The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Rep. Trent Kelly on Threat China Poses to America | Sept. 23

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

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I'm Virginia Allen, and this is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, September 23rd. What kind of threat does China really pose to America? And is America ready to face that threat? Today, I am sitting down with Mississippi Representative Trent Kelly to ask those very questions. Congressman Kelly serves on the House Armed Services Committee and has served our nation in the military for over three decades. And so he's joining me today to talk about the relationship between. America and China. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. Voting is one of our most important civic duties. Because its impact reaches far and wide,

it is important to have trust in our electoral system. That's why the Heritage Foundation created the Election Integrity Scorecard. The scorecard compares each state's voting rules and regulations and gives each state a ranking on their transparency and overall potential for interference and corruption. If you want to understand the nature of the election system in your state, make sure you check out the election integrity scorecard at heritage.org slash election scorecard. It is my pleasure today to welcome to the show, Mississippi Congressman, Trent Kelly. Congressman, thank you so much for being here.

Well, it's an honor to be here and thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to have you. Well, Congressman, I want to begin by really thanking you for your dedication to this country and specifically for your military service. For 36 years, you have served as the Mississippi Army National Guard as a combat engineer. Would you just share a little bit about your experiences? I know that you are mobilized for Desert Storm. You deployed to Iraq twice, correct?

That's correct. You know, I think that's just important. It kind of goes to the core values of most of the men and women who serve this country. We don't do it for pay and for all those things. We love this nation. And so it's just been an opportunity for me to give us. back to this nation that is given so much to me. So 36 years is a long time. I had a full head of hair when I started this thing. And I don't know if soldiers made me pull it out or if some of

the hard missions. But it's so important. And now I'm getting to the level. I'm on the strategic level as a major general where the policies and things that we do impact soldiers' lives. And so I think that's so important to give back, not just to America as a whole, but to those service members who choose to serve this great nation. And you serve on, currently on the House Armed Services Committee, you serve as ranking member on the Intelligence and Special Operations Subcommittee. You are constantly looking at what are those threats to our nation. So in your assessment, what are the greatest threats to our country right now? I think we have to keep our eye on China, and both economically and agriculturally and militarily and all those things.

China, Russia are the biggest threats. there are pacing threats right now. But, you know, I'm also on the Ag Committee as well as the Intel and Norm Services. And I see food security. I think we really have to make sure our supply lines and we have to be a nation as a whole in government, be prepared to be self-sustaining should the need require. I mean, our energy policy. We went from an energy producer to now we're relying on others and taking down our strategic reserves.

It's so important that we see national security as a whole of government and all those functions. in the military, we use dime, diplomacy, information, military, and economy. But I think it's so important we see the national security threat as a whole. Yeah. Well, and specifically in the areas of agriculture and natural security, those are crossing paths a little bit right now in regards to China because we're seeing that China is coming to America and buying U.S. farmland. What do we know about that and what's happening there?

Yeah, I mean, that's so difficult because I don't think we know how much. they're buying. And I think we have to make sure that we shouldn't allow foreign countries to buy farmland here. And so we need to put stipulations. And, you know, and I tell our business owners right now, China, they're not buying it as China when they buy it. They're using straw men. And so you need to be really, you need to, when you're selling large things, you need to make sure that you're investigating who exactly are we selling those two? Because we have to be self-sustaining and we have to not allow other countries to take advantage. We need to, we need to We need some reciprocity of how we deal with foreign nations too.

You know, we allow China to operate so freely over here, but you go over there and I assure you you don't have the same freedoms there. So I think there needs to be some reciprocity with these nations. If they're allowed to purchase here, we should be allowed to purchase there, and that's not always the case. Well, and of course, when we talk about China, we have to mention Taiwan and the conversation there, and especially the president's comments over the weekend. An interview came out that he did with 60 minutes in which he was really pressed on the fact of if China invades Taiwan, would America actually come to Taiwan's defense with troops?

And the president said, yes. What was your reaction to the president's comments and then also to the White House sort of starting to walk that comment back? Yeah, that's not the first time they've done this. So he had experience and he did this prior about a couple of years ago. But I think we've always had political ambiguity in our response to China invading Taiwan. That being said, I think China needs to look at the tea leaves, and most of the American politicians and most of the American people do not support Chinese using force to take Taiwan. But as the President of the United States, you have to know your own policy and you have to be able to answer your own policy. So I think it's horrible that he's not doing that.

But I also think we have to be very careful about not rattling sabers for war, but we are always prepared to war. And I think one thing China understands seeing how Russia, when they invaded Ukraine and how the world came to our aid or to Ukraine's aid, I think it will be even more so if China chooses to invade Taiwan. There are such great partners of ours in that region, Japan, South Korea and all those. So I think China needs to heed his words, but I think he should stick to the political ambiguity. If you were to describe America's relationship with China right now at this present moment, how would you summarize it? And then if we were to fast forward five years, what do you predict about that relationship changing or morphing?

You know, we encouraged all our businesses many years ago to buy Chinese and to sell to China. And so now we're asking them to back off. And I think that's important, but I think we have to educate them. I think they have to understand the threat and the malign influence that China has used. I think they need to understand that they've infiltrated our universities. They're buying our farmland. They're stealing technology. They are not a human rights friendly country.

And I think we need to hold China accountable. And so we just have to educate the Americans. Not only that we need to do that, but we need to tell them why. Americans demand not only that you ask them to do something, but that you tell them why you're doing that. And I think they will rise up and help us to start combating some of this because China's all over the world and they are stripping resources from everywhere in the world. And so we've got to start investing not just here, but in other parts of the world to combat Chinese influence. And what about the area of cybersecurity? Because we hear about Chinese technology.

We hear about technology from the Russians. from the perspective of as Americans, are we prepared enough to combat any sort of cybersecurity threats, whether it be from China, Russia, or any other bad actors? Yeah. I think we have to really relook what the threshold of a not necessarily war, but where do we cross the line? Where is a country using cyber to attack? Where does that cross the line into something that requires sanctions or even more than sanctions? And so I don't think we're prepared because I don't think that we understand the problem set enough to address it.

So we really have to work on that. We work hard, but when they're continuously attacking, and then we don't have any offensive capabilities. When they do something, we need the ability to do something back to them on the same scale. And right now, I'm not convinced that we're prepared to do that. Who are the other nations that we really need to be aware of and talking a lot about apart from China? and Russia right now, that we need to be very focused on as a nation and prepared to face on all fronts, whether that's cybersecurity militarily, whatnot. Well, I mean, Iran is always going to be, and they're trying to become a nuclear threat.

They're more regional in nature, though. They don't expand and they don't have the partners and allies, and then North Korea is the same way. North Korea and Iran, they have the bad will towards us to do those things. They just don't necessarily have the capabilities that China does. And Russia and China are the key threats that we need to focus on, and especially China, because China can bring the whole of government, the economy and all those things that Russia just can't bring right now.

Yeah. As far as our military, are we prepared, you know, should there, with any of these countries, be a time when, you know, we need to be ready to really face them? Yeah. You know, having served 36 years, I will tell you, we have the greatest military, not just in the world, but in the history of the world. And as we saw, we overestimated how strong Russia was. They did not perform as well in Ukraine.

But I think we can't sit on our laurels. They're catching us both in technology gaps, in weapons systems, and size of the Army. But we know how to employ those forces. We know how to jointly do those. But I think we can't sit on our laurels. We have to continue to strive to get better. And then we have to relook warfare. And those are a lot of the conversations we have.

How does tomorrow's army look? And I always use World War II an example. The Japanese did us a favor by sinking all of our battleships in World War II because battleships were not the future of that war. Aircraft carriers were. And so we transitioned from battleships to aircraft carriers. So what is the next aircraft carrier for this? How do we fight?

We don't fight the 1980s war that I joined in. The way that we move had to be more mobile, we have to be able to consolidate firepower. we have to really look at how we fight and what assets do we really need to bring to bear to have the strongest military in the world. As far as policy solutions, what are the pieces of, whether it be legislation that you and your colleagues are talking about, that, okay, these are the strategic steps that Congress is going to take in order to make sure that America is as strong as it possibly can be and is ready for any and all threats?

I think we have to be on that strategic level. All too often in Congress, we ask the, Army, the Navy, the Air Force. We asked them to be the experts. And they do know the weapon systems and all those things. But again, had we relied on just battleships and relied on the Navy, we would have built more battleships instead of aircraft carriers. And so I think we should be sometimes the strategic thinkers in the room,

and we need to hold them accountable for what they're doing. And so I think we have to shape where we want to send them. We need to give them the goals we want them to achieve. and then they can figure out how to achieve them, but we can't just do business as usual. We have to be the strategic thinkers here in Congress. Congressman, before we let you go, I want to ask you, we have an election in less than two months now. If Republicans do retake the House, what will be your top priorities and what do you think those top priorities of your colleagues will be? Wow, there's so many top priorities.

Number one is we have to have some oversight on some of the things that have happened, whether it's the, intelligence community or DOD, so there has to be some oversight, Department of Justice. Those things are important to get to the bottom of, we've got to build back America's trust in our FBI and our Department of Justice. That's one of the things. The other things is, is the, I don't know if Reagan said it exactly this way, but it's the economy stupid. You know, I mean, we have got to do the things that make us a strong, a strong economy. Without a strong economy, we can't be a great nation. And if you look back, we had GDP growth that was beyond what they ever said was possible under Trump. Now we've got inflation hitting us at all areas. We continue to spend money.

So we've just got to make sure we put a curb on their appetite to spend money on things that don't matter. Well, Congressman Kelly, we thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. Make sure that you subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast wherever you get your podcast. It helps us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen. We love hearing and reading your feedback. Thank you all again for listening.

Have a great rest of your day. And we'll be right back here with you at 5 p.m. for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Bluey and. Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen, Doug Blair, and Samantha Rank. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.