Sticks, Carrots . . . Baby Carrots: Rep. Mike Gallagher On The China Threat

>> Speaker 1: Beyond the physical effects of Green Bay's weather, there is a psychological edge that comes from playing in the NFL's harshest environment.

>> Speaker 2: It ain't cold. It ain't cold, baby. It's all in your mind.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Friday, January 13, 2023, and welcome back to GoodFellows, a Hoover Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whelan, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow. That means I have the highest high honor, privilege of introducing the stars of our show. Three of my colleagues we jokingly referred to as the GoodFellows. That would be the historian Naill Ferguson, the economist John Cochran, the geostrategist, lieutenant general Hr McMaster, the, our Hoover Institution senior fellows all.

And rounding out our panel today, joining us from his district back in Wisconsin, Congressman Mike Gallacher. He is the newly minted chair of the House Select Committee on China. Its formal name is the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and Chinese Communist Party.

Congressman, thanks for joining us today.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: It is an honor to be back.

>> Bill Whalen: So question, sir, why are you not on a plane to San Francisco to see the packers playing the 49 ers? I'm sorry. Wait a minute, the packers didn't make the playoffs, did they?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Low blow.

Although watching the Lions game, I sort of got a bizarre solace from the fact that there's no way we would have beaten the 49 ers. It was, it was very depressing. But we'll see. Hope springs eternal in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

>> Bill Whalen: There you go. So, Congressman, let's get into China today.

I wanna read you a quote you said on Fox News last month, quote, the Chinese Communist Party is our foremost threat in the world today. Question, sir, is that a commonly held sentiment in the House? Is it a commonly held sentiment in the Senate? And is is a commonly held sentiment in the Biden administration?

 

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I actually think it is. Now there's attempts to parse the language. I mean, if you see recent documents from the White House, the National Security Strategy, if you see documents from the Pentagon, the National Defense Strategy, or just hear the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the secretary of defense talk about it.

Sometimes the White House will try and say, well, climate change is the existential issue of our time, but China is a, I forget the exact phrase they use in the National Security Strategy. So there's a little bit of muddled thinking, I think, in that. And then the Defense Department will say, well, Russia is an acute threat, but China, I've heard the chairman say China is our biggest near, mid and long term threat.

So you parse through the language. I actually think one of the most remarkable achievements of HR McMaster and Matt Pottinger and many others in the Trump administration was to incept into the Biden administration the biggest shift in us foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. It built on a recognition that the Chinese Communist Party is our top threat, our top competitor, whatever language you wanna use.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen.

>> John H. Cochrane: We batted around whether to take the climate stuff seriously, HR told us not to. But it is the National Security Strategy and it direct things like, if they said, well, we want Taiwan, but we'll put in windmills instead. National Security Strategy says you're supposed to give them that.

What's your view on that? Is it serious or just puffery?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I actually think it's more than puffery. I think it's very serious. Yeah, I think you have a divide in the administration that hampers our foreign policy and hamper sensible policy for moving forward. You have sort of a John Kerry climate change wing, on the one hand, that saying the biggest issue is a transnational issue is climate change, and therefore we need to have a more cooperative relationship with Xi Jinping, that Xi Jinping cares about commitments that are made at COP 27, which I think is naive and foolish.

And then you have sort of a more realistic wing. I don't know who the leader of that wing would be. Maybe it's Eli Ratner, maybe it's Jake Sullivan himself, I don't know. But I think there's sort of a competition between those two wings that gets in the way of good policy sometimes.

So I take it seriously. And I take it seriously if for no other reason than we're spending a heck of a lot of money on sort of green new Dew policies that I think are a mixed bag at best and actively economically harmful at worst. And that is connected to the health of our overall country and our foreign policy.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Maybe there's less of a contradiction, though, in the sense that China is a huge part of the reason for increased CO2 emissions. China's responsible for a huge proportion of the increase in coal consumption. So if you're concerned about climate, then you have to be concerned about China.

And there's no way that we address the problem of global warming if we can't constrain China. I wanted to ask a slightly different question, if I may, Congressman. It's about cold war. One thing that struck me about the new National Security Strategy, and it's been done in speeches too, by people in the administration, is that they say, we're not in a cold war with China.

But then everything else that comes after that sounds remarkably like a cold war, including the kind of methods that they're proposing to use to constrain China, like limiting Chinese access to western technology. Are you comfortable with calling it Cold War two, as I've been doing for the last four or five years?

 

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I am, I think I stole it from you. I usually say new cold War. I've written multiple op eds using that framework, and I think it's useful both for the similarities and the differences that it illuminates. The similarities, I guess, would be that this is, in some sense, a whole of society effort for both of the competitors.

It's not just a military competition, it's an economic competition and an ideological competition at its core. The differences are very obvious as well, we never had to consider selective economic decoupling when it comes to technology, data, and dollars with the Soviet Union, because our economies didn't really interact.

And I think that's actually what makes the new cold war in some ways more difficult than the old. I mean, I would be lying to you if I said I had a neat and tidy policy solution for every american company that has exposure to the Chinese market. And where do you draw the line for decoupling?

Do I really have a problem with Wisconsin farmers selling soybeans to China? No, do I have a problem with Wisconsinites buying cheap t-shirts from China? No, but I do have a problem with an app, a social media app that's controlled by a Chinese company that's controlled by the Chinese communist party becoming the most dominant media company in America in the form of TikTok.

I have a problem with them using American technology to advance their hypersonic technology. I have a problem with them controlling the commanding heights of rare earths. I have a problem with the energetics, the propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics that make our weapons go and go boom being sourced from China in many cases, but drawing that line is very, very difficult.

But I thank you for using the analogy. It gives me credibility when I can cite Niall Ferguson and Walter Russell Meade and some others to show people that I'm not just a crazy hawk.

>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, Mike, you're not just a crazy hawk. And I think whenever I hear these days about people lamenting the dysfunction of Congress, the tension and vitriol surrounding the speaker's election, I just point to your committee, and then you and other members who are determined to have a positive influence through bipartisan legislation.

Hey, could you maybe just talk to our viewers a little bit more about how you frame the efforts? I saw your areas of focus, and I can imagine lines of effort and goals and objectives coming out of that. And the degree to which you feel you have bipartisan support for those focus areas.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, I was hoping we could just use this as a brainstorming session. I intend to force all of you to come testify before the committee at some point, so we might as well get started on that.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: One other final point on cold war, though. I think like part of the point is that we would want the new cold war to stay cold.

And for those who sort of think this is a bad thing to be talking about a cold war, we might need to wrap our head around the fact that that's sort of the best case scenario right now. There are worse things than Cold War. I mean, this thing could heat up, and we don't want it to heat up cuz that would be very, very destructive.

To your point, HR, I'll maybe do it in reverse order. Yeah, the vote we got on the creation of the committee, 365 to 65, was great. I was really encouraged by that. Sitting there listening to the debate on the House floor, listening to a lot of what my democratic colleagues said about wanting to participate was very encouraging.

And the speaker is sincere in wanting this to be a bipartisan effort. I know that historians here can quibble over the idea that politics stops at the water's edge, I don't think it ever has. But to the extent that we can in Congress identify, here's the center of gravity on China policy, here's where Democrats and Republicans agree, I think it makes our foreign policy stronger.

So that I'm very encouraged by. And then informally, a lot of my democratic colleagues have come up to me. Lot of smart, serious people with the right background in national security, they wanna participate. So I'm cautiously optimistic we'll get good members on this committee. Where can we have a unique impact?

I think really in two areas. One sort of elevating the discussion on China and explaining why all this matters, right? Why should the American people care about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party? Why does it matter to someone in northeast Wisconsin? Think about, we talk about Taiwan, the defense of Taiwan.

And I think for defense geeks, we sort of assume that everyone thinks that we should help Taiwan defend itself. My observation at the intersection of defense policy and retail grassroots politics is that we have a long way to go to convincing the American people that we should be moving heaven and earth to improve our deterrence by denial posture in the Indo-Pacific.

And answering that question for why it matters. So I think we can be the committee that answers that why? The second thing is because China-related policy is referred to so many different committees, right? Armed services has a clear role. Foreign affairs does arms sales. Ways and means does trade policy.

Financial services has an obvious role in terms of the American capital that's flowing into certain Chinese industries. Judiciary controls, FARA laws, CFIUS referred to multiple committees. A lot of good ideas fall through the cracks between the committees, and we can play a coordinating function to ensure that for the 10 to 20 priority policies and pieces of legislation for the speaker, they don't die in a divided Congress.

And we're gonna actually get some things done. Maybe I'll add one other thing, and I'm sorry to go on, there are certain things that are just poorly understood, like niche issues that we intend to own. So, for example, I mentioned TikTok. TikTok's bound up in this broader question of what is the regulatory framework for cross-border data flows.

There's something called the ICTS process that I think you guys started, and the Trump administration exists. It's kinda the Wild West, though, right now. And Abe, before he died, gave a great speech about a data-free flow with trust model that seemed to make sense. But we can kinda grab that issue and run with it.

Another one is just what I would call counter United front work. I think United front work is probably the worst-understood aspect of the Chinese Communist Party. And if we do nothing other than educate our colleagues as to what it is and why it matters, I think we'll have played a constructive role.

That being said, give me your best ideas for where we can.

>> H. R. McMaster: Just a couple comments just on the same idea of connecting what has been disconnected. If you look at economic statecraft, the tools that are available are export controls, inbound investment screening under the CFIUS process, the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, outbound investment screening.

I mean, there are a whole range of tools, there are ones involving human capital. Immigration is a big part of this, being able to attract the top talent as well as grow the top talent. And I often quote Antoine Busquet, he's a historian, I don't know if you know him, Neil, but he wrote a great book called The Scientific Way of Warfare.

But what he observed, he said, what is required is a holistic approach that does not seek to isolate open systems from their environment, but apprehends their profound interconnectedness. And when we take discrete actions in one area, like export controls, but don't consider investments in technologies and supply chains to make our supply chains more resilient, or we don't consider the human capital dimensions, we oftentimes work across purposes.

So I think it's great that you are looking across. That's why I think that the organization's committee is perfect, cuz you're drawing people from those committees that have oversight of these different parts of the challenge.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Quick point on that, I think you're honing in on what is an emerging big idea, and I think it may sound simplistic to this crowd.

But just the basic idea of we cannot selectively decouple without simultaneously deepening our partnerships with allied countries when it comes to technology sharing when it comes to data sharing, when it comes to trade in general. And the trade agenda has completely fallen by the wayside for both parties, I would argue, right now, or how do we leverage existing allied frameworks or new cooperative structures such as AUKUS to do that?

Part of the problem with AUKUS, and this was a problem that predated AUKUS when we talked about incorporating Australia into our national technology industrial base. We have all this outdated ITAR legislation, International Trafficking and Arms Regulation, which precludes us from cooperating with the Aussies and the Brits, our closest allies.

We're gonna try and reform ITAR to turbocharge technological cooperation under AUKUS. So I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit there that we can really grab.

>> John H. Cochrane: I'd like to ask a big-picture question, then we'll come back to these weeds, cuz I'm a little skeptical, a lot of this stuff, I'm an economist, I've seen all sorts of skullduggery wrapped in the flag in my time.

And lots of people are lining up for subsidies, China, give me money, lots of people are lining up for protection, China, China give me protection. This hasn't ended well, especially competitive industrial policy in the past. LeMme ask you, what is the long term goal? What is the vision, if we are in Cold War II, what's the vision for where it ends?

Are we now fighting the war? Are we trying to deter China from fighting the war? Is the long run goal like it was with Russia? Isolate them, impoverish them, and wait for them to change regime? Impoverishing a large country like that seems like a very difficult and not particularly noble goal.

Is the goal to set a set of incentives so that China will at least engage and, we would hope, liberalize at some point internally. I see a lot of answers in search of questions, and I see this dangerous dynamic of a bar fight. The guy comes and bumps into you and spills your drink, and so the reaction is, well, I'm gonna go push him and call his mother a bad name.

Well, that usually doesn't end well. How are we gonna get out of this bar? Surely you've thought about this. Where's the George Kennan on what we're gonna try to do over 20, 30, 40 years?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, at the record show, I've lost both of the bar fights I've been in in my life, so I'm ill equipped to do this.

One of which happened at the Hoffer house in Munich when I was a pesky college student, it was a big misunderstanding. And I suspect, John, I can't get away with saying that the long term vision is we win, they lose. The politicians have done fairly well relying on that.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, what do you mean by they lose? They are reduced to rubble, impoverished, the way Germany lost World War II? They lose, they give up the communist party and join liberal democratic society and then turn into something that looks like South Korea.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, that's answerable easily enough with the cold War I analogy, cuz what Reagan did was essentially to set the United States on track to win with a Without firing a shot and without reducing the Soviet Union to rubble.

You mentioned Kennan, Kennan's vision was always that in the end, the Soviet Union would succumb to its own internal pathologies. We just had to contain it for a sufficiently long period. And I would say a reasonable starting point for this discussion is that we wanna try and do that again, cuz it was a pretty good outcome.

I 100% agree with you, Mike. Avoiding World War III should be priority number one, just as it was in Cold War I. It was a very good idea not to have World War III with nuclear weapons. Let's make that our number one priority, and let's try and replay the way in which Cold War I ended, which was pretty peacefully, with the internal decay of the Soviet Union playing out and the United States not having to do more than maintain credible deterrence right the way through the tougher part of the first Cold War.

Am I thinking about this the right way, Mike?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I agree with everything you just said. I sort of think about this, I've stolen this analogy from our mutual friend and your colleague Matt Pottinger. You sort of think about this in two phases. There is the traditional marathon that we all think about winning.

And I do think in the best case scenario ends in some way roughly analogous to the old Cold War, where the regime succumbs to its own pathologies. Or abandons certain ambitions that would allow them to blackmail the rest of the world economically or export their model of techno totalitarian oppression to Taiwan and other countries.

But it's as if to qualify for that marathon, you have to win the near term sprint. And the near term sprint is all about deterrence by denial in the Taiwan Strait. But if I may say, the Reagan administration one and the economic competition not by some large industrial policy, not by taking whatever the Soviets were subsidizing and out subsidizing it here.

>> John H. Cochrane: He won by deregulation, getting the economy growing like crazy. And that does not seem the U.S. we are killing our internal stem and science. We're just allowing it to shoot itself completely in the foot. We're still hidebound by all sorts of stuff. The answer there was let the internal American economy grow, not in a large competitive industrial policy approach.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: But I don't think me endorsing new Cold War and attempting to articulate an endgame it doesn't follow from there that I'm endorsing massive.

>> John H. Cochrane: No, you're not. Many other people.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I think my voting record would support that as well. And I think a lot of what we need to do to win is just act less like CCP light apparatchiks in our own domestic endeavors to sort of resist the pull of wok ism in various educational institutions and unlock and unleash the power of free enterprise in America.

And get out of this just pattern of self loathing where we no longer believe that we deserve to win, that we no longer believe that in this competition, we're the good guys. Those are all things that we can do irrespective of what Xi Jinping wakes up and wants to do.

But I will say, and I sort of tried to get at it when we talked about selective decoupling. Drawing the line is very difficult. I didn't vote for the chips act, we can get into that. I suspect five years from now we won't have the fabs that we need for a variety of reason.

But I'm sympathetic to the idea that we can't allow the Chinese Communist Party, particularly to take over Taiwan to control semiconductor manufacturing and then hold the rest of us economically hostage. How do you solve that problem? This is the thorniest part of the equation for me. I will admit a great deal of humility in part because I'm not an economist as well.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, I think the objective is kind of simple overall. The overall goal is to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from achieving its vision for national rejuvenation at our expense, right? And what at our expense means is accomplishing their objectives that place us at a profound disadvantage. Us being the free world, free market, economic systems, democratic nations, right?

They first want to continue this massive military buildup, but also to gain a qualitative differential advantage, a technological differential advantage over our military so they can, through intimidation or through aggression, achieve sort of exclusionary areas of primacy across the Indo Pacific and then challenge the United States globally.

So that's like a negative objective for preventing them from doing that. And of course, the means that they employ to do that are in large measure. Stealing the technology that we develop, as well as garnering investments from U.S. companies in Chinese companies that must act by law as an extension of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army.

I mean, great example Mike, I can send you some others. A company named for paradigm raised $700 million from U.S. venture capital investors. That company now does all the battlefield artificial intelligence for the Peoples Liberation Army. I mean, there are many, many other examples of that. And then, of course, you have the way that we are enabling our own demise economically in many ways and enabling their mercantilist model to succeed is through the dumb money flows that are the scaffolding that holds up their system.

And so I just think in many ways what we can do, I think, is stop underwriting our own demise. And it begins almost with a Hippocratic oath, do no hurt or harm in three fundamental areas. Don't help them gain an unfair differential advantage over the United States militarily through the theft of technology and so forth.

The 2nd is, you don't enable them to gain an unfair economic and financial advantage over us through their authoritarian mercantilist model and our enabling of it. And the third area, I think, is to not enable them to perfect their technologically enabled Orwellian police state. And oftentimes we do that with investments.

I think US investors that invested in sense time in Hikvision, I mean, how do you look at yourself in the mirror? I mean, so I think that a lot of it is just, there's this old cartoon of a guy watering a sapling with a noose around his neck tied to the sapling.

And I think China is the sapling. We've been watering that thing and we're hanging ourselves.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Two quick thoughts on that HR. I don't think it's industrial policy to say that US capital should not subsidize genocide and PLA military modernization. I think that's fundamentally different than, I think, a concern you're articulating John, which is that federal government subsidies in various industries have a distorting effect.

And also both what you said, HR, and what Neil said about our long-term objective, I think should remind us of something, which is that ours is a defensive strategy. In some ways, unlike the early Cold War, we're not debating rollback per se. We're defending the status quo from totalitarian aggression.

And I think that if we talk about that the right way, that could go a long way in terms of persuading some of the more isolationist members of Congress on the left and the right to invest smart resources in the defense of Taiwan and in our own defense in other areas of the world.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Can we talk about Taiwan? We talked about it the last time you were our guest, and I wanna kind of update our audience. I'm going to play Devil's advocate cuz it's hugely important in these conversations that we don't just sit around agreeing. From a Chinese vantage point, it's not clear that the US is entirely respecting the status quo with respect to Taiwan.

Certainly the president has come close, I think, on three or more occasions to repudiating the strategic ambiguity, making an unconditional commitment to the defense of Taiwan. And there's no question that us politicians, including the former speaker, Nancy Pelosi, have acted in the visits as if Taiwan is an independent country.

And I spent enough time in Beijing to see why the Chinese leadership think there's a deviation from the status quo going on. And I worry a little bit that we are gung ho about Taiwan without having a particularly good strategy for the eventuality of a crisis. Let me put it to you that next year, I don't think it'll happen this year, but next year, with a Taiwanese election in January, the US presidential election in November.

There's gonna be a very dangerous time if we carry on down this road, because we are nowhere near Bridge Colby's strategy of denial. We're not really credibly able to deter China at the moment. I worry a lot that the Biden administration failed to deter Putin. I mean, let's not forget it failed to deter him with respect to Ukraine.

And I worry that they're gonna fail to deter Xi Jinping with respect to Taiwan, and then we're really gonna be stuck with a much bigger, a much tougher situation if. Let's suppose the Chinese blockade Taiwan. I don't think enemy invasion is what we should really be focused on.

Suppose they blockade it, what do we do? Do we really have, in your eyes, a credible plan for next year? Let's just talk hypothetically about next year, if we get into that situation. That's my biggest short run concern, I'd love to get your current thoughts on that.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, one thing you said makes me think that there is a real risk, a political risk, or there's gonna be a political temptation that plays out in the context of our presidential election on the republican side to stake out an ever more hawkish position on Taiwan.

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Right.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: You're already seeing it, some prospective candidates have said we should just support Taiwan's independence, right? Which would be a massive departure from traditional policy. So, perhaps part of the function that my committee can play is both in the way where I just said we're gonna play this accelerating function when it comes to policy and legislation.

Perhaps at times we'll have to play a restraining function to make sure that we all stay on the reservation and do things that are in our own national security interests. That being said, I would quibble with the idea that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan upends the status quo in any meaningful way.

And you could argue it was not well timed, you could argue she didn't come with C130 filled with harpoon missiles or whatever the deliverable was. You could argue that it was purely a media play for her legacy as speaker. I don't know if it made it into the Netflix documentary or the HBO documentary.

I get all that. But I think to say that that upended the status quo is to accept the CCP's talking points on that.

>> Niall Ferguson: Advocate, I think.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Yeah.

>> Niall Ferguson: One can see that the more such visits happen, the more plausibly the CCP will be able to argue that we're treating Taiwan de facto as if it's independent.

And if a candidate emerges for the Taiwanese presidency who sounds as if he, and it's likely he has at least some leanings in that direction. I'm worried about how that plays into the CCP's hands by giving them a story they can tell to the Chinese people, to the effect that we are, in fact, the ones who are rocking.

>> H. R. McMaster: Are you arguing for addressing their legitimate security concerns like we did with Putin, Neil? Before the invasion? I mean, come on, I mean, they don't get to dictate who visits Taiwan. They don't get to dictate it, and we just say.

>> John H. Cochrane: Neil asked a huge question here.

Suppose China does what I think the obvious move. They blockade Taiwan, they say food, medicine, goods coming and go, this is part of China. You said this is part of China, you simply have to go through China border controls on your way to Taiwan. And we're not letting Stinger missiles in, but everything else goes in and out, what does the US do then?

Stern denunciation at the UN, maybe. The only thing I can think of is financial sanctions, which is basically blow up the financial system, which would be a huge problem for us as well as them. But I don't see a shit that just seems like game over right there, I'm desperate for HR.

HR said there's no problem you can't solve with a tank. But.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, in this case, there's no problem you can't solve with a submarine. And nobody talks about submarines when they talk about.

>> John H. Cochrane: No, no, but that's a problem.

>> H. R. McMaster: About China.

>> John H. Cochrane: China blockades Taiwan, and you send a submarine into sink Chinese ships.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Think of if there is a recent analogy to this. The analogy, I think, is the Tanker War from 80 to 88 with obviously a much less capable navy. But with an Iranian military that was using some asymmetrical capabilities, especially mines, right? And we applied with, we responded with a naval task force that was defensive in nature to ensure the free flow of oil out of the straits.

And I can imagine something like that, John. But I think Neil's question also was, hey, do we have a plan to do that plus the military capacity? I think that what we could be doing from a diplomatic perspective for sure is to gain guarantees in advance that this would be a multinational effort to say, hey, People's Liberation army, navy, you don't, you don't get to tell us that we can't sail our commercial ships into Taiwanese ports.

And guess what? We're doing it, if you try to stop us, we're gonna have to act in a way to defend those ships. And again, we necessarily have to reflag all these ships like we did in the 1980s. But I think there are analogies we can draw on to better understand, kind of the range of responses that we could make.

And, of course, you can respond in ways that are asymmetrical, right? Hey, if you restrict moving into Taiwan, how about if we restrict Chinese shipping now through the Straits of Malacca? How about if we block that off? I mean, I think there are all sorts of options open, and I think much like Russia prior to the invasion of Ukraine, I do believe, and we shouldn't underestimate them.

But I do believe that the People's Liberation army, which includes all their services, probably has an inflated idea of what they can accomplish.

>> Bill Whalen: So, Congressman, how does the United States deter Xi Jinping.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, quickly, I think Neil has a good point, which is, myself, I'm not personally comfortable or persuaded by the war plans such as they exist.

And I think they rest on a lot of assumptions that are naive. And I don't think integrated deterrence is gonna get the job done here. A vague threat of sanctions combined with some mean tweets will not make Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping think twice in the same way that integrated deterrence failed in Ukraine.

So how then do we deter? We need to surge hard power, and it's my belief that hard power gives us our best chance at deterrence west of the international date line in general. And I think we need to flip the script when it comes to what the PLA has done to us with their rocket force against us such that we can target their ships at relatively low cost.

And there, we are unbound thanks to hrs work by the INF treaty such that we could field INF non compliant missiles at relatively low cost over the next two to five years.

>> H. R. McMaster: They're already developed.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Yeah, it's not new technology, it is rocket science, technically. But it's not new technology.

So if you think about this, CSBA recently did a great report called Rings of Fire that I stole in a speech I did on this. You think about this as like a series of concentric rings in the Pacific. The inner part of that is Taiwan itself, we can clear the $18 billion backlog of foreign military sales that have been approved but not delivered to Taiwan's.

We can take some of the harpoons that we're gonna spend money de-mailing, send them to Taiwan, We can move them ahead of the Saudis on the list. There's a lot of things we can do, we can use loitering munitions, we can get really creative on Taiwan itself. You go to the next ring, small teams of marines, we now have a basing and access agreement in the Ryukyus in Japan.

If we get a similar thing with the northern Philippines, now we're cooking with gas right there. Then we can make them think twice. And then you zoom out to the outer ring with an INF non-compliant missile using advanced energetic materials, imagine stationing one of those in Alaska. Or if we give the Aussie some semblance of sovereign control in the northern territories of Australia, I think we can get really creative in building what I call an anti navy.

If you expect that it will take us at least a decade to rebuild our own navy and air force, the question is, what can you do in the next five years within the window of maximum danger? And I think we can if we had a good president and a hypercharge Secretary of Defense with the right concept, I think we could actually put an anti navy in Xi's path and make him think twice.

>> H. R. McMaster: And if you go back to the writings of Mackinder, right, on what the requirements are to have a dominant continental power. One of those elements are free access to the seas, which we enjoy, located where we are in North America. Neither Russia nor China enjoys that, which is one of the reasons why Taiwan looks so attractive to them.

If you look at the map and just turn the map 90 degrees to the left, you see Taiwan as the cork in the bottle, really there. And the other analogy that works is the Japanese centripetal offensive in 1941. After which Japan oriented those defenses outward toward the United States under the belief that we would never pay the price to penetrate that inter island chain and threaten Japan directly.

If you take that concept and flip it 180 degrees and orient it on the Eurasian landmass, China has big problems. Not that we want to do this, to pose them with the problem is to tell them, hey, listen, if you wanna go after Taiwan, if you wanna lay claim to the ocean in the South China Sea, you're gonna have some major problems.

And then lastly, I'll just say here, too, Mike, and I'm sure you'll be looking at this, are emerging technologies that are relevant. And they're low cost undersea drones that there's a company in southern California developing. And there's a startup here that is developing low cost swarm drones that are really perfect for targeting China's long range missile strike complex, right?

The combination of radars and sensors and missiles that you need to make that work.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Isn't the best analogy, though, HR, just the previous three Taiwan strait crises, all of which involved sort of massive, I'm trying to use a word that's not scatological, require a lot of cojones on our part, right?

So in the first one, Eisenhower gets an AUMF from Congress in advance, I believe threatens the use of nuclear weapons at one point. And then the second, Eisenhower crisis, deploys matador cruise missiles, massive mobilization. And then the third, under Clinton, that was the biggest show force since the end of the Vietnam War.

I mean, which kinda gets to the paradox of deterrence. I mean, in order to prevent World War III, which we all want, you need to convince the other guy you're willing to go to war. It's not easy, for sure-

>> Niall Ferguson: The difference is clear. I mean, China is a far more formidable military and naval power than it was in the mid 1990s, when they really had to back down.

And my great concern is another analogy, which we haven't talked about, but the most obvious one, which is the Cuban missile crisis. Where in a funny kinda way the roles are reversed, because in 1962, an island that was close to the United States, far from the Soviet Union, became the bone of contention.

And it was the Soviets who had to run over a great distance, a US naval blockade, the roles would be reversed. I mean, we could find ourselves in the position that Soviets were in 62, having to send a naval force a very long way to challenge a blockade.

And the more we study the Cuban missile crisis, the more we see how close the world came to World War III with Soviet submarines, you mentioned submarines, HR, essentially about to fire nuclear tipped torpedoes.

>> John H. Cochrane: They have been ordered to fire.

>> Niall Ferguson: I really worry about

>> H. R. McMaster: Given the latitude, not the order, the latitude to fire, right, which was what was surprising.

>> John H. Cochrane: Down to one commander who said, no, I'm not gonna do it.

>> Niall Ferguson: I don't think we should rerun the Cold War with that meticulous attention to detail that we actually do the Cuban missile crisis over, because we might get a different and less good outcome this time around.

We were discussing this only yesterday with Philip Zelikow, who was visiting us at Hoover. I desperately want to avoid rerunning the Cuban missile crisis over Taiwan. My worry is that before Taiwan is credibly defended, before it's a porcupine, before we've done the things that you just very, I think, persuasively described, because it's certainly gonna take several years.

There's this window of vulnerability where they could decide to gamble, because it's obvious that time's running out. I take the view that Xi Jinping regards Taiwan as his ultimate goal, the reason he has extended his term in office. He's not about to just put that aside and say, shucks, it was nice while, I thought about it, but on second thoughts, no, that seems unlikely to me.

He's now in a position of total dominance, that was confirmed by the party, but he also turns out to be more of a risk taker than we knew, willing to cast aside zero COVID, incur really significant numbers of deaths. The more I look at this China and this Chinese leader, the more I think we must not underestimate his readiness to take risk in the relatively short run.

Your committee, you're absolutely right to say this, Mike. It's gonna have to keep people from going so hawkish that they feed an increasingly, I think, militant nationalism in Beijing that ultimately spills over into that second Cuban missile crisis. That worries me a lot. And I was interested that you pointed out that there are kinda super hawks emerging.

It's almost as if domestic politics is driving a competition between the parties in the United States to see who can be the more hawkishen, I wanted to ask you why that is. I remember asking another legislator in a different chamber of Congress about this, and his reply was, it's simple, my people blame China for COVID.

In Wisconsin, what do people have against China, even if they don't quite know where Taiwan is? What's driving this hawkishness in American politics?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: COVID is certainly part of it. And if reasonable people can sort of disagree about whether it came from a lab in Wuhan, which I think is most likely, or whether it came from a wet market.

I don't think it's arguable that the CCP did everything possible to cover it up and cost us time and cost us millions of lives in the process. So I think that's certainly part of it. But prior to that, I think you have an economic story. We're here in the industrial midwest, people blame China for the hollowing out of a lot of industries.

That being said, its not like anyone has ever come up to me at a town hall and said, you know what, Chinas accession to the WTO was a really bad idea. But they're expressing that in other ways, if that makes sense. The third sort of candidate causal variable, I would suggest, and I'd be curious to get your take, I think I think there's something when Americans see the NBA sort of bending the knee to Xi Jinping or Hollywood.

Or Hollywood or take your pick of the most egregious example of this fealty paid to the Chinese for fear of losing market access, I almost think it, offends people in America. Maybe it gets a little bit at the Jacksonian impulse in America. People look at that and say, we just look, look weak.

I hate that. How do we let this country get this much leverage over us? Does that make sense at all?

>> Bill Whalen: So, congressman, you've said you wanna have Adam Silver appear before your committee. You've said you wanna have Bob Iger appear from the committee. What do you wanna hear from the CEO of Disney?

And what do you wanna hear from the commissioner of the NBA?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I just would like them to talk honestly about the trade offs that they're having to make. And I'd like to ask them some tough questions about, how do they still even consider themselves an American company in any meaningful sense?

And when it comes to making a decision to censor a movie, to have a more friendly storyline or so as not to offend the CCP, or to muzzle an NBA executive because he tweeted out something supportive of.

>> H. R. McMaster: Or to fire Innis freedom?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Yeah, how was that decision made?

Did you consider the negative impacts on your own brand? Did you consider the negative impacts on American values? Maybe I'm overstating that. So I don't want to suggest they're gonna come into some bomb throwing committee spectacle. I get that this is very complicated. I want to engage them.

And if they have a coherent counterargument, I'm more than happy to entertain it. But I think it's helpful for them to hear from the representatives of the American people that this upsets a lot of people. There are serious concerns with the way these companies and industries have behaved.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: But once we get to the economics, I'm very worried that we're doing something very counterproductive here. We've talked about the parallel before to cutting off Japanese oil supplies in the late 1930s. Suppose we successfully disengage and reshore cut China off from the rest of the world. So it's on its own?

Well, then it has to develop its own industry, and then it has much less to lose. Isn't our goal, we are not yet fighting the war. I thought our long run goal was to engage China, to have it a fully engaged, properly behaving part of the world economy.

It's still very poor, still has a long way to go. If they see that they have nothing to lose economically by grabbing Taiwan, as opposed to there's this wonderful pinata of stuff from engagement with the rest of the world. I think that there's a carrot as well as the stick.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: John we tried it. We get huge carrots, man. And I think we do Taiwan yet. Sometimes in life you're disappointed, man. I mean, we tried it, and.

>> John H. Cochrane: And sometimes what you're trying to do has the opposite effect of what you want. Cutting off Taiwan right now, may make them more likely to do things you don't wanna do.

Starting the war when you don't have to start it is all.

>> H. R. McMaster: John, listen, man, I mean, okay, this goes back to Nial's question, too. Why aren't we Americans, we're accommodating to the party. Hey, the reason is Xi Jinping, man, and what he's doing. I mean, how about extinguishing human freedom in his country?

How about genocide? How about millions of people in concentration camps and rectification camps and re education? How about extinguishing human freedom in Hong Kong? How about Jimmy Lai sitting in a jail right now, along with lots of other political prisoners?

>> John H. Cochrane: Right.

>> H. R. McMaster: And then how about saying, hey, man, I own the ocean in the South China Sea, the area through which one third of the worlds surface trade flows?

How about the threats to Taiwan, or Japan, or South Korea, for that matter? How about bludgeoning Indian source to death on the Himalayan frontier? How about a sustained campaign of additional espionage against us? How about foisting Covid on the world and then adding insult to injury? So I'm just saying we keep blaming ourselves, we don't wanna.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: No, no, no.

>> H. R. McMaster: We might start a war with China by being, competitive with them instead of rolling over.

>> John H. Cochrane: They need to see the carrot of engagement with us so that we can talk about all these issues and make progress on these issues. Once it's a war, once it's a shooting war.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: But there can be sticks in terms of altering their habit. Look what the party's doing now. They're saying, we really will never crack down on the tech sector again, we promise. I mean, they're desperate to track back in the investors they scared away with their own action with the crackdown on the tech sector.

It's all lies, it's all bullshit. But US investors, they're gonna do what they always do. They'll send more money to China because they read it in the Wall Street Journal that China's not gonna crack down the tech sector anymore. That capital, I believe, was gonna get stranded. I mean, I really think we're into a situation where, as Nial said from the beginning, Xi Jinping does not make decisions like we would.

We have to stop mirror imaging him. He's driven by fear of losing control. He's driven by this aspiration in his mind and his warped view of history. Do you ever see drunk history? The show drunk history? It's worthwhile. It's pretty humorous, Xi Jinping, it's like a version of drunk history where all the ills of the Chinese people were caused during the century of humiliation.

Hey, man, the Chinese communist party, as Frank decoder, caused the ills for them. So I think.

>> John H. Cochrane: We have our own drunk history these days.

>> H. R. McMaster: I think that we can't be self referential here, and we have to recognize that to be tough, right? All we've had over the years is carrots and baby carrots.

We need to have some sticks too if we want China to conclude. And we asked about the objective, right, Mike? I think the objective is the Chinese Communist Party's leaders at some point based on our return to competitive arenas, recognized. Hey, I can have enough of my dream, enough of national rejuvenation without pursuing it at everyone else's expense or at the freedom of their own people.

And so maybe that'll happen at some point in the future, but certainly if we continue to just cooperation and accommodation, that's not gonna happen, coz we know what that spurred. It spurred the militarization of the South China Sea. It spurred all the economic aggression against us.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Could I test a working hypothesis against this group?

And I say this, I agree with what Nial said earlier about Xi Jinping looking at Taiwan as his legacy issue.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: But I wonder, one of the argument I've heard from the neo engagement crowd is that this is just a Xi Jinping problem. As soon as he goes away, we can go back to the status quo anti, I don't know if that's like status quo anti Trump or where that begins.

I don't think that's true. I think this is more than just a Xi Jinping problem and maybe there's a little bit of recency bias. I just read Alex Joske's or I read it a while ago, reread Alex Joske's book about how the peaceful rise narrative. He sort of argues was a deliberate espionage and covert action campaign to sort of convince a lot of our elites about the.

Spies and lies.

>> H. R. McMaster: Great book I saw your blurb on the COVID Mike. Excellent book, yeah, excellent book.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: So, I don't know. I mean, am I wrong in thinking that this is more than a Xi jinping problem, that there's something embedded in the party's DNA, such as it exists, that leads it to a more confrontational approach?

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Okay, Nial and John, you go first, and then I have a story about this. You guys go first.

>> Niall Ferguson: I mean, I'm not gonna pretend to be a China expert, but I try and talk to people who are. I think there's a obviously more than one faction in the CCP.

And although she's entirely dominant now, as the Congress made clear, it's also true that those people who favored engagement and economic. Liberalization, they're still around and they're not happy. And the disgruntlement at the high level, not just amongst students at Tsinghua, must have been a part of the reason for the abandonment of zero covids.

I don't think it's right to think of the CCP as just lots and lots and lots of little Xi Jinpings in this sort of enormous pyramid with him at the top. It's conceivable that a change of leadership down the line, which inevitably will come, would have some significant policy implications.

I think there's also a generational point to be made here. My friend Li Dao Kui once said to me when I was visiting at Tsinghua, everything in China is intelligible in terms of generations and the generation that's now coming to power. This was shortly after Xi Jinping had ascended to the presidency, was entirely shaped by the cultural revolution, and that is their kind of point of reference.

Their nightmare is a kind of resurgence of Dong Lan, of chaos, but they also have this sense that there were aspects of Maoism that were admirable. The next generation will definitely not think that way, and so I don't think we should assume that China's completely set on a course.

I also take myself back ten years or thereabouts, when I was making a television series about China just as Xi Jinping, Washington emerging as the dominant player. And it was very striking to me then how big a change this likely represented. So I don't think we should assume that there is a kind of inevitable continuity and the next Chinese leaders will have similar goals.

Cuz I don't think that's borne out by the long run of Chinese history or the recent past, John.

>> John H. Cochrane: I would speculate that Taiwan is gonna always be a problem because it just represents the alternative is there for all to see, how can the CCP stay in power as an autocratic communist regime?

And you have the evidence right there. Here's what could happen, here are people who are Chinese just like you, living free, liberal democracy, living much better there, that GDP is much better, they're much more productive. You could have this, here is what you would look like if the nationalists had won the civil war.

That has got to be just a perpetual thorn in the side of anything that's gonna be a CCP until they give up and look more like Taiwan. So I don't see how they can avoid, like, what they did with Hong Kong, let it sit for a while, but then gradually strangle it has to be their long run strategy.

Unless, you know, someday, as soon as we, we all like the Soviet Union, as soon as we all think it's inevitable and it'll last forever, boom, eventually it has to go. But it just is such a piece of evidence against their fundamental value that I don't see how they can let it sit like this forever.

>> Niall Ferguson: Hey, John, let's hear the story.

>> H. R. McMaster: Hey, okay, all right. Hey, first of all, I want to congratulate Mike, too, because I just think the title of the, of the committee's right. You said the CCP. The CCP does not mean the Chinese people, and to get the point that John made, hey, we don't want China to fail, right?

We want the CCP to fail in its designs, which they would carry out at our, at our expense.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I asked for that edit HR for that reason.

>> John H. Cochrane: For you.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: And I think in the floor debate, it allowed me, cuz a lot of my democratic, I didn't mean to interrupt, but there's an interesting point.

A lot of my democratic colleagues are attacking the committee because it's going to fuel anti-Asian hate or whatever, I think that's the argument. But making that constant distinction between the party and the people and Chinese-Americans who are subject to coercion, absolutely, I think is a critical task. Sorry to jump in there.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, it absolutely is a critical task. And so, hey, this is our last day of a long day of meetings in the great hall of the people with President Trump, right? And he got grouchy, man, but at the end of the day, he hated long meetings like that anyway, but he's like, why are we doing this meeting?

And it was with Lee Kishong, the premier, who's the titular head of state, right? So this is theater to kind of go along with this idea that Lee Kishong, rather than Xi Jinping. Anyway, so long table both delegations on each side, and I'll just tell you, Lee Kishong, start with this long soliloquy in which he basically said, hey, we don't need you anymore.

We are in a position of power relative to you now, and here's what the future looks like. The future looks like we lead in everything in technology, in advanced manufacturing and, hey, if you're lucky, you can sell us agricultural products and raw materials, maybe some oil, natural gas.

Hows that sound? I mean, that was the thrust of it, so I think to your question of what's changed? Part of what's changed is they believed that they were in a position of tremendous advantage over us, not only economically. But if you look at Chinese news every day, they're probably believing their own propaganda, Chinese news every day is how great the party is and what the party has done for you, how great Xi Jinping is and what Xi Jinping has done for you?

And how screwed up the free world is, especially the United States, right? And so when they looked at us from the outside, our democracies, messy, right? Look at all the traumas we've been through in recent years, they thought, hey, these guys are over. And if you want more evidence of it, just read the joint statement with Xi Jinping and Putin prior to the Olympics, they laid it out.

The message is, hey, you're done, you're over, we're in charge now, get used to it. And I think that's what's different, but the design was always in place. We mentioned Josky's book, but hey, also, Rush Doshi, who's in the administration, wrote the book the Long Game,. Which also, that's the whole thesis of the book, is, hey, this is always what they wanted to do.

And Frank Decoder's last volume of his four volume study of the party is also great on this topic.

>> Bill Whalen: We have a few minutes left on the show, Congressman, before you leave, I'd like to get your thoughts on the current Washington scandal to share, and that is the issue of classified documents.

I trust nothing behind you as a classified document, I trust nothing behind HR as a classified document. But can you give us your sense, congressman, of what's going on here, what reforms you think need to be made? And HR, maybe you'd like to give us a story about how you dealt with classified documents when you're at the NSC?

 

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, if the door of my basement is locked, does that turn it into a skiff compartment information facility? Listen, this is, I mean, I was a former counterintelligence officer, so the idea that these documents are being handled this recklessly is crazy to me. I don't know, maybe it's just different at the White House HR, just because I don't know how it works with classified documents there.

I mean, cuz presumably you can bring them into the president's office, but usually a classified document doesn't leave a skiff. And then for Biden to downplay it and say, hey, don't worry, my corvette was locked in my garage, I take this very seriously, is laughable. So we've requested a battle damage assessment, effectively from the DNI that hopefully we're gonna get next week, when we're back, to understand what was in these documents.

Could they have potentially endangered sources and methods? I don't know. But I said on TV this morning this should actually be a wake up call to Congress on a slightly related issue. Which is that we're a target for so called FIS, foreign intelligence and security services, the CCP's intelligence entities foremost among them.

And we all get a clearance as soon as we're elected with no background investigation. Everybody, George Santos included, gets a tour, a top secret clearance, There's no coherent brief on here's what you need to do to make yourself a hard target. I mean, two factor authentication, just the basic thing, so we all need to wake up to the fact that we're targets for foreign intelligence collection and we just don't have that culture on the hill right now.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, when I was national security advisor, there was a process in place, right? And the NSC staff, the professionals that are there, know how to run that process in connection with what documents, the presidencies in particular. And everything that goes in is logged in, and then it gets logged out.

Anything the President touches is supposed to then be preserved for the National Archives and eventually maybe a presidential library. I don't know what happened after I left in 2018. I just can't even imagine how those documents got Mar-a-Lago in the case of President Trump, or how these documents get to the vice president's garage.

How does that happen? I'm not sure how that happens. So I think the investigation will show some of these vulnerabilities. But I'll tell you, Congressman Gallagher, you're so right about the lack of training for people who come in and get a clearance for the first time and inadequate procedures, I think.

The other thing is, this is something maybe you could work on, is a revision of the Presidential Records Act, that allows you to use encryption apps. So all my phone calls I had to do, just in the clear, I could never use signal, could never use WhatsApp. Now, some people probably did a violation, but I didn't do that.

I went to a classified line, if it was classified, never spoke about anything classified on the unclassed line. But on some things that are just mildly sensitive, I mean, it might be good to be able to come up with a way to use encryption, but then also preserve it.

And I don't know if there's an app that signal or something could create that would allow us to do that, but that's something maybe to work on.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Talk about a niche issue that no one else is running with, we can own that one, on this election.

>> Niall Ferguson: This brings us back to Cold War two because I think what people don't fully grasp, and it needs to be said again and again, is that this is a tougher cold war than Cold War one.

Not only is the Chinese economy much, much bigger than the Soviet economy ever was, but the level of penetration of our institutions is far higher. The number of Soviet spies was always finite, and we kinda knew who they were. We have only just begun to understand the scale of the penetration by the Chinese intelligence agencies.

And when we fully take account of that, we're gonna realize how much harder this cold war is gonna be to win. I really want us to emphasize that, cuz it sounds niche to talk about, how do we have encrypted calls in government, or how do we get people in Congress to use two-factor authentication?

It is a massive, massive issue, most people remember the Cold War these days, the first Cold War in terms of James Bond, right? It's about a fairly glamorous world of espionage, but when you look back on that, you almost feel nostalgia because the KGB was such a definable target.

I just don't know the scale of the problem we confront now, and TikTok, which we barely touched on. But I know it's a big issue for you, Congressman, is part of the story cuz they're able to gain intelligence in entirely novel ways, just by getting the data of American teenagers in a vast, vast quantity.

So I can't emphasize enough, Cold War two is gonna be harder to win than Cold War one. Indeed, we could lose it, and we've got to focus on that scenario.

>> John H. Cochrane: I think we're missing the point here. So there's two points here, one is how much actual espionage are China and Russia getting out of the folders stuck in boxes next to Joe Biden's Corvette?

Not much, this is not what the story tells us. What it tells the average American, like me is that every White House is completely chaotic and fairly incompetent. And that includes Hillary Clinton's laptop, that includes Trump's Mar-a-Lago stuff, and now Joe Biden's Corvette. Second, but what it tells us, what is this doing with special prosecutor investigations?

This is pull you over because you have a light out kind of stuff, judicially. This is part of our going after partisan politics through the judicial system, which needs to stop. And then again I'm kind of grateful to Joe Biden. Trump now gets to get a get out of jail free card and there's no way they can prosecute him legally for his stuff when Joe Biden.

Yeah, they're gonna go, Biden's wasn't as bad and so forth. But we really need to get out of partisan politics through special prosecutors impeachments come on, really relatively minor stuff in the big issue. Now, that issue, I think, is really where the Joe Biden thing goes. Let's turn it back to the other issue, the real issue that Naill, which is not about presidential paper documents in the wrong place, but about the espionage.

And we started with TikTok, maybe we can end with TikTok. I don't understand what is, maybe you can make this precise for us. Where is the great threat to national security if a media company takes, what, 12 year olds watching videos on TikTok and knows where they are and what they wanna buy, what is exactly the danger that comes out of this?

>> Bill Whalen: And if I could add to that, Congressman, you've called TikTok digital fentanyl, is it really analogous to a lethal drug?

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: I saw that analogy from FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, and I think it's apposite in the sense that it's highly addictive, if not deadly. If you factor in anxiety, depression, and suicide, and ultimately can be traced back to China, obviously, the precursors of fentanyl are traced back to China.

And TikTok is owned by ByteDance, ByteDance is a Chinese company that's effectively controlled by the CCP. So for that, I think it's a useful.

>> John H. Cochrane: Wait, can we stop on that one? So I'm old enough to remember comic books are terrible, they're rotting the minds of American children, we need to get them off of comic books.

It's not obvious that playing with, this is a separate issue, where they're playing with social, with-

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: People don't get the news from comic books. And young Americans increasingly get the news from TikTok. I bet you comic books could not track your location, TikTok can track your location.

They lied about it, and now there's a report from Forbes last week that suggested they were tracking the location of journalists cuz journalists were writing negative stories about TikTok. It's as if in 58, we let proved on the KGB by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the New York Times.

That probably understates the threat posed by allowing TikTok to become the most dominant media company in America. It creates a massive platform for CCP propaganda-

>> John H. Cochrane: We're America, we're competition, there's multiple sources.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: And they can sell it to an American company. The concept of a private company, it does not exist in China in the same way it exists in America, and that basic ownership structure makes it problematic.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: They must act by law as an arm of the government. And now I think if you place it in context, you'll look at the other broad range of united front work department work that goes on. Including, now, as we know, opening clandestine police stations in the United States to police the Chinese diaspora.

So they're gonna track their locations through TikTok, they're gonna turn off TikTok.

>> John H. Cochrane: If I'm a journalist and I don't wanna be tracked, I turn off TikTok, that's not hard. 99% of the users, TikTok or teenagers who are watching videos of dogs. How bad is a national security risk if the CCP knows that a teenager went down a Burger King to watch a video of dogs on it?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I wrote a column on this quite a while ago now, which agrees with Congressman Gallagher. And I started out, John, thinking just the way you think. And then I started to do my homework. And the first thing I did was to ask my son, who's now 11, to talk to me about TikTok and show me how it worked.

And once you start seeing the world from that vantage point, from the vantage point of an American kid, you realize that it's very insidious. I have a confession to make, my part in America's downfall, the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was in my class at Harvard Business School.

He came fourth in the section. Extraordinarily talented student and you have to hand it to them. They ate Facebook's lunch. They ate, basically ate American social media companies lunch. But you're right, congressman. It is a deeply dangerous thing that all that data is being made available. It certainly is available to the CCP, and we can't be complacent about it.

And the analogy with fentanyl is not, I think, overdone. We aren't really, and this is a subject for another show one day, we aren't really taking seriously enough the mental health epidemic amongst young Americans. 25% of girls aged between eleven and 17 suffer from serious depression. 25%, Jonathan Haight told me that just the other day.

We're kinda old, unlike Congressman Gallacher, the GoodFellows are nothing. Spring chickens. Well, okay, age two is catching up with you, but you're still fresh faced by comparison with the grizzled old me. It's very hard for us to fully understand, John, what it's like to be an American teenager online all the time with these extraordinarily addictive apps.

And the fact that the most successful one is essentially Chinese controlled. That should scare us more than it's scaring you.

>> H. R. McMaster: And, hey, will you say Nial and Mike, just also to get to John's question, why should we worry about it? Can you talk a little more about algorithms bias and what the concern is there?

 

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, one of the things that I think was Forbes again revealed recently is that TikTok was sort of deprioritizing, via algorithmic bias or algorithmic interference, certain videos related to voting around the election. So we talk about all the concern with Russian meddling in our election in 2016.

The app provides a platform for the CCP to meddle in our own election simply by manipulating the algorithm. There was another report that Brennan Carr highlighted, where, and correct me if I mangled this, but basically, they intensified certain videos, or promoted certain videos, relate. If for young women that had interest in eating disorders or things like that, and in some ways intensified the anxiety that Nial is citing there.

So and I think it's all bound up in the lack of transparency around the algorithm itself. Algorithmic opacity is one of the concerns with TikTok. So completely endorse everything Nial said about the good work that Jonathan Haidt has done. I think coddling in the American mind is really one of the best books of the last decade.

>> John H. Cochrane: You guys are on the larger issue of this tech and what it has done to mental health kids, which I entirely agree with. But remember, that was Facebook, then it was Snapchat, then it was WhatsApp, then it was YouTube videos, then it was TikTok. I'll bet you guys a nice beer or whiskey in Nial's case that three years from now, the teenagers will be onto something else.

And TikTok will be in Facebook's position of saying, my gosh, only people over 30 currently use me on my user's way on the way down. No tech platform lasts that long. Even Twitter's on its way out already. So competition will work.

>> Bill Whalen: So, Congressman Gallagher, we had a rather spirited conversation here on GoodFellows last month about the merits of soccer v football, or football versus football, if you will.

Nial Ferguson, defending the World Cup. HR McMaster, kind of in a little disdain over what soccer is all about. We Americans have a hard time getting excited about zero zero shootouts, if you will. But I thought maybe there's a chance for you as a resident, Wisconsin and cheese head, to explain the Nial, the virtues, the wonders of being able to watch playoff football here in America for the next month.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Well, it loses some of its beauty when the green and gold aren't playing.

>> Congressman Mike Gallagher: Okay, currently down on football, but soccer I don't even recognize as a sport. In fact, I think we hosted, Munich versus some other team at Lambo this year. I didn't go, I was offended that those cleats were allowed to touch the hallowed ground of Lambeau Field.

>> Niall Ferguson: Those of us who watched the World cup were privileged to see one of the greatest sporting events of all time, the World cup final between Argentina and France. So I kinda rest my case. I don't even need to. I don't need to have this argument. I think Lionel Messi won it for me.

>> Bill Whalen: That's it for this episode of GoodFellows. On behalf of my colleagues, Nial Ferguson, John Cochrane, HR McMaster, our very special guest today, Congressman Mike Gallagher. We'd like to thank you for joining us. We'll be back again in about two weeks or so. It'll be our 100th episode of GoodFellow, so you don't wanna miss that.

So again, thanks for watching today, and we will see you very soon. Take care.

>> Speaker 8: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch battlegrounds. Also available@hoover.org.