The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Elbridge Colby on China’s Next Move Regarding Taiwan and America’s Role

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Already rocked by the war in Ukraine, the world uneasily looks towards Asia and the Chinese Communist Party. The authoritarian state has cast its gaze towards the small island of Taiwan, and dreams of conquest. America will inevitably be drawn into a potential conflict between China and Taiwan, but author and defense expert Elbridge Colby says we are woefully unprepared.  “We're not doing what we need to do,” Colby says. “We spend a lot of money on defense, honestly, but we have not focused enough on dealing with China and adapting our force to deal with that specifically. I think we're just asking for trouble.” To Colby, an ascendent China is the biggest geopolitical threat currently facing the globe. And America needs to step up to deal with that threat.  He says, “American interests in the world are Americans' physical security, our freedom and our prosperity. What is the chief danger of that? Well, by far it's China, and it's China dominating Asia in particular.” Colby joins the show to discuss what makes China so dangerous, and what steps America must take to neutralize the threat. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey there, Dairy Signal listeners. Doug Blair here. We are live at the National Conservatives Conference here in Miami, Florida. We are having the opportunity to talk with some of the brightest and best minds in the conservative movement. Today, I spoke with Elbridge Colby. Elbridge is a former Pentagon official who has some dire prognostications about China and Taiwan. He says that the United States is not ready to engage in a turmoil and a conflict with China. If it came to it, we would probably not do so hot. However, it's very, very important that we focus our ever. towards defeating China and defending Taiwan. He sits down with me. We chat all about it. Very excited to have you listen to it. Coming up after this. As conservatives, sometimes it feels like we're constantly on defense against bad ideas.

Bad philosophy, revisionist history, junk science, and divisive politics. But here's something I've come to understand. When faced with bad ideas, it's not enough to just defend. If we want to save this country, then it's time to go on offense. Conservative principles are. ideas that work, individual responsibility, strong local communities, and belief in the American dream. As a former college professor and current president of the Heritage Foundation, my life's mission is to learn, educate, and take action. My podcast, The Kevin Roberts Show,

is my opportunity to share that journey with you. I'll be diving into the critical issues that plague our nation, having deep conversations with high-profile guests, some of whom may surprise you, and I want to ensure freedom for the next generation. Find the Kevin Roberts Show, wherever you get your podcast. My guest today is Elbridge Colby, principal of the Marathon Initiative, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development and author.

His book, The Strategy of Denial, American Defense in an age of great power conflict, comes out in paperback this month. Elbridge, welcome to the show. Great to be with you. Let's talk about great power conflict. Let's talk about some of the foreign affairs issues of the day. We are seeing that Russia is continuing its invasion of Ukraine

and that China is beginning to, I possibly invading Taiwan in the near future. Is America ready to deal with those threats? Not well enough. I mean, I think in the case of Russia, I mean, actually the Russians have, if anything, showed that they are less formidable than at least I had supposed, but where the real challenge is is in the Pacific in Asia with China. And there we're not doing what we need to do. And I mean, you know, we spend a lot of money on defense, I mean, honestly. But we have not sort of focused enough on dealing with China and adapting our force to deal with that specifically. And, you know, I think we're just asking for trouble.

So is there anything that we could do right now, right, this second, that would make us more prepared to deal with a conflict with China? I think, you know, I mean, the nature of defense stuff is that it often takes a long time. I mean, it's about, you know, producing complicated weaponry and platforms. We have a lot. I would make sure, you know, if, I mean, we don't know, because a lot of this is, you know, secret information. But I would just make sure that we have whatever we need available in case,

the Chinese do move. I don't know when they're going to move, if ever, but what worries me is if they have, they think they can get away with an invasion of Taiwan successfully, that's going to mean they're more likely to try to try to do it. And then I think over time, but this means acting immediately, I mean, one of the things that's tough about the situation is if we want to have an impact in five years, we need to, we need to like pull the emergency, you know, door or the emergency bell now. Right. Because you need to act with that degree of urgency to have an impact in three, five years. And that's not what we're doing. So we're thinking that this problem's going to be out there in the 2030s. We'll be lucky if it's still out there in the 2030s.

Should we be preparing for a land or sort of a normal military-style invasion with tanks and planes and all of that? Or should we be preparing for a subterfuge campaign that maybe we'll try to take down Taiwan from within? My view is that the only way China is ever going to bring Taiwan to heal is through direct military assault. So kind of, it sounds old-fashioned. But, I mean, look, at the end of the day, there's a lot of talk about cyber and influence and blah, but usually, you know, if a country doesn't want to be subordinated, it's not going to be hoodwinked into giving up its freedom. And the people on Taiwan do not want to live under Chinese rule. To the contrary, they're moving the opposite direction.

So if China wants to force them to come to heal, it's going to need to use overwhelming military force. And this is now the official assessment from what I understand of the U.S. intelligence community. And, you know, if you look at what's happening in Ukraine, the Ukrainians are bravely resisting the Russian assault, you know, armed with Western weaponry and so forth in training, that's what stopped the Russians from bringing them to heal. It's not some Russian subterfuge campaign. The fact that the Russians couldn't seize and hold their kind of critical territory has meant that the Ukrainians are still free.

Now, that actually is an interesting point because we seem to be, as you've mentioned, unprepared for this. Is this something that's been a recent development within the past 20 years, or has this been always something that we've been unwilling to deal with China? Well, I mean, China, look, China's risen, I mean, sort of almost like astronomically in the last 25 years. I mean, its economy grew for many years at something close to 10 percent, and now even, you know, somewhere around 5 percent, if we look over the last 5 to 10 years. So that's, you know, very significant growth. I mean, during the Cold War, we were really focused on the whole, on the Soviet Union.

China was kind of not the primary challenge that we thought about. But this has really become much more of a problem over, like, the last 10 years. when it's become clear that China was really going to be a peer, that they were going to continue growing economically and that they were going to turn that economic wealth into military power and challenge our interests and those of our allies and partners around the world. You know, 15 years ago when George W. Bush was president, maybe you could think that China would kind of behave,

you'd pat them on the head and they'd stay in their place. Nuh, that's not what's happening. So this is something, you know, people started to sound the alarm, I'd say, around 10 years ago, and it's become louder, and we tried when we were in the Pentagon under the Trump administration. But now it's really, it's a, you know, five-alarm fire, and we're kind of acting like, we'll get to it. Right, right. Now, what does that look like? What does a prepared America look like? Is it somebody that's willing to go to war over this in the Pacific? Is it somebody that's going to give weaponry to the Taiwanese, much like we're doing to the Ukrainians? What does that look like? Well, both. I mean, there's no way Taiwan can defend itself without American help, in my view, just because of the scale.

I mean, you know, Ukraine is about a quarter of the population of Russia. You know, Taiwan would be about between 150th and one one one hundred. I mean, so we're just a totally different order of magnitude. I don't want a war. I desperately want to avoid a war, but I'm a firm believer in, you know, if you want peace, prepare for war. And what that means is not like some kind of generic readiness, but it means you're specifically ready to defeat a Chinese attack

in a way that they understand will mean that they fail. I mean, look, China, they really want Taiwan back, they really want to dominate Asia and so forth, but they're not insane. I mean, Mao Zedong, you know, is one of the worst people who ever lived, really close to the top or the bottom. And he, you know, he wanted to take Taiwan over and he never tried because he knew he would fail.

So that's what we wanted. And what that means, it's not, I mean, it is rocket science, literally, but it's not rocket science from a kind of planning perspective. We need to buy a lot of the right munitions. We need to have a defense industry that can produce this stuff at scale. We need to be able to have our ships be ready. They need to be repaired and supplied. Our forces need to train focusing on this.

This sounds like stuff that you think the military doing, but no, because we're spending a lot of time in Ukraine. We put a lot more forces in Europe. You know, there's still a lot going on in the Middle East. People think, oh, I'm doing a million things. No, no, no. My view is, make sure you get China right. So China's like priority one, two, three, four, five now. And like, if you're doing something else, you should probably be worried about your job. That's the kind of attitude that we need. And that's, that we're not seeing that enough. There are green shoots in the defense establishment, but not enough. You mentioned that Mao Zedong wasn't crazy, but, you know, obviously Mao Zedong is not in charge

China anymore. Do we know how willing a modern China, how far they're willing to go to reclaim Taiwan? We don't know. I mean, we just don't know anything. I mean, I always say if anybody speaks about what China will or won't do with too much confidence, I just kind of discounted because nobody knows. I mean, Xi Jinping doesn't even know. He was probably what he's going to do next year. Maybe he does. Maybe he has a plan for what he's going to do next year, but he could always change it. I mean, so we don't really know. So what we can look at are the factors, the incentives and disincentives that would go in. But, you know, look, this is pretty clear. China has been very that it regards Taiwan as part of China.

Throughout the existence of the People's Republic, Xi Jinping himself has talked about it repeatedly in very specific terms, underlining how important it is to him personally and to China. He specifically links it with what is his central political project, which is called the Great Rejuvenation of Chinese Nation. So it's kind of like, I mean,

and they're building a military specifically to do it, and they're exercising it. So my view is like if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and talks like a duck, maybe it's a duck. Right. It's probably a duck. Yeah. One of the things I think is interesting as we're watching the conflict in Ukraine unfold

is that there is a portion of the American conservative movement that feel is there's too much involvement in Ukraine right now. What are your thoughts on that and how does that relate to the Chinese threat? Well, look, I look at this, I start from American interests. What are American interests in the world? American interests in the world are Americans' physical security, our freedom and our prosperity. And so what is the chief danger of that? Well, by far it's China, and it's China dominating Asia in particular. So first and fourth, foremost, we absolutely must take care of the China threat and in particular deny it its ability to dominate Asia.

We're not doing that. So that's the kind of the main prism. We have a strong interest in Europe. We do not want Europe to be dominated by Russia or anybody else. We don't want Europe to turn into a massive conflict area, et cetera. And we, of course, want to support, I think, countries that are fighting for their freedom and independence like Ukraine. But, you know, we have priorities.

Like a business has priorities, right? A family has priorities. And we're not taking care of our top priorities. So my view is we should support Ukraine to the extent that it does not interfere with our ability to get us to a place where we're very comfortable on the Asia-China front. And that's not what we're doing. And I mean, the notion that they're not trade-offs is ridiculous. I mean, we've increased our level of forces. That's money.

That's time. That's attention. Some of the weapons we're using, et cetera. And, I mean, the administration's approach, it actually just like doesn't make sense because they're building up again in Europe. They're spending a lot of time and attention there. they're not making huge shifts in the posture in the Pacific. They're not trying to get the Allies to do a lot more. And they're not upping the defense budget.

I mean, if you're going to do all this stuff in Ukraine and do the China stuff, you've got to do one of these things. And they're not doing that. And so it just doesn't even make sense to me. And I'm kind of like, you know, look, I think the solution has got to be, we've got to start from a realistic point of view about. Our military, it's not, it can't be everywhere at once.

It can't fight the Chinese and the Russians, even the weakened Russians, you know, at the same time. So we need to be realistic about that. So we focus on China. The good news is the Europeans, they're much richer together than Russia. They're willing to spend more on defense. The Russian military has been weakened. Let's help them out. But let's not act like Europe is the number one priority. I mean, Europe's going to be 10% of global GDP in 20 years. Asia is going to be well over half of global GDP. And so what we're doing is to me, it's just irrational. It's certainly not an American's interest, but I'm not saying that we shouldn't support the Ukrainians.

I do think we should support the Ukrainians, but it's got to be consistent with our prioritization of Asia. Right. You've mentioned that the idea would be to prevent Chinese dominance of Asia. What does that look like exactly where we say mission accomplished, China is no longer dominating? Where does China stand after that? Well, I actually think it's basically a balance of power, which is to say it's actually one of the reasons I think we could achieve this goal and it could be stable is that it would be pretty good for China.

It would be a situation in which China would be enormously powerful. It would be one of the two most powerful countries in the world. It would probably have an area, kind of a sphere of influence in Asia and possibly elsewhere. But it wouldn't be enough to control us. And, you know, countries like Japan and India and Australia and Taiwan, South Korea, they would be kind of on our side. We might have some, you know, exchange across the divide. But basically, China would be in a pretty good shape.

They could still have a huge economy. They could become more prosperous. But they couldn't dominate all of us. And so I think, to me, that's a reasonable goal. And it's one that China could accept with pride. Because I think one of the real, you know, look, there's a strong strain in American foreign policy, American life, says, you know, we're going to democratize China.

and they're going to completely transform into this fuzzy panda or something. It's not going to happen. I mean, even if China does democratize, it's probably still going to be a big problem for us. Because they're going to have a lot of similar incentives. I think they'd be easier to deal with. Certainly, if I were Chinese, I'd rather live in a democracy. But we've got to look at it from our own interests. And so I think that's like a goal that could sustainably lead to peace.

And frankly, we would hopefully never have to fight a war. But the critical predicate to that is being so ready. ready to fight a war that the Chinese never try it. Right. I mean, it seems like sort of an obvious question at this point. But look, why does Taiwan matter so much in this equation? Well, the thing is it matters a lot. The way I think about Taiwan is it's not important because it's a democracy or, you know, it's got a great economy, although we might admire that and sympathize that with that a lot.

It's important because the only way America is going to be able to stop China from dominating Asia is with a coalition. And Taiwan is very important for a coalition. We can't expect, it's not fair nor is it realistic for America to stop China from dominating Asia on its own. So we need to work with Japan, India, Philippines, South Korea, etc. If Taiwan falls, that coalition is going to take a huge hit, both directly in military terms. I mean, it's going to really increase China's military position and power, but also everybody in the region's going to say, and quite reasonably, wait a minute, I can't really trust the Americans, I better

make a deal with China. So, and if we lose Taiwan, frankly, I think we're going to have to do some crazier things to compensate for it that are actually going to be worse. So the problem here is that Taiwan, I think of it as like, it's like a 70 out of 100 interest. It's not like defending, you know, Texas or Washington State or whatever, Alaska. It's a foreign country. It's far from us. But it's really important. But the key then is to be able to have a military posture and a military strategy that allows us to fight the war in a way that's not so existentially costly. And the thing is we can do that because really what we need to do is defeat a Chinese invasion, which, you know, missiles, aircraft, ships, submarines,

satellites, air bases, et cetera, we can pull that off. One of the things I've been reflecting on a little bit as we've been sort of watching this conflict in Ukraine and the discussion about China is that there was this idea amongst many thinkers about the sort of end of history, right? We were at this point where neoliberal democracy had succeeded in the world and we would never have this type of conflict again. Why was that idea so prevalent and how, I think, are people responding to the idea that's probably dead?

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I actually, I've only met Francis Fukuyama once. some of his more recent commentary I've been less impressed. I thought the end of history it was a phenomenal book, an article. And actually, you know, interestingly enough, in the actual book, he talks about wars

at the end of history. In fact, that people might get into wars out of like boredom, which is pretty meta. But I think the way that most people thought about it was like the kind of hey, we're at the end of history, everybody agrees, it's not worth fighting wars anymore. Big powers aren't going to fight each other anymore. I think it, why did it appeal?

Well, I think it definitely appealed to progressives, right? because that's kind of core to their idea that human being, you know, human society would advance and become more pacifistic and kind of left-leaning and so forth. And the way Fukuyama talked about in the book was social democracy,

that actually Europe was the end of history, not America. America still had, we were still in history a little bit. I was like, I think I want to be in history then, yeah. But, you know, so I think it kind of, it played to a lot of the predilections. And you can see it in the response to the Ukraine situation. I mean, the way I talked about the Ukraine situation just now, I mean, there are obviously some people on the right and so forth

who are saying, you know, we're supporting them too much. But by far, the dominant, you know, line in Washington and the political establishment is a kind of like, you know, end of history sort of, you know, it's an existential struggle between democracy and autocracy. And that's not how I look at it. And I don't, you know, it's almost part of the Ukraine response, I think is kind of connected to almost trying to resuscitate that idea.

You know, whereas I look at it fundamentally through a sort of realistic lens. Like, history is never going to end. There's always going to be competition. It's going to be endemic. We need to look at this through our national interest lens in a way that's responsible and moral, of course. But I think that's sort of like sometimes I look at the Ukraine debate, particularly on the sort of the elite side, and you're like, you know, people putting Ukraine flags on their hashtag or whatever. And like, of course, I think we all sympathize with what, I mean, the abominations that are happening there and the terrible suffering. But it's like people are identifying with it in a way that suggests that they're like trying to

make a much, much broader point. I mean, Fukuyama himself has said that. And I think that's a mistake. I think it miscasts what's going to happen there, what our interests are there, but that's a lot of what's going on. Sure. Given that strain, this is a final point, given that strain of thought is so prevalent in Washington,

and given that it doesn't seem like the direction we're going in, will America be able to counter the Chinese threat, at least given what we've been up to right now? I have real questions. I'm very worried. I mean, I think implicitly a lot of Washington is basically acting as if they think they're going to consolidate Europe and, hey, we might lose Taiwan, but we'll figure it out because Europe will be on our side, which I think is wrong because Europe won't be strong enough. And I'm not really sure that Europe is meaningfully on our side. And so I think, you know, there's, I think the current administration, there's a strain of like sort of too clever by half. Like, I think they kind of give off the impression that they've kind of all got all figured out.

It's kind of they got like this special, you know, ninja move that they're going to balance things and sequence them. And it's like, I think it's really kind of simple. It's like Occam's razor, keep it simple, stupid. Like, are we allocating the military resources the China problem? Are we putting the forces necessary? Are we putting the political capital there? If not, we've got a real problem. And if the Chinese know that and they know that we're eventually going to get around to it,

they have an incentive to move before we actually do get around to it. And that worries me. That was Elbridge Colby, principal of the Marathon Initiative and former Pentagon official. He's also an author in his book, The Strategy of Denial, American Defense and the Age of Great Power Conflict, comes out in paperback this month. Elbridge, thank you so much for your time. Great to be with you. And that'll do it for this episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I have some really good ideas about how the American people should payfully push their government to be a little bit more effective on countering China, but those will have to go for another day.

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