School of War -  Ep 122: Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger on a Victory Strategy for China

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger join the show to discuss their recent Foreign Affairs essay on the need for a victory strategy in America’s cold war with China. ▪️  Times      •   ��  01:53 Introduction      •      03:25 Meeting in Iraq     •      07:43 “There are bad guys…”     •      13:15 Why detente isn’t working       •      23:45 Real statesmanship?     •      32:12 Rearm/Reduce/Recruit      •      35:20 TikTok Follow along  on Instagram Read the Foreign Affairs piece here No Substitute for Victory America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed  Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today, we are lucky to talk to two of Washington's, dare I say, America's leading China experts and both leaders in their own right. Fun fact, also both Marines. Congressman Mike Gallagher chaired the China Select Committee this last congressional term, and among many other claims to fame is probably more responsible than any other individual for the legislation recently signed into law by President Biden, forcing TikTok sale by its Chinese Communist Party controlled owners on pain of being banned in America. Matt Pottinger served in the last administration's White House as Deputy National Security Advisor, and at least as much as any other individual deserves credit for pivoting America

towards a realistic and tough strategic view of the China challenge. Both men believe that we need a, quote, victory strategy over the CCP, not a plan for perpetual coexistence. It's a controversial view. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. A date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches.

We will fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. McLean, thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be joined today by two distinguished guests. First time on the podcast is Matt Ponder, former Deputy National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. Today he's affiliated with the Hoover Institution, with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Garno Global.

He is one of the nation's leading China experts. Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. And he is joined by, I believe, Congressman, Chairman Gallagher, you are joining the guest company of those who have been on our show three times now, if I'm not. mistaken. Wow. It's just you and a handful of others. Welcome back. The steak knives, the set of steak knives is in the mail. So I'm not the top? Who's who's the most frequent? You tied for three. The three is the top right now. With who? Saturday Night Live, you get a jacket if you've been on a certain number of times. So I think you should get a some kind of garment for Mike. We are thinking of getting swag. So you can get the first shipment of swag when it comes in. But Mike Gallagher,

of course, was the representative of Wisconsin's eighth district to the U.S. House of Representatives for several years. He just recently stepped down from that role. I don't know if you probably deserve some well-deserved time on the beach. I'm not sure exactly where you're calling in from, but future affiliations, TBD. Where our beaches, the white sand beaches of Green Bay are famous for that. No, I'm in changing diaper mode and just an unemployed award of the state now. So these two gentlemen wrote a fantastic and interesting article in foreign affairs, which we're going to talk about in just a minute. It's called No Substitute for Victory.

America's competition with China must be won, not managed. But before we get to the substance, I just, you gentlemen know each other. You've known each other since before collaboration on this article, maybe indeed before collaboration in Washington, D.C. When did you two first meet? We met in Western Iraq in Al-Ambar province in 2007, if memory serves. But I'd heard about Pottinger before that because we were in the same military occupational specialty or MOS.

We were both counterintelligence, human intelligence officers in the Marine Corps. I think, Matt, you joined two years before I did. So you were kind of ahead of me by a couple cohorts. So I heard rumors about this super old second lieutenant because Matt had to get an age waiver because I think he was 30 when he joined. 32. He had like a very successful career as a journalist in China, Mandarin linguists. And I thought, who was this weird, old guy in our very small specialty?

And then I remember vividly meeting him because he was leaving Iraq, getting ready to redeploy back to the United States. and I had just arrived for my first deployment. And he was sitting in a little Kwanza hut hunched over, editing his last Intel report. And like his helicopter was ready to leave. And most people would have dropped their pack a long time ago. Here he was like super into his final report and started geeking about about the tribal structure in Al-Kheim. He led the team on the Syrian border, which I then took over that team later.

And so that's how I met the great Matt Pottinger. Does that square with your recollection, Matt? And then also I have to ask, you know, in my infantry company, three lieutenants, me and two other guys, we got there at the same time. And then the fourth lieutenant joined us like six weeks later, I think, all in Lijun. And for the rest of his life, that officer who is still an active duty Marine officer will be the boot to me and those two other lieutenants. It doesn't matter. He could be, he could make flag rank. He will be the boot to me.

Is Congressman Gallagher the boot to you? He was the boot, but he was clearly gungy and smart and and was jumping in, eager to, eager to go in to the fight. And I was the old lieutenant. At that point, I probably was probably 33 years old by the time Mike and I crossed pads in 33 or 34. I don't know. Yeah, probably 34 years old.

I came in at 32. Mike was fresh out of college, but one of the most talented people in that community, which is a pretty small, special group subset of Marines and ended up doing an incredible job out in the field. Can I have one thing to this? And I may have said this on your podcast before, but I remember also because Matt was a legit, like China expert spoke and speaks Mandarin fluently. And at the time I'd studied Arabic as my minor in college.

I had just gone to Middlebury's Arabic immersion school, and I thought I was like this, you know, modern day, T.E. Lawrence, you know, I was going to, you know, I single-handedly bridge the gap between the Sunni tribes and the Marine Corps. I remember thinking like, why, why would anyone waste their time stunning China and learning Mandarin? I mean, we're, you know, we're friends with China now, right? We're trading. It's all good. And then fast forward over a decade later when I'm a freshman member of Congress. And once a month, I would meet with Matt. We would like alternate. He would come to the Hill. I would go to the White House. And I kind of went to the Pottinger grad school because I felt like I needed to learn about China. And I said Matt, I think when I was

on the Walker campaign, Matt wrote a very trenchant analysis of the problem with China. That was my kind of awakening moment. And I think remains the closest thing we have to a long telegram. And that provided the intellectual foundation for what became Trump's national security strategy and the biggest change in U.S. foreign policy, I think, since the end of Cold War. I think Matt deserves a ton of credit for that. And really, I think, is related directly to the article and the argument that we're making. Before I leave or we leave Iraq behind entirely, did anything in your professional experiences there as intelligence officers inform your current thinking on China? Are there experiences that you had, things that you learned on the battlefield, obviously with a different problem set, a different

enemy, a different region, inform your thinking today? It's a great question. I mean, look, you know, if nothing else, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to deter a war than to fight one. And so we should be pursuing, you know, peace through strength. It really should not be merely a slogan. It really should be the cornerstone. of American policy, national security policy, foreign policy. And, you know, Mike and I had to wade through deployments, both of us, multiple deployments, one for Iraq for me, two to Afghanistan.

I think you went twice to Iraq, right, Mike? And just the incredible amount of energy and time and resources and heartache that goes into waging war would be, you know, it's, really worth trying to deter our adversaries. Even if it seems expensive, it is nothing compared to the overall costs in lives and treasure and time and opportunity cost when you do end up having to wage war. I agree completely. I would only add something simple or simplistic, which is, you know, there are bad guys in the world that want to kill Americans. And that's something you can like read about in the book, but then when you see it up close and personal, it's a different thing. And to this day, I think there are people that naively assume that, oh, the Chinese regime,

you know, really what they care about is economics and things like that. And, you know, they don't really want to take down the capitalist system led by America. So I almost think it had a way of teaching me something very simple about good and evil. And kind of to riff off Matt's point, I do think like hard power is paramount. And we were able to turn the tide or really Matt, because it happened before I got there. I mean, I got a parking ticket my first week in Iraq. So that tells you that I sort of missed the war because Matt had already won it. But the awakening had happened in Anbar and the change had happened in Al-Qaim because we had a massive deployment of hard power.

We changed our strategy. And I think a hard power is paramount, but ideology does matter. That's true when you're dealing with the Salafi jihadists that you're interrogating and trying to get to tell you something as when you're dealing with a Marxist-Leninist regime. like the Chinese Communist Party. Let me add one line to that because it's, look, I mean, I think it was Hannah Arant who said evil is often banal. But when I was in Iraq, I got to see pure evil in the form of ISIS. At that point, the Islamic State was still under the Al-Qaeda umbrella before they had their schism. But we were hunting eventually successfully a guy in our sector who was a master bomb maker,

who would make suicide car bombs, you know, just cars that would be laden with explosive. And he would then recruit mentally retarded, you know, children or young men and unbeknownstant would put them in the in the driver's seat and have them drive into marketplaces and detonate killing, you know, rarely actually U.S. Marines in some cases also, but usually just women and children, local Iraqis. I mean, you know, you'll never convince me that there's no such thing as evil after seeing things like that. Well, you know, Hannah Wren took a lot of flack for that, too. I mean, that was her phrase that she used to describe Eichmann as he was on trial in Jerusalem.

And at the time, people criticized her for underplaying real and true evil for, you know, trying to make it seem more relatable. There's a great movie that, like, I think it's at the banality of evil point called conspiracy. It's about the Nazis sort of just sitting around in this very like nice villa discussing the final solution and all the it's an amazing movie. I remember it though because I made my wife watch it on Valentine's Day a few years ago, which was not the best choice for for Valentine's. It's a little grim. Kenneth Branagh is in it though. So I don't know if your wife like Kenneth Branagh. I've actually been there.

I've been Devonzi House, which is the house. I mean, it's just a museum now. And it's like it's so it is chilling because it's like a nice corporate. You can imagine it in the 40s being like the site where you would do your corporate retreat on a little lake near Berlin. Exactly. And they've got the minutes of the meeting posted, you know, and you can read them. I mean, there's a series of shocking things that come out. I mean, one is, I mean, in fairness to Arendt, the minutes are now.

The minutes, you know, we've all been in many meetings in many bureaucratic environments where people are negotiating over turf and like there are petty rivalries. And all of that is reflected in the minutes despite the subject matter being, you know, genocide and mass murder. And then it's also striking the extent to which the minutes make clear that the destruction of the Jews of Europe is a war aim that will trump other war aims. It's not like a nice thing to do on the side. This is actually the aim of the Nazi machine. And they will devote and prioritize resources for it. And then as they go through in the planning, you're looking at they've got the number of the Jews of Ireland. You know, countries they haven't conquered yet.

Like they're making plans for what comes next. I mean, it's actually, if anyone ever is in Berlin, I mean, it's kind of a. must visit. So, well, let's get to the article, which is just thematically an extension of the conversation we're already having. In the article, you both criticize and reject an approach to dealing with China that we could call detente. What is detente? Why won't it work? Deitant is a phrase that captures really our 1970s Cold War strategy. Okay. It's an old French term, but is applied in the Nixon-Kissinger era, followed by the Ford Kissinger era, followed by the Jimmy Carter administration, up until the point when Jimmy Carter's

National Security advisors, Bignie of Brzezinski pivoted away from Dayton, we can talk about that in a bit because he's a very interesting figure, Brinski. The period of Dayton really described a few things. It was an engagement, strategy, but it was really an engagement strategy from a self-perceived American weakness, not a perceived American strength, which would have been the sort of engagement that Ronald Reagan in the 80s would eventually pursue with his counterpart Gorbachev. He engaged him as well, but it was not a detente policy because it was from a position of unmistakable strength, as interpreted by both the Soviets and the Americans. During the 70s, it was from a period of perceived weakness. We had just

been humiliated in the war in Vietnam. We were dramatically cutting our defense spending. The Soviet economy, people forget this. Everyone says, yeah, it was a sclerotic, horrible joke of an economy, nothing like China. In fact, the Soviet economy at that point during the either late Nixon or early Ford years, probably reached its apogee at about 58% of US GDP. That's pretty close to China's percentage of US GDP today, which is about 65%, and that's probably an overestimation of China's economy, given how badly they did over the past few years. I think they're overestimating, and we're overestimating the size of their economy. The Soviet economy, for all of its problems, was feeling kind of ganky at that point. They were investing heavily in a conventional military

buildup. They were for the first time ever on track to exceed later that decade, the U.S. arsenal in quantitative terms. They were much more integrated with the world economy than we give them credit for today. We weren't doing much trade with them at all, which is very different from us with China today. But the Soviets were doing a lot of trade with a lot of other countries. And it was mostly commodities and it was oil and gas. And even our Western European allies were heavily dependent on Soviet oil and gas. The Japanese were buying a lot of Soviet energy and other things. So detente was this idea that the Americans had that given rising Soviet strength,

given that we have just gone through a pretty rough period, we had a social upheaval at home and a lost war in Asia, we should try to downplay our differences, try to segment those areas where we might be able to work together with the Soviets towards common mutual goals like strategic arms limitation and downplay the ideological differences between us and the Soviets, try to, as Henry Kissinger said at the time, try to push all the sentimentality out of our foreign policy, squeeze it all out and really try to achieve a nice, even balance of power. And eventually, we hope the Soviet aggressive, Soviet aggression in the form of proxy wars in Africa and in, you know, in the Middle East and in Latin America and eventually direct wars like

their invasion of Afghanistan. We hope that those would naturally be self-limiting. And as Mike and I argue in our piece, and that turned out to be untrue in the 1970s. The detente goals failed. John Lewis Gaddis wrote in his seminal book Strategies of Containment. Mike gave me his old copy of that book, which I read. And then I reread. the newer edition that came out in 2005 that has a full, you know, view of the entirety of the Cold War. Gattis says that really the main goals of detente were not achieved. I just would add in a prior argument, an article, I had sort of noticed, or I mean, we all kind of noticed a distinct shift in the Biden administration's foreign policy.

I think it's fair to say, and we point this out in our piece, that the Biden administration started off carrying on a lot of the hard-nosed policies that Trump administration had implemented with respect to China. Now, that's not to say there was always kind of not to be critical of UMAP, but it seemed to me from Congress, there was occasionally a two steps forward, one and three, four steps back. You know, there were certain factions in the Trump administration. But on balance, we were kind of pushing in a more hard-nosed direction. The Biden team came in, and actually, I think the underappreciated story was a level of continuity with respect to the Trump administration's policy on China, but the things started to shift about a year and a half, two years in, whether it was taking the foot off the gas with respect to export controls and continuing to allow

licensing exemptions for technology going to Huawei, for example, whether it was a completely joke of an investigation into COVID origins. And then, of course, I think the biggest incident was the attempts to ignore and obfuscate and downplay the spy balloon incident. for the sake of preserving Secretary Blinken's trip to Beijing, which was part of this broader outreach of every major cabinet official going to Beijing. It just seemed that there was something going on that I at the time called zombie engagement, which was my way to describe a return to this idea that by engaging in an endless series of talks, you know, counter-narcotics working groups,

sitting across the table with high-level officials, you can somehow turn down the temperature, and thereby reduce the risk of war or a deterrence failure. There's a logic to it, but I would argue we've tried and tested that hypothesis for over 20 years, and it failed, and it gets to something that Matt actually argued in front of my select committee in the very first hearing we did, and I've since called it the Pottinger paradox, which is to say, and Matt, correct me if I get this wrong, but this is how I think about it, when you're dealing with Marxist-Leninist regimes, the more accommodating you are of them,

paradoxically, the more aggressive they get. But if you have a very adversarial and honest approach in the military domain, the economic domain, and the ideological domain, that gives you the best chance of deterring them. And if you don't accept that paradox or don't accept that we are indeed dealing with the Marxist-Leninist regime, then you might find yourself returning to the logic of zombie engagement or responsible stakeholder of theory or thinking that we can sort of neatly segment the competitive aspects of our relationships while pursuing cooperation when it comes to fentanyl production, climate change, and now the new version of this is AI.

Jake Sullivan in his Foreign Affairs article says that when it comes to AI, we have common interest we can work with the CCP on. And I think Matt and I just disagree with that. or just far more skeptical of that. Can I, if you'll promote me, I'll play devil's advocate here for a minute. And I will take as given that if there is an alternative to your approach, it's not the Biden approach. I will not put myself in the position of trying to argue for the Biden approach.

But I will try to give voice to criticism of your article online. Your article has been praised and also a target of criticism. And a line of argument against what you are suggesting might run something like this that a lot of our problems in foreign policymaking since the 90s have been because we learned the wrong lessons or maybe just overlearned some lessons from the end of the Cold War. We took things to be certain and given that are in fact much more contingent. You see this in democracy promotion. I actually think this is true, that because of the way that things in Eastern Europe turned out after the fall of the Soviet Union and, you know, the widespread democratization that did in fact happen there, that we sort of assumed. that if you remove tyranny in the Middle East, the same kind of thing is just organically going to happen.

That, you know, manifestly was not the outcome. But similarly, you could extend that argument and say that the collapse, the implosion of the Soviet Union as a good and happy ending to the Cold War happen for, you know, we're happy that it happened. I think most of us. I mean, I think maybe there are some serious realists actually who are not so happy. But it was, you know, more likely a one-off than not. You can't plan policy around the set of contingent circumstances that led to that collapse. That collapse was actually dangerous in some ways as much as it actually worked out for the good. And in fact, the challenge from China, yes, Matt, your points are well taken about how the Chinese

economy is overblown. Nevertheless, it is a serious going concern that is intertwined with the United States and the allies of the United States in a way that never was the case during the Cold War. And yes, we look at the Chinese regime and we look at their, their, treatment, the CCP and their treatment of Tibet and people in Jingjing and the, you know, the Han Chinese population, their own, their own core population, they're gangster-like behavior, and we connect that to their Marxist, Leninism, and we detest it. But if we were to turn the map around and put ourselves in their shoes, they look at us as a kind of dangerous, liberal slash

slightly revolutionary country in our own right. And real statesmanship is realizing that there's truth to both ideological critiques of both sides, that at some level, we all have problems because we are in love, we are higher on our own supplies, and we are in love with our own ideologies. And real statesmanship is a couple of people getting in a room from both sides and working it out coldly and ruthlessly, according to their own conceptions of national interest. This involves deterrence. This involves a serious defense policy. It might involve the defense buildup that you call for in your article. This is not what the Biden people are doing. This is what Richard Nixon were reincarnate, something like what he would do.

And this is safer because this is actually more likely to prevent the World War III that we would all like to deter and prevent than the victory strategy you were proposing. Why is Richard Nixon reincarnate wrong about all this? Look, one of the ironies of all this is that our policy towards China after the end of the Cold War, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, actually was a triumphalist policy that assumed that all Eastern Bloc type countries, all Soviet-style communist parties would then collapse. So in fact, we went too far with the idea that the Cold War would, it'd be axiomatic that all communist systems would fall.

All we'd to do was enrich a middle class in China. And it was inevitable that they were going to go, you know, the Chinese Communist Party Party would go to the way the Soviet Communist Party. Now what we've done is we've overcorrected so far in the other direction that we're basically saying there's no scenario imaginable where the Chinese Communist Party isn't in charge forever. And in fact, they might even be number one soon. There's this sort of defeatism, this twinge of defeatism that I pick up, particularly in pockets of the Republican Party, that, hey, they're going to beat us in a lot of stuff. So we might as well just try not to provoke them and accommodate them where we can. You know, they're going to

outspend us militarily. And in fact, according to the American Enterprise Institute, they've almost matched our military spending. Oh, well, we can't compete with that anymore. Let's just let, let China kind of have its way in the world. And we're not going to draw red lines. We're going to draw them a lot closer to shore going forward. What Mike and I are arguing is for a more realistic that doesn't give into sort of drunken triumphalism on the one hand, but is also definitely not a defeatist strategy. It recognizes that actually we hold enormous leverage right now. And we should be learning some of the lessons from the Cold War that actually cut our way. You just talked, Aaron, about, you know, how intermingled our allies economies are,

even our own economy is with China. It turned out that we were, able to use that to our advantage against the Soviets eventually. When we late in the Cold War, after the Soviets had gained significant market entry into Western Europe for their energy supplies, that ended up serving as leverage against the Soviets. We turned it around against them when President Reagan persuaded the Saudis to increase oil production. The price of oil came down. it really hurt the Soviet economy and their budgets when the price of oil came down. And we were able to start threatening even their access to the West. And so basically what looks like Chinese inevitable growth actually is a growing area of vulnerability for them.

President Trump used to talk about how in a trade war, America wins because we have more ammo, as he put it. By that, he meant that for every dollar of stuff, goods and services, America sells to China, China sells us $5 of goods and services. That actually gives us the leverage. It means, especially right now where Beijing has no real domestic consumer economy to speak of, their whole strategy is to grow themselves out of the hole they're in by just selling more stuff to the United States in Europe. I mean, this is a golden opportunity for us to frustrate. see Jinping's economic plans.

I just would add to the extent that I agree with all that, obviously, to the extent that the critique you outlined, Aaron, suggests a moral equivalence, i.e., you know, we got problems, we, you know, we do provocative things, you know, who are we to criticize this, the godless genocidal commies? I would reject that equivalence. I do think, like, underlying our argument is the assumption that America is a force for good in the world and also that ours is a defensive strategy, right? We're trying to preserve the status quo in the end of Pacific and globally against the attempts of the Chinese Communist Party

to completely upend it and thereby court World War III, which would be incredibly destructive. This idea of sitting in a room and statesmen kind of carving out difficult and complex compromises we're not, we're not averse to that. I don't think we would reject that. And certainly if it were the case that the CCP wanted to get serious about cutting off the export, of fentanyl precursor production to the United States, which is killing tens of thousands of Americans. We would welcome that. But my committee, in my last week, we put out an investigation that proves definitively that the regime is indeed doing the opposite, subsidizing the death of Americans. And that's just one example where our assumptions about their willingness to

engage in honest cooperation is naive. But when we sit in that room, we want to do so from a position of strength, having rearmed and having reduced our economic and technological dependency on China. And then the third thing I would say is I certainly believe, and I don't know if Matt agrees by, I think that there is a, we don't want to underestimate the strength of the regime. In many ways, they are marching forward and trying to sort of perfect what the Soviets could not and using technology to sort of perfect techno-tototelitarianism. But I do think there's something inherently brittle about these regimes. And I wonder if, I don't know, I wonder if the white paper protests illustrated that in a way in China. But I'll pause there and let Matt correct my analysis.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that not only they brittle, but a lot of the strongest criticism in China right now of Xi Jinping is coming from within the Chinese Communist Party. I'm not suggesting that there is an organization, that there's even the ability to easily organize against Xi. But the fact that you hear, as many of my Chinese friends do, bitter criticism from within the party of Xi Jinping, particularly given the fact that they've had to slash salaries for government officials, that they've gotten rid of their bonus system. By the way, I have to give the Chinese Communist Party some credit under Zhang Zemin, you know, two leaders ago. They implemented a bonus system for government bureaucrats. So I wish we did that in the United States. Like you could actually

get a performance bonus and you weren't just locked into these pay grades and so forth. But Xi Jinping has effectively undermined that system just because they don't have budgets to really pay local government workers because of the economic troubles they're having. Also, people are annoyed in China because they have to study Xi Jinping. thought. That's the new state ideology, Xi Jinping thought on, you know, socialism in the new era and so forth. This is mind-numbing stuff. It is really painful reading. And so Chinese government officials used to chair, they would do a cheat sheet where you

would fill in answers based on what someone posted on a, you know, on a web bulletin, bulletin board. Now they have to read the stuff on an app that tracks their eyes to make sure that they're doing the reading themselves. They have to actually go through, commit the time, facial recognition, provide answers, get quizzed. It's an enormous time suck and people resent it. One thing I want to mention, Aaron, is that as Mike and I fielded a lot of responses to our piece, some of the most violent agreement we've received have been from Democrats.

I've briefed members on the Hill who are Democrats who actually agree with the general thrust of our argument. And some of the most bitter criticism has come from Republicans. And we've gotten strong criticism from Democrats and strong support from other Republicans. My point is these arguments don't cut vertically along party lines. They cut right across the center of it, which which tells us that we're getting at something that is much deeper than just sort of any kind of a partisan argument. This is really about fighting for the soul of what American foreign policy is going to look like from both parties going forward. Well, I regret to note that we're coming towards the end of our time here.

And there's so much more to discuss. Your article also, I mean, it lays out the sketch of a grand strategy for the U.S. Victory-oriented competition with China. Folks read the article. You have this formula, rearm, reduce, and recruit. But I do want to... Like Captain Planet, admittedly. Recycle reduced reuse.

I was humming that in my basement, and I pitched it to Matt. And we couldn't think of anything better. It's memorable. It's memorable. I'm trademarking the Pottinger paradox that Mike just mentioned. That's right. The more you reassure a Leninist dictatorship, the more comfortable you make it feel that you mean it no harm, the more aggressive it will become.

Well, Matt also had this image of for years we treated the CCP like a baby dolphin. And we kept feeding it and feeding it. And it turned into a great white shark. I then used this as the framing mechanism for a speech I gave in Australia. And in the 15-hour flight over there, I started researching what can beat a great white shark. And it turns out orcas can, like, beat great white sharks. And I really went deep on like the nature of orcas. They're fascinating.

They have their own language. And they hunt in teams, which is why they're superior. And so I did a whole speech in Australia based on that and the joke that Orcas sounds like Ocas if you do it in an Australian accent. So these are the things I did productively. Speaking of statesmanship, this is where my mind goes. This is the X factor. This is the Geneseecois that completes the total statesman.

Yeah. I know that has to go. One criticism we've gotten from the right is that, well, given rising debt costs, we can't afford to spend more in the military. and there's no support for it. Well, you know, we just passed a big defense supplemental in Congress which suggests there is support for it. There's polling and data to suggest the American people support modernizing and equipping the military. But I would also say we do believe we need to make difficult choices between guns and butter. And the fact that both parties seem to have abandoned

the idea that we need to reform entitlements, I think is a tragedy. Like I do think eventually we're going to have to reckon with that. The true drivers of our debt are not defense spending. It's health care, it's retirement costs, it's Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And so I am emphatically for sensible reforms to those so that we don't go down the path of the debtor nation. We've crossed what Neil Ferguson calls Ferguson's law, where we're spending more to service the interest on our debt than we're spending on our military. We agree that that's a problem.

We just don't think the military should be the bill payer for that. I'm going to take the privilege of our last 30 seconds here to say something that needs to be said. You both have made tremendous contributions to American security, and I believe are doing so right now, and we'll continue to do so in ways that will probably be even more dramatic. But with a little bit of recency bias, I want to give some special praise to Mike here, who through your chairmanship of the select committee, Mike, you not only drew attention to some important dimensions of the competition that I think have driven the debate in positive ways, you advance the American interest and materially harmed the CCP. interest in a few ways, the most spectacular of which was the TikTok ban talk sale legislation that was just signed by the president a few days ago. This was your enterprise, your, your baby. It is, I feel so unused to the U.S. Congress tackling a complex, an important issue and getting it

right, not only getting it right by getting it right by lopsided margins and something that was inherently going to be controversial. And I think, I think every American should be grateful to you. I mean, it was a truly fantastic way to put an exclamation mark on the end of your time in Congress. You're here. Huge impact. Very, very kind of you. I had a lot of help from a lot of different people. And I appreciate that, but I do still think my, my august, august joke remained practically underappreciated and really didn't land in the room in Canberra.

So I leave with a big sense of regret. Mike Gallagher, Matt Pottinger, a brief but important conversation. Thank you so much for the time. Thanks for having us. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.