We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today
we are joined by Michael Sobolek. He is the author of the new book
Countering China's Great Game. He also wrote an article recently for Foreign Policy that
I've found fascinating. It's called She's Imperial Ambitions are rooted in China's history.
Michael is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. Thanks so much
for joining us. Michael, Hey, Emily, thanks so much for having
me. This is a real pleasure. Yeah. Of course. One question
it's occurring to me right now that I've never asked you, in particular,
is how on earth did you end up specializing in China? Michael by accident,
So tell us the story. Yeah, okay, So this takes us
back to twenty ten, and I was an undergrad in my penultimate semester at
Texas A and M University, and I got into this internship, this fully
funded internship abroad program through A and M. And I was originally angling to
go to London because it was my first time to ever leave America and I
thought, you know, like Britain feels like a really safe foray into foreign
travel for me. But like long story short, London didn't work out and
I had to pick a new country, and on the advice of my dad,
I knowing nothing about foreign policy at the time, just checked the box
next to China, and just on a whim, went to China the first
time I traveled internationally, and it was absolutely incredible. We we live with
some host families. We stay there for about five weeks, did a whole
bunch of traveling, had really great conversations with young students, young folks there
as well, and I left even before I really had a deep appreciation for
the national security dynamics between Washington and Beijing. I got to see China for
what it was culturally, civilizationally, and just to kind of see the people
up close at a time when China was a bit more open than it is
today. In twenty twenty four, and I left with this deep fascination of
this country that I haven't really been able to shake since then. So the
time period there is particularly interesting. This is, you know, ten years
into wto the Obama. I don't know what we would call it. Would
you call it a thaw? Michael, tell us about what you saw when
you were there? Oh, my word? Okay. So when I was
there, there was this one overnight train that we were on. So we
spend most of our time in Chian, which is an old one of the
former capitals and past dynasties in China's history, and we were traveling a lot
inside of the province and there was this one night, and it must have
been around midnight or one o'clock in the morning or something. On this overnight
train in the middle of China, I brought my Bible with me from America
and I opened it and just started reading. And a lot of the students
that were traveling with us, there were Chinese university students, and they were
also aspiring members of the Chinese Communist Party. And as many of your listeners
will know, the CCP is a decidedly atheistic organization. So when they noticed
me reading a Bible openly, and of course they saw I was an American.
They had a lot of questions, and we had this really frank,
open conversation about religion and Christianity in the middle of China and this overnight train.
And I don't really know that those kind of interactions would happen today.
I think the risk the risks involved are certainly higher today than they were back
then. And in some ways you're right, like the relationship between Washington and
Beijing was a lot friendlier at that time. Part of that was because of
the policies that the Obama administration was implementing and pursuing. I think I agree
with you on that they certainly tried to embrace and engage Beijing whenever and wherever
they could. I think that was a strategic mistake. But as we've seen
over time, the relationship has grown quite a bit more confrontational, particularly after
COVID, and here we are today with more and more people talking about us
being in a cold war. Yeah. Absolutely, And what I thought was
especially helpful about the Foreign Policy article, which I know is much discussed,
a topic much discussed in the book, again, countering China's Great Game is
the history and obviously people know about how trying to looks at its own history
and ways that are often different from the West's perspective on its own history.
But can you talk to us about the legacy of imperialism that Shei Jinping is
drawing on, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about how she
Jinping is drawing on the legacy. But just if you could tell us a
little bit of the history itself, that would be super helpful. Yeah.
So, this book that you've graciously mentioned a few times, Counter in China's
Great Game, is the first book I've ever written, and part of the
book release process I discovered along the way was strategically trying to get the most
either interesting or the most controversial portions of your book published as excerpts. And
I thought to myself, what what are some of the more controversial claims I
make in the book and at least in the China sphere. So for those
for your listeners who are following the China debate very closely, I think this
will make intuitive sense to them. For those who are not, just to
just bear with me for a second. So the article in Foreign Policy that
you just mentioned about Shijiping's imperial ambitions in the history of China's foreign policy.
In that article, I make a really simple argument. A lot of American
policy makers and China experts in Washington kind of assume that China's history started in
nineteen forty nine when Mao Zeidong established the People's Republic of China. Now,
something that I think is widely agreed upon bipartisan lely, and I think it's
a good thing, is that American policy makers need to focus on the Chinese
Communist Party and not lump the Chinese people into this cold war that we're in.
The Chinese people suffer under the CCP every single day, and it doesn't
make strategic or even moral sense for America to target the Chinese people as the
object of our competition. But I think that we are at risk of missing
a really important strategic reality if we just focus on the CCP. When you
are locked in a cold war with an adversary, one of the biggest things
you need is data about your competitor. You need to understand not only what
they're doing in the world, but why they're doing it, what makes them
tick, how they view themselves, how they view themselves cosmically like what's their
strategic culture? And we grappled with all these questions with the Soviets during the
First Cold War. And one of the biggest benefits that the United States has
right now is that we have more data on China than they have on us.
And the reason for that is so simple. The United States is a
very young nation historically speaking, but China is this ancient civilization and culture that
predates by millennia the establishment of modern China today, the People's Republic of China.
So in this book and in that article from Foreign Policy, I basically
ask, if you study the dynastic era of China's history, what can you
learn about China's foreign policy and what can you learn about how that relates to
what Hijinping and the Chinese Communist Party is doing today. And the answer that
I came to is really simple, and it's China has been an imperialist power
for a very long time. We talk about Russia as an imperialist power a
lot in the United States, and I think that's well earned on Vladimir Putin's
part, but I also think that Xijingping and the CCP is an imperialist power
as well, and I think that we tend to downplay China's colonial foreign policy.
But if you look historically, like from the first Chinese dynasty to the
last one, China expanded by like a factor of four, which is crazy,
and a lot of that expansion was due to wars of offense. So
when we look at what China is doing today, and it's foreign policy with
the Belton Road Initiative and other key projects, it's the outworking of this long
urge and ambition that China has had for millennia to expand its cultural, civilizational,
and political influence in an ever more increasing measure. So when we look
at the bri the Belton Road Initiative, I think it's a mistake to look
at it primarily as an economic venture. It's really a strategic gambit, and
you cannot understand it apart from imperialism and colonialism. Yeah, as you were
talking, I was thinking about either the early stages of the Cold War and
how some people will go back one of my biggest scripes with the left right
now, we can maybe agree myself and someone on the left can maybe agree
on the folly of let's say Alan Dallas or whatever else and different coups.
And again the threat though was very real because Soviets repeatedly said that they had
international ambitions and that they did want to spread global communism around the world.
And they also happened to have nuclear capabilities or we're in the process of developing
nuclear capabilities that were greater than ours or rivaled ours. And some people will
look at this and say Steed and Pang is just trying to do socialism with
Chinese characteristics. As he says it, this is just about making the world
a better place, and the Chinese just have a different philosophy on how to
do it. Why is that sort of dubbish argument wrong? Michael, Yeah,
so, I mean at a really abstract level, like sure, of
course the CCP views the world differently than the United States does. That doesn't
make it inherently okay or inherently good. If you look at number one,
like the rhetoric of the CCP and of Xijingping, they tend to be I
think, a bit more clever than the Soviets were, because Sijingping does know
how to mask the China's ambition to make it more palatable to Western audiences,
like for instance, the Belton Road initiative was originally called the One Belt,
One Road initiative, which is a very declarative, declaritative moniker for a project,
like saying there is one road and there was one path that the whole
world is going to take under China's leadership. Once eventually the powers that be
in Beijing realized that this wasn't going over too well in Washington and in parts
of Europe. They rebranded to the more boring sounding Belton Road Initiative. So
I do think that the CCP is aware of how they are perceived by the
United States, and they've they've they tend to be pretty good at rebranding whenever
they need to. But if you look at the Belton Road Initiative initially,
when a lot of Western analysts are trying to understand, like what is this
thing, there were a lot of comparisons to the Marshall Plan. So that
was America's efforts after World War two to rebuild Western Europe from the rubble,
from the ruins of warfare with the Nazis and the Soviets, and there was
kind of this grasp of trying to understand like Iseshijing Ping trying to do something
like that is this his effort to try to bring the global South like more
directly and fully into the developing world infrastructure projects, development, That's all part
of what China is doing, and it's I think it's easy for a lot
of folks who tend to be sympathetic of China or just kind of dubvish and
general, it's easy for them to look at and look at that and say,
well, how can you criticize that? I mean, China is doing
what the United States and a lot of Western countries has failed to do up
until now, which is really bring the spoils of globalization to the global South
and like bring wealth and prosperity there. I think that's that's a shallow critique.
But like if for for most of all reasons, that is not China's
primary aim at all, Like they are not funding projects that are sustainable in
any way, shape or form. Like the goal of sustainable sustainable development is
for local peoples and local economies to continue the development after the host party withdraws
and leaves, like that is the goal of US foreign aid on our best
days. But the CCP isn't even trying to do that, Like Chinese workers
are the ones who are building out these BRI projects, and that economic benefit
gets shipped back to China, and the locally, to mees often don't rebound
the benefits as they should. The reason for that is the BRIS primarily a
strategic and an increasingly militaristic gambit for Shijing, being to expand China's political and
military presence and influence around the world. They're doing this in cooperation with local
elites at the expense of the local peoples. That to me is pretty colonial,
not in the sense of they're trying to like actually have sovereign control,
not in that sense, but in a political sense. I do think it
is quite colonial, and it is quite exploitative as well. And if you
look at the Pacific Islands, in Southeast Asia, in Africa and the Middle
East, and in our own hemisphere in Latin America, this is a global
reality. Like China is using the Belton Road to expand its military influence and
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Zapmidebt dot com. You know another interesting parallel, like nobody would say that
the United States didn't have you know, some military ambitions or even like NATO
whatever in the aftermath of World War Two, But you know you're writing about
the history and Sijon Paning still you know puts if I'm mistaken, correct me,
Michael, But there are even additional portraits of like mouth that are we
putting up around China. And now sort of borrowing from Marx and Hegel,
how deep is shejen Ping from your perspective and with all your expertise here,
Michael, and that kind of idea of material dialectical materialism, meaning that he
sees the world as this sort of struggle towards an end, but that sort
of the means even from his perspective, and this was how Stalin and Trotsky
and Lenin saw the world. The means to that end, we're going to
necessarily be violent and painful and difficult. Is Sijin Ping in that camp?
So I cannot recommend enough a book by one of my friends named Ian Easton.
In the book is called The Final Struggle, and Ian makes the case,
I think, quite convincingly and quite chillingly that Shijingping is kind of a
true believer ideologically on this stuff. Hijingping thought is the touchstone of ideological legitimacy
inside of the People's Republic of China today. It's highly informed by Marxism,
Leninism, it's highly informed by Mao Zedong, and it is the official ideological
line of the Chinese Communist Party. And I think a lot of policy eggheads
in Washington have downplayed ideological concerns about our adversaries for a really long time.
I think eventually, you've got to start listening to your competitors on their own
terms. And when you listen to Shijingping, he has his worldview and it
is quite unlike ours. And I think if we are to ignore that,
we are to make ourselves vulnerable, and we're going to we are to make
his own the likelihood of him achieving his ambitions higher. Like when you do
not respect your adversary enough to take them seriously, that's not a sign of
strategic maturity, that's a sign of strategic hubris. And I think America has
been tempting those fates for a really long time. And I think this is
the one of the really interesting things that I encountered writing this book. The
ideological layer is real in the CCP today, is real under the leadership of
Shijingping, Like the economic tech competition between Washington and Beijing is very real today.
And writing this book, I became more and more convinced that even if
you understand the ideological threats coming from the CCP, even if you get like
the techno authoritarian threats coming from the CCP, the the imperialist angle is really
useful, I think for policy makers, mainly because imperialism is historically a really
bad foreign policy for big nations to pursue because it tends to be self defeating
over time. And I think that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party today
are engaged in some strategically self defeating behavior and if we, if we are
able to identify what that behavior is, we can begin to exploit it and
force them to compete on strategically weak terrain. And that's one of the biggest
goals of the book. So do you think that's what student paying When we
see these harrowing images, for example, of lithium being mined in the Congo,
or various minerals being mined in just awful conditions in different parts of the
world, for you know, by Chinese contractors or wherever the however the business
arrangements are sometimes just Chinese companies, and whatever the business arrangements are, does
that fit into that sort of Marxist idea of the march of history. And
is that what Tjimping is envisioning when he's sort of plundering the resources of Africa
or China of Africa or South America. Yeah. Sure. So with that
big focus on resources like China and the CCP in particular, I think that
they have identified something that I believe they would characterize as the excesses of capitalism
and the excesses of the West. So their gambit from day one when the
United States started economically and diplomatically engaging the People's Republic of China was these people
talk a big game about freedom. They talk a big game about liberty.
We think it's all a facade. We think we can buy these guys off,
and as long as we pay, they're going to pay lip service to
their ideals about liberty, and they are going to be more than happy to
make a buck off of tyranny. That was the gambit that Dunkshall Ping and
all of his predecessors from Jungsmen, Hujintao and now Shi Jinping have made and
they've been largely correct. Like one of the biggest reasons China has been able
to corner these strategic supply chains, whether it's critical like rare earth minerals like
you just mentioned, Emily, or the supply chains for personal protective equipment,
or for solar panels, or for electric car batteries or for like pick your
category. Essentially, they are doing this out in the open, and everybody
has known that they've been doing it for a very long time. Western companies
and American companies have enabled them to to do this, and they've profited from
China cornering these strategic supply chains. It has made consumer prices insanely low for
decades, like the American people and just you know, everyone in the developing
world benefits from the cheap prices that we pay at Amazon, Walmart in all
these places. Like the level of global prosperity in the context of like human
history today is staggering. That is staggering, and a lot of that,
not all of it, but a whole bunch of it has happened because of
our willingness to allow a Marxist Leninist regime to control global supply chains and a
lot of key industries. And I do think that Shijinping sees that as an
indictment on Western political thought and as a validation of his ideological perspective. And
as long as we don't take serious steps to counter this reality into chaint it's
going to continue to be a huge problem. And one day we're going to
wake up and realize that it's not just a problem, it's a crisis.
What are the I mean? Obviously we've talked on this podcast many times about
the Taiwan situation and how that can evolve into a very immediate threat. We've
talked about that in the context of TikTok, But Michael, what are the
kind of long term threats here? To the average American who says, you
know, maybe just let China live and let live with China, and you
know, let's focus on the problems within our own borders at this point.
What can what could happen, you know, down the road. So maybe
a good starting point is that that sensibility of I hear a lot of people
talking about how dangerous the Chinese Communist Party is, but like, look at
the southern border, Look how dangerous our own homeland security situation is. Like
I really understand that perspective, and I think it's easy if you look at
just cable news or even just social media at some of the mistakes that American
policy makers have made here at home. I think that that maybe like gut
check of distrust of American elites talking about problems abroad like when we do certainly
have our own problems at home, that makes sense. And I think that
the best way to answer that question is to basically say, the Chinese Communist
Party is talked about a lot as a global threat, and it is,
I certainly believe it is. But maybe the best starting point is to recognize
all of the ways that the CCP is a threat inside of America, and
the ways that the Chinese Communist Party have infiltrated our own homeland are inexorably connected
to their global conditions. So what do I mean by that mentioned TikTok Emily
a couple seconds ago? And this is I think the best and also the
most pernicious example of what Beijing is doing. TikTok is a threat today.
It is not a hypothetical threat. It is a real threat to the United
States of America today. About one hundred and seventy million Americans are on this
app monthly. That's like about half of our country. And more and more
young Americans are turning to TikTok as a source of news. Now, forget
what TikTok is saying right now in all of its pr and its litigation in
the courts. They are wrong when they say that the concerns about their app
are about speech. That is absolutely incorrect. The United States Congress recently legislated
on TikTok, not because we're worried about the content on the app. Policymakers
in Washington are earned about TikTok's parent company that is controlled by the Chinese Communist
Party, and TikTok can obfuscate that reality all they want, but it is
impossible to disprove Bite Dance TikTok's parent companies domiciled in China. There have been
instances documented instances of TikTok employees being forced to go outside of the official chain
of command and report not just their activities to Bite Dance executives in Beijing,
but to turn over US user data to executives and Bite Dance in Beijing.
In China, there have been instances of TikTok surveiling US journalists to figure out
who inside of the company was leaking there have been instances documented instances of pro
Hamas content being boosted on TikTok in a way that is disproportionate to the demographics
of users on TikTok. The same goes for content being suppressed about wigers to
bet Ins, Taiwan, tinam and Square massacre, and so many other topics
that are deemed sensitive to Beijing. TikTok has been leveraged by the Chinese Communist
Party and the threat to your question of emily about what could happen one day
if the CCP gives the go order to the People's Liberation Army to go after
Taiwan and if TikTok is still operational in America when that happens, you better
believe that Shijinping is going to do everything he possibly can to leverage TikTok,
not only to sway public opinion against intervening to help Taiwan, or to do
anything to isolate or punish China. He is going to leverage it to so
lies and disinformation about what is actually happening or not happening in the Taiwan straight
He's going to do exactly what he did a couple months ago, which is
leverage TikTok users to call Congress and to tell them that half of America opposes
intervening to help Taiwan. This is the threat of TikTok. It is meant
to divide Americans and be the CCP's voice cloaked in American voices. That is
one of the biggest threats that faces that faces our country today. And I
Congress was right to do something about it. Yeah, and you know,
we've we've hosted full debates, full, you know, podcast length debates on
this. But I completely agree with the other Taiwan question that people will people
will die. Probably American lives will be lost because of TikTok if this,
if this happens just because of different confusion, if there's an invasion of Taiwan,
just because of confusion of all those different things, Like if you're war
gaming it, and Michael, maybe you've actually literally done this, maybe you've
actually literally wore gamed this out. But like the reality of minute one of
a Taiwan invasion in a world with CCP control over TikTok, it seems to
me like the hard reality, the hard possibilities are terrifying. Absolutely, they're
chilling they're absolutely chilling, and like, maybe it's helpful to be a little
more direct and explicit about what we're talking about. We're talking about America's greatest
geopolitical and ideological adversary. Maybe we can go a step further and say enemy
having control over one of the most popular social media platforms in the United States.
Like, I'm a parent, My son is only three years old,
but if in the days when he will inevitably become a teenager and eventually gets
on social media, I, as a parent today am really concerned about the
prospect of having my child on an app that is controlled by an adversary of
America. That really can earns me at a guttural level. And I think
it also concerns me because I value our democracy. I value our republican form
of government that is for Americans only, that is not for the Chinese Communist
Party, like ByteDance has no First Amendment rights, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't
have a First Amendment writer for the protection of the US Constitution that is for
Americans. And I want to preserve the integrity of our system. And I
think every every patriotic American wants that, and that is the threat that China
poses, Like if you look at TikTok, if you look at Confucius institutes
and a whole host of other forms of CCP infiltration. Their goal is to
use American voices to advance their own interests in their own propaganda inside of our
homeland. That to me, not only is that a really sophisticated form of
competition, it's really scary and I think that we really need to take that
seriously. And how you know, when we look at literal images of people
from China crossing the border, some of them, by the way, I
think, probably have much more legitimate asylum claims than a lot of the people
coming from Central America, because if they're right that they're Christians or persecuted Chinese
minorities, that fits into the asylum definition more neatly than a lot of economic
migrants claims do. But Michael, it seems so obvious, whether it's you
know, from people that could have connections to literal terrorist groups in the Middle
East or to the CCP as many people from China do that when you have
people pouring over the border, when you have an app like TikTok, there's
something intentional happening. That is akin to what the United States and the Soviet
Union did to each other during the Cold War. But it seems like in
this case we're literally just like, hey, take the reins of NBC News
in nineteen seventy, like whatever it is is in this case, we're so
well completely our guard has been let down. Yeah, there is no excuse
at all for how the Bidenen administration is handling the border. I mean,
it is a dereliction of their duty to protect Americans. And if you look
at how the CCP is leveraging it, there are videos on TikTok about how
to get into this, how to get through the southern border illegally. And
then you layer on top of this China's connection to the cartels in Mexico,
and then you you know the fentanyl inflow, which is just such a deadly
epidemic inside of the United States. And I do think that is also a
strategic gambit on the Party's part, Like there's this multi front effort to weaken
Americans, to weaken us inside of our own borders, And I just find
it so mind boggling that we have political leaders that don't see that for what
it is like the fact that the Biden administration is pursuing a working group with
their senior level CCP counterparts about fentanyl. Forget it. Why in the world
are we pursuing high level dialogues with the very regime that is responsible for this
dangerous drug that has killed so many Americans. We shouldn't be cooperating with them
on this. We should be penalizing and punishing Beijing for their complicity and the
deaths of Americans. It is. It is so backwards to me in so
many ways. One of the things I really loved about the chapter in your
book that's the Foreign policy article is the focus on Kissinger, because there's something
and Kissing you write about. You know how Kissing your studied the history of
China and came to a different conclusion from the one that you came to.
And Kissinger obviously had very deep ties financially to by the time that he passed
away. And it seems to me like some of those realists, and you
talk about how Nixon ended up looking back on all this, on all of
those decisions from his administration, some of those realists were rightfully scarred and terrified
by the Cuban missile crisis, by the day of Pigs, and by some
of these extremely fragile moments. Those are just the more high profile ones,
but the extremely extremely fragile moments in the history of the Cold War. And
see that kind of mutual understanding, or the relationship of mutual understanding, which
by the way, is often very beneficial for wealthy elites who get richer and
rich are off these relationships. And there's some cronyism involved in it, but
it seems to me maybe that's a charitable or maybe that's the best case scenario
to explain why people like kissing your others. Others now that are more dumpish
on this issue. They believe that if we can just foster these economic ties,
if we can have you know, more back and forth with Hollywood and
the Chinese box office, this soft power exchange, these economic exchanges, will
only be a good thing. This will only basically I'm saying, Michael,
or I'm asking, how do we prevent war? It's the typical Cold War
dilemma, but now with China, how do we prevent war without provoking war?
Oh my goodness, So I Emily, I love this question, not
only because it's important, but because you touched on something that I think bears
just a little bit of extra focus. Great power competition and foreign policy is
often discussed in such abstract terms, and I think it's easy to carrene into
cavalier excuse me, and too cavalier rhetoric about national security. But the way
that you just described those, as you put it, those fragile moments during
the Cold War, when we were so perilously close to armageddon, that needs
to pierce the hearts of our policy makers in our generation today, like foreign
policy is not a parlor game. It's real life with real lives on the
line, and I think that can be so easily overlooked and forgotten in a
hyper politicized environment. So I mean, when we talk about how do we
prevail in a cold war without it becoming a hot war, that's more than
just a question of how do you practice foreign policy shrewdly? Like that is
how do you how does the US government live up to its constitutional duties to
protect the American people? And I think reframed in those terms, it becomes
a lot clearer and just the weight of responsibility kind of comes into focus more.
So I get into this question and countering China's great game of how do
how do we do this? And I think I turn more than anything else
to some words that Matt Pottinger wrote in the forward of my book. Matt
is the was the Deputy National Security Advisor for President Trump, and Matt was
is today like the most the foremost expert on the Chinese Communist Party in the
United States today. And Matt got into this point in my books forward that
I just have not been able to get out of my head, which is
when you are going up against a Marxist Leninist authoritarian regime, it is actually
destabilizing to go out of your way to reassure them and to back down and
to give them strategic space, because these types of regimes do not view international
security the same way that we do. I think it is a very Western
belief and desire that we can live in a positive some world and that rational
minds can come to this grand bargain agreement. That is not the strategic culture
of Marxist Leninism, and I do not think that is the mindset of the
Chinese Communist Party today either. And if you look at the moments during the
Cold War when we most successfully had diplomatic negotiations. I'm thinking in particular during
the Reagan administration. It was when we approached those engagements with preponderance of power
and with the upper hand strategically, and we were able to negotiate and conduct
diplomacy on America's terms. So when we talk today, I think we're losing
the Cold War with the CCP right now, and I think to gain the
upper hand we need to play some very deft, measured brinksmanship with the party.
I'm not saying it's going to be risk free, but I'm saying we
can manage the risk and the process. We need to identify we're the party
where the Chinese Communist Party is weak and where we are strong and force them
to compete on that terrain. I'm thinking in particular the CCP's fear of free
speech and information, the CCP's proclivity to commit awful human rights abuses, the
proclivity of Chinese companies globally to engage in corrupt practices. We tend to be
really strong in those areas, and the CCP cannot help but behave abhorrently in
those areas. If we start to shift our competition with the Chinese Communist Party
in that direction. I think over time, we're going to find ourselves gaining
control of the tempo and pace of the competition, and we're going to find
them instead of us trying to react to the problems Beijing has created for us,
they are going to be on their back feet reacting to problems we have
created for them, And I think that's where we need to go. Michael,
is there anything else you think Americans or maybe even particularly conservatives don't understand
about the China issue that we haven't mentioned yet, or maybe we've mentioned it
and you just want to underscore it. Is there anything else do you think
people are just missing or need to think more about. Yeah, So with
that invitation, why don't I open a can of worms and talk about like
one of the biggest debates on the right with foreign policy right now, So
one of the biggest debates on China in particular, is this considering the trade
off between like can we help Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan at the same time
or do we need to prioritize and focus more on the China threat by redirecting
some of those resources to Taiwan. I find this to be such a fascinating
debate and honestly a really important one. I also find it to be a
very difficult one because I see things on both sides that I agree with and
I think are factually true. The Conservatives who are arguing for maybe like a
quote unquote Asia first approach to grand strategy today, the biggest point they make
that I think is correct is that the United States is not the hyper power
today that it was in nineteen ninety one when the Berlin Wall fell. We
are not the hyper power today that we were in the wake of World War
Two. I think that is correct, and especially if you look at the
balance of power between the People's Liberation Army in the US Navy and Air Force
in the First Island chain like in East Asia, is that balance of power
is not tilting in our favor. So the capabilities argument behind the Asia first
perspective of we don't have the resources to fully help Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan
need to prioritize at least at a historical level. That makes sense to me,
and I get it. On the other side of the argument, I
think the most compelling case that I also agree with is it's also true that
if we do walk away from Ukraine, and as maybe some on the left
would want us to do, redirect aid away from Israel, that is going
to have a strategic impact on the stability of Taiwan. The government of Taiwan
has been screaming about the connection between Taipei and Kiev for a very long time.
I think it's foolish for us to ignore that. And I think it's
also notable that Vladimir Putin and Shijingping are passing a lot of notes to each
other these days and having a lot of high level summits today, like there's
clearly coordination and they're clearly watching how America is interacting with both powers. So
I think on both sides of this debate, you have two realities that are
equally real. We aren't as strong and overwhelmingly powerful as we used to be
on the one hand, But then on the other hand, walking away from
partners in one region does have a deterrence and credibility impact on partners in another
region. So what do you do in a catch twenty two like that?
And it really comes down to the type of problems you want to deal with.
Do you want to deal with the risk of having putin roll into Ukraine
and then maybe go further and test the NATO alliance, which could happen,
but maybe we'd be in a better position with Taiwan. Or do you try
to maintain deterrence everywhere and hope that we don't get over extended. I think
that the best, most honest, And again, if anyone who follows me
on Twitter, like, it's really clear that I I tend to follow in
though we don't have a choice, we have to like help Ukraine and Israel
Antaiwan, like that is where I fall. But I also want to acknowledge
that this is not like a slam dunk debate, and there are people on
really good faith on all sides of this. The reason I think we can
do all three and still be okay is because of the importance of asymmetric competition,
which we are not doing enough right now. If we begin to exploit
the CCP's asymmetric vulnerabilities, which is all chapter five and chapter six in my
book, I think we begin to whittle away at their strategic focus and their
margin of power. And I think that like these regimes are brittle, Phuton
is brittle, She is brittle, They're governments and their like their regimes,
these are not stable, legitimate forms of government. I think we need to
start exploiting that, and we have a better system of government in our favor.
So what I'm not saying, Emily, is that this is going to
be easy and that this is going to be like a cake walk to peace.
Far from it. But I do think there is a path that we
can pursue to be the leader in all the regions of the world we need
to be while also avoiding war. I certainly hope that's the case. All
right, everon cross your fingers that we don't get annihilated in a nuclear CONFLX.
Oh goodness, well, Michael sabel Like this has just been fascinating.
Congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and sharing
some of your work here today. I really appreciate it. Hey, this
has been a pleasure, Emily, thank you so much. Of course.
Now again, the book is called Countering China's Great Game. You can go
ahead and get that now, Michael, much appreciated. I'm am a leadership
ski culture editor at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until
then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the friend. Don't you got
me right, but you won't scratra