Matt Pottinger Sounds The Alarm In Asia

>> Andrew Roberts: Matt, you're a former Marine Corps officer. You've spent seven years as a reporter in China. You've got a BA in China studies. You're fluent in Mandarin. You were senior director of Asia at the National Security Council in 2017, and then deputy national security advisor from September 2019 to January 2021.

You're currently chairman of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a distinguished fellow at Hoover. So who better to ask for an overview, really, of the present state of US-China relations today?

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, well, look, I think that starting in 2017 and continuing to this day, there's been a recognition on the part of the White House that the assumptions that we held for many, many years failed to play out.

Those assumptions included the idea that really that came into fashion at the end of the Cold War, that it was inevitable that China would become a more liberal system. And in fairness, over the course of the 90s, their economy did make important steps towards liberalization. But we also thought that that would lead to popular demands for democracy, that the economics would feed into a political calculus, and that over time, it would simply become a friendlier and more liberal system.

And that has not played out, to put it mildly. And in fact, it predates Xi Jinping, this sort of authoritarian turn. He's really accelerated the clock and taken it from authoritarian to totalitarian. But ironically, things really started to make a U turn, or at least stall out when China came into the World Trade Organization.

That was a major strategic miscalculation by the United States and by the west generally. We thought that that would be the starting gun for an explosion of more liberalization. And once China came in in 2001, it stopped liberalizing because it had already achieved access to the US and all the world markets.

It actually didn't follow through on a lot of what it promised. But its economy grew tenfold in just the space of less than a couple of decades. Quite amazing, actually. And that has not weakened the party's monopoly on power. It has strengthened it.

>> Andrew Roberts: Why, what went wrong with our analysis?

Where were we so wrong to think that the richer a country gets, the more liberal and democratic it gets?

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, I mean, in fairness to ourselves, because I was among those, as I was a young reporter working for the Reuters News Agency in the late 90s in China, I was very hopeful that China was gonna continue.

It was an exciting time in China, right? It really was beginning to liberalize. You saw people who were able to move into city centers for the first time. They were able to travel abroad, they were able to work for foreign enterprises and start their own businesses. It was a very exciting and heady time.

I think we all got a bit carried away way, and a bit hubristic in believing that, well, we've got a formula here. It's inevitable. If the Soviet Union, the mighty Soviet Union, couldn't keep it together and couldn't compete with the model and the values and the economy of the American free superpower.

Then China was ultimately gonna have to follow a similar path. And what was going on at the same time was the Chinese Communist Party was quietly, very, very carefully studying the mistakes that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and trying to avoid that by allowing a certain amount of economic dynamism.

But the remarkable thing about Xi Jinping is that when he came in, he commissioned a couple of documentary films that were made and that had to be viewed by the military and party members. And the conclusion that he drew was that the Soviet Union didn't collapse because it failed to liberalize, or that it didn't liberalize fast enough, but that it went too far with things like glasnost and perestroika.

The sort of Gorbachev comes off as the villain in the narrative that Xi Jinping tells, including in his late 2012 early speech when he became leader. When he told the parable of the collapse of the Soviet Union, he cast Gorbachev as the villain. His view was, and he stated this in that address, was, we cannot turn our backs on the legacy of Lenin and Stalin.

That is what led to the historic nihilism that ultimately unraveled the great Soviet Communist Party and then the Soviet Union with it. So he's going back in time to try to forestall the collapse. And by the way, that suggests that there may be something to the idea that eventually, if China does continue liberalizing its economy, it may be forced into a more pluralistic system.

But Xi Jinping is quite determined not to take that road.

>> Andrew Roberts: Do you think China could be the great exception to the rule whereby the richer someone gets, the more political influence he wants and demands?

>> Matt Pottinger: It is so far, I think, that if the United States and the west don't lose their nerve and don't lose our democracy and maintain a certain amount of economic dynamism, I think that we will be this constant pull that becomes a reference point for many Chinese people who would like to see a more pluralistic system there.

So I think that history has yet to be written. If we defeat ourselves and turn our backs on our own great legacies and the United States is the oldest democratic republic, then China's model will become sort of the main game for this planet.

>> Andrew Roberts: Now, you've said that Chinese foreign policy is focused on trying to expel the US from East Asia.

Where should the wests red lines be in East Asia?

>> Matt Pottinger: It's funny, I was actually gonna ask you. Red lines is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. And that term red lines, I think it goes back to early 20th century, a British phrase. It might have been France and the UK dividing up the Middle East that that phrase red line comes from.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: That was done with red pencils, was it? I didn't know that.

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, exactly.

>> Andrew Roberts: Perfectly possible. We've had lines in the sand, haven't we? You're in Texas in the 1830s. Didn't Sam Houston or somebody put a line in the sand and so on?

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, that's right.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: So there have been lines around. But the drawback with red lines is sometimes you don't sort of back them up. The classic example, obviously, being President Obama in Syria. As soon as you say the word red lines, you have to stand by this. You've got to. So what is the story with regard to East Asian red lines, places where the US just simply can't allow China to expel you all the way.

 

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, so, during my time serving as an advisor to a president and as deputy national security adviser, I thought that we shouldn't be in the business of drawing too many red lines or forcing the president to draw too many red lines unless we were quite confident that we would back them.

But what I would say is we're now in a situation where it feels as though the United States has no red lines right now. I'm quite alarmed by what we've allowed to happen in Ukraine, what's happening in the Middle East right now. We have failed to even call out the main actors that are causing us so much grief.

I'll give you a hint, it's not the Houthis, okay? Last I checked, the Houthis don't actually produce anti-ship ballistic missiles using Chinese and Iranian technology, so. But they sure have a lot of them. Isn't that interesting? So we are shying away from. We're going too far in shying away from drawing and enforcing red lines right now, and that's in several parts of the world.

In Asia I think that, interestingly, there's an exception with the Biden administration in that President Biden has gone farther than his predecessors in drawing. He may not have used the term red line, but he's very clearly drawn one when he said four times on the record that he would send us troops to defend Taiwan in the event that China attacks.

That is a red line. And I think he did it quite deliberately, quite consciously, in order to sow some doubt in the mind of Xi Jinpin. Particularly after Vladimir Putin showed how unimpressed he was with our resolve when he steamrolled into Ukraine in February of 2022. So that is one that has now been drawn.

That red line must be defended both because the president has drawn it, but also because it would be wise to defend it. And I'm hopeful that other presidential candidates, whether it's President Trump running again, or Nikki Haley or Dean Phillips or Bobby Kennedy Junior. No presidential candidate should back away from the line that has now been drawn by President Biden on Taiwan.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And what would be the effect of a war on the global economy, a war in which China invaded Taiwan or at least blockaded Taiwan? What would start to happen? Talk us through the sort of war plan of what would happen in what kind of timeframes.

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, so, the remarkable thing about that scenario, which would be really a catastrophe.

Is that it doesn't matter if you are someone who really cares about democracy in the region or if you are just using sort of the cold math of Realpolitik. This catastrophe has something for everyone. And the catastrophe would start with a major disruption of global trade, including the trade in advanced semiconductors.

More than 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors come from Taiwan. Taiwan is gonna have a hell of a time manufacturing those semiconductors in the event of a blockade. Because even though semiconductors travel by airplane. So Taiwan could certainly fly those things off to Japan and elsewhere. The electricity required to make them is immense.

I don't know what the latest figure is, but it's somewhere in the order of ten plus percent of Taiwan's electricity goes into semiconductor manufacturing. Might be closer to 14%. Taiwan's got a lot of great resources. It's got some of the smartest people in the world, just wonderful people, cosmopolitan people with an affinity for democracy and capitalism.

What they don't have is energy, okay. If China commits to a blockade, Taiwan's gonna have to ration electricity pretty quickly, and we will feel the effects of that in the form of a global financial crisis type set of reverberations. It'll feel like the COVID pandemic and the global financial crisis combined.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Won't this be bad for China, though? China's trades and China's income?

>> Matt Pottinger: Certainly, and probably China will be the first one to be deprived of high end semiconductors. Cuz Taiwan's not gonna be doing China any favors in the event of a blockade or an attempted invasion. Those chips to the extent that they can flow, they're gonna flow to other nations.

But China would undoubtedly feel massive economic effects. But the way that marxist Leninists think is always in relative terms, it's always about relative power. I'll give you an example. In 2021, after we'd had a year or more of the COVID pandemic, a senior Chinese official commented that the effects of the COVID pandemic were similar to the effects of World War II.

But he cast China as the winner much the same way that the United States was the ultimate winner in World War II. Even though we lost a half a million troops, even though we saw a terrible global crisis and huge suffering. The United States sort of emerged, in relative terms, as a superpower.

In the aftermath of that war, Chinese Communist Party officials have talked about COVID, this was before, of course, COVID really undermined their economy in subsequent years. But in 2021, you had Communist Party officials saying, on the record, this thing has worked out pretty well for us. COVID, it may have hurt our economy, but it hurt the other guys a hell of a lot more.

And that's gonna be the kind of thinking that's gonna be operative in a Taiwan scenario.

>> Andrew Roberts: Where do you think the scientific thought is at the moment about how COVID started?

>> Matt Pottinger: Well, look, it is very clear that the default explanation is that this was an accidental leak of a virus from a laboratory, almost certainly a virus that had been partially engineered through gain of function research.

If some of the documents that have come to light just in the last couple of weeks are incredibly meaningful. We've seen a number of people who've been very assiduously avoiding making a judgment about where this thing came from. Now saying this is as close to a smoking gun as we're gonna get to a accidental lab leak.

I think that's certainly the case. It's conceivable that some other information comes to light, but it seems extremely far fetched at this point. The documents that came to light recently are the confidential applications that were made to US government agencies to make a virus almost identical to the one that then emerged from the same city where they were going to be making these viruses.

And the array of if you look at the spike gene that they were applying for US grants, by the way, this money was not actually granted by the US, but it looks pretty clear that they were already working on this research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the help of American scientists.

The spike gene is something that has not appeared in nature. It is a very, very slim chance that those things would array naturally. And it's ridiculous, virtually preposterous, to think that those things would appear in nature right after someone had applied for a grant to make that unnatural spike gene to make a bat coronavirus infectious to humans.

By the way, the SARS coronavirus, the COVID coronavirus is not infectious to horseshoe bats, which some people have claimed would be the natural reservoir. They can't catch it only humans are highly susceptible to this thing, not bats. So I think we're at a point now where you're gonna have a lot of people who are gonna hold out on this idea that it was a natural emergence, a zoonotic spillover.

Many of those people are heavily conflicted because they were getting their livelihood from grants to do very risky research on these types of viruses. And so as people have said, it's very hard to get someone to see the truth in something that their paycheck depends on them not seeing.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Absolutely, let's go back to Taiwan for a moment. Should it have mercury conscription under the kind of threat that it seems to be living?

>> Matt Pottinger: Absolutely, I'll tell you, I visited Taiwan over the summer, and I brought with me a number of senior Israeli retired military officers, as well as a former national security advisor of Israel.

And we met with senior political leadership, but also senior military leadership in Taiwan. And it was a very fruitful discussion because I think the Taiwanese have heard a lot from the Americans over the years, but they don't talk to the Israelis all that often. And there's a lot of natural respect for the Israelis, given the similarities of their situation to Taiwan's.

In many ways, the Israelis are in a worse position because they have land borders with so many of their enemies, but Iran looming off in the background, feeding those enemies. So here you had a discussion, and one of the things that emerged very quickly was the necessity of the need for conscription, ideally for a smaller reserve force than Taiwan currently has, but a much better trained reserve force.

Taiwan has millions of people who are technically on call in the reserves, but many of them only train every other year for a little bit. Some of them haven't trained even that much. Israel's military is primarily a reserve military. They have a small active-duty IDF force, but they really train well.

You do two and a half plus years of conscription. You then belong to a unit for many years after that where you know the people, you know your neighbors, you know the people that you went through your boot camp with and did your initial conscription service with. I think that I've got, I've actually asked one of those Israeli officers, Kobe Maram, who is a former IDF colonel.

His sons are fighting in the current fight on the northern border against Hezbollah and also against the Hamas terrorists down south. I asked him to co-author a chapter in a book that Hoover Institution Press is gonna publish later this year.

>> Andrew Roberts: Please give us the title we're all in favor of plugging.

 

>> Matt Pottinger: Here you are.

>> Andrew Roberts: What's it called, Matt?

>> Matt Pottinger: It's called The Boiling Moat, urgent steps to defend Taiwan. And the Boiling Moat is a-

>> Andrew Roberts: Great title by the way, that's a fantastic title. Go on, tell us more.

>> Matt Pottinger: The title, I have to credit Kuai Tong, who's a Han dynasty first-century diplomat who advised Chinese generals that you don't want to attack cities that have erected metal ramparts and established boiling moats.

You wanna find other ways of either subduing or dodging direct conflicts with those countries. And the phrase he used was Jin cheng Tang chi, and Jin cheng Tang chi means metal ramparts and boiling moats. Taiwan, unlike Israel, Taiwan, unlike Ukraine, is blessed with this incredible geographic ally in the form of the Taiwan Strait.

And that is what could be turned into a boiling moat in the event that China attempts an invasion.

>> Andrew Roberts: What does it need that it hasn't got already? It must presumably have lots of mines and underwater drones and all of those kind of things.

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, they need to do more undersea, unmanned undersea work.

Taiwan's invested a lot of money and time, and effort into manned submarines. And I'm sympathetic with the effort because it's been hard for them to get that kind of support from other countries. But these submarines are not going to be nearly as effective as turning quickly to an unmanned program.

Certainly, anti-ship missiles, cruise missiles that can be launched from shore, not only from fast attack boats, that Taiwan has these fast, small, very, very dangerous boats, dangerous to China. But unlike Ukraine, we have to also be honest with ourselves that Taiwan is not going to be able to hold out on its own for terribly long.

We're going to need for the United States as well as for Japan and perhaps other allies. Australia comes to mind to intervene on Taiwan's behalf. But Taiwan has to be able to fight long enough that we can get a force assembled and apply that mass to the problem.

That we've discovered that there are things that we can remedy in our own arsenal in the United States that would be incredibly problematic for China in the event of an invasion, and-

>> Andrew Roberts: Give us a few.

>> Matt Pottinger: I'll give you one. One is something called the LRASM. I think it stands for Long Range Anti-Ship Missile.

This is a missile that traditionally is launched from other ships, but you can launch them from bombers. The United States Air Force, we've determined, is a decisive player in this conflict. But the Air Force is not equipping or training as if it knows that it is a decisive player in this conflict.

LRASM missiles are purchased in small quantities by the US Navy to be launched from surface ships. But the US Navy is gonna have a hard enough job. We're gonna have our attack submarines in the fight. Those are gonna be very dangerous for China, but we don't have enough of them with enough ammunition to give me confidence that that's going to settle the matter.

We're going to need our long-range bombers, the B-1, B bombers, B-2s, even B-52s, can be fitted to carry from the United States. These LRASM missiles, there's a cheaper version of it. LRASMs are expensive. There's something called a propulsion or propelled JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Munition. It's basically taking one of our traditional standard 500-pound laser-guided bombs.

But fitting it with a rocket that will allow it to fly a couple hundred miles or so and to target ships. And China is fearful of these types of weapons, but we're not procuring them. The United States Air Force is not procuring these weapons. And I think it's because they seem to think this is the US Navy's problem.

If this is the US Navy's problem, then we should be prepared to lose a hell of a lot of ships and sailors. I don't think that's smart maneuver warfare. We need to have our air force involved.

>> Andrew Roberts: And is the United States as a society, as a government, ready to lose that much over Taiwan?

Where could you see an American president essentially backing off and not wanting to?

>> Matt Pottinger: Well, look, the key question to ask is, what does it take to achieve deterrence? Because I'm confident that deterrence has worked. We know it's worked until now. I'm confident that it can be sustained.

I'm confident that it can be sustained using weapons platforms, bombers and ships and equipment that we already have in our arsenal, but which lack sufficient munitions. They lack the sufficient supply of torpedoes and anti-ship missiles and the like. And that is our vulnerability that we need to rapidly, we should declare a state of emergency in order to try to achieve a rapid scaling, together with allies, of our defense industrial base and try to pull off the equivalent of a Rosie the riveter moment here.

These things are much more complex to make, the supply chains involved in making modern laser-guided munitions and so forth. It's a much longer supply chain and timeline than what we saw with traditional dumb bombs during World War II. So let's get on that. Let's get ahead of this problem, because that is what's going to determine whether we deter or not.

The key thing to remember, Andrew, is that deterrence, this is a stupidly obvious statement I'm about to make, but we forget it frequently. Deterrence is a hell of a lot cheaper than war. It is a lot cheaper than war. And we were reluctant at various points in the Biden administration and the Obama administration, early, early in the Trump administration.

Although President Trump, to his credit, did provide lethal munitions to Ukraine, including, it's now a household term to say, Javelin anti-tank missiles, right? No one knew what a Javelin anti-tank missile was. Thank goodness we provided those to Ukraine during the Trump administration. These types of things are cheap, cheap, cheap investments compared to the cost of a war.

So the real question is not, is America willing to sacrifice in a war? It is, what are we willing to show that we're ready to sacrifice in order to prevent a war that would take us back to the worst periods of the 20th century, and you seem to feel that time is running out.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And the statistics definitely support you on this. The Chinese Navy a decade ago was one third of the tonnage. Now it's half the tonnage of the US Navy. And obviously it's got many more ships now. They're building aircraft carriers at a much larger rate than the US Navy as well.

And our Royal Navy, the British Navy, is a tiny, essentially a sort of organization just to protect our own shores. And it doesn't really do a great job of that either. Do you feel that there's a sense of time running out for the west?

>> Matt Pottinger: Well, the key lesson that we should keep in mind is the idea that we should achieve a new offset strategy.

Bob Work, who was a former marine and deputy secretary of defense, has written in the past about this idea of a third offset, and he's right about this. And there's good news in this concept. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union began to out produce us in a lot of their conventional manufacture of munitions, to the point that we became very concerned that we weren't gonna be able to stop a conventional invasion of western Europe.

So we ended up committing to what was our first offset strategy. Basically, it was a way of asymmetrically offsetting soviet advantages, military advantages, and we did that through nuclear weapons. We created a superior nuclear arsenal that really created all kinds of planning problems for the Soviets if they were to try to commit to a conventional assault on Europe.

And so the Soviets spent many, many, many years trying to catch up. There was the missile gap, and eventually they did catch up, at which point we pulled off our second offset, which sort of reversed the play on them. We, under, particularly the Reagan administration, we made significant investments in conventional capabilities that were so high tech and so fearsome.

Making use of better intelligence and targeting and communications and laser guided munitions and basically bringing the computer age to the military.

>> Andrew Roberts: And also 600 ship Navy that John Lehman built up for Ronald Reagan.

>> Matt Pottinger: Well, thank God for John Lehman. Thank God for John Lehman, we can't ignore that fact.

But the truth is that the Soviets in general were outmanufacturing the United States. But it was inferior equipment that was offset by smaller numbers of significantly, qualitatively better weaponry developed by the United States. It began in the 1970s, and it accelerated during the Reagan 80s. And so what we need right now is not to say that we are going to manufacture as many ships as China has.

By one measure, I saw, China has 200 times the shipyard capacity of the United States. It's a shocking statistic.

>> Andrew Roberts: Wow, wow.

>> Matt Pottinger: It's a US Navy statistic, by the way.

>> Andrew Roberts: Terrifying there.

>> Matt Pottinger: It was a slide that leaked in which the Navy confirmed that it's 200 times.

But look, the Chinese are studying Mahan, right? And they're studying some of the same people that Teddy Roosevelt was looking to 120 years ago. And what I would contend is that they might be making a mistake by doing that. If this were the 20th century, I'd say, yeah, China should build a 400 ship navy in the 21st century.

A 400 ship navy surface fleet, heavy navy looks like a hell of a lot of juicy targets for rather cheap munitions to take out. I don't think the answer is a 400, 500 ship navy at this point. It is new technologies that are qualitatively less expensive, but very, very deadly to this.

It's kind of a vanity project for China to build a 400 plus ship navy, I think. I'm not sure it's going to serve them as well as they think. It's not gonna serve them as well as the great White Fleet that served Teddy Roosevelt or John Lehman 600 ship Navy served the United States in the 20th century.

We still need to be improving our shipyard capacity dramatically. This is something that really bothers me. We have an inherent advantage in our undersea capabilities. We should keep driving those capabilities. But I don't think the answer is a 400 ship surface fleet.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell us about China's relations with its neighbors.

It seems that virtually nobody in that region likes China. Have any number of neighbours, India, Vietnam, Australia, Japan, the Aukus, and so on, who perfectly, understandably and reasonably, fear China. Is this an inevitable result of all that wolf warrior talk or is there something more profound going on?

 

>> Matt Pottinger: Look, China challenges the notion of sovereignty. Without any sense of irony Xi Jinping is parroting, maybe unconsciously, similar slogans that imperial Japan used in 1940 when it was pushing for its greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere. Xi Jinping has a speech that's referred to as the Asia for Asians speech.

His embrace is not a comfortable one and it undermines the idea of sovereignty. It ranks countries according to size and strengthen. China is at the top of the hierarchy that Beijing is promoting regionally and with the idea of a global play. And so because we're a friendly democracy, we get a lot of public criticism from friends and allies and partners around the world.

And China doesn't get as much in private. The conversations from Asian diplomats are quite telling, they're deeply concerned. Their concern about the United States is not that we're gonna overembrace them. Their fear is that the United States is going to abandon them. They're afraid of us going and they're afraid of China coming.

That's a very different kind of a dynamic. We really don't wanna see this field, because settling for some kind of a grand bargain, spheres of influence model is gonna really be the end of us. It's gonna spell the end of us eventually.

>> Andrew Roberts: And there are some areas which ought to be in your sphere of influence that are clearly negotiable at the moment.

Latin America, let's talk about that. Where Xi has been ten times, where China's invested 700 billion, the Cuba spy facilities, the Panama Canal choke points. Is the Monroe doctrine still fit for purpose?

>> Matt Pottinger: It is, and I give President Biden credit for some aspects of his policy. I think he did a poor job ahead of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

But has done an admirable job of really trying to shore up Ukraine and help the brave people defend their future and their country. Latin America is a dark spot on the Biden administration. I don't know why they dropped the ball. We had a pretty good thing going to the Trump administration.

President Trump was active in his personal diplomacy with latin american leaders. We had launched this thing called Americas Crece, which means the Americas grow. We had appointed the multinational bank for the region, an American for the first time, who was really helping a lot of the pro-free market, pro-democracy leaders in Latin America.

Sort of empowering them and helping them with development and funding to keep more problematic models like China's one belt, one Road thing at bay. Maduro was pretty scared of the United States, he was on his back heels. He was afraid that we might even come in there and give Venezuela back to the Venezuelan people.

Cuba certainly wasn't doing things like it's doing now, which is they're negotiating to create a military base for China right off the coast of Florida. Which is just, are you kidding me? I mean it's like-

>> Andrew Roberts: What would the Biden administration do if that agreement went through?

>> Matt Pottinger: I don't know.

They've not given me much confidence that they even care about this, because they tried to cover it up and then they tried to say, well, a lot of this started quietly when Trump was in office. Which I've asked around and can't find a single official who is working in the intelligence community or the White House who believes that that was the case.

They've really tried to downplay it. I don't understand that, this is like Soviet active measures kind of stuff where the Soviets are mucking around here. I mean, talk about echoes of the Cold War. I mean, this is another unironic sort of emulation by China of the soviet approach.

We need to just-

>> Andrew Roberts: Sorry, how would-

>> Matt Pottinger: Back to red lines, right?

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, no, totally. But how would a incoming Trump administration react to a Chinese naval base on Cuba?

>> Matt Pottinger: Well, look, I don't think that we can accept it. I'm speaking on behalf of the United States when I say we.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: No, no, I understand, you're not speaking on behalf of the Trump.

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, look, I think we could create all sorts of problems. I think that we could begin using some of the same techniques along China's periphery that we've used in decades past. I think there's a lot more we can do in the information space.

You know what China fears more than anything is that it's people having free access to information, a free flow of information from outside China's border, and the ability to communicate among citizens privately without fear of being snooped out. We're not even trying to create technologies to poke holes in China's great firewall.

I think we should be doing that irrespective of whether they try to move forward. But we can turn up the amplitude, we can turn up the volume on activities that would give China an incredibly hard time, the Chinese Communist Party, a hard time, because what they fear more than they fear us is their own people.

We don't have that problem. I would love to see us start injecting a freer flow of information, not disinformation. That's the Chinese play, I'm talking about real information, news. The ability to communicate across borders and within borders. That would be a starting point for me. And I would signal to China that we can pull down their firewall if they are dumb enough as to try to build a military base in the western hemisphere.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, let's just look at what might happen. What could happen if there were a 1989 style democratic movement inside China that the CCP couldn't hold down. What would happen? Would you get warlords? Would you get a single democratic unitary state in China? Just imagine-

>> Matt Pottinger: What Taiwan has shown is that ethnically Chinese people are pretty damn good at democracy.

They might be better at it than we are. Judging by the economist intelligence unit and some of these other indices that measure democracy, Taiwan beats the United States on every measure. They're the most democratic country in Asia by a long shot, and they've done it in a way.

They've done it in style. 40% of their parliament is female. I think the United States might be 25% of our congress. Women are the mayors of major cities all across. They've elected a woman to the highest office twice now in Taiwan. So they know how to do democracy, they know how to do liberal democracy.

And I think that that model is what really, really rankles Xi Jinping. It's that more than any other dimension that has obsessed him so much with the idea of snuffing out Taiwan's democracy. So I think that what would come afterwards would be something that the Chinese people determine.

Maybe it is a single country. And by the way, if you wanna see a powerful country that has an incredible positive impact on the world, imagine a Democratic China. You just think of the entrepreneurialism, you think of the culture, the effects of a free and open China on the world.

I think that China could hold together as a single country, as a democracy, and I think they would do pretty darn well at that. But it's also conceivable that it would fracture into more of a European kind of model, maybe it became sort of a confederation. Europe has done reasonably well as a union where the country still maintains sovereignty, they maintain their own militaries.

But they have a shared currency and an easy passage over borders and these types of things. That's a possibility as well. But I don't think that you hear this hand wringing that, my gosh, the Communist Party is terrible. Yeah, it's committing genocide. And yeah, they've killed 50 million of their own citizens through starvation.

And they had a cultural revolution, now they're intimidating their neighbors. But imagine if you didn't have the Chinese Communist Party, then it'd really be terrible. I mean, there's no basis for that sort of analysis that I hear it's very flaky, lazy analysis that I hear from time to time.

I don't think it's right.

>> Andrew Roberts: No, what about the other analysis, the sort of Noam Chomsky narrative which says that Belt and Road has failed? The wolf warrior talk is over, the demographics are against China, their population is dropping, it's gonna be 700 million by 2050. And basically the US is building up China as it needs an enemy because China's had no history of imperialism and desire for world domination.

What do you make of that?

>> Matt Pottinger: I wish that were the case. I would love not to have China as an enemy. Let me tell you, my wife would really love for us not to have China as an enemy because I spend so much time thinking about it.

The aspirations we should not underestimate. We shouldn't overestimate the Chinese Communist Party. It has all these inherent weaknesses, I think that those demographic statements of the fact that their economy is losing all this dynamism as it centralizes its model. Again, it recentralizes, all that's true. I think over the long run that's not gonna work out well for China.

The question is what happens between now and then? And that is pretty much the life expectancy of Xi Jinping is the same number of years between now and then. And Xi Jinping has big aspirations and they are dangerous. They're dangerous to the notion of sovereignty. If you read some of this internal textbooks that Chinese PLA generals have to read at the National Defense University.

And by the way, they're all called Xi Jinping thought series of textbooks, they explicitly say that their goal is to replace the westphalian order. They wanna do away with the idea of sovereign nation states and replace it with a China centric, Sino centric global empire. I mean, who's in for that one?

You know what I mean? It's like we're not just talking about Democracy versus authoritarianism. We're talking about the basic building blocks of the modern. The nation state is a basic building block for diplomatic discourse and the balance of power globally. They wanna undermine that, they say so explicitly in their internal documents.

I think we should do Xi Jinping the courtesy in effect, I think we should show enough respect to say that what he says internally are things that he means. I don't think we should say he doesn't really mean it, or he's never gonna be able to do that.

I think he very much intends to do those things.

>> Andrew Roberts: And so what about the Thucydides and trap arguments, this idea, Graham Allison's great book entitled the Thucydides Trap. It looks back to Athens and Sparta essentially being sort of forced into actual war against one another. One's a rising, the other's a falling power, one is an envious power, the other is a glutted power.

And that there's something inherent in the human condition and in history that means that the United States and China are going to have to be enemies and possibly also military confrontation between them.

>> Matt Pottinger: Well, Graham Allison's a terrific thinker and terrific person. I reject the premise that that's the right model to describe the current order.

I don't think China is truly a rising power. I think it is a dangerous early superpower that may be peaking. It might be peaking, and that is capable of doing tremendous damage with the power that it has amassed. But it is not looking at a comfortable ascent under its current leadership.

It is not looking at an ascent, it is looking now at a slow roll downhill. And the question is, what damage can it do in the meantime? The United States, meantime, is showing all sorts of strain. But I still think that our system, God willing, if we continue to preserve it, is going to do remarkable things in the 21st century.

So I used to tell some of my asian diplomat counterparts and friends that China's a lot like the Yellow river that flows across northern China and the United States is more like the Pacific Ocean. The yellow river looks placid on the surface. You can't see, it's murky, it looks like chocolate milk.

It's got so much of this lust silt in it, but it looks very placid. But under the surface, violent things are happening. There are terrible pressures that are building up in the form of invisible dams that suddenly reach a crisis point. And change the course of a river in ways that are quite dramatic and that flood and kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

The United States looks rough on the surface, just like the Pacific Ocean. But if you've ever gone scuba diving, you know that even in a rough sea, as soon as you get under the surface, everything goes quiet, it becomes placid and calm. And so I will choose the Pacific model with our rough currents on the surface over the illusory placid yellow river.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: What should we do in Britain we've had a spying scandal at Westminster. We've had a lot of universities take a lot of Chinese money and seem to be bending over backwards to China all the time. We've had lots of concerns about defense industry suffering industrial espionage from China.

Is this something that you're concerned about and what can we do about it?

>> Matt Pottinger: Look, I remember when I was in office and I was making visits to the UK, I would sometimes hear just the self doubt. And I was often this role of bucking up, my dear friends in London to say, come on, this is Great Britain.

Stop being defeatists, stop thinking that your future model is to try to become more like Switzerland. We'll try to attract more oligarch money and become a banking center and become more neutral. That is not going to work out well, and it's not necessary. United Kingdom has, through its history, its key role.

Even post Brexit, the UK has an incredibly important role to play as a leader of Europe. And I think the UK should wear that. I think it should wear its history, I think it should wear that legacy and basically just be confident.

>> Andrew Roberts: And sort of man up when it comes to these spying scandals and universities, and defense industry.

 

>> Matt Pottinger: Absolutely, come on. We're making it easy for our adversaries, and it's because of the self doubt. Come on, let's have the courage of our convictions. The UK is one of the great leaders.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell me, last question. Well, last question before we get on to the ones I ask every one of my guests.

What do you see as the majority differences between a Trump China policy and a Biden China policy?

>> Matt Pottinger: Yeah, well, I think if President Trump is re-elected to a second term, I suspect that the first thing he's gonna focus on is trade. It animates him. It's what animated a big part of our, especially our early China policy in the first Trump Administration.

I imagine that he will accumulate leverage in the form of more restrictions on Chinese exports to the United States. President Trump cares a lot about the auto sector, he always has. China right now has grown to be the dominant EV manufacturer, and Tesla's just been overtaken by BYD.

And BYD is only one of a great number of Chinese companies that make pretty good EVs, right? Of course, they've done that with the benefit of subsidies. They've also had the benefit of the transfer of American technology for their batteries and all, and for the EVS generally to do that.

So I would imagine that if President Biden doesn't move first with sort of preemptive tariffs, I think President Trump will slap significant tariffs. I don't know the number, I can tell you that I've heard US auto sector people quietly mentioning that they would need to see 50% to 200% tariffs in order to halt the onslaught.

200% for the cheap EV's and 50% for the high end ones that compete with Tesla and combustion engine cars. I think China is gonna be looking to try to find ways to manufacture those EV's in the United States. President Trump was never against the idea of Japan, for example, building auto plants in the US and making good cars, using American labor and so forth here.

So that's gonna be part of the game. It's gonna be a game of trying to China trying to move its supply chain and manufacturing closer to the US and probably into the US in order to jump over this tariff wall that I think President Trump is going to be quick to seek to enact.

Look, I would imagine this is just speculation on my part, but section 301 of the Trade Act was the tool that President Trump used to initiate his trade investigation in 2017 that resulted in significant tariffs. That was an investigation into Chinese systematic theft of American intellectual property. The Biden Administration said that they were going to open their own Section 301 investigation investigating Chinese unfair use of subsidies, but they didn't do it.

They never did it. And my guess is it was a battle between the US trade rep and the treasury secretary and the Biden Administration, and they sorta had a stalemate. Janet Yellen wanted to repeal Trump era tariffs. Kathryn Tai wanted to keep them and President Biden probably decided, okay, here's the compromise.

We'll keep the Trump tariffs, but we're not gonna move forward with a new Section 301 investigation. If Trump is reelected, I would imagine that he would pick up that Section 301 investigation and proceed to investigate Chinese subsidies, illegal and unfair subsidies. And that would lead to a new round of tariffs and maybe other remedies as well, like outright bans on certain imports from China.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: If Trump were re elected and were to veto further American military support for Ukraine, do you think President Xi would see that as a form of western weakness and therefore be emboldened with regard to Taiwan? Or do you think he'd be so nerve wracked about the evidence, personality traits of Trump that he wouldn't want to pursue the Taiwanese?

 

>> Matt Pottinger: President Trump has stated his desire to try to negotiate a ceasefire. He will have to proceed very, very carefully if he doesn't want to inadvertently send a signal of weakness to see that we just didn't have the stomach for backing European countries against invasions from Russia. I think from the public statements President Trump has made, he's talked about what motivates him is the desire to be peace, right?

That's a good goal that I think we all are in support of. But the only way that you can negotiate with Russians or the Chinese Communist Party is from a position of strengthen. And that means if I were setting out to try to negotiate an armistice or something, I would wanna increase my leverage by giving even greater firepower to the Ukrainians as my first step.

Give them the ability to really give the Russians a bad day, give them things that the Biden administration has been reluctant to. Give the Biden administration is sorta-

>> Andrew Roberts: A few of these through those LRASMs might be a pretty useful thing for the Ukrainians to get.

>> Matt Pottinger: Their land targeted variants of that thing called JASMs as well, which is basically the same thing, but targets land targets.

I think we should build a position of strength and then also be ready to provide the only way that a piece is gonna hold. The only way that a piece is gonna hold is if there is a credible, real security guarantee for Ukraine at the end of this thing.

So whether that means bringing them into NATO or it means that the United States puts troops in there and says that we will fight if you guys come any closer beyond that new DMZ or whatever it is that is negotiated. But if we don't give the guarantee, a ceasefire will be temporary and will be followed by something worse than what we currently have.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: So what history book or biography are you reading at the moment, Matt?

>> Matt Pottinger: So I just re-read Jeffrey Blaney's book. Look, this book is really something else. This second time I've read it, this new book that I've just written that I told you about, The Boiling Moat to Defend Taiwan.

I have a chapter dedicated to Jeffrey Blaney, and that pulls many of his insights. The third chapter of the book is about many of the myths that we still tell ourselves about wars. That he was able to really obliterate some of these myths. And some of them are very surprising, they're counterintuitive.

The idea, for example, that wars are accidental or unintended. He did an incredible investigation of the causes of all of the wars and also the causes of the peace that followed the wars, virtually all the wars of the last 400 years, and he could not find a scenario where a truly accidental war took place.

The consequences of wars are frequently accidental. The loss of a war is always accidental when someone loses one. But the start of wars are deliberate, and he did an incredible job of showing that one of the other things-

>> Andrew Roberts: Remind me the name of the book, sorry.

>> Matt Pottinger: It's called the Causes of War.

And I read the third edition, which came out in the 1980s. If I can prevail on Jeffrey to update it to a fourth edition, the world would be better off for it. I think this should be required reading for anyone who wants to do statecraft. But he writes it almost like a detective story, where he's trying to investigate what really caused the wars to begin, the mysteries of large wars, why they end when they do.

And one of the other things is that we like to use this word, balance of power. I think I just used it in this interview. But balance of power connotes this image that the more equally matched countries are, the less likely there is to be conflict. In fact, that's frequently the opposite is true.

It is when you have a very significant imbalance, a decisive imbalance in power, that peace between those two countries prevails. And it's one of the reasons that I think Taiwan has prospered over these decades after World War II, was because until now the US and China were not equally matched.

China knew that it was going to suffer a terrible defeat if it messed with Taiwan. And it's now that we are more closely matched than ever that the odds of war is rising.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, absolutely. And sort of back to the Thucydides Trap in that sense, what is your favorite what if?

What if a fist your counterfactual that you enjoy thinking about?

>> Matt Pottinger: Boy, yeah, it's a great question. I mean, what if the Tiananmen massacre hadn't happened in 1989? But what if those protests that led to the Chinese Communist Party's massacre of Chinese students, what if it had happened ten years later, or even 15, 20 years later?

Would that have irrevocably changed China in the way that the Soviet Union really came to an end? It's one that I wonder about.

>> Andrew Roberts: You think the CCP might not have unleashed that massacre in its central square ten years after 1989-

>> Matt Pottinger: If the protests hadn't happened then.

In other words, if the protests had happened a decade or more later, when people had more means to communicate like they had really in the late 90s, when the Internet was really taking off in China for the first time. Sort of late Hu Jintao, the aughts, before Xi Jinping took over in 2012.

What if that had been the big democracy movement? Might it have stuck and actually succeeded? And might Chinese Communist Party have had fewer means or been more reluctant to gun down in the Internet age 1,000 or more of its children? Maybe.

>> Andrew Roberts: Fascinating, maybe, exactly.

>> Matt Pottinger: Remember the 89, the Chinese protests in 89 came before the November 89 Berlin Wall, right?

This was the spring of 89. It was the forerunner of a lot of the movements that swept across the Communist bloc.

>> Andrew Roberts: Matt Pottinger, thank you very much indeed for this incredibly stimulating and really, really interesting episode of Secrets of Statecraft.

>> Matt Pottinger: Andrew, it's always great to be with you and I love listening to your podcast.

Thank you so much.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you. My thanks to Matt Pottinger. On the next Secrets of Statecraft, my guest will be Elliott Abrams. Elliot has held several important posts over the past 30 years, including deputy national security adviser and US special representative for Iran.

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