American Thought Leaders - China’s Hegemonic Ambitions, From Taiwan to the Moon: Richard Fisher

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“Building on a foundation of economic and then political influence, China has drawn Russia, North Korea, and Iran into its early, active, military dictatorship coalition,” author and China expert Rick Fisher said.In this episode, I sit down with Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He specializes in understanding the Chinese Communist Party and the Asian military balance.“The major threat elements that China is producing on a weekly, maybe monthly basis, ought to rate headlines on the major American television networks. Cable channels should have shows that specifically highlight these various threats, but they’re not,” Fisher said. “The American public is relatively uninformed about the breadth and depth of these threats that are developing from China, Russia, North Korea, soon Iran, and the fact that they are all now in a state of coordination.”We discuss the nuclear coalition the Chinese regime is forming with other rogue states. We also discuss the global implications of the regime’s military ambitions, from its space programs to its activity in the South China Sea.“We lose the battle of the South China Sea, we begin to lose the battle for freedom on Earth,” Fisher said.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Building on a foundation of economic and then political influence, China has drawn Russia, North Korea, and Iran into its early active military dictatorship coalition. In this episode, I sit down with Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He specializes in understanding the Chinese Communist Party and the Asian military balance. We discuss the nuclear coalition China is forming with other rogue states. We also discuss the global implications of China's military ambitions from its space programs We would probably think that they were launching satellites, when in fact they would be putting nuclear warheads into space.

to its activity in the South China Sea. We lose the battle of the South China Sea, we begin to lose the battle for freedom on Earth. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of this podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse, job numbers are a lot worse than previously forecast, and many Americans are worried about a coming recession. But there is one way to protect your savings. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and

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Call 855-862-3377. That's 855-862-3377. Or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377. Or text AMERICAN to 65532. Rick Fisher, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me, sir. My understanding right now is that communist China's military buildup is greater than that of Germany during the 1930s,

and not only in conventional weaponry, but in nuclear weaponry. What's the reality? That is the reality. China is on the path to achieving nuclear superiority over the United States probably by the early 2030s. By the mid-2030s, they could have a fleet of three, four, maybe five, six aircraft carriers, three or four of which could be nuclear powered. They are on the path to a conventional only military primacy and maybe military political primacy on

Earth, but also to reinforce that primacy or even hegemony over the Earth-Moon system. So that even if we are cornered on Earth, we won't have the option of going to the moon to get all the resources we would need to survive, fight back, or even defeat the Chinese Communist Party hegemony. And yet, it doesn't seem like China is projecting its military power. For example, what we do hear about is Coast Guard cutters ramming each other in the Philippines around a contested shoal. So what does that have to do with this gigantic military buildup that you're describing? Well, this military buildup is deployed and ready to invade Taiwan. And there are even in recent weeks, horrific indications that a Chinese communist regime controlling Taiwan, they are deployed against Japan. They have assisted Pakistan, North Korea, and soon Iran to become nuclear missile powers.

But you mentioned the South China Sea. Yes, for the last three years or so, there has been an escalating pattern of violence by the Chinese Coast Guard, maritime militia, and even Navy against the Philippines. This is all connected. In order to be able to project military power around the globe and to project Chinese communist power to the moon and beyond, the Chinese Communist Party needs to control the South China Sea. The South China Sea is the gateway, the door, which the Chinese nuclear navy will sail through. Hainan Island, which is at the top of the South China Sea, is the spaceport that the party will use to populate the moon and to populate Mars and beyond. So the rammings, the violence in the South China Sea that barely makes headlines in the United States,

but which makes all the headlines in the Philippines, in Taiwan, in Japan, Southeast Asia, this is all very important. We lose the battle of the South China Sea, we begin to lose the battle for freedom on earth. Explain to me how this isn't just China kind of asserting its dominance in the region, that it says it rightfully should have, of course. Yes, of course. And Taiwan rightfully belongs to China, the Communist Party says, when in the whole history of Taiwan, regimes on the mainland have only controlled Taiwan for just a scant few decades. China should control a massive province in India, essentially because they say so. And so any place that the Communist Party wants to assert a claim to, it will do so.

I'm sure we're on the cusp of hearing about claims to most of Antarctica. And when they get to the moon, we'll hear about claims to the moon and ditto to Mars or any other moon or planet or asteroid that the party decides to occupy. Their territorial aggrandizement is essentially going to be endless. But they are always going to conceal their true goals, and they're always going to cloak their behavior in layers and layers of respectability to try and convince the world that they are morally and then legally justified to basically commit murder. OK. You've been studying communist China's military buildup for decades. Tell me a little bit about your background so we know

where you're coming from here. Well, I graduated from a small liberal arts college called Eisenhower College with the idea that I would come to Washington and become the world's expert on the Soviet Navy. This was the year 1981, 82, and I actually was admitted to the Russian area studies program at Georgetown University. But as part of a work study program, I received the opportunity to work at the then Georgetown University Controlled Center

for Strategic and International Studies. And I ended up working for two China and Asia experts, Ray Klein, Dr. Ray Klein, who used to be a high official with the Central Intelligence Agency, and then Robert Downen, who worked for former Senator Robert Dole, late Senator Robert Dole. And that changed my life. I simply got a job at the Heritage Foundation in their new Asian Studies Center, and I've been writing about studying military issues in U.S.-Asian relations ever since. And in about 1994 or so, I decided, after having avoided it for a long time, that I had to do a deep dive and become an expert on the People's Liberation Army. And did that essentially by going to their air shows, assembling my own database, and then going to air shows in Russia and other places to take an inventory of who was then selling new military technologies to the PLA.

In about 2004, they stopped giving me visas to go to their air shows, so I decided I would go to military exhibitions everyplace else. And I still do that and collect on what the Chinese put out in terms of brochures, write down the answers to any questions they care to answer. And it all goes into my database and contributes to my writing about China's military modernization and its

strategic objectives. What we hear about the Chinese military is everything from it's a huge military, the army, there's a lot of people in there but they're not really good fighters at all. It's not really, it doesn't mean much, right? All the way to the Chinese military has already surpassed, in some ways, the U.S. military. And there are ways, for example, with these hypersonic weapon technologies, as I understand, that no one has a response to. Where does the reality fit on that spectrum? Well, even in the 1980s and 1990s, when the People's Liberation Army was backward, was struggling to figure out how to modernize and trying to acquire technology from all over the world, it was still a very real

threat to its neighbors and even to the United States, primarily because of the thousands of years of Chinese strategic history that prized two aspects of behavior. Non-transparency, or keeping secret from everybody what you have and what you're going to do, and then the prize, the emphasis, value they've placed on the element of surprise. So even if China had a backwards military, if they struck first massively, wherever they chose to strike, they could probably win. Today, you have that tradition now married to a military force that is far more modern, far more capable, and yes, in some ways exceeds the actual hardware military capabilities of the United States, as you mentioned, in hypersonic weapons. China has multiple hypersonic weapons. Some are probably very secret, we don't know about. But China is, I think, the second country, right after Russia, just after a couple of years, to have married a hypersonic warhead, maneuverable hypersonic warhead that is extremely difficult to shoot down to an ICBM or in

the Chinese sense actually a satellite that could circle the earth multiple times and rain these hypersonic warheads down on our heads. Explain to me what that type of weapon is and how it can be used, because you hear about it, but a lot of us don't really know what it is. A normal ballistic trajectory ballistic missile is fired from the ground, the sea, or even the air and immediately goes into a ballistic arc or a parabola or a half circle. It has an apogee, meaning a high point, and then it goes down. It can be terminally guided with radar or optical seekers to achieve very, very high accuracy, but still it descends from a very high point. And because of that, it can be seen by radar or optical sensors. And if it can be seen by those sensors, it can be

targeted by defenses on the ground, be they anti-missile missiles, laser weapons, microwave weapons that fry the electronics and such, you have a chance to defend yourself. Now, a hypersonic weapon starts out in a ballistic arc, but it can immediately descend to a lower altitude, so it's out of radar sensing range. And then when it gets to the lower altitude, it can jinx around, go up and down, so that even if the radar sees the warhead approaching, it has changed its position enough so that it can basically move faster

than the computer has time to calculate an interception solution. So essentially, it becomes very, very difficult to shoot down. And China deploys hypersonic warheads on its DF-17 intermediate range ballistic missile. It can put those warheads very, on a new Dongfeng DF-27 intercontinental ballistic missile, and it has sold this technology or given this technology to North Korea, which also today has an intermediate-range hypersonic warhead, maneuverable hypersonic warhead missile. What's in these warheads? They can be non-nuclear. They can have fuel air explosives. They can be traveling fast enough so

that they can penetrate concrete or earth defenses, attack a command post underground, or they can be armed with probably a smallish nuclear warhead. Although nuclear warheads can be very powerful and still be very small, basically the size of this chair, and still have tens of kilotons or even 100 kilotons worth of nuclear explosive force. How could we imagine the impact of such a, can you give me some kind of a reference point?

One non-nuclear hypersonic warhead from a DF-17 probably has enough energy to travel straight through an aircraft carrier and maybe break the keel of the aircraft carrier, which would very quickly force the aircraft carrier to bend up, break like the Titanic, and just sink. 5,000 souls. Boom. Gone. That's the power that they have. And you often see Chinese propaganda stardusts coming up with illustrations of these missiles

slamming into American warships, carriers, and smaller ships to make this very point that we can hit you with a missile and destroy 5,000 sailors. And what about on the nuclear side? Well, China has been developing nuclear warheads since the late 1950s. Nikita Khrushchev, a former Soviet leader, broke up the the Soviet alliance with China because he wouldn't give Mao nuclear warhead design data that he demanded. So Mao invested his own money, made his own nuclear enterprise, if you will. In the mid-1990s or thereabouts, the Chinese basically decided to brag to the Americans that they had stolen the designs of all American nuclear warheads. They revealed that to us as a means of generating fear in their power, in their military potential.

That revelation then spurred former Congressman Christopher Cox to begin his investigation that resulted in his historic Cox Commission report. I joined his office after the report came out to help with the marketing of that report. But it was really one of the first and really most profound warnings from the American Congress about the threat that China posed to our freedom and security. But China's investment in its nuclear enterprise is massive. And it's not just nuclear material, nuclear warheads, but it's also multiple companies that are making the missiles to carry these warheads, possibly on fractional orbital bombardment systems that can circle the Earth multiple times if they so desire,

and all manner of short-range to medium, intermediate, ballistic, intercontinental range missiles. So there's nuclear warheads right now up on satellites? No. In 2021, the Chinese tested their fractional orbital bombardment system twice. And as of now, no, as far as I know, they don't have nuclear warheads in space orbiting the Earth. But what they did in 2021 is tell us, show us that this is what they could do. So I imagine that since then, they've simply

been building these fractional orbital bombardment capable missiles. And they are now residing in silos or in missile bases and storage. And how does one deliver these things to these bombardment satellites? Well, they're already part of essentially the third stage of the rocket. The first FOBS, fractional orbital bombardment systems, were built on an early large Chinese space launch vehicle called the Long March 2C. A space launch vehicle that was essentially

about the same size as the old American Titan II ICBM from the 1960s, a liquid-fueled rocket. But the Chinese, because they're so reliable, cheap, easy to make, they've kept on using them. They still use them today. So the production line for Long March IICs has been in operation since the 1970s. And they have had the potential to amass any number of these rockets, put them in storage, but just in the last few years reveal this fractional orbitable environment capability. They would exist probably in storage areas and space launch bases. China has five space launch bases.

And so they would probably store them there, roll them out, put them on the launcher. It would take a while to put the liquid fuel into the rocket. But this would just be a matter of hours. We would probably think that they were launching satellites when, in fact, they would be putting nuclear warheads into space. I see. It's just not something you hear about a lot.

No, no. The major threat elements that China is producing, kind of on a weekly, maybe monthly basis, ought to rate headlines on the major American television networks. Cable channels should have shows that specifically highlight these various threats, but they're not. The American public is relatively uninformed about the breadth and depth of these threats that are developing from China, Russia, North Korea, soon Iran, and the fact that they are all now in a state of coordination they they they are all in some way funded by China by the Chinese Communist Party which in my opinion exercises a kind of leadership and and is is actively working to make all of them more powerful.

And one day, when the Chinese Communist Party so decides, they will attack. And sadly, I am not sure that we will be prepared. Can you give me a picture of what the arsenal looks like, or just a bit of it somehow? So what we are now seeing is that you have China, all at the same time, is moving to a position where it could soon achieve nuclear superiority, not just over the United States, but also over Russia. China is building a navy that is today larger than the American Navy and by the mid 2030s could have the ability let's say to on its own invade and take

over a country like New Zealand, help a country like Australia or I mean Argentina win a second war over the Falklands Islands, definitely will be able to invade, conquer, and massacre the democracy on Taiwan, or help the dictatorship in North Korea to conquer and destroy the democracy in South Korea. Or, as the 2030s unfold, China could have the ability to support multiple wars simultaneously and deter the United States, or at least delay the United States from reacting to any of them by fear of its overwhelming nuclear force that would be revealed to be a force that also includes Russia's nuclear capabilities, North Korea's

nuclear capabilities, and Iran's nuclear capabilities. We're basically entering a period in which the Chinese-led coalition of dictatorships could dictate on almost any level to democracies around the world, including the United States, and we are approaching this danger well within our lifetimes. And definitely, this is the threat legacy that we will be leaving to our children who will have to figure out how to survive in a world where the United States is no longer the prime military power. and it is our enemies that are controlling the agenda in terms of law, in terms of economic policy, in terms of the allocation of resources around the earth, energy, food even. This is a horrible, horrible position for the United States to be looking toward after having spent so much effort to win World War II and then to win the Cold War and hand to the current generation an era of unparalleled peace

but to only after after 40 years be on the cusp of losing it and losing it profoundly. How do you react to people and there's quite a few of them out there, who would say, you know, this is just China overcoming its century of humiliation. They have the right to do that. They have the right to establish themselves. It's us trying to project power on them that's really the problem. It's always difficult to argue with either political liberals or political libertarians about dictatorships that are practiced in the art of profound lies and are practiced in, you know, steeped in centuries of history of disinformation and deception.

The Chinese Communist Party is at the top of this game simply because for the last 5,000 years, this is how they've conducted their own politics. It's been just the use of deception and cutthroat tactics, surprise. Rick, if I can jump in just for one sec. Often, when I talk about the Cultural Revolution, probably the most effective attempt of eradicating traditional culture, but the culture, the military lessons of the culture were not eliminated. This is one of the areas that they very deliberately kept. True, true. But in terms of their intentions, they are steeping their intentions in deception.

For example, about one year ago plus about a week and a half, experts from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the main rocket building, moon launcher building company in China, sponsored a conference. And as part of this conference, their top experts unveiled what they had been working on for three years a 100 year program 200 year program basically to occupy our solar system to use uh lagrangian points which are points of equidistant gravitational pull between planets and moons and suns and the such, to use Lagrangian points and the ability to mine resources on planets and moons and whatnot, to fabricate rocket fuels to get to the next moon, the next

planet, whatever. They have a 200-year program on how to do this and extend basically their control out to Pluto, if that's how far they want to go. I mean, by that point, we'll probably have perfected nuclear propulsion that will begin to make us truly a multi-galactic civilization. But the key here is that first they want to control the moon, then they want to control Mars, and then they want to control the rest of our solar system. Why? In order to reinforce their control on Earth. And I always try to explain this to our liberal and libertarian friends.

This is what they are doing. Now, they may describe it as this or that piece wrap it up in peaceful exploit explanations of exploration to benefit mankind and such but we can never ever forget this is the chinese communist party that is controlling all of this activity the same chinese communist party that, 60, 70 million of its own people even before embarking on this vast military program to achieve political military hegemony on Earth. find that our liberal and libertarian friends often fall back to arguments of denial. And okay, it's a free country. You can deny what's happening. But for me, from my perspective, the reality of what they're doing speaks far more than their words, their white papers, their journal articles,

or the statements of their leaders. What does political-military hegemony on Earth mean, one, exactly, and two, how do we know for sure that's the ambition? Well, we know this is the ambition because we've been told this was Mao Zedong's ambition. Mao Zedong's ambition derived from Lenin's ambition and then Stalin's ambition. Stalin helped to create Mao, empowered him for over a decade, was transferring all the factories that produced that generation of weaponry for the People's Liberation Army. The Soviets and Mao split in 1960, but Mao's ambitions continued.

His Cultural Revolution put back the schedule, but that schedule was revived when Deng Xiaoping convinced the West to invest in China, that China could be an ally against the Soviet Union. And we went along, basically, with that deception. Deng Xiaoping never had any intention of being our friend or our ally. He was continuing Mao's ambition of achieving primacy. And that ambition has been continued by every leader since. since the mass total of their actions and occasional statements that we can collect all point in this direction now because they don't come out and just say

it it can be disputed and those on the left or the libertarians yes they will dispute this but the more that our backs are against the wall, the more that we face the combined nuclear military threats of the dictatorship coalition led by China, the more undeniable this becomes. The question is whether our friends on the other side of the debate will recognize all of this in time, whether our friends on the other side of the debate will recognize all of this in time, or whether there will be no

freedom to pass along to our children. It'll be too late. Will it be too late? You said something that has happened recently is horrific for Taiwan. Can you just expand on what you meant there? Yes. Early in August, a Chinese, Xiamen University, which is in Fujian Province, right across the Taiwan Street, and has a

program that basically helps to plan the societal takeover of Taiwan by the Chinese Communist Party, revealed something of a plan, kind of showed some ankle about what they would actually do. I mean, I'm sure that the Chinese Communist Party has been unrolling generation after generation of plans since 1949, about what they're going to do to Taiwan once they take over Taiwan. But they rarely, if ever, never really, made these plans public. There have been references to them by Chinese officials or experts, and they make maybe a headline or two, and then people forget about them. But this revelation from Xiamen University in early August was more specific and more frightening than most. They basically were saying, look, we need to create a shadow government for Taiwan, and we need to do it really quickly, which, you know, the urgency there implied we're going to need it real soon, meaning, oh, you're going to invade real soon.

And then when they get there, the shadow government needs to take control. They need to emerge from the shadow and take control of Taiwan immediately. There's, you know, China has been, the Communist Party has been spending decades trying to convince Taiwanese, first Hong Kong citizens and then Taiwan citizens, that they were going to practice something called peaceful unification. That will take over, but it's going to be for your benefit. It's going to be okay. Yes, we're taking away your freedoms. Yes, we're telling you what you can and can't do and how you're going to have to run your life, but it'll be great. You'll love it. Everybody over here loves it. I'm sure you'll love it too. That all blew up in 2019 when basically most of the population of Hong Kong took to the streets and said, no, you can't take away our freedoms. Don't take away our freedoms.

And that woke up most of the population on Taiwan and said, what? One country, two systems? Peaceful unification? That must be one big lie. That must be another grand deception. So by revealing this plan for a shadow government, the Chinese Communist Party, in essence essence is telling Taiwanese that yeah, yeah, all that talk before, those were lies, those were deceptions, we did that so that you

wouldn't build up a military force that could actually defend yourselves from our invasion, and yeah, we might be about ready to invade now, and yeah, our shadow government will emerge, and yeah, we'll arrest everybody from the Democratic Progressive Party, you know, kind of half the population, and the ones we really don't like, well, they'll just disappear. And if you complain about it, well, you'll disappear too. So, I mean, compared to any other nation, really it's only the US military that can remotely challenge the Chinese

military now. Would that be an accurate statement? Not entirely. I mean, the polls have been running pretty consistently for several years in South Korea in favor of South Korea developing their own nuclear deterrent. I can almost assure you that as soon as South Korea goes nuclear, Japan will go nuclear. And in the 1970s, the United States had to intervene not once but twice to convince our friends in Taiwan

that their nuclear program was something that they needed to stop very quickly. Now, they did that, but did they round up all the engineers and ship them here and far and turn them all into dumpling chefs? No. If South Korea and Japan went nuclear, might Taiwan follow quickly? I can't say for sure, but it's something I certainly wouldn't rule out. So China, by threatening all of these countries in Asia and threatening the ability of the United States to defend them, which they've been doing successfully now for the last decade, they are pushing their neighbors to acquire their own nuclear deterrent. And with about

20 nuclear artillery shells, Taiwan could probably stop most of an amphibious invasion. If you stop the amphibious invasion, then the airborne invasion will likely fail, and the overall Chinese invasion of Taiwan could fail. With about 20 nuclear artillery shells, you could probably take out most of the North Korean armored invasion of South Korea. Yes, the North Koreans have all these nuclear missiles now, and that's a huge problem. But if their army is dead, then their war stops. And then the regime in North Korea will probably be facing existential threats from a military that lost that war and a political party that just watched their leadership force them into a point of suicide.

So the cost for China of embarking on such massive and profound aggression is potentially very high. The question, though, is whether the states of Asia that have the ability to acquire nuclear weapons will do so rapidly enough. Maybe South Korea, maybe Japan could do that. Taiwan, maybe yes, maybe no. But this then puts a premium for China of striking first and striking massively. And they are quickly approaching a position where they could probably get away with that, especially as we approach the 2030s and beyond. It seems almost insane to be talking about nuclear war so casually, right? It's also very disconcerting to be considering the end of your civilization so casually. And this is one of the prices, one of the steep prices that Americans and democracies pay when they fail or refuse

to consider the threats to their freedom as seriously as they require. When we talk about nuclear weapons these days, we talk about in the context of typically non-proliferation treaties. Right. Right. And how to kind of reduce the number of weapons and how to make sure not one ever goes off. Right. Certainly not in terms of, you know, creating new deterrences, essentially proliferating nuclear weapons. The non-proliferation sector business, really, if you will, in the United States is large and very well funded. The number of students that get degrees every year in

peace studies or in degrees that emphasize how do we eliminate nuclear weapons uh it's it's it's a huge business and uh you you you have probably a dozen universities across across the the united states that will basically take you up to a PhD in this area of study, whereas maybe a handful, if less than a handful, of universities will take you to a PhD in how to deter, how to properly describe the threats that we face and what will it take to keep those threats away from our shores. We have been intellectually disarming ourselves for generations. I mean, when I was in university in the 1980s, yes, there was a large and profound debate. You could go to a place like Harvard and find a Ph.D. advisor who was entirely skeptical of the Soviet threat,

would help you get a Ph.D. in an expertise that reflected that skepticism, and you would be considered a legitimate person. You wouldn't be drummed out of academia and never get a job. But today if you don't have essentially a left-wing degree that comes from some kind of anti-nuclear or peace studies source, then it's very hard for you to get a job. If you come from the peace studies left-wing perspective and you do get a job, the pressure is very hard to continue to generate people, degrees that replicate that

perspective. It's a terrible situation that we find ourselves in. You described this coalition of dictatorships and you say that China, in effect, leads it. So explain that to me or justify that to me. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese Communist Party has been pushing out strategically, but politically, and strategically and economically. Just this week, China is hosting, I believe, the fifth or sixth of the Forum on China-Africa cooperation. I mean, it'll be in Beijing, so Xi Jinping doesn't have to travel to Africa. But all, I would say 99% of the African heads of state

will go to Beijing to listen to lectures, propaganda, and then have their wives taken out on very generous shopping trips. That's what happens when China hosts one of these big continental political action exercises. And they've been doing this for the Africa section since the early to mid-2000s. And they have created the same kind of coalition in Central Asia under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. They are close to creating a Shanghai Cooperation Organization in the Middle East and would dearly like to create a similar organization for Latin America. In Southeast Asia, they would like to create a Shanghai cooperation-like organization that would exclude Japan and the United States from being militarily active in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asians, however, still value their strategic relationships with

Japan and the United States. But for how much longer, we don't know. So on a political level, economic level, the Chinese Communist Party has been projecting to create these networks, global networks, that acclimatize generations of leadership in these regions to agreeing with what the Chinese say, agreeing with what the Chinese want, and taking Chinese money to pursue economic and really corruption goals that they all have in their individual countries. So they've been training leadership all around the globe to like and obey the Chinese Communist Party. So that's just what they've been able to accomplish in the last 30, 35 years. Now you bring in the military dimension. Here, the activist level and the cutting edge is on a much narrower scale. These are

pretty isolated and brutal dictatorships that have been funded by China for quite a while anyway, or have been reliant on commerce with China for quite a while, and have been drawn into closer and closer military relationships. I mean, Pakistan and North Korea are essentially proxies of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party has basically built the nuclear missile capabilities of both of these countries. They've done it secretly. They've done it with deception. But they've done it.

Russia has been brought along more recently, especially in the last 15 years, because in the early 2010s, Vladimir Putin decided that no, he wasn't going to align with the West against China. He was going to align with China against the West. And he's done that progressively over the last 15 years. When he decided to begin his war to reclaim the former Soviet Union's glory in Europe, he did so with the acquiescence of China and then very quickly the material and economic support of the Chinese Communist Party, to which he has also enlisted the military material support of North Korea and Iran with the establishment, I believe in July, mid-July, of a revival of the Russian-North Korean military alliance. I mean, North Korea has already shipped an estimated 13 million artillery shells

to support Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. And the North Koreans have probably hundreds of millions of artillery shells more to share with Putin as he contemplates wars against the Baltic states, wars against Poland, Moldova, elsewhere. And this would all be funded and facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party, which is today the major economic support pillar for the Russian economy, the major economic support pillar for the Russian economy, the major economic support pillar for the North Korean economy, and probably a major support for the Pakistan economy as well as the Iranian

economy. So building on a foundation of economic and then political influence, China has drawn Russia, North Korea, and Iran into its early active military dictatorship coalition. And the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has a long list of countries willing to join it. And as the Africa Forum, which already has a military component, becomes more active, as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for the Middle East develops an active military component, they will all be following the lead of how China has built up Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Key countries could be in line for nuclear capabilities. If Brazil lines up with this coalition, sure, China will help them to acquire nuclear weapons. Ditto for Argentina, which still wants to take over the Falkland Islands.

I mean, the current president of Argentina, Javier Millet, is an amazing guy. He's certainly a hero to the free market and freedom ideological world. But politically, he can't end Argentina's desire to take over the Falklands from our ally, chief ally, the United Kingdom. He may depress and maybe ignore that ambition, but once he leaves office, if he's replaced again by the socialists that preceded him, they will again revive their military relationship with China, which could eventually lead to their acquiring nuclear weapons, especially if they agree to go to war against England and the United States. We would be drawn into that. So yes, this seemingly small coalition of nuclear dictatorships could very quickly grow as North Korea or Pakistan or Iran, not just China and Russia, proliferate nuclear weapons, fuel so many regional conflicts, many of which the United States has no interest

in. But if the ally of the dictatorships wins, that will move the balance of power, the global balance of power continually against the United States and against freedom. Are you saying, essentially, that the only way to counter nuclear proliferation is with more proliferation, basically? From the 1950s onward, we were able to deter without proliferating. In a sense, we proliferated because we stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, in South Korea, and for a while even in Taiwan, Japan we did so, but we didn't admit it

for political reasons, very good ones, and maybe even had them in the Philippines for a while. But we had the major responsibility. We, as part of our bargain with our allies, we guaranteed nuclear deterrence through our own capabilities in coalition with their militaries. Just to be transparent, Dutch fighters, Belgian fighters, German fighter aircraft, Turkish fighter aircraft, Italian fighter aircraft, were all equipped to carry tactical nuclear bombs, bombs that we controlled in their countries, but would release to them. And we practiced how to put them on their airplanes and how their airplanes could fly them to targets. So that created confidence in the larger American nuclear deterrent of our ICBMs back in the United States.

After the Cold War, we took away all those tactical nuclear weapons. I mean, we have some in Europe, but not nearly enough. The Russians could have 2,000, maybe 10,000 non-strategic nuclear weapons. The Chinese, by my estimate, could have up to 5,000 non-strategic tactical nuclear weapons for regional or theater military operations. In Asia today, we have very few, only maybe a handful of tactical nuclear weapons. Essentially, we're not deterring China's use of tactical nuclear weapons in Asia. We're only doing so with our ICBMs in the United States.

And those are soon to be overwhelmed by China's buildup that could also be used in coalition with China's, North Korea's, and Iran's nuclear forces. So we have options. We can build up our regional nuclear forces, and we could ask our allies again to host those forces as they did from the 1950s up until 1991, 1992, thereabouts. We could do that and deter, potentially, possibly deter, without encouraging or even assisting proliferation. We could also invest far more heavily in missile defenses. Missile defenses are very expensive.

They're a lot more expensive than missile offenses, nuclear weapons. But at a moral level, they're far easier to justify to a tax-paying public. And we could do this, but we would have to have the ability to defend surveillance assets in low Earth orbit, which ultimately means we have to have the ability to exercise military control in the Earth-Moon system. The Chinese understand this as well, which is why they are contesting control of the Earth-Moon system. They do not want us to have the ability to detect missile attacks on Earth and defend ourselves with missile defenses. If we invest in missile defenses,

they will not only accelerate wars on Earth that divert our funding from missile defense, they will also work to divert our funding from space programs. That's how they can control our building of missile defenses and space defenses. But I wouldn't want to leave our listeners with the suggestion that I think that nuclear proliferation is the answer to saving democracies around the world. It may come to that, unfortunately, if we do not succeed in rebuilding our regional nuclear forces and missile defenses. I hope it doesn't, but because we are entering such a perilous position of superiority, communist Chinese, Russian superiority in so many categories, an ability to conduct multiple wars in a coordinated fashion around the globe as they drive toward control of the Earth-Moon system. It may come to the fact that our alliances may only survive to the degree

that we help our allies acquire their own nuclear deterrent. Because of our inaction, we are falling down that path. I certainly hope that we rebuild our regional nuclear force capabilities, and I certainly hope that we rebuild missile defenses and maintain the ability to defend our options in space. But this is going to be terribly expensive. It will require the kinds of political exertions that our leadership is not used to. And it will require buy-in from our allies to a degree that they have not been exposed to in generations. And all of that is going to be very difficult, is going to require a forward thinking and strong American leadership.

Again, will we be able to do that? This is something that Americans especially truly have to think about as we approach this next election. How do you respond to criticism that, for example, that what you're describing is a kind of a fear-mongering and it would just feed a kind of bloated military-industrial complex? Well, our military-industrial complex is certainly large. It can be accused of being bloated. It can be justifiably proven to be wasteful.

But I would simply point you to the Chinese military industrial complex, which is even more bloated. What you walk away with from going to arm shows, especially in China, back when they allowed me to go, was you quickly realize that for every company in the United States that was building, let's say, bombs that you drop from aircraft, there were multiple bomb-making companies in China. We have one company that makes main battle tanks. In China, you have at least two. You know, we have essentially two, two and a half companies that make fighter aircraft. In China, you have at least four.

And when you get to unmanned systems, the number of Chinese companies making unmanned systems compared to the United States, it's, okay, let's say 25 to one. I mean, even these companies, the Chinese military may only purchase weapons from a fraction of these companies, but it gives them all lunch money so they continue to make the next weapon, to make the next best idea. Sometimes you can sell those weapons to foreign customers. But the idea is this military-industrial complex is probably 10 times larger than it needs to be because the Chinese want to have 10 options for every military contract that comes along. Basically, you're describing a massive military industrial

policy here. Yes. And we've already known for a long time about how the Chinese Communist Party has legally created a dual use, not just economy, but a dual use society. All economic enterprises that have a Chinese Communist Party cell, and you only need two members to make a cell. So if you have three members in your company, two of them are probably by law Chinese Communist members that are taking orders from a very long hierarchy. And you must, as a Chinese company turn over to the government to the military to the intelligence services anything that you have

anything that you create anything that you steal anything that you're funded to steal that could militarily benefit the Chinese Communist Party so if you are in business in China you are a Chinese business, whatever it is you're doing, you are potentially a military business. I mean, even if you're making dumplings, you probably have an assignment that once China goes to war, once China invades Taiwan or invades South Korea or Japan, you, the dumpling maker, will be making so many dumplings for the PLA per week.

And you'll have to turn them all over. You're describing a society that's kind of wired to support China's military ambitions. How do we deal with that in an immediate sense in your mind? Well, there are immediate threats and there are distant threats, but there are also distant threats that have to be dealt with in an immediate sense. And, uh, the, the challenge in space, especially in the earth moon system is a distant threat that has to be tended immediately.

Um, it is very fortunate that during the Trump administration, President Trump led the creation of our Space Force so that we can, we have a service now dedicated to assuring our security in low Earth orbit and beyond. That's a very important tool that we have probably required for a very long time. China's projection to the moon, which could happen by 2030 or 2029, is a huge deal. If we lose control of the moon, we lose the high ground. We lose control of cislunar space. All of our satellites are moving of cislunar space. All of our satellites are moving into cislunar space, the area between the moon and the earth. If you control cislunar space,

you can better control low earth orbit. If you control low earth orbit, you basically can assure military victory on earth. So all of this is immediate, really, and we cannot lose focus on our own strategic projection to the moon in order to preserve our security interests in cislunar space. But as we do that, we simply have no choice but to the best of our ability to deter the immediate conflicts on Earth that are just around the corner. The battle in the South China Sea, as I mentioned, is about assuring the beginning of China's global military projection and projection into space. We cannot lose the battle of the South China Sea. Let me just jump in at this point. Is it an issue? We hear about there being, for the first time, no carrier group in the Pacific at all. Is that an issue for this question?

Just a little bit of a deviation here, but I want to get back to it. Yes. Aircraft carrier battle groups could make a big difference in Asia for the United States. But the kinds of forces that we really need, we don't have. We need missiles. We need probably thousands of missiles, short, medium, intermediate range missiles that are on ships, on submarines, and on land bases in Asia. We're just beginning to understand this and build up to this, but we're not doing so

with the urgency that's required. With thousands of missiles, we stand a much better chance of deterring Chinese attack against Taiwan, Chinese attack against the Philippines, because the Chinese missiles will take out our carriers. They'll take out our Navy. But if we have thousands of missiles, then we have at least some assurance of striking back, of destroying the Chinese invasion forces, wherever they're pointed. So that's an immediate imperative to build up our missile forces. Again, we're very fortunate that Donald Trump took us out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty with the former Soviet Union and then Russia, which prevented the United States from building regional missile forces. The Chinese used that advantage to build

up their regional missile forces. We are very much behind in that arena of competition. And we are much more in danger of losing wars in Asia because of it. So attending our interests, security interests in space and on the moon, being ready to confront immediate military challenges in Asia on Earth, working to isolate and disarm the emerging dictatorship coalition. They all have to be made pariah states, and we all have to move, the democracies at least, move into higher levels of embargo against all of these countries to isolate them, to make sure that they cannot benefit from the global economy. Yes, that is also going to create increasing chances for skirmishes, battles, naval battles, even wars around the globe. But small wars are preferable to larger wars.

Scaring the dictatorship coalition is preferable to fighting it. And we have to get on with this business with enthusiasm as soon as we can. And it's not just a military contest. It's also a political contest. It's an intelligence, a spy war contest. And it's a contest of ideas. And we're just beginning to understand this. Because ultimately what you're talking about is establishing deterrence in all these different areas, really, right? To making sure to try to prevent war, really. Yeah, war happens when the other side thinks it can win.

When the other side does not think it can win, it very rarely decides to start a war. Argentina and the Falklands Islands, a prominent example, yes. You can have governments that are insane enough to start wars when all the strategic balance is against them. on American leadership to ourselves be in a position and to lead our allies into positions where our enemies decide, hmm, tomorrow's not a good day. Next week is not good either.

Next year, probably not. Well, Rick Fisher, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you for having me. Thank you all for joining Rick Fisher and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.