Firing Line

- The architect of a major shift in the United States' China strategy.

This week on "Firing Line."

[Matt speaking in Chinese] - [Margaret] As Deputy National Security Advisor, Matt Pottinger crafted a competitive approach towards China.

Pottinger is a former journalist who reported from within China for seven years before becoming a Marine, and serving 3 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He spent four years on Trump's National Security Council which, in 2017, labeled Beijing a "revisionist power."

- Beijing is not just authoritarian under Xi Jinping.

It is a totalitarian dictatorship.

- [Margaret] Pottinger was the highest ranking White House official to resign over Trump's conduct on January 6, 2021.

- I decided that I was going to resign, that that would be my last day at the White House.

I simply didn't want to be associated with the events that were unfolding on the Capitol.

- [Margaret] As China pursues plans to annex Taiwan, builds up its military capabilities, and controls critical supply chains, what does former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Matt Pottinger, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thanks for having me.

It's great to see you.

- You're a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where I serve on the Board of Overseers.

And you and I have been friends for many years.

You often describe China under Xi Jinping as leading an axis of chaos with other autocracies around the world.

And you believe that China is already waging a Cold War against the United States.

What is the number one thing you think Americans need to know about China in 2024?

- Well, one is that they are waging a cold war that's turning hotter in the form of proxy wars, whether it's the war in Europe...

Remember, the European War that's happening right now is the largest on that continent since World War II ended.

Right?

You also have Hamas doing its worst last October.

And the war that has resulted from those terrorist attacks that are spreading.

The thing that Americans need to know is that Beijing is treating those conflicts as proxy wars against democracies in an effort to really weaken the power and credibility of the United States, to pave the way for a new global order that Beijing is quite explicit about when you read their internal writings.

So they like to cloak their ambitions in sort of gauzy terms.

But actually it's an extremely careful vision for a world that's more friendly and amenable to autocracies.

- What is Beijing's intention?

- Beijing's intention is to render the United States irrelevant.

It's not to conquer us.

It's not to, if it can avoid it, defeat us in battle in a conventional war.

But it is to render us irrelevant.

And it's using several different elements of power that we don't usually think of in the United States.

Right?

We don't think about influence operations, covert operations, to actually advance the Chinese Communist Party's domestic, regional and global ambitions.

- You spent many years in China as a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal before you joined the Marine Corps and served in Afghanistan.

- As one does, right.

- What did your experience covering the Chinese Communist Party teach you about how Beijing operates?

- Well, I was a reporter in the late 90s all the way until 2005, in China.

It was a great time to be a reporter in China.

China at that point was moving towards a more liberal economic model from a catastrophic one under Mao Zedong.

This was where the real flowering of the reform and opening era that Deng Xiaoping seeded was coming into full bloom.

Deng Xiaoping was no Democrat.

He was no closet Democrat.

He used to say that we should never have any trace of a parliamentary democratic system.

But he tried to build within the constraints of a single party dictatorship or autocracy, he tried to build in a little bit more checks and balances.

Xi Jinping has really reversed those modest political reforms to make it a full blown, single party, one-man dictatorship.

And it's really graduated from autocracy to totalitarianism.

It's gone back in time, in that sense.

- You have published a new book that you edited and you co-wrote, entitled "The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan."

Why is Taiwan important to Americans?

How do you convince an ordinary American citizen that it is in the interest of the United States to go to war, potentially nuclear conflict, with China over Taiwan?

- Yeah.

So first of all, I believe that deterrence is the way that we avoid some kind of a terrible outcome here.

- We'll get to deterrence.

Can you just like, walk me through the cascading consequences for the United States and beyond if China were to take Taiwan by force?

- Well, we'll start with democracy, and then we'll talk about how it's going to make you poor if you're an American.

Okay.

We'll bring it right home to people's pocketbooks.

Okay?

So Taiwan is the most successful democracy in Asia, a full blown democracy that respects minority rights.

It has free speech, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

- It is democratic China.

- It is the democratic future that China could have.

- Right.

- It's one of the reasons that Beijing wants to extinguish Taiwan as a separate government.

It is really partly about that.

A big part of it is about snuffing out a story that creates significant problems for the narrative that the Chinese Communist Party, you know, is telling its people.

Curated lies.

- So then what happen, if Taiwan is annexed by force by the CCP, how does that impact Americans' pocketbooks?

- Yeah.

So Taiwan happens to make almost all of the advanced semiconductors in the world.

Taiwan makes something like 93% of those chips.

Ken Griffin, hedge fund manager, at Citadel Securities, was quoted saying it would be an instant Great Depression if there was a war over Taiwan.

- Your book makes the case that deterrence is possible, and it lays out a formula for deterrence.

However, before we get to deterrence, Xi Jinping, in his New Year's address, said China's, quote, "reunification with Taiwan is inevitable."

Your book points to other public statements that he has made in the past few years.

And you note, quote, "Xi has been less concrete, at least in public, about a timeline."

And yet, CIA director Bill Burns told the Senate that he knows as a, quote, "as a matter of intelligence," that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

What do we know about Xi's plans and timeline?

- Yeah.

We know that he is a lot less patient than his predecessors.

We know that he has set a very high bar that I believe means that he is equating his broader legacy as a leader, as the dictator of China, with, as he puts it, solving the Taiwan question.

- Do you have a sense of his timeline?

- I don't think anyone knows for certain.

Xi Jinping himself may not have decided exactly when he'll move.

But we know that he has the intention to do this.

He told President Biden last November that, you know, peace is all well and good, but at some point, we actually have to resolve this.

Remember, we're trying to defend a status quo.

We're not saying we support Taiwan independence.

What we're saying is that Taiwan has a really good thing going.

They're not seeking de jure independence.

So why break what's not, you know, or fix what's not broken?

- Why fix what's not broken?

Yeah.

- Beijing has benefited from Taiwan being such a great success economically.

So why is Xi Jinping trying to change the status quo?

He's not trying to prevent a change in the status quo.

He's trying to force a change in that status quo, favoring annexation.

- You write, quote, "if just one lesson could be drawn from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it must be that deterrence would have been a lot cheaper than war."

- Yeah.

- Your book delineates a workable deterrence policy.

What, in your view, are the components of that successful deterrence strategy?

- Yeah.

So deterrence is an act of psychology when you boil it down, right.

It's really about persuading Xi Jinping that war is not going to work out the way that he thinks it's going to work out, and that he's better off not throwing those dice.

He's better off with the status quo than he is with trying to force a change in the status quo using violence.

And so what are the ingredients that go into eroding his rising sense of optimism?

And by the way, historians who've looked at the beginnings of wars over time have been really amazed and disconcerted to find that overweening optimism is one of the key indicators that aggression is about to proceed.

So Xi Jinping, right now we see this rising sense of optimism that either the United States isn't going to be there or Japan is going to sit this out, or that Taiwan isn't going to improve its defenses quickly enough to really be able to slow down an invasion.

So it's really an act of showing that we have the capability, number one, but also will to actually fight, and that Taiwan has that will to fight and capability, and that Japan has the will and capability to fight.

- It is your view, as I understand it, that our current strategy is destined to fail in terms of deterrence.

What needs to change?

- Deterrence doesn't happen by accident.

It's not enough to be the most powerful military in the world, which we still are.

You actually have to design and plan and procure your capabilities, your military capabilities.

So what that means is we have to demonstrate that we can stay in a fight.

If we get drawn into a fight, we're not going to fold after a week.

And that means that we have to show that we've got the depth in our industrial base to be able to produce weapons rapidly.

- So we need to spend more on our military.

- We need to spend smarter, and we need to spend more.

Both.

- In your Foreign Affairs essay that you wrote with former representative Mike Gallagher, you wrote that the US needs to win its competition with China, which in turn would lead the Chinese people to, quote, "find inspiration, to explore new models of development and governance that don't rely on repression at home and compulsive hostility abroad."

- [Matt] Yeah.

- Fareed Zakaria interpreted that as a call for regime change.

Is it?

- Well, I don't even know what it would mean to say that we're pursuing regime change.

We're not there- - Just to be clear- - Just to be clear- - are you calling for regime change?

- this is not a call.

No.

What we're calling for is a clear-eyed recognition of the fact that if Beijing under Xi Jinping is not able to achieve all of its goals, there is a significant chance, a lot greater than zero, that that system begins to- - To collapse from within.

- To collapse from within, and that we should not fear that outcome.

We should be ready for it, even if we're not the ones subverting their system to make that more likely.

- There is a concern that your call for increased investment in military spending is actually not going to succeed at deterrence, it would succeed at provocation, that it could force the CCP to lose face, back them into a corner, and give them no choice but to act out.

- One of the things we know from historians who spent a lot of time looking at the history of wars and how they begin, why they begin.

When we hear the term balance of power, we imagine the scale perfectly balanced where, you know, all these great powers have roughly the same amount of comprehensive power and military might, and somehow that balances the scale.

What historians have found is that when the balances are nearly- - Even.

- even, that is usually an indicator that war is about to occur, because there is ambiguity about who is stronger.

That's when the temptation rises.

So a balance of power is a dangerous thing.

And in fact, when you have a gross imbalance, that is not, as Kissinger and others had at one point postulated, they were wrong.

That is not the precursor to war.

It is actually a condition for peace.

- Is Xi's aim to have hegemony in the hemisphere or global hegemony?

- You have to give credit to the communists where it's due.

They don't think small.

They're thinking interplanetary at this point.

Okay?

This isn't their neighborhood.

It's not even the hemisphere.

They're talking about the globe.

And they're literally making plans for the moon and Mars, you know.

They are racing ahead right now.

So they're talking about a community of common destiny for mankind.

That's one of Xi Jinping's bumper stickers.

What he's talking about is a world where global governance actually favors autocracies.

And now he's talking about a community of common destiny for mankind in space.

And so I wish I were making this stuff up.

But the point is the vision is definitely global.

- There's a debate in foreign policy circles in the United States, especially on the right, about whether we have concentrated too much on defending Ukraine at the expense of Taiwan.

Senator Josh Hawley, for example, has said, quote, "we have to make a choice.

Ukraine, China.

We can't do both."

- Well, look, first of all, it's the same thing.

I'm sorry, what I was talking about with this proxy fight.

Let me quote, or at least paraphrase as accurately as I can, our secretary of state, Tony Blinken, who in April flew to Beijing and announced in a press conference that Beijing is overwhelmingly the number one supporter of the war in Ukraine.

Not on Ukraine's side.

On Russia's side.

- Right.

- There are serious doubts about whether Russia would have been able to sustain the war but for Beijing's massive support in the form of not only diplomatic cover and propaganda, but the material that goes into the weapons that are killing men, women and children across Ukraine right now.

Beijing is hosting Hamas, a terrorist group.

In fact, the day that Tony Blinken made those statements, Hamas, unbeknownst to Blinken, had just shown up in Beijing.

And Beijing is now hosting terrorist groups and trying to figure out ways to help Iran, of which it is also the primary sponsor in the world, how to help North Korea, of which it is also, you know, the main supplier of energy.

The point is that this axis of chaos has Beijing at the core.

So what good does it do us to say that we're only going to fight that tentacle of the octopus, but we're gonna ignore the other three tentacles of the octopus?

We're fighting the same enemy in all of these theaters.

- In 1975, Henry Kissinger joined William F. Buckley, Jr. on the original version of this program to discuss the Nixon administration's normalizing of relations with China.

Take a look at this clip.

- In the world in which we find ourselves now, in the world of nuclear superpowers, in the world in which American power is no longer as predominant as it was in the late 1940s, it is necessary for us to conduct a more complicated foreign policy without the simple categories of a more fortunate historical past.

So I think we have to come to an understanding that on the plane of day-to-day foreign policy we may be prepared to make those practical accommodations that preserve the peace as long as vital interests aren't threatened.

- What did Kissinger get wrong about preserving the peace?

- So I was lucky that I got to spend a lot of time with Henry Kissinger when I was in office.

And I learned a lot from him.

But he was wrong about some things.

And one of the things he was wrong about was, and I think it's encapsulated in that in that clip, remember, this is 1975.

- Yeah.

- 1975 was really the apogee- - Height of the Cold War.

- of Soviet power.

So at this point when we had just, let's face it, we lost the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union was sort of at its apogee economically, Kissinger was sort of succumbing to some of this defeatist thinking.

Fatalism.

The problem was, that failed to take into account the nature of the Soviet system, and that it would interpret those signals as signs of American weakness that actually invited greater aggression.

And that's exactly what played out over the course of the 1970s.

Detente.

He was really describing detente, right.

And detente didn't work out the way that it was planned.

We thought that by reassuring the Soviet Union, they would become kinder, gentler, less aggressive.

In fact, given the nature of their ideology, the nature of their system, it became more aggressive.

- They saw it as weakness.

- And so I fear that there's some thinking on both the left and also in certain pockets of the right, right now, in Washington that believe that, have this idea that detente is somehow going to work out to our interests.

It's actually already inviting greater chaos.

- Former President Trump has been complimentary of Xi Jinping, especially on the campaign trail.

Take a look at this.

- President Xi is a brilliant man.

Top of the line smart, top of the line.

You know, when I say he's brilliant, everyone says, "Oh, that's terrible."

Well, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.

Smart, brilliant, everything perfect.

President Xi is like central casting.

There's nobody in Hollywood that could play the role of President Xi.

The look, the strength, the voice.

I want China to do great.

I do, and I like President Xi a lot.

He was a very good friend of mine during my term.

- What is your level of confidence that President Trump would pursue deterrence with China?

Are you confident that if China act aggressively to annex Taiwan, he would intervene on behalf of Taiwan?

- Well, I think his view when he was in office was, let's provide Taiwan with things that it needs.

Let's also provide Japan with a lot more of what it needs.

And let's make sure that the US military is ready and has what we need.

So look, I've always believed that the president of the United States should have an open, ready, and frequently used line of communication to dictators.

When President Trump is very flattering of these leaders, he would often, you know, it's not language I would use, but oftentimes he was allowing or approving steps by the government to defend our interests or, you know, inject friction into China's planning in ways that I think are advantageous.

That is to say, if President Biden were to be a lot tougher in his policies towards China while being- - Flattering rhetorically?

- I can live with that.

I can live with that, more than the opposite.

For us to posture and harangue, you know, a leader publicly, but then to have soft policies, that's the worst of both worlds.

- Yeah.

You're quoted in the Financial Times as saying, "If any candidate shows weakness on NATO, Ukraine and on Taiwan, that will be the preferred candidate for China, even if it means they have to stomach more tariffs.

- Yeah.

- Who do you think Xi Jinping would prefer to be the next president of the United States?

- Yeah, I think that if we look at it from a pure bilateral relations standpoint, Xi Jinping is more concerned about Trump than he is about Biden.

But when he looks at what could unfold in Ukraine, for example, if we were to turn our backs, if President Trump were to turn his back on Ukraine.

- Which he's indicated he would.

- Well, I saw after he met with the Polish president, President Trump made a very good statement right after that dinner where he said, we can't allow...

I'm paraphrasing, but we can't allow Russia to steamroll Ukraine.

Europe needs to do a lot more.

That's true.

- What about the prospects for the future of NATO, given the weakness, rhetorically, that President Trump has demonstrated?

- If President Trump sticks with the first term policy of basically calling for greater commitments by NATO without actually turning his back on our obligations under NATO, I think we'll be fine.

Okay?

If he actually- - His rhetoric, though, has not matched that.

His rhetoric has suggested there, frankly, a lack of interest in supporting a continuation of NATO.

- What I'll say is, if we ever turn our back on NATO or say that we actually pledge that we will not defend certain of our NATO allies, but will defend others, that is a recipe for disaster.

- Final question.

You were an early proponent of the theory that COVID-19 did not emerge naturally, but instead escaped from a lab in China.

Doctor Anthony Fauci now says that he's open to either possibility.

But back in 2020, he was among those really downplaying the lab leak theory.

Do experts who treated this as an outlandish idea at the time bear any responsibility for hindering a serious discussion of Chinese culpability?

- I think that we have a system right now where too much science is supported by one decision maker in government.

Because what you could see as you go back and you look at some of these FOIA documents, what you can see is a conversation that was taking place among independent scientists, but who depend on the National Institutes of Health for their money.

And their original instinct, as you read these emails, it's amazing, their original instinct was, "I don't see how this happens in nature.

The genetics of this virus do not match up with anything we've seen in nature."

And we also know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is doing experiments to create- - More viruses.

Right.

- exactly the same kinds of viruses that ended up killing 30 million people worldwide.

But then many of these people ended up signing a letter soon after saying it must have been a natural virus.

That shows a rot at the heart of the scientific community in the United States.

And that is not to say, US government shouldn't be funding science.

But we've got to revolutionize- - The incentive structure is not aligned with actually independent scientific thinking.

It's aligned with groupthink.

- Exactly.

This was a classic example of groupthink.

It's now very clear that the most probable explanation is not only that the virus leaked, accidentally, by the way, I don't think there's any evidence that this was intentional, but there's also a growing body of circumstantial evidence that this virus was not entirely natural either.

In other words, it was a natural virus that had been improved, if you like, through human engineering.

And who knows why they were doing that.

It may have been that they were trying to create a vaccine for the Chinese military or for the broader public, for, you know, dangerous coronaviruses.

But what we've ended up with is, according to The Economist magazine, somewhere between 27 and 33 million people dead, including 1.1 million Americans.

The fact that we haven't started, you know, four years later, we haven't even really begun grappling with the implications if in fact, I'm right, and this was an engineered virus that accidentally escaped, is malpractice.

It is malpractice.

There's a lot of work we need to do on this front.

- Matt Pottinger, for your insights and for your service to our nation, thank you for joining me.

- Thanks for having me.

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. [upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music] [gentle music] - [Narrator] You're watching PBS.