informed analyses of contemporary national security challenges. So finding a way to balance the private sector experience while still scratching my intellectual itches is what I'm trying to figure out right now.

>> Andrew Roberts: Which brings us on very nicely to my next question, which is about which history book or biography you're reading at the moment.

 

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, I taught a course on the korean war last summer with a friend of mine, Aaron McClain. So I remain haunted by all these histories of the Korean war, foremost among them the tr fernbacks, this kind of war. Which probably from a historians perspective, is not good history, but it's a weird combination of fun history and essays, and it makes it just so interesting.

And the Korean war is endlessly fascinating to me. That being said, I'm preparing to teach another course this summer in reading Nicholas Spykman's work. Foremost among them America's strategy and world politics, which isn't a pure history. I mean, it's analysis, but Spykman is interesting. I will confess something that has been sitting on my desk for a year now and I haven't had the courage to pick it up because it just seems so daunting is the gathering storm by Churchill.

So you need to tell me whether I need to invest the time in reading this.

>> Andrew Roberts: Of course you do, it's one of the greatest books. It tells you absolutely everything you need to know about appeasement. Okay, the first bit about appeasement. Read that in particular, his sense of growing frustration and irritation and sort of fury as he sets out precisely what the world needs to do in order to save itself from this horrific conflagration which he almost alone sees and no one listens to him.

And in fact, everybody denigrates him and ridicules him, puts him down, shouts him down. That's the moment where I think that everybody politician, or as you are going to be ex-politician, but budding political theorist and scientist have got to read. So can you take that from the bottom of your pal, please?

If I can stick it at the top. Right, last question, which I again ask all my guests. What's your favourite what if, your counterfactual, which fascinates you?

>> Mike Gallagher: Well, to take it back to the Korean war, and this comes out in John Pomfret's great book, the beautiful country in the military kingdom.

Which is a great primer to anyone who wants to, as I do, learn more about China and the US. What if we had not killed Mao's son inadvertently? I mean, he's a lawful combatant on the Korean battlefield. Would the CCP have evolved into some sort of hereditary communist dictatorship?

And I just think that's an interesting bit of counterfactual history and what that would have meant for the relationship. And it gets particularly interesting because the heist cursing Chinese movie of all time right now is a colorful retelling of the Battle of chosen Reservoir. It's called the Battle at Lake Changin, and the sort of Mao and his son dynamic play a big role in that movie.

If you have three and a half hours to burn and you want to get insight into CCP propaganda, I would recommend watching the movie.

>> Andrew Roberts: Mike Gallagher, thank you very much indeed for coming on Secrets of Statecraft. Best of luck with the next stage of your career. We've had four national security advisors on the show, and I'm hoping that one day, maybe you'll be the fifth.

Thank you again.

>> Mike Gallagher: That will be a sign that America has truly fallen, if I'm the only person available. Thank you, sir.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you to Congressman Mike Gallagher. On the next episode of Secrets of Statecraft my guest will be Lord Conrad Black. Former media mogul and biographer of Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt.

 

>> Narrator: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.