School of War - Ep 134: Michael Sobolik on China’s Geostrategy

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Michael Sobolik, author of Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance and Senior Fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, joins the show to talk about China. ▪️ Times      •      01:38 Introduction      •      04:29 Belt and Road     •      07:54 The Beginning      •      13:12 Chinese imperialism     •      20:50 Mackinder’s math     •      25:19 Nazi geostrategic thinking     •      28:21 Spykman and BRI     •      31:42 Imperialism is not a relic     •      35:43 Countering China     •      40:40 Tracing BRI back to Beijing      •      46:55 Keeping Taiwan safe Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

In a world of cyberspace and information warfare and artificial intelligence and all the other new phenomena that students of warfare have to contend with today, some old-fashioned insights can get lost in the noise. Insights, for example, that come when you just take a good, hard look at a map and ask yourself, what choices and restrictions does it impose on your adversary? Maybe ask yourself how your enemy's actions in space tip his hand about ultimate objectives. Let's do that exercise today with regard to China. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Michael Sobolik.

He is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. In Indo-Pacific Studies, he has served in the Senate as a senior aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. He is an author on foreign and defense issues, an analyst, and he is most recently the author of Countering China's Great Game. Michael, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me on. And this is, I guess I should disclose, this is our second effort to record this conversation. We did a great public event a few months ago on your book, and we intended to record it for this podcast, which we've done for the show, something like this a couple times. We did a live event with Ever Lookback Last year that worked that well. And after the fact we realized that it had not taken and I blame, we were wearing, we were laughing at it at the time considering the subject matter, we were wearing these DGI, you know, Bluetooth microphones.

And clearly the Chinese Communist Party intervened. Classic sabotage. Exactly. They knew. They knew that you are a secret weapon and they intervened to make sure that it didn't work the first time. So once more and with feeling, we are going to talk about your excellent book. And I will say now what I said in front of that audience, which is it really is excellent. I really do recommend it to readers, in particular readers who are looking for a single volume

that gives, you know, a elegant and readable. That is to say it's not the longest book in the world, but nevertheless, somewhat comprehensive overview of the Chinese grand strategic tradition and its sources. It reminded me most of all, if there's any book, it's sort of in direct competition with, And I think, frankly, in favorable direct competition with, it's Kissinger's on China, written from the point of view now of 2024 and what we know now and from your own, we'll just say slightly more hawkish perspective. So well done to you in the book.

Gosh, that means a lot. And I remember hearing you say that during our public conversation and thinking that, man, if that's what someone's taking away from this book, then the mark was hit because Because in chapter two, which I suspect you and I may get into in a minute here, but chapter two begins with basically a full take on of Kissinger's on China and his broader perspective of our relationship with Beijing. But no, that's very generous of you and that means a lot. Well, let's get into the substance of things here.

One of the things that's striking about your book is the amount of emphasis you place on understanding the Belt and Road initiative or what used to be known as one one belt, one road. And by the way, you attribute some significance to the evolution of the latter to the former in the translation. And you should speak to that. This, you know, there's a way of when you notice that one might have the kind of superficial reaction of isn't this sort of old news?

I feel like we were all talking about this 10 years ago. It turns out, you know, a lot of these investments haven't shaken out. It's just not in the headlines, really, in the way that it definitely was closer to its rollout. Why do you assign it such central significance in your effort to understand Chinese strategy? If you listen to the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom about China's foreign policy broadly and the Belt and Road specifically, you come away with this picture that Xi Jinping has really just committed one own goal after another. The conventional wisdom of the Belt and Road is that it's a has been, if anything, it's turned into a strategic albatross for the Chinese Communist Party. There are a lot of these huge infrastructure projects. They got partially funded, never really got off the ground.

Some critical corridors like China, Pakistan, economic corridor are still mired in uncertainty. And you've had some nations that have had real, like, debt issues because of these projects, Sri Lanka being the poster child of that. And I think that the DC chattering class on China policy came to a pretty quick conclusion, which is the Belt and Road could have been a problem for the West if it had worked economically. It hasn't. And now it's Xi Jinping's problem to deal with.

And they're right to a point in that, of course, the Belt and Road has had issues. It's not an unmitigated success economically. but it is a huge success strategically. And writing this book, I really came to the conclusion that we are on the verge of making the exact same mistake globally with the CCP that we made locally with them in the South China Sea. These fake militarized islands in the South China Sea began as these really simple land reclamation activities where one artificial atoll after another popped up. And America, frankly, waited too long to realize what the true game was. It wasn't building fake islands just to play, you know, checkers on a map. They were trying to change the military footprint of the people's liberation army in the South China Sea.

And when we woke up to it, it was too late to change. The Belt and Road Initiative, similarly, is in large part Xi Jinping's global effort to expand the People's Liberation Army. in terms of actual physical deployments. It is not primarily an economic venture. It's not primarily a commercial venture. It's a geopolitical one and very closely related to that, a military one. And if you read the actual publications of the PLA, you see this very clearly. So that was a huge motive for me to write this book because I think we have really prematurely

written off the grand strategy of our greatest competitor. So we'll come back to this because I want to get into what, you know, what specific specifically is geopolitical about BRI and what that means. So we'll come back to that in a minute, but I want to take you up on your, your, your observation that there are parts of your book that more or less directly respond to Kissinger. So you, you spend a fair amount of time getting into Chinese imperial history and how that affects, again, for lack of a better phrase, sort of contemporary grand strategic

culture in China. How does it, how does it affect contemporary strategic culture? in China, that imperial legacy. And, you know, what, what are the distinctions between your view and those of those of the great man? So I think a lot of, not just China analysts, but a lot of elected officials in Washington start their understanding of China with the assumption that history began in 1949, right after America emerged victorious from World War II. And right after Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War and established the People's Republic of China. Every now and then, you will have some really serious, generally hawkish members of Congress

who will rewind that timeline a little bit, and they'll realize that a lot of the grievances that the CCP has today stem not only in the PRC's history, but from the century of humiliation, as the Chinese call it, in the 19th century when European powers carved up China, colonized different parts of it. But there really isn't this understanding that China as an entity and a civilization is so much more than the PRC, the People's Republic of China. It's even more than the Chinese Communist Party, which is a challenge, again, I think, to the conventional wisdom, because rightly so, we look at the CCP as an ideological threat. And they are. but they also are the inheritor of a strategic culture, just like the Biden administration and the Trump administration and any presidential administration is an inheritor of American strategic culture.

We have our own story, our own origin story, our own political identity that has certainly changed over time. But there is a deep abiding nature within nations in which they tell themselves a story about their role in the world they live in. And China has its own story like that, except unlike America where it's, you know, 300 years or less, China's story is measured in millennia. And if you take account for the broad sweep of China's dynastic era from, say, 21 BC to 1912 AD, just a long period of time. And if you study the flow of China's foreign policy from dynasty to dynasty, you see a number of trends that are still really pertinent today.

One of them is that from the first dynasty to the final dynasty, China expanded by a factor of four in terms of territory, territorial acquisition. And to me, returning to Kissinger, his analysis of China is one that I find difficult to square with the actual historical record because he characterizes China as this empire that only expanded defensively, was never really looking to acquire more territory in an imperial sort of way.

If you look at the Han, Sui, Tang, Ming dynasties, like forget the like the Manchus and the Mongols for a moment, the actual Han Chinese dynasties. This, this is a civilization that has always seen itself as the middle kingdom and its foreign policy demonstrated it, not just in like a. colonial tribute system kind of way, although that's a huge part of it, but trying to spill blood to expand its borders over and over again. And today, the Belt and Road initiative, I think, is a really good analog for that ancient tribute system, which is demanding political allegiance, willingly, ideally, but if unwillingly, at the barrel of a gun. That's really interesting.

You know, I have it on the authority of no less, well, I probably shouldn't say the name here. I was in a meeting in Saudi Arabia. I think I can say that much with a senior Saudi official a couple of years ago. And we were talking a lot about Iranian imperialism. And this official was very good, frankly, on the subject, very clear-eyed. His views courted with mine and those of folks like us in Washington. And then I probably, with the idea of making a little bit of trouble in mind, raised the question of Chinese imperialism and suggested that, you know,

if the Saudis see themselves as a quote unquote realist power in the face of quote unquote, you know, revolutionary expansionist powers that China ought to be of concern to them as well. And he immediately responded with a speech that could have been delivered by a CCP apparatchik. And he was doing it, I think, to mess with me as much as I was originally trying to mess with him to the effect of there's no such thing as Chinese imperialism. There's French imperialism. There's British imperialism. Those are long, well-documented traditions, but there's no such thing as Chinese imperialism. And I was struck by the, not just the obnoxiousness of the claim, but the sort of the boldness of it. And I responded, you know,

I think the people of Tibet, not to mention the Muslims of Northwest China would beg to differ. And you didn't really have an answer to that. And the conversation kind of moved on. But it is striking how well ingrained this notion that China is kind of a natural status quo power has become in Western or I guess in my story, Middle Eastern conversation. I think too, if you go back to the transcripts of Nixon and Mao's conversation with Nixon and Kissinger's conversations with Mao and Joe and Lai in 1972, you saw Mao planning these seeds.

And I include this snippet of their conversation in countering China's great game, where Nixon is basically being incredibly. deferential to Mao and says, listen, we really understand that China poses no threat to the United States. And then, like, Mao corrects him and says, or any other country. And from the very beginning, the officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party have engaged in this disinformation campaign targeting not only American politicians, but frankly, it's, it is a global effort for them to win the narrative war about who China is and what the Chinese Communist Party is. And I think it's really easy for officials in Saudi Arabia to be pretty blasé about Chinese imperialism,

because let's face it, the Tang Dynasty never really reached what is now today's Saudi Arabia. But, you know, where they did reach, they went as far as Persia, as far as India. And the Vietnamese certainly know a thing or two about Chinese imperialism. Like the sway dynasty alone attacked Korea four times in a very short span of time. And it is really an impressive feat of disinformation that, to your point, China is broadly perceived as a status quo power. So I want to get into this question of geopolitics and as it were, methods of primacy, methods of hegemony, however you want to talk about it. because there are obviously today in 2024 aspects of Chinese policy that are that are just expansionary period.

The South China Sea border disputes with India. I mean, these are just simply questions of territorial expansion. And it's about to say land grabs, I guess in the case of South China Sea is more sea grabs. Sea and land production grabs. But then you have, I think, this equally interesting and perhaps depending on how you want to analyze it, more significant scheme to exercise some sort of control. Maybe I don't know if control is the right word. I defer to you.

I'm interested to hear how you explain it over Eurasian affairs. And BRI is somehow central to that. So how does Michael Soblike, how do geopolitics work? Like walk us through it. Like what, how does this whole thing work here? So for a crash course on geopolitics, at the risk of. stating what is overly simple, start with a map always because geopolitics, it's literally in the term itself, geo. If you try to understand geopolitics without taking account for not just topographical

terrain, but the actual world map itself, you're always going to be lost. But I've been struck at how much you learn about national interests from understanding geography. And for, for me right now, Aaron, in this conversation, I have a world map that I'm staring at. And it is, I think, really interesting that one of the godfathers of geopolitics, a British historian and cartographer, Alfred MacGender, he had this big theory that has been written about extensively in national security literature. And he has, I think, the world island theory of Eurasia. And his thesis was simple. He who controls Eastern Europe controls the heartland. He who controls the heartland, controls the world island, and whoever has the

world island of Eurasia controls the world. Context is also important in geopolitics. He wrote that in 1919, right after the conclusion of World War I and not that long before the start of World War II, the concern for British strategists in 1990 was the same of Winston Churchill post-World War II, which was the intersection of West and East really meet in the middle of Eastern Europe, not just civilizationally, but politically. And if you want proof of that today, look no further than the war in Ukraine.

I think it is a really telling example of how McKinder has some really, like, abiding observations through history. But I get the deeper truth behind that is nations are, or nations perhaps say like Putin or Xi for a variety of reasons are looking for opportunities to secure their own interests, which if you have an authoritarian regime, there is always this deep impulse to expand, to almost make up for your domestic deficiencies with territorial

acquisitions abroad. And that's a key dynamic that I get into for China in Chapter 5 in particular. And the whole gambit for containment during the Cold War was if you can prevent an authoritarian regime from realizing that expansion, they won't be able to outmaneuver or outpace those internal contradictions, which I think is the crux of and maybe perhaps the missing piece of what's happening right now in our China policy. geopolitics matters a lot because China is not just going down the road of territorial acquisition because the CCP is an evil regime, although I think it is. They cannot help but do so. Take Xinjiang, for example. You mentioned Western China a few minutes ago, Aaron.

China has spilled blood in that territory for years. And it's not just because there's bad blood between Han Chinese and Uyghur Muslims. they need Xinjiang for the Belt and Road Initiative to work properly. Xinjiang has always been China's gateway to the rest of the Eurasian landmass. Without control of Xinjiang, the trade routes will not function properly. So what you have in this long-standing colonial project of Xinjiang is not just the domination of Uyghurs, Wei's, Kazakhs, and other ethno-religious groups, it is China's gateway and highway into the rest of Eurasia.

And no, they're not looking to conquer Central Asia by no means, but they are looking to exert political and economic dominance there. And if you're looking for trip wires or for asymmetric points of advantage in geopolitics, you identify those kind of locations. You look for what are the areas of the map that matter asymmetrically, that matter more to my adversary than they matter to me. And Xinjiang is one such territory. For Russia, it's certainly Eastern Europe.

But getting that basic calculation in geopolitics is crucial because you learn a lot about your competitors and your adversary's strategy in the process. Can you just answer kind of a really straightforward, dumb question just to make what's implicit here explicit? Why does he who control the world island control the world? What is it that McKinder is thinking about from the perspective of British strategy in 1919 that concerns him? You know, so, so what if the Kaiser had, in fact, defeated the Russian Empire in a way that it stuck in seas? You know, like, so what? Like, what's what's the upshot? If you look at Eurasia, as I'm doing right now, you have not only Russia to the east of that critical node that McKinder mentions, to the west of it, you have Berlin, which in 1919 and 1945.

was the epicenter of much instability in the world. Very closely linked to Berlin, you have the British Isles, which again for McKinder, not only is he British, but the British Empire was the primary stabilizer status quo power of the 20th century before the World Wars. Gaining a decisive advantage in the heartland of Europe would give any power, whether a Western power or an Eastern power, a decisive advantage to then springboard forward either with influence or with dominance or both.

Part of it is even geographic. If you think into the World War, I'm sorry, into the Cold War, there were particular lines of Soviet mobilization of their armies that the allied powers were defending against primarily, and they were buttressed up against entry points from Eastern Europe. This is where, again, talking about where the West and the East meet, no better example than Turkey, which is simultaneously a NATO ally and is also trying to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, like the really interesting parts of the world meet here. And Eurasia as a broad landmass to your question of why does it matter if anyone dominates Eurasia? From a global population perspective, India and China are the two most populous nations in the whole world by far. If you look at the gross domestic product of the entire Eurasian landmass, it is no surprise for anyone to learn that it outpaces and outmatches the United States. It is quite simply at the risk of being really, really basic.

It is the biggest space of land on the globe in our world today. If you dominate that or at least a significant portion of it, you are in a decisively favorable. position and you have an advantageous one that allows you to really move without any exposed flanks, which is the concern for Nazi Germany. There's a reason that we tried to stop Hitler when we did because he was on the verge. If he beat Soviets, he would have been in that position. And American strategist knew that. Well, and indeed, that was his goal, right?

I mean, that is to say he, Hitler, if I'm not mistaken, is literally tutored in prison in Bavaria following the beer hall push by a man named Carl Haushofer, who is a student at a remove, not a personal student, but who has studied McKinder and has written his own geopolitical treatises in German, inflected now beyond the sort of cold, sort of smaller realism that McKinder brought to analysis with, you know, sort of obviously proto-Nazi or at some point just just Nazi visions of of ethnic superiority and racial domination, everything else, becomes a really toxic stew. But an ingredient in that stew is McKinder's original analysis, which is, in your opinion,

my opinion, too, basically sound, or at least a sound foundation to start thinking. I mean, there are, I think, important amendments get made to it as, you know, Spikeman comes into the conversation and others. But it's a sound foundation to start thinking about power, you know, on the planet Earth. and Hitler, you know, sort of very self-consciously geopolitical. This is, in fact, this is why the word geopolitics becomes kind of toxic for a while in the 20th centuries. It's associated with the Nazis. The Nazis are using geopolitical analysis as a kind of game plan.

And if you think about how Nazi military strategy works in Barbarossa, you know, ultimately the idea, right, is that the Japanese Empire and the Nazi Empire are going to meet somewhere around India. You know, and then sort of like dot, dot, dot, dot. Well, I have to see what happens after that. But they, you know, and it's amazing is if you look at the world in the summer of 1942, pretty dark time for humanity, it's not a foregone conclusion that they weren't going to make it. That observation about India is a really interesting one. The, you really cannot understand Britain's colonial or imperial dominance apart from its possession of India. because it not only provided a springboard into the subcontinent.

And like in some sense, you know, India is the essence of the subcontinent, to be sure. But it also provided the justification for subsequent colonies linking the British Isles to India. Like it was not only the crown jewel for what it was in the subcontinent, it provided the demand for more colonies. And from the Suez Canal and Egypt, all the way through the Middle East, up to Britain, it was truly the essence of the crown. And for Nazi Germany and for Japan to have this mind's eye vision of meeting in India says something about why so many people are talking about India today and why India is always being courted by. not only the Americans, but certainly by the Russians. Their relationship with Iran is highly complex, more complex than many people in Washington would prefer it would be. But this is interesting because I didn't really get into India extensively in the book. But I think there's a great, I think

there's a great piece to be written that you, an open question of can you actually counter China's great game without India? Or to what extent can you? Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting about BRI is the way in which it perfectly maps on to McKinder, as though they themselves have been careful students, as were the Nazis. And not just to McKinder, but also to the later authors who come along and provide, I think, important revisions to McKinder. So, of course, famously, Nicholas Spikeman comes along about 20 years later and says, the heartland's all well and good, but actually it's the littorals, right? It's the Eurasian littoral that is important, not just because it helps you, you know, keep an eye on slash keep the heartland

divided, but they are themselves the economic center of gravity. The littorals matter. And so the, the one road is quite literally an effort to build connecting infrastructure, knitting together the heartland, the McKinder heartland, with with some sort of Chinese primacy as the, you know, both the agent and result somehow at the same time of these projects. And then the one belt is Spikeman and the maritime space, the littoral. So it's hard to imagine that this is accidental. And it's also hard to imagine that this is all just like a way of investing excess capital for a decent return. Yes.

And I think for people who want a data point for that, look at where Xi Jinping announced the belt and road, the belt component. He announced the terrestrial component of the Belton Road in Kazakhstan. I think it was in, if I recall correctly, September of 2013. He goes to Astana University. And the language he uses to talk about the Belton Road goes all the way back to the Han Dynasty, where this really famous CCP would call him a good faith explorer and, ambassador of Chinese civilization and goodwill. He famously trekked over the mountains, made it into Central Asia, was an emissary of China.

But the rest of the story is the hordes of the emperor were not far behind him. And not that many years after his visit to Central Asia, China was setting up colonies there. And later that year in the fall, Xi Jinping then goes to Indonesia to roll out the maritime component of the Belt and Roe. And he talks about the Ming Dynasty. And the naval friendly visits, quote unquote, of Chinese admirals who were there on, you know, goodwill missions, as he would put it. But if you're in Indonesian and you remember the voyages of Zhang He, the famed admiral, then you know that he was not just waving and saying hello as he was sailing by.

He was enforcing the tribute system. And he was enforcing China's political and civilizational superiority at gunpoint and with violence. Like it is not difficult to find the actual account of Zheng He's voyages. And I think this is an interesting component, too, of how China and the CCP in particular came to this vision of the Belt and Road. Part of it is undeniably being astute students of geopolitics and understanding how Western minds and Western powers have been wrestling with these similar questions. I think another element too is this has been their story for millennia. If you overlay a map of Zheng He's voyages on top of the maritime component of the Belt and Road, it is eerie. It is striking.

They have been trying by land and by sea to do what McKinder, Spikeman, and others have been theorizing about relatively recently. They've been doing this ever since 21 BC. And it is a story that I am just really shocked is not really more deeply understood or appreciated in the policy circles of D.C. Where do you rate the communist part of C.S. You know, contemporary Chinese, Chinese strategic thinking. You know, it's there, right? There is a, there is a revolutionary tradition in China, literally the Chinese Communist Party. But you seem in your own analysis to weight the imperial legacy more.

Comment on this. Like, help us understand what, if anything, is actually communist about the strategic vision and how you think about it in comparison to the imperial tradition. I think that America has a history, a relatively recent history of being way too dismissive of how regimes talk about themselves and of how foreign dictators in particular talk about their own interests and their own ideology. I think the best defense of why the Chinese Communist Party and why Xi Jinping is in his own way a true believer came from a book by, I think a friend of our

is called Ian Easton. And he wrote what I think is a fantastic and really disturbing book called The Final Struggle. It's not that old. It came out within the past few years. Yeah, he came on the show and discussed it, I think, when it came. I agree. It's a fine book.

It is. And he, I think, makes a very compelling argument that Xi Jinping thought is not this idle curiosity of party members in China that are just trying to check the box so they don't get dinged on their social credit score. Like, Xi Jinping thought is actually a thing. And the commitment to Marxist Leninism with Chinese characteristics is real. It is real. And I think we'd be fools to think otherwise.

The reason I focus on geopolitics in countering China's great game is not to say that the ideological component of the CCP is irrelevant or is overstated. I came to notice and be really convinced that geopolitics also matters and was getting the short end of the stick when it comes to China analysis. And if I left anyone who reads the book with the impression that I was depressing ideology, I think that certainly wasn't because I think it's unimportant, perhaps overcorrection. But I really do think that the 21st century thus far has been this rude, awakening to the reality that imperialism is not a relic. It is very much real. I think back often, often to what then Secretary of State John Kerry said when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, he said, responsible nations do not behave this way. And if you even look at how President

Biden has talked about China, for years, he has talked about making China, a modern country. And if you read his remarks as a senator very closely, he's not being evasive at all. He's talking about China leaving its imperial past and becoming a modern power, a. A.k.a. a liberal, democratic one. And we tend to have this conceit in America that imperialism is this thing of the past. And that was a huge dragon that I set out to slay with countering China's great game.

Like McKinder. McKinder is writing in a period where what was one of the best-selling British books right before the First World War, Norman Angels the Great Illusion. Gosh. That's how no one's going to know. War is irrational. War is irrational. It's funny. These things never, these arguments never really go away.

Even if one side is consistently right and the other side is consistently wrong. So the book promises not just an analysis of the great game, but some thoughts on countering it. How should we counter it? You are, you're a skeptic of, as it were, just competing in terms of foreign direct investment in a straight head-to-head way, which, you know, has been a regular topic of conversation. It was a major topic of conversation, certainly during the Trump administration, that, you know, the Chinese are all over the place. They're throwing all this money around. What America needs to do is get out there and kind of throw some money around too, to, you know, buy some of the influence that they haven't yet snapped up. What's wrong with that?

Let's start with your critique of that and then move on to measures you think. Or whether specific measures are what I'm really interested in. You're very good at explaining as sort of the way of thinking about competition. Sure. So there is not only nothing wrong per se with trying to offer an alternative to the Belton Road initiative. It is essential. And if for no other reason, then Washington will get laughed out of every single room its diplomats enter. when we shake our finger and say, don't take that Huawei telecom infrastructure or don't partner

with Wushi AppTech on biomedical research or AI, big data advancements for medicine, or, you know, take your pick, pick your industry. We need to have a credible alternative or at least try to have one. The reason, though, that we keep on having the same conversation over and over again is because the CCP has identified a huge advantage that they've exploited pretty adeptly, which is, number one, they can subsidize their own national champions in a way that we can't, which means they make R&D advancements in some cases quicker than their Western competitors do, not in all, but in some cases.

Number two, for foreign aid, they do not have democracy, good governance, and anti-corruption benchmarks that they have to meet unlike America, which again, I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but I am saying it's a limiting thing. And they were able to corner the market on 5G telecommunications years ago. And it was only because of some really deft diplomacy by the Trump administration that we forestalled a really bad outcome there. But my concern, like, the more I looked at how Washington's China policy was changing, like, yes, Washington politicians were freaking out about Huawei, rightly. More recently, the freak out has been about TikTok. Again, rightly. And you and I have had a lot of conversations

about TikTok. That said, though, preventing TikTok's malign influence inside of America is a defensive play. That's protecting our own homeland from the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party. Blunting Huawei's market dominance is not an offensive play. That is blunting China's efforts not only to control the next generation of telecom communication, but to blot their own intelligence gathering capabilities. That's well and good and we need to keep doing that. What's lacking in that strategic vision, though, is trying to create problems for the CCP

that stem from their weaknesses. What we have done, I think, so poorly as a nation over the past few years in regards to our China policy, we have not been asking, where is the CCP weak and brittle as a regime and where is the United States strong and how do we move the competition to that terrain? As it stands right now, Washington is stuck in this cycle of if you're on a PC control Z, if you're on an Apple, Command Z, but we're trying to edit, undo our way out of three and a half

to four decades of unmitigated economic engagement with our greatest adversary. And it's a game of whack-a-mole. We will never fully catch up. We will solve some problems only to realize that these problems pop up again. I know this because I worked on the Confucius Institute problem set in the Senate. And my old boss, Senator Cruz, passed legislation through the NDAA that resulted in a huge slew of Confucius Institute's closing, only then a few years later to find that they discovered a way to reopen. And it was really simple. All they had to do was change their name. And they evaded the legislation as long as they weren't technically called a Confucius Institute. So this is the problem with Homeland Defense.

There's almost an offense dominant role in great power competition. And that might be overstating it a little. But I do think that there's this fundamental reality that if you're going to win a Cold War, you don't get a gold star for taking care of your own homeland. You win Cold Wars by going on the offensive and identifying the weak nodes of your adversary. And we have not done that with China yet. This has a very Andy Marshall net assessment flavor to it, that you want to pick competitions, you know, just as you described, that are going to be important to the other guy and that you have an advantage regarding. And avoid the competitions with the opposite is true, or at least do your best to mitigate loss.

So give us your best example. Like what's what's your what's your best proposal for such a competition that we should invest heavily in that illustrates the principle that you just laid out? Let's let's talk about two. And counterintuitively, they are not directly about the Belt and Road initiative, but they're linked to it. The best way to take on China's foreign policy into hamstring the Belt and Road from becoming a global military project is actually not. to go after the BRI directly. The best thing we could do is to trace the roots of the BRI back to China. When you are dealing with the regime like the Chinese Communist Party, one of your starting

point net assessments of the CCP, I think needs to be that this is a brittle, fundamentally insecure political entity. And this is the reality, to be sure, for any authoritarian regime. but if you look at the CCP, you can find an abundance of evidence to suggest that they are not perhaps confident in their ability to sleep through the night without looking over their shoulder. Not just Xi Jinping, but the party as a whole. Look no further, I would say, than their vast infrastructure for censorship and surveillance, which is the first target that I'll mention.

The digital Belt and Road, the digital Silk Road, which is basically censorship ship capabilities in a box that they can ship to the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere, that was honed and perfected in China first, not only on minority populations like Uighurs, but on Han Chinese themselves. And if you are a regime that feels the need to not only censor specific, like sensitive topics like Tiananmen Square or what have you, but if you actually need to have total control over broad discourse about the Chinese Communist Party, you're not confident or safe or secure in who you are.

And a good example of that is COVID. They were more concerned, the party specifically, the party was more concerned about stopping information about the virus than they were about stopping the virus itself. And then Americans died. So if we're looking for an area where we're strong and they're weak, free speech in America is one of the best things about America, one of the best things about the Constitution. The CCP has no analog to that. If we want to start not only making life difficult for the party, but putting on public display the conceit that is at the heart of the CCP's hold on power and make them a global example, make it more expensive and more difficult for the party to control information inside of China, inside of their own borders.

I asked Matt Pottinger, who was the former deputy national security advisor, one of the best strategic minds on China policy in the world today. I had him on my podcast and asked him, when you were serving President Trump, do the U.S. government do anything like this? Were we trying to complicate China's censorship capabilities at all? And he said publicly, no, we were not doing a single thing because we were self- deterring ourselves from even attempting to. So that's one key way. Briefly, I'll talk about a second way. We mentioned Xinjiang previously, and this is where geopolitics can lead you into really interesting competitive strategies.

If the party needs Shenjiang to be a gateway or a commercial hub for the Belt and Road to function, are there ways that we can make it more difficult for them to meet that goal? Not all, but a good bit of the Belt and Road common. that flows through Xinjiang is either, it's either denominated in U.S. dollar, or even if it's not, either party on either side of that transaction is going to want to access the global financial system, which is decidedly U.S. dollar denominated. And I think that the United States has an opportunity to leverage our currency in a very similar way that we did after 9-11.

We realized that it wasn't enough to just go after Al-Qaeda. we needed to go after the financial networks that enabled al-Qaeda to commit acts of terror. And we said to U.S. banks, you have an obligation to know who your customers are. And you are forbidden to open a correspondent account for anyone that is implicated in acts of terrorism or planning or facilitating acts of terrorism. I think, and I've been saying this since 2020 and publishing on this since 2020, and it's a big part of the book, we need to run a similar play with the U.S. dollar in regards to China today and say to those same U.S. banks, you under no circumstances are permitted to service accounts for anyone that is profiting from commerce in a region of genocide. And that is what Xinjiang is.

The Belt and Roan cannot function properly without the Uyghur genocide. That's not a sign of strategic strength. If you need to commit atrocities for your pet foreign. policy project to function, that is weakness. And I think we need to find ways to make the CCP pay for that. Let me have a last question for you. Respond to the following criticism of what you just laid out specifically, but sort of your project more broadly, that we need to deter a war with China and the Western Pacific. That is largely a question of hard power, of military deterrence. I agree with that, by the way, as to you. But that, the, the, the, the

criticism would run. And that's what we need to do. And a lot of what you, Michael Sobolick, are prescribing is focused on one way or the other pressuring CCP control of China, if not directly in every case indirectly. That is potentially escalatory and overshoots what we need to accomplish. What we need to accomplish is essentially keeping the Chinese off the beaches of Taiwan. And if, you know, within the limits we are comfortable with, there is a kind of Chinese sphere of influence, well, you know, ultimately what we want is to avoid war. And that's okay. That's okay. What's wrong with that critique? I think the best way to keep the beaches of Taiwan safe is to create problems for the party inside of China, which for some will sound like a cavalier approach

to foreign policy. I do think that there's a paradox at the heart of how we deal with these regimes. And I think, Aaron, as you know well, this debate in Washington has been raging over the summer. And Matt, Pottinger and former representative Mike Gallagher have been publishing together on this exact argument and this exact critique that you are bringing up. And I think it actually might have been on your podcast that I was listening to the two of them talk about this with you. And the former representative, Mike Gallagher, talked about what he kind of in a funny way he calls the Pottinger paradox, which is the more conciliatory you are to these regimes, the more of a free hand you are giving them. And oddly enough, yesterday, just for an entirely

separate project, I was reading through Paul Johnson's modern times. And the dissolution, the fallout of World War II in this odd period where before Americans actually realized the Soviets were the next big thing that we had to wrestle with, I am just now beginning to learn how naive FDR was in regards to Stalin. And a lot of the really irresponsible steps that he took to telegraph incredible deference to Stalin in the wake of the Allies victory in World War II. And it was only by deft diplomacy by Winston Churchill that the Mediterranean and Greece in particular remained outside of the Soviet sphere of influence. And I, it's a little, well, unless to me, it was a little known interesting facet of post-World War II history, but I think it's a really instructive

episode. These types of regimes and these types of strongmen respond to clear. clear articulation of deterrence and clear symbols of strength in a positive way, I think. I think the worst thing we could do is to telegraph, not just weakness, because that's kind of a bumper sticker way to talk about it. If we telegraph that we are willing to give room for imperial ambition, then imperial ambition will expand. I think that is at the heart of this. And if we want to keep Taiwan safe and if we want to keep out of a hot war, letting our competitors know that we know where they are weak, that we have their number and we're not afraid to leverage that, that is a highly stabilizing step to take. I think it would bend toward keeping them in their place, which is a good thing. Michael Sobolik, author of Countering China's Great Game.

You're also, you mentioned as we talked, you were also a podcast host. I'm sorry that I failed to mention that it's obviously the most important thing that you or anyone can do is host a podcast. Like any self-respecting millennial, I have my own podcast. Exactly, exactly. This was a really, really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me, Aaron.

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