Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - US Foreign Policy in 2023 - with Congressman Mike Gallagher

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Congressman Mike Gallagher returns to our podcast, this time to look ahead at American foreign policy in 2023. Congressman Gallagher -- of Wisconsin's 8th CD -- has a unique perspective, since he’s just been tapped to lead the newly created House Select Committee on China. Congressman Gallagher served for seven years on active duty in the Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. He served as a top staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Congressman Gallagher has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University, a second master's in Strategic Intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD in International Relations from Georgetown. Rep. Gallagher has served on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In addition to foreign policy, in this episode, we also wound up talking about the new Congress and the reforms made during the Speaker's election. In this episode, we discussed Yuval Levin's "Some Good Can Come Out of the Kevin McCarthy Fiasco" -- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/opinion/kevin-mccarthy-speaker-house.html

They're trying to succeed where the Soviets failed and perfect this model of total control by Leninist party state that they can export to other countries. You know, they talk openly about the triumph of world socialism and the inevitable sort of diminishment, if not collapse, of the capitalist system led by the United States. So I think their goal is to both win this new Cold War and render us in our system of self-governance subordinate, humiliated, and irrelevant on the world stage. Two weeks ago, we talked to Mohamed El-Erian about the macroeconomy and markets in 2023. And last week, we sat down with John Podhordes to dig into what to expect of TV and film viewing

this next year. And so today, Congressman Mike Gallagher returns to our podcast, this time to look ahead at American foreign policy in 2023. Congressman Gallagher has a unique perspective since he's just been tapped to lead the newly created House Select Committee on China. China, one of the few bipartisan issues in American politics and policymaking today. Now, just to refresh on Congressman Gallagher's impressive background, he served for seven years on active duty in the Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. He was a national security aide on Capitol Hill, having served as a top staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He's also a scholar and a policy wonk, having earned a bachelor's

degree from Princeton University, a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown University, a second master's in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown University, a second master's in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, and a PhD in international relations from Georgetown. Mike has served on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And in addition to foreign policy, in this episode, we also wound up talking about the new Congress. I wanted to know what Mike Gallagher thought of the practical implications of the concessions that Speaker McCarthy made to the rebel faction over the course of multiple ballots in his race for speaker.

Will these reforms make the House impossible to govern, or were some of these changes badly needed? In this conversation, we try to steer clear of both wishful thinking and also doom and gloom. Mike Gallagher on U.S. foreign policy in 2023, this confusing, complicated Congress in 2023, and also we exchange some speculation on developments in his hometown in Green Bay and mine in New York. And of course, we take a couple of questions from you, our listeners. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast a fan favorite, Congressman Mike Gallagher from the state of Wisconsin, and I think a regular listener, and a fan of a football

team that may be sending their quarterback to our New York Jets, which I'm not sure if they're exporting a virus or a value add, but I'll let him weigh in on that. Congressman Gallagher, thanks for joining. It's an honor to be back. Is this my second time? How many second-timers are there? Where do I rank? There's a lot. How many numbers?

Mohamed El-Erian, Neil Ferguson, Mike Murphy. There's a lot of your friends. Richard Fontaine. A lot of your friends are second and third times. Who gets the best ratings? How do you measure ratings on a podcast? Come on. Downloads.

Downloads. Do I get more downloads than Neil? Come on. You know what? I'll have to talk to Alon. We'll have to look at the numbers. I'll send them to you. Neil's a big hit. Neil gets a lot of numbers. It's the voice. How could I compete with that voice? I know.

Bibi Netanyahu? Well, compare your numbers to Netanyahu's been on. I love someone who's worried about downloads. That's like a man after my own heart um we'll we'll talk about football for a minute at the end uh before we get to those heftier topics uh you have this new perch since we last spoke uh in congress in the new congress uh that deals directly China. You're chairing a select committee. Can you just tell us for a moment what this new project is? Because it's not a permanent committee. So what is this and what will you be doing?

Well, the Select Committee on China, which is the colloquial way we refer to on what is officially known as the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party exists to really do, I think, three core things. One, as a communications effort to explain to our colleagues and the American people why this all matters. Why should someone in Northeast Wisconsin or in New York or wherever in America care about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. Two is to sort of

act as the speaker's accelerator for key China-related legislation. And because China legislation transcends every committee's jurisdiction, a lot of times good ideas die because they fall through the cracks of the committees or bills get referred to multiple committees and nothing happens. So a lot of what we're going to do is identify what are the key things we can actually get done in this Congress. And then I'll have the job of coordinating among the various committee chairs that have a piece of this puzzle to ensure that we're all working together. And then I would say there's some niche issues that our committee, I think, has an opportunity to lead on. For example,

and I'm sure you've talked about this with some of your guests, Pottinger foremost among them, and keep in mind the caveat that to the extent I say anything intelligent on China as a recovering Arabist, it's solely because I went to the Pottinger grad school and had breakfast with him once a month for my first three years in Congress. By the way, Pottinger is another, I think he's been on three times. Oh, my gosh. You got some catching up, too. He's also a huge hit.

Do you get swag if you hit like a five-time or something? That's on a need-to-know basis. Talk to me when you hit number three, and then we can talk turkey. Call me back, coffee mug. It's my sort of contention that maybe the least understood and in some ways most pernicious element of CCP aggression is something called united front work, which is this sort of weird combination of intelligence operations and influence operations for which

there's no easy American analog. It's the way in which they stifle criticism of the party and promote pro-CCP narratives. It's the way in which they sort of capture foreign elites. It's what Xi Jinping himself refers to as a magic weapon. It's sort of part of the core identity of the party. I think we can be the committee that exposes the nature of United Front Work and educates our colleagues about it and then identifies a mechanism through which to counter United Front work. That being said, we're creating something out of nothing. So I expect that we will, will there be some trial and error early on? Above all, the speaker wants this to be a

bipartisan effort. He's reached out to Hakeem Jeffries numerous times. The China Task Force, which Mike McCaul led and did a fantastic job leading it, he wanted that to be bipartisan. The Democrats refused to participate. He doesn't want that to happen here. When was that? When was that committee set up? That was the last two years. So the last Congress, basically, at the beginning of the last Congress.

And he, in good faith, went to Speaker Pelosi and said, hey, you know, this is an issue that affects all of us. Doesn't need to be Republicans only. Please work with us. And she balked at the last second. I think it was sort of bound up

in kind of covid politics and you know the whole controversy over if you even mean it was it looked like it was just going to be a hunt for the lab leak yeah right yeah exactly so do you are you optimistic that this will be bipartisan and and uh leader jeffries will will assign members to it i am we had a vote uh two weeks ago i think that instantiated the committee, H-Res 11. And the vote was, I have it written on a 365 to 65. So the 65 no's were all Democrats. And most of those were hardcore progressives expressing concern that somehow this would fuel anti-Asian rhetoric and hatred, which, you know, I can assure you as chairman of the committee,

that will not be, this will not be a forum for that. And I think one of the things we want to show, and part of the reason I'm so obsessed with the United Front work is the way this issue of what I call kind of transnational repression, the way in which the CCP targets members of the Chinese diaspora across the world and in the United States and even, you know, Chinese Americans for our targets of their coercion campaign. And I we you know, we hope the Democrats will participate and we should get their announcement of who their ranking member will be and their members will be here shortly. So I'm hoping it's someone good and normal. Great. So I want to cut to an issue that's in the news right now because you're perfectly positioned to talk about its larger significance, which is we recently learned in the last week or

so that for the first time, China's population fell, fell in 2022 to 1.411 billion. So that means it's down some 850,000 people from the previous year. So it tells us a lot of things. A, the Chinese are not repopulating at the rate they need to in order to keep growing, which tells you perhaps about their optimism about their country's future. But what was also interesting is that the numbers were reported by China's National Bureau of Statistics, which announced the annual data in a briefing. So I have two questions for you. One, I thought we were told not to believe what the National Bureau of Statistics from China says or any agency. So

are you skeptical of the data? And why would, I guess, why would a Chinese government agency release data that is harmful to the Chinese narrative? And the second question is, what are the larger geopolitical implications of a shrinking China? Well, I guess I'm always skeptical of the data. I mean, I think right now where we're seeing lethal lies from the Chinese Communist Party is surrounding their COVID data. The numbers make absolutely no sense, right? They're sort of obviously far too low. So to make us skeptical about anything that comes out officially from

the regime, as for why they might be engaging in a rare moment of transparency here, I don't know. I think for the broader geopolitical, maybe it's just sort of like just prepare their populace for the pain that is to come on the horizon and it does seem and again this is something that pottinger has written about frequently xi jinping seems to be preparing his populace for for economic pain to come and he repeatedly talks about you know uh early parts of the cold war the invasion of korea mao's courageous decision to you know fight the Americans in Korea, or the war to liberate, I forget, I read about this one, how they refer to it as the war to

liberate Korea from American aggression or something like that. He does seem to be preparing his populace for the hard times ahead, perhaps to inure them from the inevitable economic consequences that would come if they made a move against Taiwan in a military sense. So that's the only guess I could hazard right now, but all it would be is a guess at this point for the broader geopolitical implications. I still listen, the literature, like the political science literature is mixed on this question. Um, you know, there's, there's like a theory out there that declining powers or powers that are experiencing turbulence could get more aggressive in terms of their external ambition.

So as to distract their populace from the internal challenges, there's a theory that suggests the opposite. Having wasted a lot of my time, my life getting a Ph.D. in political science, I often find these academic questions unhelpful in the real world. But I remain persuaded. But it's a legit point. I mean, Brett Stevens wrote a whole book about this years ago called American Retreat, where he said that those are the countries we need to be most worried about, which is, you know, some people at the time, he was actually writing about Russia. And Russia's population, interestingly,

was shrinking and its demographics or shrinking demographics were a big issue, a big issue that consumed Putin. And people were saying, oh, you don't need to worry about Russia. It's, you know, shrinking power, paper tiger. And Brett's argument in this book was declining powers typically tend to be on the march. I mean, they're the most dangerous because they have the least to lose. Yeah, but Brett wrote like a historically informed book. It wasn't this sort of rigid, poli-sci, independent variable, dependent variable. That's sort of what I'm generally skeptical of.

I sort of prefer the more qualitative case study version. And I think on balance, he's right. But everything, and here's what you don't know, everything gets filtered through, in this case, a small group of human beings. And as we used to say when I was in the human intelligence business, the problem with human is that it involves humans. Humans are unpredictable. And in this case, who knows what lurks in the heart of Xi Jinping? I still don't think he's abandoned his core ambition, which is reunification of Taiwan with the mainland by force, if necessary, I still think that we are in what I've called the window of maximum danger. I'm still persuaded by what

a professor at Naval War College, Andrew Erickson, calls the window of maximum danger. And he really teases out how, you know, once they get into the 2030s, China is sort of running into a demographic buzzsaw, the likes of which no society in history has really dealt with. I think the statistic he trots out is that more retirees than a society in human history. So if that's true and if they if they can see that on the horizon in the 2030s, I think it's logical to assume that they think this is their moment to make gains relative to us on the world stage. And I think things will really heat up next year in 2024 with the election in Taiwan. We'll be preoccupied with our own presidential election. So I think the rough part is going to happen this decade. It's sort of the terrible 20s for those reasons, as well as some reasons that have to do less with China and more with our own incoherent budgeting process. A lot of our big defense bills like the Columbia-class

submarine are coming due. So we're going to be struggling to muster the resources necessary to invest in our own defense and enhanced deterrence precisely at the moment when Xi Jinping could get most risk acceptance. And again, if you kind of just examine his rhetoric recently, I mean, I know that there's this charm offensive underway right now. And I know that various officials went to Davos and told the world that China's back and this and that. But when she talks to the party and talks to internal Chinese audiences, it's pretty aggressive. As I mentioned, there's a sort of cult of the Korean War right now underway. They seem to be drinking their own bathwater and all of those things

conspire, I think, to make him more aggressive in the short term. And in terms of Taiwan, so you can make the case for why China would want to invade Taiwan, reunify with Taiwan. What, based on the intelligence you're seeing now, without citing specific intelligence, and based on all the policy work you're doing now, do you think is the Chinese leadership, and I use that term loosely, whether it's Xi or whether it's the military command's leadership, what is their takeaway from the West's response to the war in Ukraine? If you're going to pursue a fait accompli, you better do it right.

And right means what? Fast? Fast. Don't underestimate your opponent. You know, make sure that you have sort of the basics, brilliance in the basics, you know, mastered in terms of, you know, just the blocking and tackling that's involved in combat. I think one thing we're sort of realizing, too, in the Ukrainian conflict is just how important it is to stockpile munitions. And that's a lesson for both sides of the equation right now. And the thing that's really hard to assess is, you know, on paper, the Russian military looked very formidable, as does the Chinese military on paper. If you count sort of just service members, if you count weapons, if you count tanks, it's really hard to tell how they're going to fight, particularly in the Chinese case,

because they haven't fought a real war in recent memory. And the last time they fought a war, I think, with the Vietnamese, it didn't end that well for them. So, you know, in some sense, you could make a confident prediction that if we had to fight a sort of a low intensity conflict right now, we'd probably do a pretty good job because we learned a lot of very hard lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, one could say that we're untested in terms of a high end kinetic conflict, right? We haven't fought a major naval battle in many years. Until you actually fight, it's really hard to know whether these militaries can fight. So I think there's one world in which the war in Ukraine actually emboldens Xi because he's going to school on Putin's failures. And also I think chaos in

Europe or a preoccupation with Europe in some ways may convince him that he has a freer hand to pursue his ambition in Taiwan. But, and I hate to give this kind of like hedging answer, the war's not over in Ukraine. So it depends entirely on how it ends. I mean, if we're able to continue to support Ukrainians and if they're able to repel the ongoing Russian assault, I think that's a win for the West. I think that bolsters deterrence, not just in Eastern Europe, but in Taiwan as well. And if we can go a step further and having learned about the fragility of our munitions industrial base because of the war in Ukraine, where we burned through seven months worth of javelin, seven years worth of javelins in the first few months, and if we can make the right investments so that

we don't go Winchester in a war with China, meaning we expend all our ammo and we're not able to resupply because it's very hard to resupply Taiwan compared to Ukraine, then we can really put ourselves in a better position. But if we don't learn those lessons, if we waste money on legacy systems that don't make sense, if we continue to invest in a bloated bureaucracy, if the West just doesn't wake up, if we don't use this as a moment to convince some of our other allies to follow the lead of countries like Japan, then it will be a massive missed opportunity and will undermine our deterrent posture. Just quickly on Japan. If you believe that- When you say following the model of Japan, do you mean investments they're making in their military?

Yeah, I think Japan's going, I mean, they're going to meet the 2% of GDP threshold. And they go from, I think, being ninth in terms of military spending to number three, based on this new plan from Kishida. Massive sea change, too, against the backdrop of Japanese history. So particularly when we're looking at an ally in Europe like the Germans, who made all these sort of bold announcements at the beginning of the conflict that have yet to become a reality, I think the Japanese model is one to highlight. It's also just a massive, a massive gift to our deterrent posture in the Indo-Pacific. And if it's in any way related to what the Japanese are seeing play out in Europe, you know, and the fact that, you know, when dictators tell you that they're going to invade a country or want to invade a country,

they might just do it at some point. So to avoid that outcome, you better rearm before the shooting starts. I mean, that is a massive, massive shift. I want I want to stay on China. But but you we taught we we brought up Russia, Ukraine. So let's spend a minute on it. Krista Ball, we won't hold you to it. What do you think 2023 looks like as. Chris, the ball, we won't hold you to it.

What do you think 2023 looks like as it relates to the Russia-Ukraine war? I think it's a lot of a lot of stalemate, no decisive gains on either side. I mean, I hate to say it, a lot more death, a lot more destruction. I mean, you know, perhaps at some point the Ukrainians decide they're in a position where they want to negotiate. I just would say that that's not something we want to foist on them prematurely. It's not something that we should be dictating at this point. And it's just not something I see either them or the Russians doing at any point soon. So, unfortunately, I think it's not so much a frozen conflict because I think the battle lines will change frequently, but I don't think there's going to be a decisive victory one way or the other over the next six months at least. On China, so imagine you're at, this is not hard to imagine, imagine you are at a Green Bay Packers game, walking around at tailgates before the game, talking to constituents of yours, and China has just invaded Taiwan, and you have the position

that you have, this well-thought-out intellectual framework for how we need to deal with it, and you're answering questions from constituents in the parking lot of the Packers Stadium saying, why on earth do we need to be involved with that? Is this the time where I tell my story about you at Lambeau Field? Or do we save that until later? It's up to you. One thing that I remember, I was honored to have your presence at the Valhalla of football that is Lambeau Field.

And I hope you... Yeah, it was a little insulting some of the way you showed me around, but we'll get to that in a second. But keep going. You were asking me questions. And your kids were there. They're great. Your wife was there. She's great.

But then you're like, so what do they do at the stadium in January? I said, well, usually we host playoff games. That may be a foreign... Now, my hubris, obviously, usually we host playoff games. That may be a foreign... Now, my hubris, obviously, that was earlier in the season. You both beat us that day. We didn't make the playoffs. You guys had an epic collapse.

The back half of our season bombed, but the beauty of that game was we crushed the Packers and Sauce Gardner, our phenomenal cornerback, ran around the field after the game with the cheese head on his head. And all I could think about was you asking me how the Jets, that we couldn't relate to you Packers

because the Jets have no use for their stadium after January. What do the Jets do with their stadium in January? What happens? We're going to come back to this because I have very strong views on this. But what do you tell? We're in that tailgate. I was there with you. I was watching all these constituents engage with you while you're trying to enjoy some

pre-football fun, and you got to answer questions about the world. Yeah. I would say, hey, have you ever been to Las Vegas? Well, Las Vegas rules don't apply. What happens there will not stay there. That's true in the immediate sense of if the PLA is successful in taking over Taiwan, well, then our ability to fulfill treaty commitments with Japan, with the Philippines pretty much evaporates just logistically in terms of how we'd be able to do that. But also we'd give them the ability to hold the rest of

the world economically hostage with either the destruction of Taiwan's semiconductor capability or certainly with control of Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing capability. So every time you see one of these industries, whether it's the NBA or whether it's a company like Disney silencing themselves or bending over to please Chinese Communist Party officials because they want access to the massive market in China. Imagine that on steroids. Imagine every American industry having to do that by allowing the CCP to not only hold that dominant military position in the Indo-Pacific and the first island chain, but the commanding heights of the global economy. And I guess on a deeper level, and I have been persuaded by this, not only by Pottinger, but by reading Ian Easton's latest book, I believe what happens in Xinjiang will not stay in Xinjiang. And if they have control of Taiwan, it'll make Xinjiang look like a club med. They're trying to export this sort of model

of total techno totalitarian control total explain what's going on in xinjiang just for uh listeners who don't understand because uh yeah it's simplest terms a genocide and that's not just sort of kind of like a republican um you know conservative labor camps affecting millions and millions of people right yeah a million over a million, over a million Uyghur Muslims. And it's both the Trump administration said it was a genocide and the Biden administration said it was a genocide. And most major allied, Western allied countries have said the same. What's interesting is when these companies that are in bed with China,

like TikTok, get asked this question. I mean, Jake Tapper recently asked a TikTok, the head of like global policy for TikTok. I mean, Jake Tapper recently asked a TikTok, the head of like global policy for TikTok. I forget the exact phrasing of the question, but he basically said, you know, is there a genocide happening in China? And he just hemmed and hawed and wouldn't give a direct answer to the question. And that I think illustrates the point of just with that level of economic leverage, it just, it just, it gives them all sorts of other leverage. And I think more broadly, they're trying to succeed where the Soviets failed

and perfect this model of total control by Leninist party state that they can export to other countries. And that may not be something that's going to happen in the next five years, but that is, you know, they talk openly about the triumph of world socialism and the inevitable sort of diminishment, if not collapse, of the capitalist system led by the United States. So I think their goal is to both win this new Cold War and render us in our system of self-governance subordinate, humiliated and irrelevant on the world stage. Do you is part of your job made easier in trying to answer that question when you're walking around the lambo field parking lot about china is it made easier by the fact that china at least to me seems to be like one of two maybe three issues but really two where there's a true bipartisan consensus at least among voters

maybe not among policymakers but at least among voters you, in a time in which everything's polarized, the two sides don't agree on anything. And suddenly, and Trump was either a vessel for this or he was the catalyst for this, the Trump administration. But there seems to be something has changed as it relates to American public opinion on China and it transcends party lines. Yeah, I think there was this sort of sense of China lurking in the background as a vague economic threat that was there for a while now, particularly in the industrial Midwest. But it wasn't a sense of clear and present danger. I wonder if not just the

policy shifts we saw under the Trump administration. And even that's the wrong way to look at that, right? I think that the Trump administration was in many ways reacting to the direction that Xi Jinping took the party. Well, but Trump ran on China in a way that was innovative. And ran on the economic component of it. Yeah, if you look at from like China entering the WTO 20 plus years ago, 30 years, you know, whatever.

And then from that period to the 2016 election, no one had really talked about China the way, no national, serious national presidential candidate had talked about China and gotten elected the way Trump. Didn't Romney get criticized

for the currency? The currency, yes. He was going after currency manipulation. There's no question. Romney was going after people, different candidates were going after bits and pieces, but there was a totality to the way Trump talked about China that no one had really talked about. I guess my only point in bringing that up is I remember that, I remember being on a presidential campaign myself where, you knower uh called for canceling the state dinner with she after we learned about china's role in the hack the opm hack and like you know

everyone in the media lost their minds and that seems ridiculous now i should point out that you are a foreign policy advisor to governor walker's presidential campaign right yes you know you know from which you speak okay um but that i mean Okay. But that seems quaint looking back. I mean, you wouldn't even hesitate to have such conversations now. So it has changed a lot. But I wonder if COVID has expedited it, right? And I sort of say whether, I guess reasonable people can disagree as to whether this came from a wet market in Wuhan or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I think it's the latter. I think the evidence stacks up in favor of that latter hypothesis.

But I don't think there's any question that the Chinese Communist Party covered up the origin early on, delayed critical information. And that cost us time. That cost us lives. It sort of corrupted the WHO in a lot of cases. So that told us something, I think, essential about the nature of this regime. And I wonder if that hasn't also hardened Americans' opinions against China in a bipartisan fashion. I actually think that probably has more explanatory power than, you know, provocations over Taiwan or whether, you know, them firing a missile into

Japan's exclusive economic zone. I mean, I'm not sure people follow that news, but I mean, COVID obviously disrupted everybody's lives. Yeah. It had also had a huge impact in the UK and Europe. I mean, if you think about what like the UK government, the Boris Johnson government was contemplating doing with China and 5G and, you know, and then all of a sudden COVID happened and no way could any country, any Western country seriously get away, at least a politician who wants a political future with, you know, handing over the telephonic infrastructure of a country to China. I want to read you a headline from Politico that said, a sea change. Biden reverses decades of Chinese trade policy. And it goes on to say,

forget tariffs. Biden's actions, I'm quoting here, forget tariffs. Biden's actions to crack down on Beijing's tech development will do more to hinder the Chinese economy and divide the two nations than Trump ever did. So this piece is basically arguing there's a lot of this conventional wisdom that Biden never really reversed the aggressive posture of Trump towards China. At a minimum, the Biden administration met Trump where it was and went farther. Do you agree with that characterization? And if so, do you give the administration credit for it? Well, I give him credit for the recent export controls from commerce on chip subcomponents. I think that was good. It was tough. I mean,

I'm not trying to detract from that. I give him credit for the AUKUS agreement. I'm getting sort of outside economic and financial competition and more sort of allied military, but I think everyone thought that's a good idea. But there we have early problems, right? Our own submarine industrial base is sending signals that they can't satisfy our own demands as well as the Aussies' demands. We don't have a plan right now for short-term technological cooperation with the Aussies. We still have barriers to cooperation. There's something called ITAR, International Trafficking Arms Regulation, which prevents

us from working. So AUKUS, great idea. There's a lot more we need to do to make it work. So I give him credit for that. On the economic piece, it's been a bit of a mixed bag, at least in some areas I see continuity. We forced the administration, the last administration to give us a list of Chinese entities on something called the Communist Chinese Military Company List that we actually mandated in a FY 1999 National Defense Authorization Act. I wasn't in Congress then. I think I was in high school back then. But for two decades, the administrations of both parties had ignored this Schumer cotton me.

And I forget who my democratic cop counterpart, maybe Gallego in the house wrote a letter saying, Hey, give us the list. We got that. The Trump administration published it. And critically, the Biden administration didn't get rid of it. Now they changed it. They made it weaker in some areas. They expanded it in some others.

But I think the, the directionally what that article is saying is right. Here's the gap. And but it was it was a gap for the Trump administration, too. We're sort of getting the sticks. We're improving our ability to put certain economic sticks out there. But there's no carrot strategy from either party, right? Because TPP collapsed and people lost trust in President Obama and Trump campaigned against TPP, the trade agenda, like the proactive trade agenda, I think has fallen into complete disrepair. Now, I'm not advocating in the region. Yeah, in the region, a trade agenda for- Or in general. I mean, I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal for a post-Brexit gold standard trade agreement with the UK that would have a docking provision

where if countries met the very high standards, they could enter that trade agreement. I'm not arguing that we resurrect TPP, but I do think there's some bilateral agreements that are low-hanging fruit that neither party has wanted to grab. A free trade agreement with Taiwan stands out, for example. This idea that you could perhaps form a digital trading

agreement that steals from some of the NAFTA modernization provisions and do something in the region there. But because of the politics of the trade issue, neither party is really running with it right now. And there's a huge gap in our strategy. There's two areas where we're further deficient. One, we're going're going to tackle on the, on the China in this next Congress, both on the China Select Committee and financial services, is this question of whether we need controls on capital from the United States being invested in China, in certain industries, whether university endowments, for example, should be allowed to invest in Chinese military affiliated companies or subsidized Chinese genocide, whether state and local pension funds, things like that. Very thorny question.

You'd know more about that than I would, but we don't want to subsidize our own destruction, to put it bluntly. And then this TikTok issue is bound up in the bigger question of cross-border data flows. It's the Wild West out there when it comes to how we govern cross-border data flows, there's no reciprocity between us and China. Shinzo Abe, before he was killed, gave this great speech talking about this data free flow with trust model. That seems to make sense to me that we could build on with our allies. But there again, I just I haven't been impressed with impressed with the administration's alacrity on that issue. Where the administration is confused, too, and where we've taken a few steps back is there's a wing in the administration that thinks climate change is the existential issue and has a more cooperative framework for how we deal with China. So that's

why it's always kind of it's always there's there's a bit of confused priorities in all these strategic documents coming out of the administration, because to the extent they have a hawkish China wing, it's balanced by this sort of neo-engagement climate change wing. Right. So it's hard to be tough on China when John Kerry's running in and out of Beijing, trying to cut anti-climate change deals. Okay, TikTok. You mentioned TikTok. I want to talk to you about TikTok. You've been very outspoken on TikTok. Is it realistic that there could be some kind of ban of TikTok in the United States, and how much of a priority should it be from your perspective? Yes, for a few reasons. One, we just banned it on government devices in a bipartisan fashion. So to some extent, you've already conceded the main point, which is it's a national security

threat owing to its not only just the features of the app, but its basic ownership structure. Two, you have over 20, if not near 30, state governments that have taken action to do the same. state governments that have taken action to do the same um and three there seems to just be this steady drip of information coming out about tiktok uh that's bad for tiktok i mean they went out there and they denied you know we pointed out well this app has the ability to track your location they said well we've never used that for anything nefarious well then forbes had an article recently saying they used it to track journalists because journalists have sources inside TikTok writing bad stories, right? There's no transparency around the algorithm. And that's sort of the main issue right now. If the CCP has the ability to

tell ByteDance at any moment what to do, and ByteDance owns TikTok, well, the CCP can control the algorithm and basically control what news Americans get. And young Americans are not just using it to post and look at stupid dance videos. They're using it to get news. So we don't want the CCP to control our access to information. So I'd be open to a forced sale to an American company, as was contemplated in the Trump administration. That's an acceptable outcome as far as I'm concerned, in addition to or in place of a ban. And my bill allows for both. But I do think it's going to become a bigger issue. And we have a bipartisan bill in the House. You have key Democrats in the Senate like Mark Warner, who have at least recognized the threat

it poses. They're not yet sold on a ban, but they're I don't know. I see I see a path forward on this issue. I don't think it's going away anytime soon. And you're, I know you have children that are very young, but I assume you would never let them download TikTok when they, no, my daughter's, my daughter's two and a half. So I got to ban it before she's like a sentient human being with a, she's pretty, she's pretty sentient now, I guess, but it's mostly just wearing princess dresses and dancing ballet in our house so by the time she's aware of phones and demanding her own it must be banned all right i'm gonna um we we have a couple questions from listeners that i uh want to play and have you react to before we let you go but before we get to that i do want to turn to domestic affairs and specifically the chaos as we say in Hebrew, the balagan

in the lead-up to the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. Balagan? Balagan. See, this is like we're a multi-full-service operation here. You come on, you offer your insights, you learn a little Hebrew. Balagan. I like that. Yeah.

Next time you're in Israel, say, this is balagan. What's going on there right now is balagan. But that's a separate conversation for another day. So you actually were one of the, delivered one of the nominating speeches for Kevin McCarthy's speakership. In fact, when that happened, someone shouted out Gallagher for speaker, which I was excited about until I texted you and you told me it's never going to happen, so I was disappointed. I also believe it was Matt Gaetz that shouted that out. Oh, did he really? Yeah.

I didn't know you took your political cues. Yeah, you know, me and Gaetz, it's like two pieces of a pie. Gaetz and I sit next to each other on the armed services committee. All right. Yeah. That makes sense, right. Okay, so there was a lot of noise about the concessions that McCarthy made in the context of his ascension to the speakership, and our mutual friend Yuval Levin tried to propagandist, so he speaks with clarity, and he's analytical, and he tries to be reasonable and constructive, and he doesn't carry

water for the Republican Party. He wrote this piece in the New York Times, and he says that Kevin McCarthy's grueling struggle, I'm quoting here, to become Speaker of the House of Representatives was mostly an embarrassment for him and his new Republican majority. No offense. Yet among the fumbling chaos, you could catch glimpses of how the House could improve itself, that is, if party factions advance structural reforms. And then he goes on to cite what some of these are, and he says one of the ones he cites is committing to advance discrete spending bills rather than massive omnibus, rather than another massive omnibus like the one in December, restoring something of the order of the budget

process. And he proved willing, he, McCarthy, willing to cut into the core of the Speaker's authority by surrendering control over some seats on the crucial House Committee on Rules. And he goes through some of these others. So where do you come down on this? Because the conventional wisdom was that these negotiations produced something that created a very weak speakership, which may or may not be true, and Yuval's basically arguing maybe, but some of the rebels, not all of them, some of them were

operating in good faith, they cared about some real reforms, they weren't just about making a statement against McCarthy and quote-unquote the establishment. And the fact that these reforms have been instituted are is progress. Is that a rosy I'd take? No, I think Yuval, as usual, is spot on. I mean, you could quibble with this or that. But on balance, I think what the rules amount to was an attempt to restore regular order and attempt to devolve more power from the office of the speaker to the committees and by extension, the members. I think for the members operating good faith, and I think Chip Roy was foremost among them. I mean, what Chip Roy wanted was

for the basic functioning of the house to return. What drives all of us crazy is when we do these last second omnibus bills that are 5,000 pages long. And nobody reads. Everyone has to vote on it without reading it. Ungodly sums of money. Or when you have a closed rule such that there's no opportunity for debate, there's no opportunity for amendment.

And in a pure majoritarian body where, you know, an individual member just doesn't have the power that an individual senator does. If the speaker musters the vote, she can just jam it down your throat. And that, I think, is what was motivating a lot of the debate. And so I think that was healthy on some level. I think forcing us to do our basic homework

of 12 separate appropriations bills is a good thing. A lot was made about- So just explain that. There are 12 spending bills, right? And they should be considered separately, the spending bills. So the issues within the spending for each of those categories is scrutinized and debated in its own right as it moves its way to the floor.

And that's not the way it's been done recently, right? No, I forget the last time we did it. I mean, it's a long time since it's been done that way. So we blow by our own deadlines. And that's what leads you into the situation where, oh, it all gets thrown together in this end of the year massive omnibus. And in some ways, I think, and not to be too cynical, I think leadership, I mean, to be fair in both parties in recent history likes that because it allows them to sort of control what ultimately happens because debate is messy. Debate is hard. You have to

persuade people. There's other provisions in the rules package that, for example, you know, require committees to list out their expiring authorizations. We have this other problem where we'll either put authorizing language, which is basically telling the various agencies what they're expiring authorizations. We have this other problem where we'll either put authorizing language, which is basically telling the various agencies what they're allowed to do into appropriations bills, even if the authorizing committees haven't passed them. We have unauthorized agencies and programs that are spending taxpayer money. It's a constitutional absurdity. So all of these rules changes were designed to get at that issue. Now, I think some of the more controversial issues, for example, this lowering the threshold for a motion to vacate

the chair, this idea that one person could force a referendum on the Speaker of the House. Okay, what people forget is that Nancy Pelosi actually raised the threshold to sort of further increase her own power. And two, yes, that could waste time, but it's not like one person could decide to oust the speaker. You'd still then have to have a vote on that. Yuval argues that in the piece, that people are too fixated on that because that's only useful for one member to do that if that member could generate support for it. And if there's not critical mass for it, it's pointless.

And if there is critical mass for it, then being able to bring the motion to the floor with one vote doesn't matter because there's critical mass for it. Now, you could criticize what's not in there. And I think what Yuval has argued and persuaded me of, and just do a fact check so that I'm not misrepresenting his work, but I've come to believe that the fundamental procedural problem in the House, or really all of Congress, is this division between the authorizing and the appropriations committees. It just creates total chaos. He's critical of that.

So you need to, and actually Nunes had a good bill on this, you need to find a way to sort of combine them into one. Because the things that would make you good- Can you explain this? So this is important. So take the Foreign Affairs Committee or take the Armed Services Committee. Let's do Armed Services. That's what I'm on, yeah. So there's the Appropriations Committee, which is the spending committee, which has a subcommittee for defense spending, basically, an Armed Services Appropriations Subcommittee.

They spend the money for the Pentagon or appropriate the money for the Pentagon and or appropriate the money for the Pentagon. And then your committee, the Armed Services Committee, also authorizes like a budget effectively, but you can't actually spend the money. So there's these two parallel efforts that aren't necessarily coordinated. Yeah, it's we we authorize an overall top line number that they're allowed to spend. And we authorize the programs that they're allowed to spend. And we authorize the programs that they're allowed to sort of spend money on, but we don't actually allocate the money for that thing. And our top line then basically becomes overruled by whatever number the appropriators decide to actually give to the defense department. So it's as if we do all this work and then the appropriators just ignore it at the end of the year, which has never

made any sense to me. Because at the end of the day, what do you want for oversight? You want members of Congress with an interest in that issue or with an interest in that executive branch agency over which they have authority functioning well and being responsible stewards of the taxpayer dollar to pay attention, to show up to their committee work, to ask hard questions of the representatives of the executive branch, ask hard questions of the Secretary of Defense, of all the service secretaries. But if they feel like their work is meaningless, then they're not going to invest their time and energy into it. And they're going to invest more time and energy into becoming C-list social media celebrities

or being bomb throwers on TV. I think it's at the core of a lot of our dysfunction. It creates budgetary chaos and it creates, I think, an unhealthy dynamic just among the members in Congress. So I've long been persuaded that we need to fix that. It goes back to the days when John Quincy Adams was in Congress. I forget the crisis that precipitated the separation, but at the time it was viewed as a way to, I think, not only overcome a short-term fiscal crisis, but also inject some fiscal sanity in the government.

Now I think it's been the reason for the exact opposite happening. So here's what Yuval writes in this Times piece. He said they could further, he's proposing, further empower the committees by eliminating the long-standing boundary between authorization, the design of programs, and appropriation, the spending of money on those programs, which are now done by separate committees. This would allow the committees that write policy to also propose the spending required to carry it out and would give members who aren't now appropriators a reason to take their committee work more seriously. The House worked this way from the late 1870s until 1921, and while that period of decentralized appropriations offers some cautionary lessons,

there are strong reasons to embrace that approach again. That's what he wrote in that piece. Well, better said than I could ever write. Okay. So I want to, one last thing. As part of these negotiations, there was a limit, if you will, on defense spending as part of the deal that Congress could appropriate. Can you just briefly summarize, explain what that component of the negotiations were that led to McCarthy becoming Speaker? And how worried should we, defense hawks, be worried about it? Technically, there was no limit specifically on defense.

There was an agreement to start the negotiations and the budget resolution at FY22 levels. So you're talking pre-pandemic levels. And there's some logic to that, right? We just blew out spending during the pandemic. So to reset post-pandemic now that we're no longer in an emergency, that's a reasonable baseline. So that's sort of the overall money that we spend on non-mandatory programs. And defense isn't the only non-mandatory program. I think the number is 1.7 trillion. So if you go to the FY 22 levels, that overall number starts at 1.445 ish trillion

dollars. Um, but there's no prescription in the rule or in any side agreement for, cause you can't, you can't even do that in a, in a house rule, uh, for what level defense is at versus non-defense. But to stay within that cap and increase defense, you would have to find efficiencies and savings in terms of non-defense discretionary spending. So there's an open question as to whether we would be able to muster 218 votes, 218 Republicans to vote for a budget that increases defense. Let's say you start at our last year baseline, $858 billion plus 2% to 3% for inflation, whatever that number is. And does that plus decreases non-defense discretionary? Open question as to whether you could convince members to vote for a budget like that. What I can guarantee you is that a budget resolution that decreases defense spending is not going to

pass the house of representatives. It just won't pass. It's a non-starter. It will not happen. So I think that's less of a concern. The real concern is a continuation of what we've seen in recent history, which is, um, uh, operating by continuing resolution, which basically means you don't pass a budget and you just spend at the previous year's levels, which is bad for defense because you can't really invest in new programs rather than a budget that decreases the size of the defense, that decreases defense spending. Okay. I want to have you respond to questions, a couple of questions from listeners, and then we'll let you go. so one of those questions doesn't come in from audio it comes in from uh from uh a listener who texted me

i won't say his last name uh because i don't think he intended me to read you this question but his name is steve and he's in the sports media world and he says uh this bill he refers to legislation might nix i'm quoting from the text might nix i'm sure he didn't expect me to read his his comment his bill might nix at this bill might nix nfl draft the nfl draft for army star lb carter who i guess is coming out of west point not a good look for mike gallagher he writes who i otherwise love of all the things to take on why this now this friend of mine's referring to an amendment you introduced, I think, in the National Defense Authorization Bill in the end of last year. What was this, Mike, and why? Well, the first thing to say is we fixed it for this particular

kid who will have an opportunity to play in the NFL? Because I think it's reasonable to say if you came in under one system where the expectation was that you could get a waiver to go play in the NFL if you got drafted, but that we shouldn't then pull the rug out from under you at the last second based on your expectation at the time you entered. The timeline's pretty close, but I think it's reasonable for this kid to get an exemption. And we got it in to the omnibus bill.

So we didn't destroy his NFL dreams. Here's the problem. If a midshipman or a cadet opts to put off their service obligation to pursue a career as a professional athlete, in effect, it means they're removing an opportunity from a kid who was committed to carrying out their service obligation immediately

following graduation. So my amendment would have prohibited midshipmen or cadets at our service academies from going pro until after their service obligation is complete. You got to think of these service academies have an average acceptance rate of about 10%. So there are thousands of patriotic Americans who do not have the opportunity to attend a military service academy, I think we owe it to them to ensure that those who do benefit from the experience and the resources that we give them actually fulfill their service obligation. And these institutions are first and foremost about defending the country and warfighting. And for the truly athletically gifted individuals, they are more than free to pursue careers as professional athletes after their obligation to our nation is complete, just like Roger Staubach did, just like David Robinson

did after doing, I mean, he had truncated time, but he served first and then played in the NFL. So if Staubach can wait to go pro, I think the next generation of service member athletes, where I've become convinced that this is an incomplete solution to the problem is I think you need the same rubric applied to Rhodes Scholars and people that defer in order to pursue certain academic obligations. There's got to be a way you don't screw up their careers and you're still getting the full five years of service that they signed up for when they decided to go to a service academy. Okay. Let's play a question we received from one of your constituents. Elan, let's roll this first one. Congressman Gallagher, this is Nick, a native Wisconsinite and Packer fan from behind enemy

lines in Chicago Bear Territory. My question for you is, how do you see India playing a role in the U.S.'s strategy to deter the Chinese Communist Party? What do you do about Wisconsinites, Congressman, that moved to Chicago? That's like, do they get, like, I don't want to hear about what the, you know, you may have to do like a re-indoctrination camp when they return. Well, as long as they don't abandon their Packer allegiances, they're fine. If they become Bears fans, that's a betrayal of the highest order.

But I blame our own tax code in Wisconsin, which is not that friendly relative to Illinois. Yeah, but I can't believe going to Chicago is an antidote. So what about his question about India? There is no successful grand strategy vis-a-vis China that does not include a closer partnership with India across all dimensions, not just military. I think we have an opportunity, by the way, to convince them to abandon some of the Russian weapon systems that they bought recently in light of the war in Ukraine. So that's sort of a short term opportunity. But also the issue of data flows that I mentioned earlier.

I think there's a huge opportunity to get to adopt a common framework with India. I believe India's banned TikTok already. So there, I think we have an opportunity to get on the same page. And imagine if you have a coherent framework for data flows and sort of issues related to the digital economy with a country as massive as India, then you start to compete really effectively with China. That's really exciting. So inevitably, and sort of the last part of this is all of this, I think, demands that we need to do a better job of cultivating the next generation of India experts here in the national security community and in America. When I went to college, war on terror kicked off. So I learned Arabic and I became an Arabist and a

Middle East expert. There's probably a generation of people that are trying to learn Mandarin and become China experts right now. We need to do the same for all these critical countries in the region that don't get as much attention. India is foremost among them. I would include the Philippines and Indonesia on that list too. And there we just don't have the depth of expertise that we need to be effective. Okay. Before you go, I know you got to go vote. I have a question. I know I've had a lot of questions. All right. And this is probably the most important question. I'm going to quote here from a piece in Sports Illustrated by Connor Orr, which makes the case if the Jets want to be competitive going forward, they need to have one Aaron Rodgers as quarterback, your quarterback.

He writes in Sports Illustrated about Rodgers. Rodgers represents, I'm quoting here, the highest ceiling of this offseason quarterback class. Brady will be 46 next year. Derek Carr, Jimmy Garoppolo, Ryan Tannehill, Jameis Winston, Marcus Mariota, all seem to represent various plot points on a graph of conservative options that will yield a noticeable but not franchise-altering improvement. Then he goes on to say, the Jets shouldn't be making a move to edge into the playoffs as a number seven seed.

They should be making a move that could result in winning the AFC East. Or it goes on to lay out why only Rogers can do this. You've lived with Aaron Rogers as a fan. Are we making a huge mistake by seriously considering him? I haven't lived. I've never lived in like an apartment with Aaron Rogers. I haven't lived. No, no, no.

As a fan. As a fan. I have lived in his. I've loved him. You know? Yeah. No, I mean, listen, he's one of the greatest of all time. I mean, you know, the numbers weren't there this season,

but he won two back-to-back, you know, MVPs before that. So, and he went on Pat McAfee's show this week and he said, I don't want to be part of a rebuild. I want to be part of a reload. I want to compete. And the Jets seem to have a lot of young talent. And I think they're one of like five teams that could actually handle the cap space issues with Aaron. So it makes a lot of sense.

It would suck for us. The problem is I understand it. And I, you know, I listen to all these podcasts, but I'm not talking to anybody in the organization. I don't have any insider knowledge. Um, so I wish I did, uh, Rogers, part of Rogers being part of a reload and not a rebuild means bringing back all these veteran guys that he thinks are good glue locker room players. Like, you know, his best friend, Randall Cobb, Robert Tanyan, Alan Lazard in Mercedes Lewis, guys like that, who are great locker room guys. They're great Packers. I love Cobb in particular, but you know, there's a

question as to whether you keep those guys or trade for younger talent that might perform better so if he's if he went into the negotiation which I think happened started this week and said if you don't bring back these five guys I'm not here I just don't know where we go from there and then at some point you either got to try out Jordan Love or you got to deal him somewhere else so I don't know I hope he comes back this This reporter lays out that all of the Packers' problems were not his problem. The Packers' offense was broken, not just because of the quarterback.

There were issues with rookie receivers and across the offensive line. So he basically says, don't judge the Packers' most recent season based on Aaron Rodgers' performance. So, you know, there we go. I can't wait to go tailgating with you in the Meadowlands and coming to watch Aaron Rodgers. Just not in January.

Yeah, right. Maybe with Aaron Rodgers. All right. Congressman Gallagher, we will leave it there. I know you've got to go vote. Thank you for doing this, as always. We'll have you back on, and the next time you come on, you get some swag. Awesome. Thank you. come on you get some swag awesome thank you that's our show for today to keep up with mike gallagher you can follow him on twitter at rep gallagher that's at r-e-p-g-a-l-l-a-g-h-e-r and you can also track him down at gallagher.house.gov. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.