Searching for an Endgame With China

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In just a few short years, America’s China policy has undergone nothing short of a revolution. Few people had been more central to that shift than Matt Pottinger. He was a reporter in China, then a U.S. Marine, and then he went on to become the top policymaker on Asia, and the Deputy National Security Adviser under President Trump. Pottinger argues in a new essay for Foreign Affairs that even though Washington’s China strategy has already gotten much tougher, it still has a ways to go—to take on more risk and lay out a clear, if radical, goal for the kind of China we want to see. His views are a window on what China policy might look like if Trump returns to the White House.

Matt, thanks so much for the widely read and fervently debated essay that you co-authored with Congressman Mike Gallagher for our May/June issue—it was called “No Substitute for Victory”—and thanks as well for joining me today.

MATT POTTINGER

Thanks for having me.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m going to start by stepping back a bit. This is not a moment in American political history where we see bipartisan convergence on almost any issue, but as I think becomes clear in interesting ways, there’s a high level of certain consensus about the challenge from China. We’re arguing about what to do about it, but there is, I think, a view of what the threat is—what the challenge is—that is quite different from what it might’ve been ten years ago. How would you describe that consensus, and to the extent that there is a kind of new paradigm in U.S. foreign policy, what does that look like?

MATT POTTINGER

Yeah, I think there is a new consensus. I think most Americans agree, and also a lot of national security practitioners or former practitioners would agree, that Beijing is posing a severe challenge to American national security and prosperity, and even to our democracy, increasingly. If you look at the interview—I think it was in April that Secretary of State Tony Blinken gave an interview to CNN where he said Beijing is now crossing a threshold into what looks to be real interference in our democracy, and I don’t think there are too many holdouts left that don’t think that Beijing isn’t the greatest national security challenge we face. In part it’s because Beijing is now so closely tied to the other adversaries that are challenging the United States and our allies—Russia, Iran, Iran’s proxies like Hamas. Beijing hosted a high-level delegation from the terrorist group Hamas on the same day in April that Secretary of State Tony Blinken was in Beijing. They didn’t bother to inform him that their next meetings were going to be with Hamas after he was about to leave town.

So there is, as you put it, an agreement on the existence of a threat. There is less agreement on the precise nature and modalities, and still less agreement on what we should do about it. But the first step has been achieved and that’s a remarkable achievement. I credit President Trump and his administration for really leading that shift, but I also credit President Biden and his team for embracing that consensus and sustaining several aspects of the Trump administration policy—and in some cases improving upon it, particularly when it comes to export controls on Beijing’s high technology.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So, in the essay, you get into some of those continuities, also some of the divergences where you see differences or tensions between either your preferred approach or the Trump approach and what Biden has done. I’d say one of the core critiques that you make is about this idea of quote unquote “managing the competition.” The kind of overarching idea of the piece is that, as you and Mike Gallagher put it, I’m quoting you here, “The United States shouldn’t manage competition with China; it should win it.” When you look at that question of management, I think there are a number of responses you can make to it. I think some of the Biden administration voices would point to fentanyl talks or AI talks as something the United States has gotten out of that, but I think there are two that come through most clearly.

The first one is about this idea of buying us time. Rush Doshi made this point in his response to you and Mike. He says that your approach, and I’m quoting him here, “risks runaway escalation and could force a moment of reckoning before the United States has taken the very steps the authors recommend to strengthen its defense industrial base and improve its competitive position.” I think Niall Ferguson, who’s written about détente and Kissinger and is not a—is generally considered a hard-liner on these questions, also says about détente that this is a way of tactically stalling in order to shore up our position, it’s not a kind of permanent state. Do you see anything to that “buying time” argument and engaging in diplomacy as a means of giving the United States space and time to develop the tools it needs?

MATT POTTINGER

Yeah, I appreciated Rush Doshi’s critique of our piece, I think it was the most substantive of the critiques that I’ve read in various places so far. I would remark—before I talk about that idea of buying time and managing competition, I would remind listeners that Mike Gallagher and I, in our piece, spent quite a lot of time talking about things that we think President Biden’s policy is doing well. Now, the problem that Mike and I point out that you’ve just teed up is that we don’t think that aiming, in essence, at the end state of managing competition is a sufficient or wise policy that has a good chance of succeeding. We think that you have to aim at victory just like Beijing is aiming at victory. As Mike and I write, Xi Jinping is not aiming for a stalemate. He’s aiming for something much more than that, and we need to do the same.

But part of competing to win involves elements of management. We’re not saying that we don’t try to maintain high channels of communication with Beijing. We’ve been explicit ever since I was in office—and even through that piece—we’re strongly in favor of the idea of the President of the United States maintaining a frequent, open channel of communication with Xi Jinping. We think, in fact, it’s the only channel that really matters, because anything below the level of Xi Jinping is mostly on transmit and not on receive. The Chinese Communist Party officials who show up are under immense pressure to make points, and they are also—also don’t have much of an audience at the top of the Chinese government to listen to and transmit our points. So the only way to really get a reliable message transmitted to Xi Jinping is to talk to Xi Jinping.

So this idea of buying time, if we go back and we look at the U.S. policy during the 1970s, where there was a similar rationale that was operating—remember we had just suffered a defeat in Vietnam, you had the Watergate scandal was playing out. The U.S. public opinion was very much divided. You had the culture wars, you had antiwar protests. You had all this stuff from the 60s that tumbled into the 70s, and really were demoralizing a big part of the American body politic. There was this thought that we should probably tone down our competitive instincts with this vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in order to buy time, lick our wounds, sort of figure things out. But what really took shape was something that did not allow us to buy time and gather strength, but in fact put us in a relatively worse position over the course of the 1970s.

As the Nixon administration came to an end, and President Ford took office, and then Jimmy Carter took office, you had three administrations pursuing détente, and the U.S. position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union grew worse, not better, over the course of that period of time. The Soviet economy strengthened as the Soviets made the most of tying Europe to greater dependency on exports of oil and other energy from the Soviet Union. The Soviets began to muck around in Africa—several parts of Africa—as well as in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. They began to muck around in the politics of, of course, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and eventually just launched an all-out invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. They were playing in Portugal. They were starting to play around in the politics of Europe and Western Europe. So by the end of this decade, Zbigniew Brzezinski really was the one who began to question whether détente itself might be the problem—that the very nature of détente itself was inviting aggression from our adversaries, as opposed to carving out new areas of cooperation.

So by the end of it, Zbigniew Brzezinski really persuaded President Carter to pivot, in the final year of the Carter administration, to a more hard-nosed, you know, hard-line policy against the Soviets that I think was exactly right. I think they learned from the mistakes. Carter ended up losing that election, Ronald Reagan came in. Everyone was fearful of Reagan, people thought that he was a lightweight or that he just was going to be a little bit crazy. He ended up being perhaps the most successful U.S. president of the Cold War era in synthesizing all of the lessons learned from all of our mistakes and all of our successes in the previous decades, going all the way back to George Kennan at the very outset of the Cold War. And most of the critiques of us have not contested nor addressed the fact that the Reagan administration was the most successful Cold War strategy, as proven by the fact that he brought it to a peaceful ending. His vice president, George H. W. Bush, brought it to a landing just a couple years after President Reagan left office.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So there’s another, I think, smart rejoinder to the idea that we should have a kind of more openly risk-tolerant approach towards China, and that’s that it will cause panic among our allies—first of all allies and partners. And then second, that it will alienate much of the developing world, the global South, where there is a—to some degree—a contest for influence between the United States and China, and that we need to be seen to be responsible and careful in order to maintain all those partnerships. Do you see any value to that, any tension there?

MATT POTTINGER

Let’s start with the global South, because you just mentioned two important ideas, but they’re actually not interlinked. The reason the global South is flummoxed by the United States and disappointed in the United States is not because we’re competing in our—this great-power competition and contest with China. It’s that we’re not showing up. We’re just not showing up. When I talk to African leaders—I talk to leaders in Latin America, Central Asia, and other parts, they just say, “Where are you guys?” They’re not saying, “We’re really worried about your competition with China.” They’d be happy to play us off of one another, but they can’t even do that because we don’t show up. There’s a lot more that we need to do in that respect.

Now, when it comes to this idea of other allies, our democratic allies who are treaty allies of the United States in the NATO footprint of Europe and the western Pacific—look, what I did when I was in office, even before I was Deputy National Security Adviser, I was the coordinator for our Asia policy as the Senior Director for Asia. I had someone on staff at all times whose primary job was to engage with our European allies. So even though I was responsible for Asia, we were doing a lot of work with the Europeans. A lot of that was quiet, it was behind closed doors, but we were always keeping them well-informed. In Brussels, in Berlin, in Paris, in London and onward, we were keeping them well-informed about our thinking, our assessments, and the direction that our policy was going. None of them said, “Don’t do that because we’re not ready to do that.” What they said was, “Well, keep us informed. We’re interested in continuing to exchange our observations on this front.”

And over time, lo and behold, we found that the European Union adopted some of the rhetoric and some of the actions that both the Trump and then the Biden administration undertook. So it’s not that they—the wrong way to think about it is we have to have a perfectly united consensus policy with all of our European allies before we can move forward with defending America’s interests vis-à-vis China. That’s not a good way to think about it. We need to actually step forward, step out and lead, and hope through good exchanges and information that many of our allies will follow us. And that is exactly what has happened. So I don’t like the idea of us watering down our policy to match a less assertive standard that sometimes emerges from Brussels say. I’d rather that we step forward and lead by example, ductus exemplo—which is, by the way, the Marine Corps motto at the Officer Candidate School is ductus exemplo. And then if you lead, people will follow, and that is actually what’s happening.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I don’t want to get into this question of whether Xi Jinping and other senior Chinese leaders would prefer a second Trump term or a second Biden or other democrat term. We’re having this conversation on a day when Biden is still the candidate, but there’s lots of reporting and rumors about a possible change, so we’ll see where that goes.

But you do hear from Chinese officials and scholars this belief that if Trump does return there will be certain risks that the Chinese government would face, that the CCP would face, but also that it would have some effect on the alliances and partnerships that have been one of the great successes of the Biden foreign policy. They say, “Look, we’re in a world of blocs. Our bloc doesn’t look that great if it’s Russia, China, North Korea against Japan and Australia and India and South Korea and the NATO allies.” But they say, “Look, all those—that beautiful bloc of yours, that’s going to come apart when Trump comes back,” just given everything he says about Article 5 and NATO and threatening to withdraw troops from South Korea and slapping tariffs on Japan or India. Do you see any risk of that?

MATT POTTINGER

So, what I would say is first of all, if the United States under any president begins to really turn its back on our allies, that would be a godsend for Xi Jinping and for his axis of chaos—Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah—little shrimps who are making noise now, the Castro remnant regime in Cuba, and Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and so on. Of course, let’s not forget about Kim Jong Un. They would throw a pretty big, wild party in celebration of the United States turning its back on NATO or even individual NATO allies or turning its back on South Korea and so forth. No question about that, no question.

But if we look at the first term of President Trump, what did he actually do, right? There was a lot of hand-wringing and concern that he was going to abandon allies. By the end of that term, I would argue our relationship with [South] Korea, Australia, and Japan was stronger than what we had inherited. The press never likes to talk about how deeply disconcerted the Japanese government was with the Obama administration, or even Taiwan’s government. We had much better relations and much more productive working ties with Taiwan under Trump than we had under Obama, according to all of the foreign leaders—or several that I’ve talked to in several countries in the western Pacific. So it’s important to remember that actually ties strengthened.

With respect to NATO, there was a real threat made by President Trump to say, “Look, if you’re not going to pay your way, you’re on your own.” By the end of the administration, I think Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, summed it up best. He said, “President Trump turned out to be the best dues collector in NATO history.” There was a cumulative increase of hundreds of billions of dollars of spending by the European NATO allies, and now, the majority of NATO allies actually have met the two percent of GDP spending threshold. Two percent of their GDP they now spend on defense. And Europe as a whole, aggregately, has also met the two percent threshold according to, I think, the most recent support coming out of the NATO Secretary General’s office. That’s a great tribute to President Trump’s time in office.

Now, what does that mean about a second term? I think it’s absolutely crucial that President Trump—even as he shows some tough love to our allies to get them to step up in ways that will make us all safer—it’s really important that the pressure that he applies be applied in ways that don’t threaten the existence of those alliances. And I think there are ways to do that. You can actually find ways maybe even to tariff countries that aren’t meeting their obligation in defense spending so that the United States recoups some of the money that we’re spending on their behalf. But you can do that without threatening the very existence of the alliance. And I’m very hopeful—if President Trump wins, I’m hoping that that’s where he comes out. That’s where he came out the first term. Certainly, the people that I think he still trusts and talks to who might be part of a second Trump term are not looking to dismantle NATO. They’re looking to strengthen it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Yeah, I mean, I would guess that the person who deserves most credit for European defense spending going up is Vladimir Putin, not President Trump, or President Biden for that matter, but—

MATT POTTINGER

You can make the same argument that Japan’s defense spending, which is in the process of doubling right now, owes much to the man in Beijing who serves as the current dictator there.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I want to go to the second big plank of the argument in the essay. The first part of it is this notion that we need to accept more friction. The second is clarity of goal—what we’re trying to achieve in competition with China. And I think in some ways this has been in some ways the most useful part of the debate that has been sparked by the essay. You argue that we should have a clear objective of changing the nature of government in China. You’re very careful to say this is not about an Iraq-style regime change, but you do say in answer to the question “What would winning look like?”—quoting you and Mike here—“China’s communist rulers would give up trying to prevail in a hot or cold conflict with the United States . . . And the Chinese people—from ruling elites to everyday citizens—would find inspiration to explore new models of development and governance that don’t rely on repression at home and compulsive hostility abroad.”

MATT POTTINGER

That sentence is the—that’s the money quote of sort of what we envision as the end state. Now, it’s important that what we said was that Chinese people themselves, including ruling elites, find inspiration to pursue or experiment with models that are not compulsively hostile to the United States and Chinese neighbors and others. I don’t believe that that should be as controversial as some have interpreted it to be. What we’re saying is we’re rooting for the Chinese people to find a better model that serves them a lot better, a less repressive model. And one that also doesn’t result in mass death happening outside of China’s borders through their mismanagement of emergent diseases and their dangerous experiments with dangerous pathogens, or through their state subsidized trade in fentanyl—illicit fentanyl.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Fentanyl precursors, right, just to be precise about it, or—

MATT POTTINGER

Well, so, if you look at the—if you look at the supply chain for illicit fentanyl—we’re not talking about the stuff that they give you when you’re getting surgery in the hospital, like the legal small doses of medical grade fentanyl. I’m talking about the stuff that’s killing upwards of 80,000 Americans a year and utterly destroying and melting the fabric of communities all across this country. China was selling that stuff directly into the United States. And these were Chinese state-owned enterprises. They were sending it by mail. They were intentionally mislabeling the mail. And during the Trump administration, President Trump was able to persuade Xi Jinping to classify those drugs in a category that required far greater strictures so that this stuff couldn’t just be sent directly to us.

What the Chinese Communist Party pivoted to do was have all the companies that were creating the fentanyl continue producing and exporting the chemicals—the precursor chemicals that make it, but send it straight to the drug cartels in Mexico. And not only are their customers illicit cartels, but Beijing, according to Congress—a bipartisan report that came out earlier this year from Congress—Beijing continues to provide state subsidies for those businesses to continue producing and exporting all of that junk that gets turned into the synthesized poison that continues to kill us by the tens of thousands each year.

Now, what has also now come out is greater information about the role of China in the money laundering—in fact, the vast majority now of the money laundering on behalf of the cartels. So when they sell their stuff, their poison, on American streets, they don’t rely on their own networks now to repatriate the profits from the drug trade. They rely on Chinese money laundering networks. Those networks are not going to be able to operate without Beijing at least winking an eye, if not doing more than merely winking an eye. Even if Beijing is not the one dealing the stuff on our streets, they’re providing state subsidies for all of the stuff that gets sold to the cartels to get turned into the fentanyl to kill us, and then the money round trips its way back to the cartels via Chinese illicit money laundering networks.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me ask two questions about that end state. I think the kind of, you know—what the ideal outcome is is clear. What is the theory of success? When you talk about using American tools and accepting some risk to help bring that about, what are we able to influence? What’s the kind of theory of the case here?

MATT POTTINGER

Yeah. The reason that Marxist-Leninist regimes are compulsively hostile is that they don’t have a very compelling model on their own in and of themselves. Most Chinese people are not communists. There’s probably 95 million members of the Chinese Communist Party out of 1.3—or now less than 1.3 billion Chinese people, their population is rapidly shrinking. The vast majority of Chinese people not only don’t belong to the Chinese Communist Party, but they don’t believe in communism. And so the whole edifice supporting this idea of Marxist-Leninist single-party dictatorship that doesn’t respect rule of law, that impinges on people’s rights and freedoms routinely in ways that people in China don’t like—the substitute for this threadbare ideology now is, “We’re going to make China great by basically building a regional and then global empire. And then we’ll be rich and strong.” And so—fùqiáng, that’s the Chinese phrase—rich and strong, rich and strong. And the Chinese Communist Party are the ones that are going to get you there.

The way that they’re trying to make China rich is really at the expense of law-abiding free-market economies, as well as poorer developing countries around the world. And so if they are not able to grow through those means, it stands to reason—it’s merely an observation, it’s not a call on my part for the United States to do something that compels regime change. Mike and I, in that sentence you just read, were really making the same observation that George Kennan made all the way back when he wrote his article for Foreign Affairs magazine, which was that a Leninist system that is unable to achieve its global vision through hostile means ultimately will start to sag and then possibly collapse under its own rotten weight.

That is what we just were describing, and what we’re saying is we shouldn’t be fearful of that. In fact, what we should really be looking to shape is the aftermath of the Chinese Communist Party, so that we give China its best chance at becoming its best self on behalf of the Chinese people. It’s not a call for us to try to subvert. We said explicitly we’re not calling for regime change and subversion here. What we’re saying is we should not fear the outcome that is predicted by history, was predicted by George Kennan, that actually unfolded in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s successful policy. So I don’t think that that should be something that is controversial or that should be called reckless and dangerous like one commentator called our piece.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Is there any end state that you would find acceptable or that would allow some kind of accommodation that would still have the Chinese Communist Party in power?

MATT POTTINGER

If the Chinese Communist Party were not trying to poison eighty-plus thousand Americans to death a year; if the Chinese Communist Party were not stealing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property each year; if the Chinese Communist Party were not actually the main backers of proxy wars against Europe and against countries in the Middle East via their proxies, Russia and Iran, I would revert back to the policy that I first advocated for when I was preparing to come into office, which was something more like this idea of a coexistence and trying to find a balance. And try to say, “Look, we’re not trying to fundamentally change you, but by the same token, you better not be directly harming our prosperity, national security, and public health and the rest.” The problem is I’ve since graduated from that hopeful vision through experience. When the facts change, so does my opinion.

So I just don’t think that we are up to date with the reality of how deeply antagonistic Xi Jinping’s vision and goals and actions are now. And that’s why I wrote the piece for you together with Matthew Johnson and David Feith back in late 2022 called “Xi Jinping in His Own Words,” where we visited some of the things that Xi Jinping was saying not when he was talking to the public audiences at Davos or standing in the Rose Garden. It was what Xi Jinping was saying in secret speeches to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which we were eventually able to get ahold of those speeches months or years after they were delivered. That was the real guidance that Xi Jinping was giving, and it was inherently hostile to anything like a modus vivendi or coexistence. There’s no trace of coexistence in the internal speeches as an end state for Xi Jinping. He’s going for the whole loaf of bread. He’s not looking to split it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I mean, there’s a lot of commentary that focuses on Xi Jinping’s role and everything that is particular about him that makes coexistence difficult. But your journey—and you don’t need to go back into your life story in great detail—but my sense of your radicalization on this issue, if you put it that way, started long before Xi Jinping was in power, when you were a Wall Street Journal reporter in China in the 90s and aughts, where you started to see some of the elements of what we’re seeing now. I mean, is everything really going to go back to the kind of Deng Xiaoping–era accommodation, even after Xi Jinping?

MATT POTTINGER

Look, one of the things Mike wrote—I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was later in the article—what we said was Xi Jinping, who is committing genocide according to Tony Blinken and Mike Pompeo—they agree on that much, that China’s committing genocide against some of its own people, it’s waging these proxy wars, it’s doing all these things—it is unrealistic to think that a dictator who’s doing all of those things right now is going to be a reliable partner that we can solve global problems with. I think that is pure fantasy. I even think that is irresponsible and dangerous, okay, to make that kind of an assumption.

But I think we said something to the effect in the article also that we need to wait until China produces a leader that we can do business with, right. And we didn’t define that it has to be a democratically elected leader. What we said was that the People’s Republic of China as practiced by a single-party dictatorship under Xi Jinping right now is compulsively hostile—is rapidly undermining our interests, including here at home with information warfare, efforts to interfere in our elections and so on. So let’s not make life easier for Xi Jinping. Let’s not give him the means to expand the sources of his belligerence, which are his economic power and his access to high technology.

Imagine if for a moment, Vladimir Putin had a $17 trillion economy like China purportedly does, rather than merely a $2 trillion economy that Russia reportedly has today. Think of how immense the damage would be, beyond the damage that Putin is already doing, if he had a $17 trillion economy at his back. I’m glad Putin only has a $2 trillion economy and I’d like to make that economy a lot smaller than $2 trillion now, in light of what he’s doing. The same is true of China. I don’t wish Chinese people ill, and in fact, Chinese people are voting with their feet. Anyone who can, irrespective of their social strata, is trying to flee China right now, many of them successfully—a lot of them to come to the United States, okay. So it’s not that I mean the Chinese people harm. I do mean to deprive Xi Jinping of the sources of his aggression. And one of them is high technology that can be weaponized, and the other is just sheer economic power that he can use to fund his—what is already the largest military buildup since the Nazis.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s talk about what has historically been one of the thorniest issues in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and today is probably one of the biggest flashpoints, and that’s Taiwan. You of course have a new book about Taiwan. You wrote a piece with Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins drawing from that book in Foreign Affairs a few months ago. You have, I think, been fairly clear that you would embrace a policy of what’s called “strategic clarity”—I mean, being explicit about our willingness to step in and use U.S. force if Beijing tries to take Taiwan on by force. Joe Biden has said that, I believe, four times—unclear exactly what that means about the policy, but he’s certainly gone farther than any president before has. And that includes Trump, who I think even recently has said that he would not say anything clear about it and would maintain his version of ambiguity.

MATT POTTINGER

President Trump’s statements are in tune with 40 years of American strategic ambiguity. Biden’s are much closer to something like strategic clarity, given that, at least according to the Constitution, Biden and not his staff are the ones who actually make policy. And so I take President Biden at his word when he says four times that he would come to Taiwan’s defense if China were to attack. I think that future presidents and future candidates for president probably shouldn’t back away from that new line that’s been drawn. That said, I don’t spend a lot of time on the debate between ambiguity and clarity because I think it is a sideshow relative to the question of, do we have credible capability to back up anything we say with respect to Taiwan? And that’s the first cornerstone for effective deterrence, much more than anything we say rhetorically.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The more complicated, or an equally complicated, dimension of this problem is a scenario short of that full-scale invasion that people worry about, and that’s much closer to what we’re seeing now both around Taiwan and also in the South China Sea. People call this gray zone tactics or salami slicing, you can kind of characterize it in different ways. But it’s in some ways hard to imagine the United States going to war with China over an old World War II–era boat that’s stuck on a reef in the South China Sea that the Philippines controls, or because a Chinese Coast Guard ship has gotten a little bit too close to Taiwan’s shore. I mean, to me the South China Sea might be the most useful place to play this out given how urgent it is.

MATT POTTINGER

I mean, the reason that Beijing has picked a completely—an almost irrelevant speck on the map to start waging gray-zone pressure is precisely because they know that we are psychologically inhibited from viewing that speck on the map as strategically important or these tactics as a military attack. And so Beijing is trying to come in just under the threshold of what it would take to actually awaken an American response. Why are they doing that? They want to show the world, they want to show the Philippine people, followed by the people of Taiwan, that resistance is futile—that you cannot actually win because the United States isn’t going to be there for you, just like they’re not there for the Second Thomas Shoal, where a squad of Philippine Marines are bravely guarding the sovereignty of the Philippine nation. So I think we need to start getting a lot more serious in terms of imposing costs on Beijing for the actions it’s already undertaking.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you were in your old job of Deputy National Security Adviser and you were tasked with delivering a message to a Chinese counterpart about what the consequences of another incident like the one that we just saw at Second Thomas Shoal—

MATT POTTINGER

I would speak with actions rather than merely words, and I would start making it easy for them to spot things that have just made the bar that much higher for them to succeed in bullying the Philippines or in trying to assert jurisdiction over Taiwan’s near waters.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What might something like that be? We don’t need a full set of options, but—

MATT POTTINGER

Well, I’ll throw some ideas out there. I mean, for one, if President Marcos were to request it, the help, I would advise the [U.S.] president to start providing a helicopter airlift to Philippine troops on those offshore outposts close to the Philippines that are administered by the Philippines, but which are now being threatened by China. I would help them do that. I would start inviting Japan to get more directly involved. Japan has a very capable coast guard. Why not start putting some Japanese Coast Guard cutters forward to the Philippines and more coast guard cutters into the western Pacific?

I would certainly be trying, as I tried to do when I was in office, to significantly beef up the U.S. Coast Guard—to give it more of a budget, rather than having them just be a hand-me-down sort of budget from portions of the U.S. Navy budget. The Coast Guard is awesome, and it is our own gray-zone tool, so let’s beef that way the heck up. If that means that we have to buy or lease some ships because America’s own shipbuilding capacity has fallen into disarray, the Europeans as well as the South Koreans and the Japanese are great at making ships. Combined, they make almost as many ships as China. Let’s start leasing ships from our friends and allies. It’s probably going to be cheaper, frankly, than us building our own in some cases.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Some of your former colleagues in the Trump administration have been critical of U.S. support for Ukraine on the argument that it distracts us from deterring China in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific—that we should really kind of focus resources there and that Ukraine is a kind of black hole of resources and strategic focus that we need to walk away from. I mean, Trump himself has not been exactly—when given the opportunity to declare, coming to Ukraine, he’s evaded it. And JD Vance and others, a possible vice presidential pick, have been even sharper about the need to step away from Ukraine. How do you see that connection?

MATT POTTINGER

Yeah. My view is you need a bigger pie, instead of trying to slice the pie differently. I agree with those views that we need to do much more to give Beijing something to think about in order to deter Xi Jinping from taking actions against Taiwan. That means more money than was made available for that theater in the last important supplemental. What I would not argue for is us turning our back on Ukraine and pretending that it’ll all work out—that Europe will, without American leadership, step up. The Europeans are doing more and more all the time; they need to do much more still. That’s going to require American leadership, not American abandonment.

If Ukraine falls, has anyone really done a careful analysis of what would be required in new manpower, new European spending, new U.S. spending in order to defend, now, the NATO line, which is going to be right up against Russian-occupied Ukraine? That’s going to be multiples of what we’re spending to keep Ukrainians fighting bravely, and to ensure that Russia at least doesn’t gain more ground than it’s already taken. So this is just—it’s prudent. It’s not ideological, it’s not romantic. This is just practical. We’re going to end up spending a hell of a lot more money if Ukraine falls than we’re spending right now to keep them in the fight.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And Xi Jinping would presumably see that as an encouraging sign in terms of—

MATT POTTINGER

No doubt, no doubt. But for those who say, “Therefore we shouldn’t—who cares what Xi Jinping thinks, that’s not what this is about”—my counterargument to that is, think about what we would have to spend if Ukraine falls. Put Xi Jinping aside for a minute. What would we have to spend just to ensure that NATO does not end up getting probed and attacked? It’s going to be multiples of what we’re spending right now. So we’re being penny-wise pound-foolish when we argue Ukraine’s not really a valid place for us to be helping right now.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Speaking of Xi Jinping's perception, turning that back on the United States. When you were in office, you resigned on January 6. Given the events at the Capitol, I don’t imagine that was primarily because of what it meant for the U.S.-Chinese relationship; but surely, China watches that kind of event and senses a distracted adversary. Any kind of disruption in democratic process this year would send a similar signal. You—

MATT POTTINGER

Yeah, yeah, China made hay of January 6. Their propagandists did. They’re trying to make hay of President Biden’s disconcerting performance in his debate, and, you know, we need to do better on both fronts. But what I’ll say is the United States has the ability—we often don’t do it until we’ve exhausted every other option, but we have the ability to course correct and to regenerate and to refresh and renew, and to do so in ways short of revolution, right? If any system can do it, it’s ours. That’s why our system is so worth preserving. So I would say enjoy the laughter while you can get it, Beijing and Moscow. We’ll see who wins the marathon.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me ask one final question that is similarly forward-looking along the lines of that Churchillian note. Without presuming anything, if there is a second Trump term come 2025, what do you think the next big strategic moves on China should be?

MATT POTTINGER

If you look at united front–messaging and Chinese diplomacy, the thing that it prizes more than anything else, the thing that it wants to preserve in its bilateral relationship with the United States above all else, is access to our technology and our laboratories. That’s number one. I would start taking a much harder look at that. That doesn’t mean a wholesale decoupling, but what it means is making it a lot harder for people to gain access to labs when we have a reasonable suspicion that those people are really there to bring that technology back home to serve Beijing’s military buildup and the weaponization of technology on behalf of the Chinese security services. We can do a lot better than we’re doing on that front and still preserve people-to-people ties, still have Chinese immigrants and also Chinese students come study in the United States, but we need to be much more hard-line about it.

So number two is just the deterrence piece, right? Making sure that we’ve got a military that’s up to the task of credibly being ready and able to defeat our foes so that we won’t have to fight and defeat our foes. The trade element, which President Trump has been most vocal about, is also critical, and I’m glad that President Biden increased tariffs on certain areas. I think President Trump, if he’s elected, would go farther and faster. I don’t want to see just a 200 percent tariff on Chinese EVs. I want to see an outright ban on Chinese EVs, including the building of Chinese EVs in the United States, because it’s still the Chinese supply chain and that’s a national security threat to the United States. So we should not be allowing China to export its excess capacity in production in order to wipe out our manufacturing industry and make China richer so that it can do its worst.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Matt, thank you again for the series of really notable pieces and for joining me today.

MATT POTTINGER

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be with you.