American Thought Leaders - How US Dollars Built—And Continue to Build—China’s Military: James Fanell and Bradley Thayer

Episode Date: March 18, 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“The first rule of strategy is don’t assist your enemy. And of course, we violated that time and time again,” says Bradley Thayer, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy.After aggressively building up and modernizing its military, China now has a larger navy than the United States.How does the Chinese military compare to America’s overall?What would an invasion or blockade of Taiwan look like for the United States?Mr. Thayer and James Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, are co-authors of the new book “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.” They are founding members of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.How has progressive, communist ideology subverted America and America’s military?Did the United States get distracted by smaller wars and lose sight of the bigger looming conflict?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Chinese Navy now is basically over 150 naval combatants greater than the U.S. Navy. So this great military growth is largely funded by us. Wall Street or investors gave them the money to grow their economy, to build the weapons to kill us. It's not just the PLA by themselves, it's a people's war. So they're engaged with the civilian sector and civilian technology and leveraging all of this. James Fennell and Brad Thayer are co-authors of Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest

Strategic Failure. Brad Thayer is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. James Fennell is a retired U.S. Navy captain and former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Navy captain and former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Now it seems like we have people in charge of this progressive movement that are adopting the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. Just look what happened in COVID. Whether communist tyranny wins or whether freedom does, of course, is the fundamental issue of this century. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan J. Kellick. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast,

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That's 855-862-3377. Or text American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377. Or text American to 65532. Jim Fennell, Brad Thayer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. It's our pleasure to join you. Thank you, Jim.

In a nutshell, if you can encapsulate for me the threat, the entirety of the threat of the Chinese Communist Party to America. Well, the threat from the Communist Party of China is an existential one to the United States and to the liberal economic order, the world that the U.S. and the British created in the wake of World War II. First, there is the military threat. As the Chinese military has been growing exponentially, both in its nuclear capabilities and its conventional capabilities, and they have been applying that military might, that hard power against allies like the Philippines

or the Japanese and elsewhere, also key U.S. partners like Taiwan, which increasingly is coming under the threat of invasion, or India. There's also the economic threat. We hollowed out our manufacturing capability in the 1990s and the noughties and sent it to China. And we recognized, of course, with COVID, the prodigious cost of doing that when we had to rely on China to provide our own personal protective equipment, as well as pharmaceuticals like penicillin and other key drugs. There's a technological threat as increasingly China's replacing the U.S. in chip production,

aircraft production, and in many other areas. In diplomacy, with the Belt and Road Initiative and other mechanisms that the Chinese are employing to advance their vision of international politics, their vision of what the world should look like. And lastly, there's the ideological threat where the Chinese Communist Party as a communist government seeks to kill the United States, that is as a bourgeois government, as a state, and they seek to replace the United States, eliminating it as the dominant state in international politics. So just as you can't be a married bachelor, you can't be a peaceful communist. And so we should expect that China is increasingly aggressive under Xi Jinping

or really any other leader, and Americans should expect, of course, that that security competition between the U.S. and the People's Republic is only going to intensify in the near term. So this word, you know, kill, when you think about it, what does that mean in the context of America? It's a very strong word. It is a strong word, and it indicates that we're in an existential battle with a nation that has a view that says that they want to be running the globe, they want to

have control of everything. And because they're a totalitarian regime, they stand opposed to anybody that would offer an opposing view, like the American and Western civilization. And so they've prepared themselves this capability to go all the way to actually use physical force if they have to. They would prefer not to use force, as we've seen them do in Scarborough Shoal in 2012. They were able to acquire territory without using weaponry. But they are preparing themselves, and they have prepared themselves, to be able to use military and physical force to achieve their goal. And so a big part of this is, of course, deception and subversion.

And indeed, this is described very openly in Chinese doctrine, military doctrine, and so forth over the past few decades. And somehow, Americans and frankly, many other nations, fell asleep at the wheel. I mean, how did this exactly happen, right, that a relatively small communist power became, you know, this existential threat that you just described, Jim? Well, the origins go back to the Cold War. So following World War II, we faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. Because we looked and saw China as a way, an avenue, because they were in the underbelly of the Soviet Union, that we thought we could reach out to them. By the time we switched recognition in 1979 from Taipei to Beijing,

we have started now this school of what we call the school of engagement. We can call it the Kissinger School of Engagement. And it started to permeate this entire federal government here, think tanks, the State Department, Defense Department, our literature, our analysis, and their idea that if we engage, things will get better in our relations with China. They'll modernize. They'll come along and follow the existing international order. And that went on for 40 plus years. And during that time, no one ever stopped and said, hey, is this working? Something that's very interesting in there is you talk about

the end of history, right? 1989, the Soviet Union collapses a few years later. And there's this kind of, I know, mania, like, you know, liberal democracy has won. And Francis Fukuyama, the end of history, becomes this kind of, I guess, the prophet with the prophecy having come true. And a whole lot of people kind of believe this. And this is part, and I found this to be a very fascinating element. Maybe, Brad, you could expand on this for me. Well, certainly. We have to recall how remarkable it was, that golden year of 1989, where it seemed it was possible to remake everything

with the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. And at that time, Francis Fukuyama recognized, again, heavily influenced by Hegel, that it did seem that key ideas that would be a liberal democracy and free market capitalism were triumphant. And a little bit of the vintage went to our head, no doubt, and it helped to color our vision and to blind ourselves to the rise of China, which was also historic in another sense. 1989 was also Tiananmen Square. So you had really a popular movement that was crushed by the Chinese Communist Party. So that year was Janus-faced in so many ways. It showed what was possible in the future that

Fukuyama picked up on, but it also also the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party. And the key lesson that Deng Xiaoping, the communist leader at the time, took from that was he was never going to allow democracy within China and any democratic elements were going to be crushed. He also recognized the profound vulnerability. It's really interesting. Actually, it was the same day of the Tiananmen Square massacre was the first post-communist elections in Poland. So that, you know, that juxtaposition, as you described it, juxtaposition is very apt. You know, something that just came to my mind from your book, as you were just describing this, there's this, I guess, fallacy that you engage in, which is the prioritization of the minor war today over the major one tomorrow. When I first read that, I thought, my goodness, that really

characterizes so many multiple scenarios over the last several decades. Yeah, we went from this moment in 1989 to late 1990 and then a desert storm in 1991. And from 1991 until this recent pullout in Afghanistan, America has been dominated by wars in the Middle East against terrorism. And there's reasons for it, but what happened was it transformed the Department of Defense that had during the Cold War had this kind of balanced nature about how to deal with the Soviet Union. We needed a global navy that could contest and keep the freedom of navigation going around the world against the Soviets, and we had to have a strong army presence in Europe to make sure that the Soviet tanks didn't roll through the Fulda Gap and down into Western

Europe. And so we had a balanced approach to national defense. We always considered two major theater wars and one lesser war as our requirement as a nation for our military defense. But when the Soviets went away and we got involved with these minor wars, that term that we use, I know the people that died there, Americans, that's not minor to them, so we're not denigrating their lives. But in the sense of the survival of the nation, it was about a peer competitor that was coming, and we failed to see that the PRC was coming. And we instead watched ourselves just totally absorb ourselves so far on this wars in the Middle East that we stopped looking forward to

peer competitors that were rising. You had the former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates saying, you know, I want to pay attention to, you know, today's events, not future events. I got to take care of what's happening now, which was a complete 180 in terms of the responsibilities and all that previous Secretary of Defense had done, which was to look ahead to make sure that we were never surprised. In fact, the 1947 National Security Act was created so that we would never have a Pearl Harbor again. We recognized that we failed on 7 December 1941, and so after the war, we won the war. It cost a tremendous amount of lives on both sides, millions. And we said, we don't want to go through that again, so let's organize

ourselves in a defense department, and let's have a Pentagon, and let's look ahead, and let's have an Office of Net Assessment where Brad has worked, and let's look ahead to make sure that we're never surprised. But when we went into Desert Storm, it was literally 35 years of not looking ahead. And from a naval officer perspective, we kind of stopped thinking about naval issues. In fact, at one point in this journey, this 35 years, there was a chief of naval operations that publicly proclaimed proudly that he had more sailors ashore in the CENTCOM area of responsibility than afloat. Well, Jim, why don't I take this opportunity to just get you to tell me a little bit about

your backgrounds or for the benefit of our viewers, because you always had this sort of Pacific focused view, which has kind of informed this book, certainly. Yeah, I spent 29 years in the U.S. Navy as a naval intelligence officer. And the first part of my career, I was a targeting officer. I worked a lot with the U.S. Air Force, spent some time in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, did a lot of deployments on carriers. And then in about 1998, 1999, I got assigned to the US Pacific Fleet headquarters. And from 1999 until I retired, every day of my career

I was spent looking at China and their military, and specifically their Navy. So I had successive tours on board the USS Kitty Hawk that was forward deployed to Yokosuka, Japan. I was the task group, carrier strike group intelligence officer. And then I was the 7th Fleet intelligence officer. That's our numbered fleet that controls the Western Pacific, west of the international dateline out to the Indian Ocean. And then I went back here to D.C. and I was the Office

of Naval Intelligence, senior Intelligence Officer for China. Anything that dealt with China through the Office of Naval Intelligence, I got to have a review of it and assessment on it before it was published inside the Navy. And then I went back to the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and my final tour as the Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. No other officer had had the Ford carrier, the 7th Fleet, and the Pacific Fleet leading intelligence operations out there. So I had a unique perspective where I was watching and what we kind of what we call fine-grain analysis of the Chinese naval operations

and their air force and things of that nature. So really watching the details event by event and watching them grow. And then to come back and deal with people back here that just seemed not to comprehend what was coming. And that was probably one of the biggest reasons that I got involved with BRAD, at least from an intellectual standpoint, is that I had lived that and I had experienced this idea that we were watching it out on the pointy end, as they say, but you couldn't get people back here to recognize the threat and to start taking actions. So let's just characterize the growth of China under the Chinese Communist Party since 1989. How has the military changed since that time?

If you go back 25 years ago, the Congressional Research Service puts out a publication that talks about the Chinese Navy and the U.S. Navy. Mr. Ron O'Rourke has been doing this for 30 years, a brilliant guy, national treasure. And he records and puts this out, and it showed, if you went back 25 years ago, it would show that the U.S. Navy had well over 150 naval combatants more than the PLA Navy. That was then, 25 years ago, basically a coastal navy that was operating mostly just 30, 40, 50 miles off the coast of China. 25 years later, the latest report that Ron put out here in the last couple of months, it shows that the Chinese Navy now is basically over 150 naval combatants greater than the U.S. Navy.

They are now the largest Navy in terms of numbers of hulls, tonnage over the last decade they've produced more tonnage, battle force missiles, in terms of anti-ship cruise missiles, the Chinese have more anti-ship cruise missiles, longer range, supersonic. So in just that one area of the Navy, they've gone from being inferior, coastal Navy, blue, brown water Navy, we call it, to being a global Navy, not on the same level

of the United States yet today, but in terms of a strategic trend line, the trend has been very, very clear. And you can say that in terms of the Strategic Rocket Force, where they have the largest Strategic Rocket Force of any nation on the planet. You can measure their air forces now are the largest air forces in the Western Pacific and across the board. And Xi came in and made major renovations in 2015 to the PLA. He actually reduced the size of the PLA from 2.3 million to just 2 million. And he got rid of about 300,000 people that weren't directly involved with war fighting, kind of the old Soviet model of people that it was kind of corruption and things of that nature.

He swept that out. He reorganized from seven military regions into five theater commands that match in ways our combatant command structure here in the U.S. So you see this almost they're becoming like the U.S. Department of Defense in terms of their organizational skills, focusing on jointness, things of that nature. And you can tell what's important to the Communist Party by what they spend their money on. At the People's Congress, they will announce this is what our gross domestic product for the year target is, and will also tell you what we'll spend on defense. Well, in 2020, when COVID hit, March of 2020, it was the first time

that the Chinese government had never been able to give in 28 years, the first time they could not say what their GDP growth was going to be because of the effects of COVID. But in that same Congress, they were able to say, well, we will spend 6% of our GDP. Whatever it is, 6% will go to the PLA. And the next year, it was the same thing. They couldn't give a precise GDP number, but they were competent that they could grow the PLA by 6.8%. So that's been going on for 30 years, that the PLA always gets more percent increase of the budget grows every year as compared to their gross domestic product. So they prioritize spending on the PLA. And that's resulted in things, for instance, when you include purchasing power parity, that they only spend,

say, $250 billion a year on defense, and we're spending almost a trillion. So we're spending quite a bit more. But each year for every ship that we produce, the Chinese produce five. So it's really been phenomenal what they've done. And it's, again, hard to comprehend how this city hasn't recognized that and said, we have to do something. This is the only military in the world, the Chinese military, that's kind of designed, structured, and you alluded to this in what you were saying, to challenge the American military. What we need to do is take a step back and recognize something which is historically remarkable. And that is, first, that China went from about 0.6% of world gross domestic product in

1990 to about 18 or 19 percent in 2019. That is so about roughly one-fifth of the world's economy was rooted in China in 30 years. It went from nothing, a backwater, to producing about one-fifth. That's remarkable and that seldom happens in international politics. Secondly, what is equally remarkable is that the United States funded this. The United States allowed this to occur. Previous historical examples would be Bismarck unifying Germany in 1860s and in 1870-1871 leading to about 30 years of a rough peace. Japan after 1868 leading again to about 30 years of difficulty before Japanese aggression and militarism came to the fore. What

we're seeing in China is historically unique and that is that China's growth is responsible, it is due to the United States. Its peer enemy funded it, allowed it to grow. So every aspect of its military growth, every aspect of its economic growth, of its diplomatic growth, science, technology, its lunar exploration, space exploration that we're witnessing, is due to the Americans. It did that. Wall Street, our investors, gave them the money to grow their economy, to build the weapons to kill us. Now, the first rule of strategy is don't assist your enemy. And of course, we violated that time and time again. And that's really the heart of the book. Well, you know, and this is a kind of a perfect moment for me to read another quote that I pulled from the book.

Put succinctly, U.S. decision makers had a profound misconception of the fundamental principles of power politics, the need to sustain U.S. primacy and defeat the threat from the ideology of communism. So, yes, absolutely. You bring up a concept that, frankly, I haven't thought about much before. Maybe I'd come across it here and there, but of threat deflation. And now this has become kind of part of my lexicon. So Jim, if you could kind of explain to me how important threat deflation versus power politics, how important a role it played in basically what happened here. Right. To follow on with Brad, this idea of power politics, of understanding a threat, you have to have honest assessment. So intelligence is the foundation of that.

And what's happened over time in this regard to China is that we started to see the influence of the engagement school seep into and essentially absorb and take over the intelligence community to where people were downplaying the threat, underestimating the timelines of when the Chinese would get something. We have a section in the book that talks extensively about PLA aircraft carriers and how there was essentially a concerted effort to basically minimize the possibility that the PRC would have an aircraft carrier. Well, minimize the idea that they were going for it, right? Correct. And then what did we see actually happen in 2012 they got their first one and now they have three and they skipped a whole generation of they went from ski jump

ramps to electromagnetic aircraft launch system they'd skipped steam catapults 70 years we have been flying off of carriers with steam catapults. We've just gone into electromagnetic aircraft launch system and they skipped that generation. But it's because of threat deflation. I mentioned the ship numbers. Why is it that we didn't react? Because people were downplaying the capabilities of these new Chinese ships. Oh, they don't have the capabilities. They're not watertight integrity. Oh, they don't have the kind of maintenance that we do. Always downplaying. When the Chinese first sent their first naval escort task forces to the Gulf of Aden in December of 2008 and January of 2009, I still remember reading in the newspaper, reading assessments that said, oh, they're going to go out there and they're going to have major problems. They're not

going to be able to steam around. They're going to have material readiness issues. They'll never fly helicopters off their boats. They won't do vertical resupply, vert rep, and they'll certainly never do it at night. Well, you know what we're on right now? The 45th Naval Escort Task Force is out there right now operating. So since December of 2008, every day, every day since right now, there's been three Chinese warships on patrol in the Gulf of Aden, escorting Chinese commercial vessels through the Gulf of Aden and up through the Red Sea. And now they have a base in Djibouti and they can do some resupply work there. But all the predictions were that they wouldn't be able to sustain that. And here we are,

you know, 15 years later, and they're sustaining it. So you could go down a list of things that people said they'll never do this, they can't do that, they can't reach this, they can't reach that, they're not gonna, it'll take 30 years to get this, it'll take 20 years to get that.

And always, in every instance, the inclination by the IC is wrong in the wrong direction. It's always underestimating. It's fascinating. I want to touch on one thing that I'm just remembering from the book about, essentially, you get this sense that naval leadership seemed to be hell-bent on showing everything they got to their Chinese counterparts to the point where Congress had to enact laws that would prevent that. And even then, naval leadership would try to circumvent those laws and still show everything. I mean, if I'm overblowing it, let me know, Jim, but it just seems like such an astonishing reality.

Yeah, so in our concern on the Hill, here in Capitol Hill, that people would be exposing too much to the Chinese and that the Chinese were becoming a threat. You had the Cox Report and this kind of concern about the Chinese. So they wrote the National Defense Authorization Act of 2000, which instituted all these thou shalt nots. The Department of Defense shall not expose this, shall not do these kinds of engagements, shall not, shall not, shall not. And as one of the people, Bill Triplett, that provided us this information, a former Senate staffer, he basically said, can you imagine in the Cold War if the U.S. Congress had to write a law to say to the Department of Defense,

don't engage with the Soviet Union, right? It would have been incomprehensible that you'd have to write a law to tell the Department of Defense not to engage with the enemy. But that's exactly what the Congress had to do in 2000. And subsequently, and we demonstrate it and we show pictures even, since 2000, the department has continued to try to engage. And every year in the annual report to Congress, the PLA report, the DOD says, here's all the engagements that we've done. Now, nobody has violated a law, and they'll have their attorneys say, we didn't violate the law because, you know, they've found ways to get around it. Never in all that process, in a public way or in a policy way, did the department say, we must stop engagement because we are aiding and abetting our adversary with knowledge of our tactics, techniques, and procedures on how to fight and

win wars. You know, it's really astonishing. It just reminds me also, we were talking about the end of history earlier. And, you know, you describe, and this is also a very interesting way of looking at it that I had seen before, that this end of history mania, let's say, created, in effect, an intellectual disarmament, right? Basically, people lost their ability to think critically about these sorts of questions. So tell me about that. Well, it certainly did. And that would be that with the victory over the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War was astonishing for so many Americans.

Soviet communism imploded so rapidly. And then basically we lost our mind. We had the intellectual disarmament or we had a great forgetting or however you want to say, as Alexei Arbatov said, Soviet analyst of America, said we're going to do a horrible thing to you. We're going to take away your enemy, paraphrasing his remarks. And that happened. At the same time, of course, the enemy did not go away. The enemy, in a very calculating manner, recognized he needed to save the Communist Party of China and what he

needed to do in order to do that was to make Wall Street a partner. So he had to reach out to Americans to allow manufacturing to come in and with that wealth he took a slice of it and reinvested back in America, right, in Wall Street, in Washington to essentially buy friends, win friends, and influence people. So a Clinton administration that had run a campaign in 1992, saying that the Bush administration had coddled dictators from Baghdad to Beijing, two years later removed any type of human rights restriction from the renewal of most favored nation status, which is what Deng Xiaoping wanted, because that

allowed the Chinese economy then to move to the next level. And also Clinton put them on the path to the World Trade Organization, which was ultimately what they wanted, which allowed rocket fuel into the Chinese economy. So we lost our ability. We chose to disarm ourselves. We chose not to see the world through the framework of great power politics or of power politics as our grandparents had done or our parents had done. And as a result of that, we squandered, if you will, the birthright. We squandered what they gave us. They gave us a Pax Americana.

They gave us a period of American dominance, of peace, of stability in international politics, which should have lasted for 50 years. It should have lasted maybe for a century, as these periods had before in international politics. And instead what happened? In essence, Clinton sold it. We made those decisions which put us on this path to engagement which abandoned every principle of power politics in favor of assisting your enemy and aiding your enemy, sharing secrets, knowledge, the ability of how to do things. The Navy, Jim has illustrated expertly, but that was also done by U.S. firms in manufacturing, right,

and really the totality at American universities. Similarly, we were training hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in terms of STEM and other disciplines so that they could go back and essentially replicate that knowledge, apply that knowledge for their own aims. So the end of history of course was in the short term, it was a triumphant moment, but its cost was formidable and that accounts for the existential threat that we have today. I just want to I guess add that this was definitely a kind of a bipartisan love affair. I mean I can't help but think that it was George H. W.

Bush who after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 89 you know basically sent the message over to Deng saying it'll be okay. Indeed he did. And that was two elements there. One was the pernicious aspect that George H. W. Bush had, that he had a personal relationship with Deng and therefore understood him. So that personal relationship, which Deng was key to play on. Deng is a communist and was never going to do anything that Bush wanted, but Bush is really an element of naïveté there fundamentally. From the standpoint of power politics, Bush had Deng where he wanted him and could have extracted human rights changes. He could have something on Tibet or on treatment of Muslims or religious freedom. There was so much that Bush had. Again it's time of great vulnerability for the Chinese Communist Party and yet Bush just

let it pass. And that's egregious. And then of course Clinton, if you will, opening the door at a fundamental level to this was equally disastrous. There were a number of these deep relationships. I'm just remembering recently passed Senator Dianne Feinstein with Jiang Zemin, who was the subsequent dictator. There's something that I find paradoxical, and perhaps we can explore it a little bit. It seems obvious to me that the human rights reality of any country

should inform, let's call it their ethics. If you look at the human rights reality of any nation, you'll get a sense of essentially how they might be dealing with you. To me, that's a truism. It's kind of obvious. So it makes no sense to me, decouple those things. And of course, in hindsight, we can see it is a disaster to decouple that. But there hasn't been a serious effort to recouple it since. We've been adrift because we've lost the fundamental principles of power politics and so we've lost the fundamental identification of what statesmanship requires in our relationship with the People's Republic of China or Russia or

Iran. It applies to other states as well. But I think that's a fundamental problem that we face in our foreign policy. Reagan described the Soviet Communist Party as the center of evil in the modern world in a very famous address in Orlando in March of 1983. And we need to have that recognition again. And instead, what have we had? Almost like an addict, right? Nothing can prevent us from engaging with China. Necessary decoupling, which Trump started, right? However fitful that was, it was a step in the right direction with the Biden administration, of course, now is recoupling, if you will, or the return to engagement with a vengeance. And it does seem, Jan, if you look at the history of American foreign relations, the end of the Cold War was one of those dramatic, it was a tipping point, where the quality

of leadership that you had before was far superior to the quality of leadership that we have had in the wake of the Cold War in terms of our expectations of our presidents, of our secretaries of defense, our secretaries of war, secretaries of state, etc. And part of that is, I think, informs, if you will, our inability to recognize the nature of the CCP threat and our vacillation in terms of what is it that we wanted to do in the wake of the defeat of the Soviet Union. Were we going to nation build? Were we going to solve the problems of the Balkans?

Were we going to get rid of Saddam Hussein and spread democracy in the Middle East? Or what was our relationship with India going to be? What was our relationship with other democracies going to be, it has been largely in co-hate. And that's very dangerous because it is squandering the value of primacy. It's squandering American leadership as a result of it. I referenced before we could have had the Pax Americana and we could have had tremendous stability in international politics as a consequence of that,

working with our key allies and partners around the world to sustain that stability. And instead, what are we doing? Well, the PRC is challenging our primacy directly, and our allies and partners are looking at us and saying, really, what's going on here with Biden? Are you going to lead or are you not going to lead, really, is their fundamental query. And with Biden, obviously, we have, sadly, we have the answer to that. Well, so something that you do in the book, which is very interesting, is you make the case for American primacy, what the value of that is. That's interesting because that's not necessarily the school of thought. In fact, I can't help but think to Graham Allison's book and this idea that inevitably

China is the rising power. The corollary is under the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. is declining power. And I think a lot of people just bought into this idea that this is the inevitable course of history. I find this very puzzling to me that the first couple of years of the Biden administration, it seems like largely they kind of maintained the status quo of the Trump administration, which was a significant shift for the first time from engagement. And then at the same time, on the Trump administration, which was a significant shift for the first time from engagement. Now, and then at the same time, you know, on the one hand, you have Putin going to China, declaring the no limits partnership, you know, going to war and that. And at the same time,

it seems like there's this incredible going back to the sort of the engagement model on the side of the current administration. So can you, Jim, can you square that for me a bit? Yeah, sure. I think we saw when the Biden administration came in, they had no problem reversing anything that the previous administration had done, except in this area of the China policy. And as you said, they kept it for a couple of years. We know that in January of last year, Secretary of State Blinken wanted to go to China right when that balloon came across, and that delayed his visit. And then what we've subsequently learned is that in May,

the CIA director went to China in a covert meeting in Beijing in May. And then following the next month in June, Secretary of State Blinken went to Beijing, followed by Secretary of Treasury Yellen, Climate Czar Kerry, Henry Kissinger's last visit was in that same time frame. Then you had Secretary of Commerce Raimondo all going and all talking about engagement and reengaging with the PRC

that culminated in this meeting in San Francisco with Xi and Biden where they announced that we're going to resume mil-to-mil engagement and cooperation and communications. And it was kind of a statement to the world that, you know, everything that had gone on for the previous five or six years from the time that the Trump team came in and said we need to treat China as a strategic competitor was back to the pre-Obama era and before vision of cooperation and engagement will get us a better life, a better situation, calmness and peace. And they didn't say full-throated engagement.

They said we're going to compete where we can but cooperate where we must. And so they have different language. You hear the National Security Advisor use this phrase, intensive diplomacy. So we need to have intensive diplomacy. But it's all different phraseology for the same core policy that we've had for those 40 years, the one that failed. So in a way, we're returning to the dog's vomit, to something that we should be rejecting. And I think there's a corollary here to this engagement.

It's not just only do we engage, engage, engage, but there was a corollary that was very pronounced into the Obama administration, which was do not provoke. So we used to do things like fly. We fly every day reconnaissance operations inside the East China Sea, South China Sea, and international waters, international airspace. We do that. We've done that in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

We've done that. That's part of our nation-state survival is to know what's going on and have intelligence. And sometimes you would delay those flights if a president or vice president was going to visit, vice versa. We'd maybe calm them down for a little bit, not do them so that they could have the state-to-state chief of state visit. Under the Obama administration, those rationalizations for delaying or canceling an SRO flight were starting to go down to be assistant secretary of state, assistant secretary of defense, and it kept going lower and lower. And the Chinese were well aware of this, and they would play these kind of visits to get us to back off doing what is

required to have your own national defense. So not provoking China in the South China Sea, not sailing our ships close to disputed waters where China is bullying a treaty ally like the Philippines and things of that nature. And our allies and partners saw us back off, and I think we're going to see more of that, unfortunately, this idea that we must not provoke China. If we're going to, you know, Kissinger and others would say we should never talk in public about our disagreements with China. We should do that behind closed doors. It's funny that we'd say that, but when it comes to our friends in Taiwan, we were very public about, you guys, you know, sit down, shut up, and don't provoke China.

Tom Christian's speech in 2004 in Annapolis, where he, you know, was afraid that Chen Shui-bian was going to declare independence. So they said they tried to talk to him behind closed doors, but finally we had to come out in public and, you know, chastise our ally in Taiwan. So we seem to be more intent on not upsetting the Chinese Communist Party than we are in reassuring and reassuring our allies. Think about what happened in Hong Kong. We had a situation in 2019 in Hong Kong where we could have taken a stand. We could have stood up and said, this is wrong. We're not going to stand by. We did make some statements. The administration did. But was there more that could have been done?

Was there economic pressures that could have been applied? We didn't do those things. And so I think it has been a bipartisan failure. DAVID FREEMAN, JR.: This argument for US primacy, at one point, this would have been sort of not a debate, I guess, this question, but today it is. There's a number of people that would say, is that really something we should be looking for? Well, certainly. Primacy did have considerable bipartisan support. We can think about the United States in the Cold

War or the United States in the wake afterwards. Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the Cold War wanted to use American power for different aims. We could think about Operation Allied Force or what Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the UK identified as the first progressive war to deal with. If I may jump in, this is fascinating what you're just saying, because one of the things that occurred to me as I was reading, right, was that this, there may have been a certain kind of associated with the end of history, a certain kind of hubris, right, that then said, hey, listen, we can go out and maybe, you know, push a lot harder than we did before to change these other places into our system. Right. Absolutely. As Colin Powell reported a remark that Madeleine Albright made to him in

1993 when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Madeleine Albright was just into Clinton administration where she said to him, you keep talking about this great army of yours, when are we going to use it, right? When are we going to use it, right? When are we going to use it for progressive purposes, Albright was saying. And, of course, Colin Powell was appalled that she would see the United States Army as that tool. But, indeed, Jan, that was it. They wanted to use it. And then Bush, obviously, 9-11 occurs, and Bush and Cheney take it in a different direction.

And they fabricate intelligence. Yes. Or someone does. Certainly, indeed. And so we spend, the United States goes off in a different direction in a way which was largely solipsistic. Our allies were scratching their heads about what were we doing here, what was actually going on. I mean the idea would be to focus on great power threats.

That's the logic and protect what you've created in World War II and in the Cold War. Preserve that to the next generation rather than using your power, if you will, fruitlessly in a way which was unwise. The fact that American power is the greatest force for stability in international politics is not something which is widely recognized, it seems, at this point in time. And we can think about all the wars that might have occurred that did not occur because of American might and its pacifying effect in many dangerous places, between Greeks and Turks, or Camp David, the peace that we were able to work out between Egypt and Israel, which helped

to stabilize that, or the role that we've played between Pakistan and India to help stabilize the crises that those states have had. There were many dogs that didn't bark, for example, and that was due to American power. And then the other advantages of American power for advancing an environment which makes it possible for our economy or for our values or for our principles to spread a world which is a little bit more accommodating to that, but fundamentally because it is far better than the alternative. The alternative is offered by the Chinese Communist Party and it is tyranny.

And so we can look around the world, would you rather be allied with the United States and the future that it offers despite its problems? People around the world are trying to come into the United States. They're not trying to go into China. China would not allow them in the first place but would certainly not welcome them. Or are you looking to the Chinese Communist Party which offers a future defined by tyranny and oppression. And when the world is asked that question, the United States is seen overwhelmingly as being the better force, the better ally, the better partner in international politics. Our ideology is better than communism. It offers greater freedom, greater opportunity to a greater number of people than communist tyranny does. And so as the 20th century was a battle between tyranny and freedom, thankfully freedom won at great cost and with many, many setbacks, the 21st century remains the same. This battle will be fought in this century as well,

and whether communist tyranny wins or whether freedom does, of course, is the fundamental issue of this century. Well, you know, some of the viewers may also be wondering, you know, America is also kind of fighting an internal battle, for example, right? There's been a number of instances that I'm aware of where countries question, hey, I'm not sure I want American progressivism. If that, if it's American progressivism that's coupled with your aid, I'm not sure I want that,

for example, right. We are seeing that, and especially in Asia, for instance, in South Korea, there's been people that have especially in Asia, for instance, in South Korea. There's been people that have been in the State Department that were pushing for raising the LGBTQ flag at the embassy in Seoul. And there was people in South Korea saying, hey, that's not our value. Why are you pushing this on us? Or you can go to the Middle East where they were pushing similar kinds of things to a society that didn't accept that, that was not part of their culture or their religion, and yet we were pushing it on them.

The progressive movement is based in this idea of totalitarian control. They're going to control people. We're going to make them follow our ideology. And people don't like that. And that's not the American way. The American way is to say, hey, you know, do your own thing, just don't harm others. Do no harm, but

enjoy your life, pursue happiness, and be responsible, and things will work out. And we have a system that worked for 250 years where people could do that. And now it seems like we have people in charge of this progressive movement that are adopting the policies of the Chinese Communist Party.

Just look what happened in COVID. You could watch what was going on in China where people had to take out their cell phones and show their checkmark to be able to get out of their apartment building, to be able to go into a shopping mall, to get into a restaurant. Well, how much did that happen here in the United States? Which states did that? Which states followed the Chinese Communist Party's model? Social credit system.

People, I remember talking to some folks 10 years ago and said, oh, the U.S. will never have a social credit system. We're impervious to that. And yet we're seeing ourselves more and more inclined to have a social credit system. Are you reading the right things? Are you following the wrong websites? Whatever it is. And when we go to digital currency, where we can track everything that you do with every dime that you have,

then there will be certain things things you're not allowed. Hey, you had too many Red Bulls today, Jim. Sorry, you don't get to have this access to this travel or this store or whatever it is, or your children can't go to this school because you didn't perform right. You're just reminding me of another thing that's in the book, the lack of education about the system. You talk about it in the context of the military and strategy and government. There's a profound lack of knowledge that you describe. This is one of the most disturbing things in here. There just isn't people in this town that are educated sufficiently around what that system is, how it works, the many doctrines which it's

applying, which are, you know, open source even that are available, like, you know, unrestricted warfare is one example. And frankly, you know, just what a pernicious, horrible, deadly ideology communism has been in every single application in which it's ever existed. That's a critically important point in that we do not educate Americans about communism, about that ideology, about its totalitarian nature. And as a consequence of that, we don't understand international politics today, right? We're ignorant of the ideology of our greatest enemy. But we understood the Soviets, apparently. We did understand, right? And so what caused the change, right? With the end of the Cold War,

that gave, I think, many people in the American educational system the excuse to say, well, the Soviet Union is gone now, so we don't need to spend money or any time looking at the ideology of communism. It was on the ash heap of history, right? Once the Soviets. Again, the arrogance of the end of history moment, if you will. But then also, Jan, the fact that we are at this period of ideological upheaval where political liberalism, traditional American ideology, is confronting progressivism, which is communism in a different guise. And so the progressive, of course, do not want the history of communism taught. They do not want the ideology taught. And so it's not, in essence. And Jim can talk to joint professional military education and the fact of how our military officers are educated.

But many of the fundamental problems that we face about not understanding our adversary because we're not teaching the adversary's ideology is a rather curious fact, isn't it? It's rather curious that you would think that you would want to know about this. But there's the negation that the People's Republic of China is our enemy. And there's the negation as well that they're communists, right? And so the period of ideological upheaval, as well as the upheaval that we face in international politics, really is twinned. And communism is at the root, if you will, of both of those struggles. I can't help but remember Matthew Lohmeyer, Colonel Matthew Lohmeyer, who was sounding the alarm, separated from the military after sounding the alarm about a kind of a Marxification of

education in the military itself. Yeah, I think what Brad was describing in your question, we stopped doing fundamentals. We stopped teaching the fundamentals of what it meant to be a nation state and the threats to that nation state into your own survival. And so when we stopped teaching it in kindergarten through 12th grade, that had an effect in the military. So my conversations with folks here in this town that teach professional military education

in the different service centers, they said what was happening was that while they at that level, the higher level of professional military education, still had some training on these kind of things, what they were finding is that the younger officers that were coming in didn't have that foundational knowledge. In terms of just awareness of the threat of communism and how the Chinese Communist Party is pushing and built around that ideology and what does that mean to a national defense community and then how do we combat that at all levels? Because

the Chinese Communist Party uses comprehensive national power. So I mean, it's not just the PLA by themselves. It's a people's war. So they're engaged with the civilian sector and civilian technology and leveraging all of this. So our Department of Defense has to be able to be cognizant of where those vectors of attack are coming from. But what I'm afraid of, we appear to be going back to this engagement policy as we described. What I fear is going to happen is we're going to have a bunch of, you're on the Titanic and you're heading towards this iceberg that's going to sink your ship. It's going to destroy your nation.

Instead of doing something, diverting away from the danger, we've got a bunch of people that are just going to simply rearrange the deck chairs and think that that's going to save us. And so going back and renaming things and repackaging engagement, and that's my concern. And wokeism and Marxism in the military is another one of these things. It's not even just a rearrangement of the deck chairs. You could probably say, well, let's throw some deck chairs overboard, and that'll save us. And it's a recipe for disaster.

I can't help but think from the Titanic film that string quartet, I guess, provided some service at the end. But certainly not in changing the outcome. No. Well, let's talk about what to do in this rather difficult situation that you've outlined now. One of the great strengths of why we defeated the Soviet Union was because we had a professional military and it was what Samuel Huntington, the great student of civil military relations called objective civilian control where civilians are in charge of course but they leave a domain to the military and they don't interfere and that's an objective domain where the military makes its own decisions and if you will, ensures that it's able to execute the orders that civilian leadership give it.

In contrast, there are what's called subjective control or politicized militaries, which do not fight as well. Historically, People's Liberation Army, for example, where the party controls them and the party tells them and the party tells them what to do. In the Cold War, we had objective civilian control, and despite the problems that we had, we did very well. Now what's happening is we're becoming the PLA, where increasingly political pressures,

political interference is routinized. And so, if you will, that great strength of the military that we need to have to deal with the topic, of course, the present topic, to deal with the People's Republic of China is being eroded. It's becoming politicized. And that means that we are not going to be as combat effective in the future. So what needs to be done in the diplomatic realm, recognize the amount of goodwill that we have. Our allies help us immeasurably, Japan, Australia.

Despite the problems that they have with us, and we've given them cause, to be sure, they want to remain close U.S. allies. And if I can jump in, the compact countries right now are in danger. We've just had Grant Newsham on the show talking about this specifically. I mean, you know. Indeed, we have introduced vulnerabilities through our blindness, intentional blindness on this front. But we have a tremendous number of allies, as we did during the Cold War. We have tremendous goodwill upon which we can capitalize, and new partners like India, but they're looking to us for leadership.

We have to have presidential leadership across all of these realms, whether it's the diplomatic, the military, or others. We need to have dynamic leadership at that level. The economic realm, sanctions, trade restrictions, cutting Beijing off from sources of New York finance from Wall Street is absolutely necessary to do. Our ideological component, Jan, just lastly that I want to address on recognizing that again freedom is superior to

tyranny and we have great ideological strengths to fight them and defeat them because wherever the PRC shows up it's defined by exploitation of people in the environment. That just goes with that territory where the United States is a far superior ally because it has a far superior ideology and it treats people in accord with human rights and their individual rights, which always makes us a better ally. We need to say that more forcefully time and again, and that again is going to require leadership. You know, and perhaps rediscovering that ideology to some extent, because I, you know, I have to say I encounter a great many cynical people these days that, you know, question that.

I wonder whether, you know, there's this, you know, I've talked about on this show numerous times times yuri bezmanoff talking about the demoralization of american society and that has that has multiple effects parts of it is people you know not believing in america anymore and part of it as it has people actually you know doing things that aren't in line with that you know what you describe as the superior ideology and doing something all things that are much more akin to what communist China did or Soviet Russia. Jim, on the military side, of course, I'll just mention that there's quite a lot in the book in this realm, and I found it incredibly compelling, but maybe just a taste on the military side. Sure. Yeah.

I mean, just two comments before that. One is, you know, Brad talked about presidential leadership. That means that we have to have this clear and unambiguous statement that the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China are an existential threat and that we are not gonna try to bifurcate some kind of walking down the middle of the road. It just will not work.

We have to declare unambiguously that they are a threat, and that needs to permeate the whole of government. The other economic piece is you just had the national security advisor on the Sunday talk shows, and he was questioned by the journalist about, hey, why did you guys slap sanctions on 500 new Russian companies? And the question was, why didn't you do it before? And he explained the rationale. But he said something that's really important.

He said, we have to cut off Putin's access to funds because that's what drives his military machine. He goes, that's essential. We have to do that. But when you ask the same person, Jake Sullivan, why aren't you doing that against the Chinese Communist Party as they are funding and building the PLA, they won't do it. And supporting the Russian war machine. Yeah, they're supporting Russia, correct.

So those are a couple that I think contribute to this answer. In terms of the military solutions and recommendations that we make, first of all, we have to restate, as we did at the beginning of this, that the situation is dire and imminent in the Western Pacific right now. China is on the verge, and we've had many current and active four-star generals and admirals say that China is close to being able to launch an invasion or blockade Taiwan to catastrophic effect. And not only of Taiwan, but of America and our sailors and marines and airmen and soldiers that are stationed over there, the people on Okinawa, the people on our carriers, the people on our surface ships and submarines. They will be in the pattern, the frag pattern, if China decides to invade Taiwan.

So the threat is imminent. The threat is real. The threat is credible from China. So we need to do something to dramatically prepare ourselves to build up our conventional and nuclear force structures. Those things take time. To build the new Navy that we need, you know in 1940 the United States passed the Two Ocean

Navy Act. At that time we were the number one ship producing nation in the world and it still took us three full years until we started seeing those aircraft carriers and destroyers being rolled out into the fleet. We are not the number one ship-producing nation in the world today. China is. China has over 13 major naval ports. We have just seven. One of theirs in the Shanghai region is larger than all seven of ours.

So we are in a mismatch in the ability to ramp up our military capabilities through the production of weaponry that we haven't seen since before World War II. And because we believe that the PRC is imminent to take action, and because it's going to take us time to be prepared in the conventional arena, we need to start to have these discussions with our allies and friends in the region about the introduction of nuclear munitions. And this is probably the most controversial part of the book. No one wants to use nuclear munitions, but in order to be able to have a deterrent effect on Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, we need to make them go back to their drawing board, go back to their comprehensive national power seminars and calculations to say, hmm, we didn't think the Americans would

do this. What are we going to do and how do we have to adjust or delay our actions? And so we need to have, we need to go to our allies and say, let's talk about this, not in private only, but we need to say that we're doing this in public and we need to go to our allies and say, let's talk about this, not in private only, but we need to say that we're doing this in public, and we need to follow through with this. China in the last three years built 350 nuclear ICBM silos in central and western China. That's a fact. Now, there's been some speculation that they may not be fully operational. I, in my assessment, believe that those reports were false flag and that they are very be fully operational. I, in my assessment, believe that those reports were false flag and that they are very capable and operational.

And so we need to treat this threat as it is, and we need to alter the status quo in this arena. People say, well, that'll be escalatory. You'll be escalating the situation by discussing nukes. Well, excuse me, they just built 350 nuclear ICBM silos that are pointed at the United States of America in three years. You hear this phrase, status quo. We don't want to alter the status quo and the cross-strait relationship and the cross-strait balance of power. Well, for 25 years, China has been altering the status quo every day,

and yet we sit here and don't do anything. So the idea that if we do something, we're going to provoke or cause an escalation is a false argument. We need to do what's required to defend ourselves and our allies, and this discussion and this idea of discussing these issues needs to be on the table. Jim, how do you respond to this idea that what we would describe as the military-industrial complex, these giant multinational defense companies and so forth are kind of overbloated, are milking the system? So how do you react to that type of criticism? Like this is actually just being pushed by the warmongers and the people that want to create this weaponry and make billions of dollars. Three things. It is a valid concern. We have made major mistakes in the Defense Department. It is over bloated. If you go back 25, 30 years ago,

there were literally hundreds of defense, small defense firms. And now they're all been boiled down into these five big defense industrial complexes. In a way they've become corrupt and they're not producing. As I mentioned, we produce one destroyer, the Chinese produce five for a quarter of the cost.

That's wrong. That should not be allowed. So we need to have major reform of the Department of Defense. It needs to be decentralized. We need to put things into place where retired officers cannot, especially the general and flag officers, cannot go back into the system and represent them, or politicians. And my third point is I've never been a defense contractor. I don't work for any defense firm. I have no economic interest. But I do know that we need to have a military that can deter, not a military that can go occupy and kill. So there's a fourth element here, which is this endless war. People

are tired of being involved with war. I get it. What we're talking about is not war. We're talking about deterrence. We're talking about what Reagan said, peace through strength. We need to be strong. Strong doesn't mean fighting the war. Strong means having the capacity to fight the war that you overmatch your adversary.

And right now our adversary is overmatching us in a critical area. And then you have to explain to folks that if Taiwan falls, it's not just the people of Taiwan. It's what does that mean to their life? What does it mean to somebody that lives in Ohio or Iowa or Mississippi? What does that mean to them when Taiwan falls and now all of a sudden chips and all that technology is in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party? What does that mean when trade, $5 trillion worth of trade goes through the South China Sea? And the Chinese say, now we're going to control who can come in and out because we're

the masters of the universe. And if you're not obeying us going to control who can come in and out because we're the masters of the universe. And if you're not obeying us, then your stuff cannot come in and out. And some people say, well, that would be disadvantageous to the Chinese. They would never do that. Well, we've seen them do that. We've seen them use economic warfare against the Philippines, against Australia, against anybody, Norway after one of those Nobel Prize events, right? It doesn't matter who it is or where it is. They will use economic warfare like a Navy ship would use a gun. They use it that way. And so we have to explain to the American people that deterrence force is

necessary to ensure that the Chinese cannot inflict total control over us and to do what they want to do, which is to basically obliterate the American way of life. So that's why it matters. I don't want any more wars. I've never wanted a war. People in the military, for the most part, don't want to fight wars, at least the people that are wearing the uniform that have to potentially go and risk their life. But we have to have the capacity and capability to make Xi and his gang of thugs in the Chinese

Communist Party reconsider taking these actions. And right now we are failing miserably in this area. And we should not allow people in this city and this, in these defense firms to make profit on that, we should do what we can to minimize their capacity to take advantage of government contracts in this endless cycle of revolving door access to these big contracts. What we need is output. We need output. I need warships.

I need aircraft. I need submarines. I need cyber warriors. I need space capability. All of the stuff in the new 21st century, hybrid warfare and that kind of thinking. We need those capabilities, but we cannot keep funding a city where people sit and do nothing here. There's too many bureaucrats. There's too many people that are on the dole. That's got to stop or we'll never achieve the deterrent effect that we need. Brad, a final thought as we finish? Well, America's had difficulties before, and we've been able to overcome them, and we've been able to win the wars that we faced. So it's very important to recognize that victory is possible. The CCP is an illegitimate government.

It's a communist government. It was imposed ultimately by Stalin on the Chinese people. It has no mandate from the people. It's human rights record, the tens of millions of Chinese people that it's killed, its hyper-aggressive foreign policies, all underscore that it does not belong in the society of nations and it should be expunged from the society of nations. And people of goodwill around the world should work to overthrow it. We should eliminate this cancer from international politics. So our enemy has prodigious weaknesses, and we have great strengths. If we can capitalize on our strengths, and if we can exploit our enemy's great weaknesses, profound weaknesses.

Again, Marxism is a Western ideology. It has nothing to do with China. It was developed by two Germans and in exile really but it has nothing to do with the greatness of Han civilization or Chinese civilization. So we have to be confident in victory. We have to right the ship as Jim said. Sound the ship, right it, ensure that it's it's capable for the task and the difficult task ahead. But we have great strengths and they have great weaknesses. And if we can marshal our might, if we can go back to the ideas of our mothers and fathers, grandparents, we'll be able to defeat this existential threat as we have defeated previous ones.

Well, Brad Thayer and Jim Fennell, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you, Jan. It's been an honor and a privilege for us. It's been our pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you all for joining Jim Fennell, Brad Thayer, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.