The Jordan Harbinger Show - 751: General Robert Spalding | China's Playbook for Global Domination

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

General Robert Spalding (@@robert_spalding) is a retired US Air Force brigadier general, the CEO of digital infrastructure company SEMPRE, and the author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept and War Without Rules: China's Playbook for Global Domination. What We Discuss with General Robert Spalding: How a 1999 book by military strategists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui called Unrestricted Warfare has become China's playbook for global domination against the Western world. Numerous ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits Western weaknesses with this playbook's primary tenet: the best strategy for warfare is not to kill, but to control. Why the CCP isn't likely to crumble under the weight of its own debts as Soviet Russia did, and why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan stands a better chance of success than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How the CCP uses corporate espionage, global pandemics, and trade violations to pursue its goal of dominance. What can we, as individuals clued in to the tactics of this playbook, do to resist the influence of the CCP on the Western world? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/751 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with elite counterterrorism undercover agent Tamer Elnoury? Catch up with episode 572: Tamer Elnoury | Undercover with a Muslim FBI Agent here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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terms at Onepelaton.com. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. In the last 30 years, we have been so fat, dumb, and happy, we forgot that the world is a dangerous place, that there are those out there that do not agree with the idea of individual liberty that are granted from God, and that they are willing to do anything it takes to make sure that that does not exist on this earth. And if we don't stand up and defend it, we're going to lose it. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional mafia enforcer, undercover agent, former jihadi, or cold case homicide investigator,

and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion, influence, negotiation, and communication, China and North Korea, crime and cults, and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.

Now, today, this is one of these episodes where I, quote, unquote, lose my mind because we're talking about China and the Chinese Communist Party specifically. My guest today, General Spalding, has been on the show before also discussing China and the so-called secret war that the Chinese Communist Party is in. with the West, specifically the United States. Today we'll discuss technology transfer, the supply chain, and why it's so important that we bring some of the security back to America and the Allied industrial base.

We're also going to explore areas where the U.S. is actually losing to China. And what we can do to push back, plug holes in our own economy, our education system, our communications infrastructure, and our military. It's not as technical as it sounds. I found this episode pretty darn interesting, even for a layman who's not a China watcher. so I really do hope you enjoy it. Now, here we go with General Spalding.

When I first had you on the show, everyone, not everyone, many people wrote to me, they said, look, this guy's an alarmist. People said things like, Jordan, I love your show, but you lose your mind when it comes to China. And they're not wrong. I do lose my mind when it comes to China, but here we are. Four or five years later, after our first episode that we did here with you, pretty much every single thing that we said in that episode, so far has come to light in some fashion or been uncovered.

or been written about by investigative journalists or is now an accepted reality, like the IP theft we were talking about, with respect to the Chinese Communist Party, and what they've been doing to undermine world order, international institutions, United States, diplomacy, et cetera. In fact, I think the last time we did this, you were in a secure room at the Pentagon, which is pretty interesting. Now we're in an insecure room in a warehouse somewhere in the Midwest, probably. Yeah, yeah, Colorado. Can we talk about the things that you're manufacturing that's public, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is why I quit government, quite frankly. You know, part of the problem that I talk about all the time is infrastructure, the digital infrastructure, the stuff that, you know, allows us to connect our devices, the data that gets collected about us. That's a big problem from a democracy standpoint, from a liberty standpoint, privacy. These are important things and nobody in the commercial space is doing anything. So, you know, I got out to work on that kind of technology and we're about to go to market now with, you know, infrastructure is. that survives even a nuclear blast and will keep the connection to your device and will protect your privacy. So, you know, our goal is to provide that infrastructure for carriers and cloud service providers and, you know, communities that want to have, they're worried about losing their digital life if heaven forbid the Iranians crack off an ICBM over the top of us that shuts off the lights. Or, you know, somebody, you know, goes out and blows up a switching center like the guy did to Christmases ago in Nashville and takes out, you know, all the cell towers in Tennessee and

surrounding states. You know, we shouldn't have to worry about suffering through that. And that's, you know, that's why I got out of the military to work on that. Yeah, it's an interesting project and probably a subject for another show. It's funny just before this interview, a friend of mine, a guy I know who's a CEO of a huge sort of tech cyber warfare related company sent me an article about, or an internal white paper, I should say, about how Russia essentially ran an experiment where they can hijack all of Apple. They hijacked all of their traffic the Russians did for a period of 12 hours and they ran all Apple traffic through Russia. And for those listening, they're probably like, what do you mean? Like the website? No, like any connection from your phone

that was supposed to go to the Apple servers in Cupertino, where I am, went through freaking Moscow or St. Petersburg and then went back, which is inefficient, slow. And gee, what were they doing with that data? Nothing probably, right? Nothing, totally harmless, just an experiment. And apparently they can kind of do that anytime they want and it's really, really hard to defend against because of the way that the internet works. You know, the internet, it's like water flowing downhill, looks for the path of least resistance. If it hits a rock, it just goes left or right, goes around the rock. I guess cyber warfare works by saying, hey, there's a clear path right over here through our data server that logs everything that's encrypted or not and then works on screwing it up.

and the internet will just send its traffic there. And if you change that, you slow down everything in the world, which is not ideal. And you can record that data. And if it is encrypted, you can wait until you have a quantum computer that allows you to break the encryption and have access to it, which is what our adversaries are doing. I heard there was some policy called, I'm going to mess this up, but it's like, log now and crypt later. Have you heard about this?

Or decrypt later, sorry. And I think it is a policy of CCP, possibly other foreign intelligence services to just get as much data as possible, even if they can't use it and they figure, and 10 years, we'll decode all this and it'll give us intellectual property, private information, things we can funnel through our AI systems, et cetera. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's a fear, you know, once you have a quantum computer that's powerful enough to break today's, you know, RSA-based encryption, you know, you can have access to anything. I said this last time we did a show, but this book, the new book, it scares me. As a China Watcher, your last book scared me. This one is somehow just as bad,

possibly worse because we're a few years on and a lot. A lot is going according to plan if you're a CCP functionary or Xi Jinping. Your devious schemes are working, right? So I got the same kind of comments that you talked about after our first show, which is, hey, this is bogus. You know, you're wearing a tinfoil hat. And so I thought, well, hey, let's let people read the Chinese words for themselves. You know, don't take my word for it. Listen to what they have to say. And then take their words and then compare it against the things that you actually see happening in the world and say, okay, is this just coincidence? Am I crazy? You tell me. So what you're talking about here is the new book, Unrestricted Warfare, or the plan, I should say, Unrestricted Warfare. The titles, the

the reason these titles overlap is because in 1999, two kernels in China created this plan. This plan called Unrestricted Warfare that involves cyber war, economic warfare, stealing intellectual property, all kinds of other domains other than firing cannons and sending warships over, other than conventional warfare. And over the last 20 years, a lot of this has come to fruition. And your new book, which I thought was really interesting, sort of says, here's what they said they were going to do. Here's a few examples of them maybe coincidentally just doing the exact same thing they said they were going to do in 1999 after studying this book. And Unrestricted Warfare, the original Chinese manuscript, even though it's recent, it's only a couple decades old, it's kind of up there with Sun Tzu.

Art of War in terms of teaching people how to wage war in the modern era, anyway. Machiavelli is really the Prince is really where I think they think that they're trying to kind of, it's a modern version of the Prince because the Prince was much more about politics and much less about warfare. You know, Sun Tzu is very much about warfare, Klauswitz, you know, all of these theorists were talking about war. Machiavelli was talking about politics and these guys are political warriors. and they're showing you how to use globalization on the Internet to take politics global. When you're taught to be a military officer in the United States, politics is not something that you

talk about at all. In fact, we're taught to be apolitical and, you know, let the politicians figure out what they want to do. And then they'll tell us what they want us to go, you know, what objectives they want. Right. It's all sort of siloed here in the United States. We've got the military, they handle military problems. We've got our diplomatic corps. They solve diplomatic problems. We've got our Chamber of Commerce and companies decide essentially for themselves what they can do as long as it's within the law. We have our legislature and things like that that create international laws. And we have international institutions that make rules. But when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party, they have Xi Jinping in the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party, and they decide what

companies are going to do, they decide what the military is going to do, they decide what their cyber warfare and intelligence units are going to do, they decide with their politicians as so far as they even have them really are going to do. And they infiltrate these institutions. We'll talk about that in a little bit. And they decide what those people are supposed to do. And it's all sort of centrally controlled, which is, I think if you've ever looked at anything communist, you know that central control is kind of the whole idea. So that what they're trying to do is centrally control everything and then expand that control out across outside of their borders. And that should scare everyone. China's great. I loved it when I went there. Can't go there anymore. But

it's not, I wouldn't want my country to turn into China. Not because of Chinese people and not because of Chinese culture, but because of the Communist Party. That's it. They just don't care about anything but power. What did China observe and learn during the Gulf War? Because that seems to be what sparked these two colonels to write unrestricted warfare in 99. Well, first of all, what was reinforced to them is we do not want to get into a conventional war with the United States. I mean, we cleaned up the Iraqi forces like in no time at all.

And you could arguably say that the Chinese forces were probably even worse than the Iraqis. So, first of all, we're not going to go to war with America in the conventional sense. Second of all, in what I say many times in war without rules, is that unrestricted warfare is a doctrine document. You know, part of the problem of misunderstanding understricted warfare is that people think of it as a strategy. It's not a strategy. It is a doctrine document. And what a doctrine document does is take lessons learned from prior wars and tries to distill some principles that you can use to think about when you're planning a new war. And so in thinking of that document as a doctrine document, you know, they were looking at the Gulf War and saying, okay, we can't go after the Americans this way.

But what we can do is we notice that they are giving us full access to their corporate sector. We have access to their society, to their universities, to their media. You know, the Internet is allowing us to really have access to everything. So how do we take this access that they're giving us and begin to undermine their system using this access that they're giving us? So we don't have to worry about them, you know, bringing, you know, tanks and helicopters and fighters to China because what we're going to do is we're going to basically just use the stuff that they've given us.

They won't think of it as a war. They'll just think of it as business. People will say, look, are we just being paranoid here? This is a comment I got four or five years ago when we first did our show. And now we can definitively say no. The CCP documents, Chinese Communist Party, I'll say CCP from here out just because it's easier. They actually state that they wish to displace us on the world stage, force us and the rest of the world to submit. So it's not just, hey, we want to be an equal power with the U.S. It's, no, we want to get rid of anyone who would challenge our supremacy. And not only that, We don't even want them to have the ability to challenge us anywhere. That should scare anybody who just values being able to, I don't know, move around freely

without getting permission from their local cadre or invent something and keep it, like intellectual property or create a business that's not controlled and given a piece of it away to essentially extortion and control to a centralized party. I mean, these things should freak everyone out, regardless of whether you think it can't happen because the idea their stated intention is to do this to everyone else. Right. And so, you know, individual liberty, rule of law, human rights, free trade, things that we basically built the international order on, they don't want to destroy the international

order. They just want to make it so that the international order doesn't represent actually, in actuality, any of those things. In the easiest example to say, okay, well, show me how they're getting rid of those principles in the international system. Okay, the UN Human Rights Council. Who sits on the UN Human Rights Council? Countries like Venezuela, China. This is a problem when you bring them into the system, and they're like, okay, we believe in human rights. We define it differently. Our definition of human rights is you don't challenge the party and we'll take care of you. You challenge the party,

we'll kill you. That's our version of human rights. Yeah, this stuff, it starts to get worrisome, we look at COVID. And you start the book by talking about COVID and how China obfuscated slash lied about the origins of COVID. I should say, again, the CCP, not average Chinese people. In fact, we had, is it Li Wen Liang, the doctor who said, hey, there's this big problem. We got this disease. And they imprisoned him. And then he got COVID and he died. And then they went, well, well, he was a traitor. And it's like, well, a traitor because he tried to warn the world about COVID. I mean, it's really, really sad. They failed to lock down even when they knew COVID was spreading very fast in China. I know you wrote this book in 2021. I wonder what you think now

that we're in 2022. 2021. China had a most, the claim to propaganda victory when it came to COVID-19. Look, hey, look, you guys, look how bad you screwed this up over there. Our COVID is fine. We suspected they were hiding the numbers, of course. But now it's with Omicron. They just can't bullshit anymore. They've locked down Shanghai and Xi'an and other cities with millions of people. their vaccination program didn't work. Their economy's taking a major hit. It doesn't look like that's going to end anytime soon. What do we think about that now?

I mean, this snake that they let go just seems to have turned right around and bit them in the ass. Well, I think, you know, when you look at it from their standpoint, the Communist Party is communist. And, you know, part of the thing, the reason that Deng Xiaoping did the opening up is because they needed technology. They needed knowledge. They needed capital to rebuild their country. It's built. If you're using purchasing power parity, they've got the biggest economy in the world. They own the supply chain, and they prove that during the coronavirus.

In fact, they strengthen their hold over the supply chain. Now, when you built your country, you've got the power you want. And oh, by the way, their military is the top military in the Pacific. When you have all these things, you can actually, okay, we're communist. Now, guess what? We're going to be who we say we are, and they don't really care. You're like, oh, oh, you know, it's going to hurt their economy. They're communists.

All they care about is maintaining power over the people of China. And, you know, they have created a system in coronavirus actually, you know, use that system perfectly to monitor and control the population using technology that Silicon Valley created. They can do it perfectly. So I'm not surprised. And I don't think that they're going. going, you know, they're not going to go and decline or fall down or anything. They're just being

who they are. Yeah, we thought that a rising China would use its new technological and economic success. The idea was, hey, they're going to liberalize and they're going to open up. Look what happened in Europe at the end of World War II and Eastern Europe and all this. We were just completely wrong about all of that. And it shows that while countries like Czechoslovakia or now, you know, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Eastern Europe, they were under the thumb of the Soviet Union. when they started to experience Western success, they did liberalize and open up, especially because of things like the Marshall Plan and foreign aid. China was under the thumb of Mao, sure, but a lot of this is just the, and they're still under the hold of the CCP.

So the recipe isn't quite the same. We expected it to have the same flavor, and that didn't happen at all. And they took a lot of the 5G networks, TVs, phones, things like that that were developed in Silicon Valley and or in China. and they just created a surveillance state instead of, hey, everybody's got fast internet and you can order an Uber from your phone. I mean, they took those ideas, but then they said, let's just instead monitor everyone. I'm wondering if you think we're more clear of the 5G issue now that Huawei seems to be in decline, or if you think they just change tax and they're going in a different direction? Well, I mean, you know, so I think if I had stayed in government and you would ask me, hey, you know, is it Huawei that we need to go after?

I would have said, okay, sure, you know, Huawei may be an issue. But, you know, Huawei doesn't have anything to do with TikTok. Yeah. Right? So TikTok is exporting basically the technology, China built technology, that, you know, does a lot of the same things that Huawei equipment in your network will do. So I think when you say, okay, if we just get Huawei out, we're going to be okay. No, we're not.

They're in our system. They're in our globalized, internet-connected system. And by virtue of having their companies be a part of that, you are not okay just because you don't have Huawei equipment. So are we any safer because of what the State Department did with regard to Huawei? In reality, no. I mean, now, should they have done it? Yes, they should, you know, Huawei is, you know, is Huawei. but is that sufficient to protect, you know, Americans from what China wants to do, which is export their vision and version of the way societies should organize?

And, I mean, there are so many things to show you that they are able to change and basically control our narrative. The latest one is Pelosi's trip to Taiwan. Reuters in the title of their article, Pelosi goes to Taiwan, China enrage. China enraged is Chinese Communist Party propaganda. It's their media, it's their propaganda creating the enraging that's happening. And then we just regurgitate it. Oh, yes, it's all our fault because Pelosi went to Taiwan and now China's mad at us. No, the Chinese Communist Party have orchestrated this whole thing.

And so, you know, that's the problem that I have because, you know, they are embedded in our system and quite frankly, better than we do. A lot of people think China is just the Soviet Union 2.0. Hey, look, you know, we outspent the Soviet Union. Maybe we can't outspend China, but we can do other things that will cause them to trip over themselves, right? They've got a centrally planned economy. They're going to have some sort of debt crisis. You mentioned before. There's actually a lot of people online, even writing books that'll say things like, hey, look, China looks like it's on the rise now. CCP looks like they got all cut and dry. They're going to hit this debt crisis. it's going to come crumbling down just like the USSR, the Soviet Union.

I disagree. I know you disagree. Tell me why that's wrong. Well, so that book, Unrestricted Warfare that I detail in War Without Rules, talks, how many times do you think George Soros was mentioned in that book? And people like, oh, is it George Soros that's funding, you know, whatever political action in the United States? No.

They are talking about the George Soros that, in their words, created. the Asian financial crisis in 1990, I think 1997 or 1998. And they're saying, no, he's a financial terrorist because he caused, you know, for instance, a run on the currency in Korea. And so what they did as a result of that, the Chinese Communist Party created a financial system in China that's closed. Their currency does not float. You cannot go exchange a dollar for a renminbi on any kind of exchange. You have to go to the People's Bank of China, and they'll exchange it on their own terms. And so it's a non-convertable currency and strict capital controls. There is no other country in the global financial system that has a closed financial system

that's allowed to be part of the global financial system. That's an example of how they took, okay, this is how if you are doing things wrong with your economy and you're part of the global financial system, you're right to have capital flight go out of your country. Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to say, hey, you can bring money into China, but we say when you take it out. Now, we should have said as a country and as a global financial system, okay, guess what? That is not how we play. You're out. We are not going to do business with you because you don't allow your currency to float. Instead, what do we do? The renminbi is part of the IMF basket of currencies. And you say, how can this be? How can it be?

well, it's because it's China. And everything that you talk about is like, well, we do that because it's China. Right, exactly. So for people who don't quite follow this because they're not former Wall Street dorks like myself, I'll try and sort of make this as basic as I can. The basket of currencies is, it's a group of currencies that say, hey, these are the global currencies that we use for everything. Here's kind of what they can be invested in. Normally, when you have a currency like that, it's the euro, before the euro was like the French franc and the Deutsche mark and things like that, the British pound, the yen. Japanese, and those things are in there because if Apple builds a factory in outside of Tokyo and they build computers there and they invest in there, they can move that money in and out of Japan, in out of the United States. If you do that in China, you build that factory in China, you can't take those profits out of China. You have to continue to invest in China. That sounds good on its face. Hey, you're continuing to invest in the area. That seems like a good policy. Maybe we should do that. The problem is, you might as well not have made that money if you can't actually deploy it anywhere and you think, oh, there's plenty of places to deploy capital

China, there is if they let you do it. And by the way, you're earning Renmin B because they're going to take your dollars, not, you know, more or less necessarily. So now you've got this currency that says what we say that it's worth. So if you run a foul of us, yeah, we can nationalize your factory. You could probably afford to take that hit if you're Apple, you're a trillion dollar company. You can afford to have a few factories nationalize. It's going to sting. But what happens when we say, you don't have any money here? You thought you had $400 billion here, but you don't. You don't have any money here. It's gone. It's gone. Or you have this, but it's only rem and be, and honestly, we're not going to give you as good of a rate because we decided, some functionary

decided that you guys were pissing in his Cheerios. So we're going to make it so that you have to spend this money in this certain way and it's only worth half of what you thought it was. They can do that and you can do nothing about it because you can't, you cannot move the money out of the country outside of their jurisdiction and authority. You just can't do it. It's not an option. And instead of saying to hell with that, we're going to build our factories in Malaysia. Instead, everyone went, okay, well, it's probably going to work out for us in the end because they're going to liberalize and we'll solve this problem later. And ding, 2022, it's only gotten worse. Yeah, and Black Rock, Blackstone, all the major hedge funds, all the banks, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, they put money in China. And

whose money did they put? Well, you know, if you're a teacher. Raise your hand if you have any money in a retirement fund anywhere in your money's in China. Exactly. Yeah. And all China has. to do is say, and this is what's going to happen, I can tell you right now what's going to happen. When they invade Taiwan and we say, we are going to sanction you, they're going to say, guess what, all that money that your retirement funds had invested in China, it's now worthless. Not only that, because we don't make our own antibiotics, we're just not going to send you any of those either. So are you sure that you want to sanction us because we've just invaded Taiwan? This is the power that the unrestricted warfare kind of created the principles that allowed them to think about the world differently.

Let's plug into it, but let's plug into it according to our way of thinking. The United States, in 99, we were all about what, smart bombs, I remember they called them. It's so funny because these terms from the 90s are so antiquated now, right? Smart bombs, which we thought like, wow, you can drop a bomb and it lands where you want it to. And now in 2022, it's like, wait, you used to drop a bomb and it would just go somewhere in the area you dropped it? That sounds horribly dangerous. Now, of course, we can drop that thing within what, like three to six feet of where it's supposed to be, maybe even smaller. What do I know? Well, I mean, yeah, you saw the strike on Zalohiri. I mean, that was a hellfire missile that was made to take out a person. Crazy.

No explosive on board. It was made to take out a person. So, you know, and Christian Brose talks about this. He's got a book called The Kill Chain. And, you know, when you kind of look at the way that these colonels are thinking about war and you're looking at Christian. What Christian Brose is saying is, we did not embrace Silicon Valley. And if we did, it'd make us more efficient at killing people, right? We could use the iPhone to be better killers.

But the two colonels are saying, what are you talking about? Right. Kill people? why not use TikTok to change the way they think about how their society should be organized so that they like communism better than democracy? You don't have to kill anybody. You don't have to blow anything up. You don't have to take the risk of having that blowback on you.

But slowly over time, people start to look at you and say, oh, why don't we organize our country like China? Because China is so much better to live. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, General Spalding. We'll be right back. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like, all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet.

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Now, back to General Spalding. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but my buddy, who's a comedian in his defense, that's something that I thought was both sort of funny and also eerily possible, which was, what if, and again, it's a conspiracy theory that's meant to be kind of a joke, What if TikTok is designed to get everybody here watching stupid stuff, doing stupid dances instead of studying, making themselves better, building something, adding to society in some way? They're just designed to get sucked into that thing for three hours a day and do absolutely nothing of use or benefit. And I thought, wow, that would be a pretty good weapon to have, right? Social media aside, to just create something where the youth and adults who should know better spend hours of their day absolutely in a coma staring at their phone.

on the toilet or whatever until their legs fall asleep, right, instead of studying or doing something productive. And I know that he's kind of joking, but it's like, man, that's maybe he's not totally off on this kind of thing. The United States seems to have gotten better in the last 20 years in terms of unconventional warfare, right? Somalia, Afghanistan, not that those wars went well, but we had to fight less conventional wars. It's not like we don't know anything about unconventional or indirect conflict anymore. I think in 99 it was like, now, we're just going to bomb everything into oblivion and then roll in with tanks. And that seemed like a great idea back then. Would you agree? Well, yeah. I mean, I think we live in two worlds. We live in a physical world

where somebody can walk through your door, put a gun to your head and say, I want you to do X. We also live in a digital world where is the world of TikTok. And yeah, we're pretty good at the former, right? We can talk. wrestle with the best of them. We can get in there and we can put a gun to somebody's head and we can take them out or we can say, hey, this is what we want you to do. That's not what unrestricted warfare is about. Unrestricted warfare is about the latter. It's basically saying, forget all that. Yes, that's the 20th century way of thinking about warfare. The 21st century way of thinking about warfare is just get them to do what you want because they think it's their idea. Get them to

give up their liberties because they think it's their idea. They're worried they're going to die from COVID. Okay, well, then let them, basic, convince them that if they do these things, they won't die from COVID, and it becomes a way for you to basically voluntarily go the way they want. And that's what they want. They don't want to create the risk of conflict, although in Taiwan, bets are off, but not against the United States. We've got nuclear weapons, could get messy. they could fight better enough. The Chinese aren't great fighters. They build a great wall that you can see from space, for God's sakes. They're not great fighters. But what they are good is at political warfare. And that's what this is about is how like how do I convince you to be on my side?

The funny things, when you work with Russians and then you work with Chinese, and when I'm saying Russians, I'm not talking about people from Russia or people from China, people that are part of the state apparatus. The Russians are like not friendly people by design. That's the way the system. The Chinese are great. They embrace you, you want to be your best friend. It's very disarming. And so when you take this approach, like, I am going to get you to be on my side, to think the way I think because it enriches you or you just, I'm using your words,

like the world economic form, and where it's in one world, we all need to work together, we need to do all these things. We're going to say those words, and you're going to think, oh, he or she is on my side, So therefore, we're sympathetico and our interests are aligned. Then they're going to do things that are completely at odds with what they say. And we're going to say, oh, that's odd. But, you know, they said, you know, they're going to do this thing. And, you know, we trust them.

Right. Yeah, we're used to dealing with diplomats that want to solve a problem, not diplomats that are deliberately obfuscating and running interference for their intelligence services or their military. Not that that has never happened in the past. I mean, we see that in the prelude to war, right? We saw that a lot with, I think, the Soviets, but that's a generation ago. Modern diplomats, unless they've studied that stuff, upside down, left and right.

They're not necessarily going to go into the interaction thinking, this person is trying to deceive me. This is me talking with the foreign minister of Japan before Pearl Harbor or after Pearl Harbor, right? This is different. And we think we have international institutions that are going to stand for law and order and when we don't. You've said in the book, and I think this is what they wrote. in unrestricted warfare in 99, the best strategy for warfare is not to kill but to control. So the CCP, yeah, they want us to be confused, argue with each other, be enslaved by economics and disinformation. And so far so good, I would say, unfortunately, especially in the last few years,

we've really seen this come to light. And on the plus side, I think now people go, what the hell happened though? That's weird. I'm not, this is really strange, what's happening, and we're telling you what is happening and hope, I think more and more people start to go, okay, I understand. I'm starting to understand this because we see the perception of China sliding downhill on the international stage, and I'll talk about that in a second. One note that you wrote in the book that I thought was so observant isn't quite the right word, but perhaps astute was the battlefield for China when it comes to information and diplomacy and economics is everywhere. I mentioned before, the United States is siloed when it comes to the military. They're the ones that fight the battle.

China's different. Everyone in the CCP is fighting the battle at every level. Corporate wonks steal IP, hackers cause damage to networks, financial institutions rip off foreign clients and companies and investors. Diplomats make empty threats and posture, like with Taiwan and now the military exercises they're running right now that you sort of mentioned at the top of the show. And the financial warfare that you talked about, you mentioned George Soros, this isn't really something we're used to hearing about in the West. They know that financial warfare is highly effective because they saw the, was it the debt crisis in the 90s that Southeast, the Asian financial crisis? I was a kid. Yeah, I don't remember it. I was like 16. I was more concerned about how

to afford gas for my Ford Tempo GL, but, or my Ford Topaz or whatever it was. A guest on the show, Dan David talked about this episode 476. There's a lot of companies in China that will just acquire a U.S. company through a reverse merger, list a bunch of shares for their paper factory. and then Dan David was sending investigators to look at the paper factory, and it's an empty building with a bunch of rotten cardboard outside. It's not a billion dollar paper company. Nobody freaking checked, and they're just like, yeah, we're just going to take your money. What are you going to do? It's not illegal for us to steal from you. And that's true. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. So it's so outside of the view of Americans, and they don't even understand it. Like,

I'll just give you one. People think it's a domestic political issue. It's not a domestic political issue, it's part of our system. So the Chips Act that was just passed. What's that going to do? We're going to spend $46 billion of taxpayers' money to rebuild chip fabrication factories in the United States. I think it's something very important, something that we should do. The Semiconductor Industry Association said, okay, great, you guys are going to give us $46 million to build these factories in America. But we notice over here in paragraph three that you're saying that we can't invest our money in China. You're going to invest your money in us. We need to take that part out. People listen. Oh, well, some senators are saying, hey, we shouldn't pass this bill for this 46 billion

dollars. And people are saying, what, you don't want to rebuild the chip factories? No, the industry itself, basically, we're going to put our money in the industry, and they're going to put their money in China. That's what's in the bill. It's so insidious, and it works right into our political system, but it's so complicated and outside the view of regular Americans. They believe we need a chip industry. I think most Americans would agree with that. What they don't understand is that the actual apparatus says those private companies could be investing their money in America, but they're not. They want to invest it in China. I did read and tell me if I'm mistaken here that there is a provision in the bill that

says that these companies cannot expand or build new factories overseas at all if they're taking this money, or at least in China. I can't remember if it's, it may be you're allowed to in Germany or something. That was the original language. And I've seen this time and time again. They get it watered down. They get loopholes in it because, you know, it's globalization. We need to be able to move our money wherever. And when you have a relationship between the chip industry and China where the chip industry wants to sell chips to China, then China can say, hey, you know, you got this bill coming up. You know, if you want to sell chips to China, you better make sure that you fix that. And so who's going to lobby Washington, D.C.? It's not Huawei. It's not Lenovo.

It's Intel. It's the chip industry themselves. And so they are just trying to run their business, right? They are trying to be good stewards of the shareholders' value. It's not their fault either. When FDR had it out with the business community prior to World War II and said, look, guys, this is the way we're going to go. You get to a point where the government has to step in and say, okay, the free enterprise is designed to be free and is designed for, you know, to maximize shareholder value. And the Chinese have rigged the system so that when you take a shareholder value, you equate that to doing things the way the China wants. That becomes a national security issue because now you can't have chips or antibiotics. That's a problem. Now the government has to step in and say, okay, the free market is not delivering.

And Alexander Hamilton said this. Even Adam Smith said this when talking about the invisible hand of economics. National security is a reason for the government to get involved in free trade. Otherwise, yes, specialization and trade, it makes all boats rise. But in cases where national security is concerned, in cases where a mercantiless power, which is essentially what China is, basically distorts the free market economy, then the government must step in because this is not the role of business to protect our nation. All they're trying to do is increase shareholder value.

Yeah, it's easy to say, oh, well, shame on Intel and these other companies. I'm only picking on Intel because I can't name another. AMD. I don't know. That might even be a brand under Intel. Right. These companies, it's easy to say, shame on them. And to some degree, it's like, okay, well, all right.

But if you own stock in that company, you want them to be able to build. I am very sad to hear that they took that provision out of the Chipsville. I was pretty stoked to hear, oh, good. It's actually going to be invested in the United States. But if we're just subsidizing these companies so that they have more money to invest overseas, especially in hostile states, like China, that is somehow, even worse, I suppose not even worse. It's almost as bad as just letting them do whatever the hell they want in the first place. At least we're going to have some chip factories here

while they expand their Chinese operations. Hopefully it results in them mostly putting their focus here, but we, I mean, really, really have to be careful giving all of our blueprints of all of our semiconductors and all of our AI in quantum computing and logistics, everything over to a state that has literally said, we're going to use this against you and use it to subjugate you and screw up your entire country and the world order so that you're subservient to us. That is really dumb. I mean, it's just dumb at this point if we're allowing this to happen. And it's really clear that the U.S. is playing checkers and China's playing chess.

And that's sad for us because we should know better. We do know better. We just don't care somehow. Here's one that I think will resonate with people, you know, that's a little bit more conventional. And you would think would be obvious. So, you know, me as a military member, I put into something called the Thrift Savings Plan. It's like a 401K for the military. And, you know, the Thrift Saving Plan board decided that, hey, they're going to take my

retirement money, you know, B-2 pilot, and they're going to invest it in aviation industry corporation of China that makes a J-20 that's designed to shoot down the B-2. Unbelievable. So my retirement funds are going to fund the weapons that I may be seeing, you know, in the air, you know, as an active duty Air Force member. That's the craziness that when we get so entwined with China, that's what's going on. And I think you just can't say it's business. Well, it's just business.

No, we can't be just business. Unrestricted warfare, again, the document from the 90s written by these Chinese colonels, they state, hey, biological warfare, exploiting natural disasters, all that should be on the table. And we can see how the CCP used COVID to damage the rest of the world by letting it spread, lying about the origins, blame the United States, blaming Australia for originating it, even though it was, of course, from Wuhan. It's all in the playbook. It just seems like their plan, with COVID especially, was facilitated by a lot of the international organizations that the United States built with its allies during the Cold War. Maybe not taken over, but they've

certainly infiltrated these. Like the World Health Organization, let's talk about the WHO. They essentially whitewashed the coronavirus for China. Can you tell us about this? And if you look at, you know, War Without Rules. In unrestricted warfare, they write, oh, the United States has used the international order to get what they want. They use the international order to get the UN to say, it's okay for you to invade Iraq. And then they created all of this alliance structure to get, using the UN as a means. What if you want to fight, that you need to use these international institutions to get the, you know, your interest be at the top of the, so how do you do that? Well, you actually, there's two ways to you do that. You get, you know, allies. So the Belt and

Road Initiative is a good way to get allies. Like now you've got the African nations, Central Asian nations, you know, a lot of Middle Eastern nations voting along the lines of what China wants at the UN. You have Greece and you have, I think, Hungary in the EU basically. So EU is taken off the playing board. That's one way. Then the other way is, hey, we need all of these agencies that are within these international institutions are run by people. They're typically, you know, before unrestricted warfare, they were typically, you know, placed there by the United States or by the United States and its allies. Now they're placed there. And this, the good example, you know, using the organization you just mentioned is Tidros. Tidros is China's plant to run the

World Health Organization. And so they have used, you know, basically the system we built. They've just basically moved in that been better at the politics of the international institutions over the last 30 years than we have. And now they're running it. And that's some of the frustration that we have. Why are we not getting outcomes from these international institutions that actually promote, you know, civil liberties, rule of law, free trade, human rights? It's like, you know, one party, another party, are fighting in the Congress. One party gets control. They get what they want. The Chinese are fought politically over the last 30 years to gain control of the international system. World Health Organization is just one example of that. And now they're using it to get their policies

instantiated throughout the world. Lockdowns. Perfect example. Lockdowns come from China, January 23rd. Xi Jinping locked down Wuhan. Before that, we never had lockdowns in our lexicon. All of a sudden, within a couple weeks, WHO, lockdowns stop the virus. Guess what? Everybody puts in lockdowns in place. And now it's like, oh, lockdowns, lockdowns made all kinds of sense. No, they don't. They made no scientific sense whatsoever.

There's no data to back up that would be effective. And in fact, what you've seen with the spread of coronavirus, whether you're Sweden or Italy, it spreads. No matter what you do from a policy, it's a virus. It's going to spread. I think that's the power of unrestricted warfare is knowing that if I get into these institutions and I get control of them and I start to control the narrative and, you know, these institutions start to say the policy of or should be this, democracies will don't take them because it's coming from the WHO. Yeah, the World Health Organization. I think that that's a little bit scary because

we want to be able to trust these. We don't want to think, oh, there's a thumb on the scale from an authoritarian regime that wants us to make mistakes. so make recommendations that screw everyone over. Look, I'm not saying that they're doing that in every instance, but we certainly saw that WHO is more than happy to say, well, we're not sure. We're going to delay the investigation. Oh, they're not going to let us in. Cool. We're not going to make a big stink about that. Oh, they're going to let us in a year later after all the evidence is gone, and they can say that this was nothing. And again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but like if you're trying to play by an international set of laws, then for God's sake,

try to look a little bit less guilty, right? Just a little bit. What do you think about Biden's new plan, I don't know if it's Biden's plan, I should say, but the administration's new plan to partner with India, Australia, and other nations to limit China's ability to operate in the South China Sea. For those who don't know, you've got all these countries around the South China Sea, Taiwan, Vietnam, I think Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, I'm probably forgetting a few of these. But China says, hey, these are our waters now. You can't really do anything here. And they're saying, you're literally fishing off the coast of my country and taking all the fish.

and we don't even allow our own fishermen to do that. What the hell? Get out of here. And China says, tough rocks, we're going to build a military base on an island that we now say as ours or that we built in the South China Sea. There's now a plan to partner with India, Australia, and some of these other nations to limit China's influence in that area. What do you think about initiatives like that? The problem with our system is that separation of business and government. In the White House, you have the National Security Council and you have the National Economic Council. The National Security Council looks after the National Security United States, the National Economic Council looks after the Economic Health of the United States. If the National Security Council, which it has,

says, hey, we've got a problem with China, the National Economic Council says, no, we don't. You know, we want to keep our economic relationship with China going. And so you start to think about, okay, how do we look at national security and foreign policy in a world where China has basically hijacked the international order? Then you look at the federal bureaucracy, right, that kind of of sits behind those two organizations within the White House, in the NSA, State Department, the Intelligence Community, DOD, and then the NEC, National Economic Council, the Commerce Department, and the Treasury Department. So what happens? Well, the Commerce Department, who's tied to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate sector, and the Treasury Department, who's tied to Wall Street,

basically take an opposite point of view. And so when the National Security Council says, hey, we need to do something about this. Okay, let's come up with this idea of Ocas. What will Ocas do? Ocas will get, you know, Australia, U.S., and India, and Japan to kind of work together in the quad. We're going to counteract, you know, Chinese actions in Indo-Pacific. Okay, great. But guess what? A lot of their undermining actions come in the commercial and financial area. And guess what? the National Economic Council, the Commerce Department, and the Treasury Department, aren't going to participate in that. So how does that play out? Oh, well, you're talking about, you know, Fiji or any of these, you know, smaller territories that are caught in between, say,

Ocas and China. Well, the Chinese aren't going to go over there and invade them with military, so this side doesn't work. What happens? They start giving them money to build stuff and to develop their economy. And so all of a sudden, they're using these elements to undermine national security. So ACUS is a great idea. It's just incomplete. And as we saw during the first Cold War, if you don't basically make it comprehensive, in other words, DOD, State Department, the intelligence community, commerce and treasury, all working together to protect democracies, it's not going to work, it's going to fail because if we had allowed the Soviet Union to get inside our financial systems and get inside of our corporate sector, they would have done the same thing that China did.

I think they would have caught on like, oh, they're letting us get into their industrial base. They were letting us get into their financial system. We didn't. They were completely cut out. And so I think the Chinese and these two colonels basically said, okay, they're letting us come here. Why would we even mess with these guys? Let them go off and do figure eights around the islands in the South China. see. We don't care. We'll yell at them, you know, whatever. In the meantime, we're going to be

buying everything up. You know, it's just a different way of looking at the problem. It's frustrating because there have to be people in our government that know better. I mean, look, you know this. There's got to be plenty of people that know that these agreements are half measures. Why are we not doing this? Is it just so antithetical to the United States to tell businesses what they can and can't do or to regulate our financial system that we just can't get it together? You're taught in the federal government that know your lane, stay in your lane. You know, when I was briefing the senior leaders in the military about the problems we had, they're like, yeah, that's really bad, but it's not in my lane. My lane's over here, okay? I can't do anything

to help that. And so when you look at the interagency, everybody kind of stays in their lane. And so Commerce Department doesn't do national security. Treasury doesn't do national security. come, they have relations with, you know, particularly political appointees, they come from the financial industry. They come from the corporate sector that work in the Commerce and Treasury Department. So getting them to think outside of that box is really, really hard to do. And then the permanent party civilians, they're counseled time and time again. Stay in your lane. Don't get out of your lane. It's in the seams between those lanes that the Chinese operate. And since there are no lanes for them. You know, when they look at warfare, it's across everything. And so if I can be across

everything and I see, oh, there's a weakness here and there's a weakness here, this is really tough. I'm going to go over here because I can't. And nobody's telling me I can't because more importantly they're saying, not only can you, you should because that's the easier way to go after the problem. And so Washington, D.C., unfortunately, because we have this separation between kind of the private sector in government, they can't get within their minds that, and it was only because, you know, I'm kind of more of a rabble rouser, and I'm like, why, why should I stay over here? Yeah, I can drop bomb 6,000 miles away. I'm not going to drop them on China. They're probably not going to drop them on us. Meanwhile, I see that they're basically running through the door here that we've kind of left

open. Shouldn't I do something about that? I got, you know, counseled a lot of times. Why are you doing this? And I'm like, because nobody else is. I mean, that's our job. We, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. I see being trampled because it's not in my lane. So, you know, I know it's a long wind of the answer, but that's essentially what goes on. People, you know, stay in their lane. It seems like we should be aware of all this by now. I mean, do you see there being changed or is it just too slow?

There's awareness. Yeah. Okay. There's awareness. But all the problems, the structural problems I just talked about exist. They are there. And absent somebody with authority. to break down those walls, those barriers, and saying, no, we're at war with China, not a war that

we understand or even would agree that this is a right way to wage war, even think about. We have to accept that as fact, and then we have to begin to organize ourselves, not like we did with the Soviet Union, but in a different way to protect our nation. And I think only until then, and by the way, President Trump didn't figure this out. He didn't understand all the intellectual underpinnings of what I'm telling you. The establishment in Washington, D.C. doesn't agree with this. They believe that we should have, you know, this relationship with China that continues along the same lines. But there is an awakening that is happening in Washington, D.C. that people that maybe, I guess, they're more young, they're up and coming, and they're

beginning to question why we're doing things. So I think in that group, you're seeing a realization that we have this problem. But even that can get fouled up by the fact that we're a democracy. And so, and the Chinese take advantage of the fact that we will use your week on China as to score political points. Well, then it becomes, you know, how do I just find my political stance with regard to China so that I can make sure that I can get reelected? And what do my constituencies think about this? And so our domestic politics gets in the way of us actually solving the problem. You know, it is very much still, like FDR's challenge with Nazi Germany and getting the American people. I think the American people came before the corporate sector came. It is the truth that the corporate sector has

enormous influence over Washington, D.C. And I would say, you know, we've had signways. There's a good book called Goliath by Matt Stoller. And he talks about these, you know, sign waves of heavy consolidation of economic power and then the breaking down of that via antitrust. And I think we have gotten to a point where we're very consolidated with economic power. Those very large corporations has an outsized ability to influence a political process. And that's exactly the types of institutions that the Chinese Communist Party loves to work with. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, General Spalding. be right back. If you liked this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other supportive

listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the discounts and deals and codes are all on one page. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it. You can always search for a sponsor using the search box on the website as well. Jordan Harbinger.com is where you'll find it. Thank you so much for supporting those who support us. It does keep us going, and it makes it possible for us to continue creating these episodes week after week. Now for the rest of my conversation with General Spalding. It reminds me of, and I'm going to screw this up, this quote, but I think it was standard oil. The president said, hey, stop shipping Hitler oil.

What are you doing? We're in war. And he said, well, we got a contract with him. And it's just like, are you kidding me? We're talking about the existence of the free world here. And you're like, well, I got a piece of paper that says you're going to give me money and I'm going to give you oil, knock it off. And this is what we're doing with our semiconductors with our AI technology, with our quantum computing technology, with IP, whether we want to give it to them or it's stolen. It just seems like people are saying, well, it's business.

I have to manufacture everything there because it's going to be cheaper. A lot of military experts say that the invasion of Taiwan is going to show a ton of build-up, ships, armor, et cetera, on the shores of mainland China. But in the book, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army colonels that wrote Unrestricted Warfare, they marveled at the U.S.'s use of helicopters in Desert Storm. I don't know anything about military strategy, but is there a scenario in which China or the CCP uses essentially a helicopter army to cross the 100-mile time? Taiwan Strait as opposed to slowly sailing across?

I absolutely believe that that's, you know, what they're going to do. I mean, we have been so kind of preoccupied by the invasion force coming by the, and I'm not saying that they're not going to use the maritime domain, but I do think that they are going to take advantage of air power in many ways. They're going to use ballistic missiles. They're going to use rockets. And they have so many weapons stored on their side of the strait. It would boggle your mind.

they're going to use fighter jets. They're going to use bombers. They're going to use, you know, massive waves of helicopters for assaulting the island. I think the difference between, and this is the problem with people trying to take the Russia-Ukraine scenario and say, oh, yeah, you know, Russia thought they were just going to march in there and, you know, take over Ukraine. Russia has got an economy less than the size of Texas. And most of their stuff is old. And, you know, they tried to min-run it because they had to because that's all they had. The Chinese aren't going to do that. It's going to be massive. It's going to be overwhelming. It's going to be fast when it happens. It'll be over like Iraq was, and it'll be mostly from the air because there is no way to drive a tank from the mainland to Taiwan. And amphibious assaults are extremely, extremely dangerous. In fact, it's why they believe that between, you know, the months of April and October, the sea states are the best time for invasion.

So that's when they will come. I actually think that they're going to take advantage of the fact that, oh, well, the Chinese would never invade now. You know, the sea states are really bad, you know, for that. That's exactly when they're going to come. It's going to be so overwhelming. People are going to be shocked, I think. It's going to be the same type of shock that the world was shocked when Desert Storm happened. And I think everybody was put off by just absolutely flabbergasted by how fast America was able to subdue Iraqi

forces and just wipe them out. That's what's going to happen when China invades Taiwan. And I'm more worried, quite frankly, in the aftermath, how are we going to survive as a nation when the Chinese say antibiotics are gone, you know, figure it out, microelectronics. I mean, most of the stuff that makes up the products that you buy, if it's not the products themselves, comes from China. All that stuff, you know, is liable to be cut off when this happens. Yeah, it seems like if it's comes from the air, it's going to be a lot less warning, a lot less time to prepare for the attack. It seems like you don't think Taiwan is very prepared for this. I read something about a military officer from Taiwan giving a talk, I think in China, saying, oh, Taiwan doesn't stand a chance.

If that's real, they should hang that guy for treason, but he might also be right, not that he should have said it in China. Not that they could repel an invasion force anyway, but is it even going to be that costly? Are they sort of keeping their eye on the ball over there? Do we know? You've got 1.4 billion people. You've got the, again, purchasing power parity. You've got the number one economy in the world. You've got the ability to create all these weapons. You have been creating these weapons.

You've taken technology from the United States. Now in some areas like AI, you lead in technology. And you've got an island of 23 million, right? That's doing great. Best chip manufacturers in the world. They own most of the chip manufacturing through Taiwan semiconductor. sector, nothing to sneeze about, but it's 23 million people and it's a little island against, you know, a massive mainland of 1.4 billion with all the resources of the number one economy

in the world. It's not shameful to say the Chinese are going to overwhelm Taiwan. You know, you wouldn't get mad because a six-foot-five, 300-pound man goes and stomps a toddler and say, well, you know, that toddler should have been able to defend itself. So, the, then it becomes, well, can they hold out long enough for the United States to get there? Get there and do what? Go to war with China, who has nuclear weapons, is not afraid to use them when they're talking about Taiwan? You're going to trade Tai Bay for Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. or New York? Probably not. What are you going to go there to do? Probably evacuate people, probably help, you know, get them out, the least of ones that want to leave, just like they left the mainland in the first place. So when I'm kind of looking at this logically, It's not shameful to say this is going to happen and it's going to happen very quickly. And we should be thinking about what are the implications. Not just that of what happens to those people. I think 70, 80 percent of the people are just going to want to stay there in Taiwan.

They're going to become Hong Kong, right? They're going to become another province of China. But there's going to be 20 percent or so that want to leave. We ought to facilitate their ability to leave and provide aid and comfort for those that are harmed in the invasion. but that's not shameful. It's just reality. And I think in our own domestic politics, we get hung up by this fact that we can't say that there's a peer adversary. There's a near peer adversary. Bologna. We're not even a near peer adversary when it comes to the amount of force they have on the other side of the Taiwan straight. We are just there kind of looking from afar saying, oh boy, I hope this thing

doesn't go the way I think it's going to go, but it is. And there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. You don't think that the Ukraine situation dissuaded them because China can punch back so hard if we sanction them. It's just not going to be an issue. Whereas Russia, I mean, they can't really do much. Yeah, I mean, I think this is the problem with China experts. They're like, oh, well, China's going to be deterred or dissuaded by X. That's not the way the Chinese Communist Party works.

They look at a situation and they learn from it. Their goal is their goal. They're not going to say, oh, that goal is no longer our goal. No, it's still our goal. oh, this is what America and the West did to the Russians when they invaded Ukraine? Okay, and they did. Last week of April, called in all the bankers from around the world. Okay, what happened? What do we do if we face these kinds of sanctions? So what are they doing? Just like they put in place the non-convertable currency and strict capital controls for the financial system, they're going to make sure that whatever sanctions we put in place

are ineffective. So they're looking at that and they're learning, okay, what are all the things that we need to learn in terms of how the international order will respond to this, and then how do we ensure that those, that response is ineffectual. That's it. China used to operate under Deng Xiaoping, the idea that you should hide your strength, bide your time. Why do you think China dropped that whole idea? It's very obvious now. They're obvious about everything they do now. It's very much wolf warrior diplomacy, like, you're going to suffer consequences. I mean, they're just, they're actually kind of ridiculous and cliche, some of the stupid stuff that Jiao Li Jian says on Twitter, or from his podium when he's reading his pre, you know, his garbage speeches where he's just

talking a bunch of nonsense. Most countries have a much more negative view of China than they have in years past, as we mentioned earlier. It's wild when you look at the data. I mean, opinion went from, I don't think about it much, or mostly positive, to overwhelmingly negative. They showed their cards pretty early here. Why?

Well, I mean, just kind of replay in your mind the words, hide your capability and bide your time, right? It's not, hey, you know, the Americans have a better way of living. Let's try to figure out how to do that. No, it's hide your capability, hide your time until we have the power to actually be who we are. We would rather be who we are as the number one fish in the pond than try to be who we are as the number 20 fish in the pond. If we're acting like the Russians did or we act like North Korea or we act like Iran, guess what? We're not going to get any help from the banks. We're not going to get any help from the corporations.

We're not going to get any help from the universities. We need all those things. Okay, so hide your capability, bide your time, take advantage of all you can. Let's make an assessment. Okay, we've reached enough power now. We are who we are. Now we can start saying with force, this is who we are. This is what we believe.

We actually think our system is better than yours. and we are showing you by all of these metrics. We're bringing these hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. We have this rising economy that rises every single year without fail. We own the global supply chain. Look at 2008. The Americans screwed up the global financial system, and we're coming in to bail them out. So that's what they're doing.

So this is just part of the natural order. Again, we try to project our vision of the future onto the world, and we just have to look at what's happening out there, and in this case, look at the Chinese Communist Party, and say, this is where they're going. We have to accept, acknowledge, embrace the fact that that's where they're going, and then we need to figure out what that means for us as a Democratic Republic, and then what do we need to do to survive. You know, Alexander Hamilton was under no illusion about the fact that America would come under attack as a democracy. FDR, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Reagan, you know, all kind of grew up in eras where the America was not always number one, but always had to be aware that there are others out there that are going to want to take our freedoms away. And the number one reason for having a constitutional republic was this idea of we have to come together. We all believe in democracy, but we all have to come together to defend each other because if not, we're going to get picked off and the whole thing's

going to come crashing down. In the last 30 years, we have been so fat, dumb, and happy. We forgot that the world is a dangerous place, that there are those out there that do not agree with the idea of individual liberty that are granted from God, and that they are willing to do anything it takes to make sure that that does not exist on this earth. And if we don't stand up and defend it, we're going to lose it. What can average citizens do listening to this? You know, we're talking about facing a hostile Chinese Communist Party. What can I do? You know, I don't really know. And I'm, I study this stuff. I look at it and what do I do? Just not, not invest in Alibaba. I mean, where do I begin? Well, I mean, that's a good start. Don't invest in Alibaba. Don't kind of succumb to the

corporate, you know, methodology. But also locally, you know, for the first thing, and this is why I got out, Number one, you can't really speak out when you're wearing the uniform. So I had to get out and kind of begin to, so I'm trying to help educate people. And I'm just trying to give you an on-ramp onto an area where you can start to learn for yourself. And you need to read. You need to communicate. You need to ask questions. And then locally, you can begin to do things that help get at the problem.

One of the biggest problems that we have from a political perspective, and this is whether you're on the right or the left, is the political system is not working for the American people. And there's a good book out there called the politics industry where it was written by a businesswoman from Wisconsin who had an epiphany that the political system, the two political parties were actually not working on behalf of the citizens. They were working on behalf of the party constituencies, the donors and, you know, the party establishment. And that in order to break that up, that you needed to create a voting system that allowed for more people to choose the representative. So rather than if you're in a blue district, the base of the Democratic Party choosing the candidate and that candidate winning the general election by the power of that base or in a red district having that happen, that you needed to have a way to have voting so that you could break down those lines so that, you know, Republicans and Democrats would have to, you know, come together in a candidate. It's not the number one choice for either one of them, but maybe it's the number three choice for either one of them.

And because it's the number three choice, that person listens to both sides. Political innovation is kind of the subtitle of the book, the politics industry, but it's looking at, how do we get back to where bipartisanship actually exists at the highest levels of government, and they work on behalf of the American people who have been complaining about the fact that all of our factories are gone and we don't have jobs? You know, I've been on a factory floor that's been broken down. So political activism, but not necessarily partisanship is what I'm talking about here. how do we get our political system to actually work better? You can do that at the local level. I, you know, focused on it as I want to start a company that would protect people from influence of their data or stealing of their data or, you know, that allow them to maintain a connection.

I did that in technology. There are so many, we're in a free country. You can look at the problem. You can learn and study it. And then you can go take your, where you think that your skills and your talents and your passion are best suited to go after. you know, what's the goal? And the goal is really the preservation of our, of our constitution. It is the thing. That document is a thing that gives us the freedom to do the things that we, that we want to do to kind of express ourselves. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show today. I know this topic is a little bit depressing. It's a little bit scary. And I want to reiterate, again, I know we said this at the top of the show, that this isn't about the Chinese people. It's about the Chinese Communist Party. The biggest victims of the Chinese Communist Party has always been the Chinese people. I mean, you're talking about 15 to 80 million dead under Mao, and that's just

the beginning. Weaker genocide in Xinjiang, and that's just, again, just the beginning. So I want to reiterate that because we have Chinese fans and people who live in America or Canada that are Chinese, and they're like, what the hell, man, you know what I do? I want people to realize that we're fighting for freedom, free market, fair play as much as possible, and not trying to single out any particular ethnicity here. I just really think that the Chinese people and China have such high potential. I mean, this should have been, they're opening up in liberalization and economic development should have been one of the greatest things to ever happen in the history of the world. And instead, it looks like all we did is create a monster, which is really sad. So hopefully we can

turn that around. Well, yeah, and my heart goes out to the people of China, the people of Hong Kong, the people of Taiwan. They're who I'm concerned about. And you're right. you know, freedom is really powerful as an idea. But if you're never allowed to even realize that it's something that's possible, it's not even an idea that's in your lexicon. And that's, you know, essentially what the Chinese Communist Party has been able to do through its propaganda and media and education. I get this in my Twitter feed. Oh, but it's also the Chinese people. No, the Chinese people don't know any better. They can't know any better because the Chinese Communist Party has created such an effective system. And it is a tragic.

I think we in being greedy and taking their money and allowing them to influence us are doing a complete disservice not only to our own citizens, but to the citizens of China and the citizens of Taiwan. I think we are perpetuating their enslavement. In the case of Taiwan, we're aiding and abetting their future enslavement. And much better for us to recognize what's going on and to begin the long, hard process as we did with the Soviet Union of pushing back and saying, no, we are going to meet you at every area, and we're going to be there to say, no, we will not stand for this. And we should do that because not only will that be better for the Chinese people, but our own democracy cannot exist in a world that is almost all authoritarian.

General Spalding, thank you so much. Thank you. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with an undercover FBI agent posing as an Islamic terrorist. I live with and grew up with the religion of Islam. After 9-11, and knowing full well that this was not the religion that was being portrayed, it kind of broke me a little bit inside. I was in law enforcement. I spoke Arabic. I'm a Muslim.

And my knee-jerk reaction was to simply help working undercover. It definitely is an adrenaline rush. unlike anything I could describe, putting your arm around someone, telling them that you're their best friend, getting them to believe you. But what attracted me a great deal to this case or what blew my mind about this case was the fact that he was arguably one of the smartest, most brilliant men I've ever been in front of. This guy was on the precipice of curing infectious diseases. The shit that he talked about in his work was science fiction to him. How could someone so smart So brilliant.

Such a gift to humanity. Turn into a fucking killer. An absolute disgusting piece of garbage overnight. He was the epitome of evil. So we're going up to his apartment, and it was right next to Ground Zero. And he put his arm around and looked up to where the towers work. And he said, Tamara, this town needs another 9-11,

and we're going to give it to him. I've heard him say so much horrible things for so long that you think at that moment in time, I could have just accepted it and gone up and did my job, but I couldn't. I imagined killing him right there and I imagine stabbing him in the eye with a pen I had in my pocket and leaving him for dead. To hear more from Tomer El Nouri about what drew him to the exciting and dangerous life of undercover law enforcement work, check out episode 572 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. So it's clear. China, well, the Chinese Communist Party, I'm going to differentiate those two a little bit later,

is at war with the West. We just don't seem to necessarily know it yet. I know a lot of people are waking up to this. I hate using that phrase because it makes me sound a little bit like the cooks who say, like, wake up, sheeple. That's not where I'm going with this. We do, though, need to finally get the friggin' memo over here. We have a great country.

The only ones who can beat us, in my opinion, are ourselves. if we do nothing to defend ourselves, we don't defend our values. Same thing goes for Canada, Europe. These are great nations. We have to defend our values from people that want to destroy those things. I mean, this is really as simple as it gets. What measures do we need to put in place? We need government. We need agreements. We need international accords. We need people to be on the same page and not be in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party. I think we should also probably not allow certain funds, especially pension funds, to invest in China. We need to reallocate that to investment in allied countries, not just the United States, allied countries that have similar

values, allied industries. We need to create our own communications infrastructure, 5G system. We need to focus on STEM education scholarships. We need to consolidate bureaucracy, especially with respect to military and intelligence affairs. That whole area seems to be a giant mess, especially according to General Spalding's book here. We need to see a growth strategy here in the United States and the West in general, and see that as a matter of national security, not as purely capitalist economics. We need to see that as a matter of national security. Also, I wanted to address, there's a lot of videos going around like, China's going to collapse in 72 days. All of that is nonsense. And when we put stuff like that out there, I get that

it's clickbait, headline crap, but I see people who should know better doing things like that. We need to be honest with ourselves if we're going to face an actual danger. There's a lot of wishful thinking out there about what China is going to be doing or the future of China, and I just don't think it's helpful. Also, interesting lines here from the book, The Chinese Communist Party, their unrestricted warfare doctrine, that publication, admired bin Laden because his plan was to suck the West into war and bankrupt us. That almost worked. Maybe it's even too early to say that it hasn't worked. We need to attack that strategy. A lot of policies Trump put in place stayed in place under Biden because frankly they were effective, China-related policies especially. And so say what you will

about Trump. He was right about a lot of things when it came to China. And I know a lot of people will disagree and I'm going to get a lot of email like, but seriously, we can say what we want about either president. They're going to be right about some stuff and wrong about some stuff. And frankly, they're both doing the same thing when it comes to China. That should tell you all you need to know. Social media companies also need to be aware and counter Chinese Communist Party propaganda. I'm not one of those McCarthyists who sees communism everywhere, but man, do we need to stronger encryption for communications, better privacy laws here in the United States, no more wholesale dumping of Americans' data into big tech and sold to the highest bidder. That is a major

mess just waiting to happen. The answer to Chinese Communist Party's doctrine of unrestricted warfare is not unrestricted warfare of our own. This would ruin our democratic free society. What we need is overt and transparent defense. In fact, transparency shine a little sunlight on that would be the antidote to a lot of this. Right, if we see what we're creating here in communications infrastructure, we see where our data is going, we see where our money is being invested,

that is going to be the antidote to a lot of the nonsense we see where people are talking out of both sides of their mouth. All right, as with all episodes about China and the Chinese Communist Party, I have to reiterate again that Chinese people are not the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Party

does not represent the values of many Chinese, especially Chinese folks that live overseas who may have fled to your country or the United States escaping the Chinese Communist Party. So when you hear episodes like this, don't let it make you more racist or more skeptical of your Chinese friends and neighbors. Let it educate you on what we all face together, regardless of ethnicity or creed. And remember, the number one victim of the Chinese Communist Party is and always has been

the Chinese people themselves. Big thank you to General Spalding. General Spalding will be linked in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes. Videos are up on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I said it once. I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I fully expect this video to be demonetized because the CCP internet army of troll, they love to report things like this is age inappropriate when we criticize the Communist Party. It's the whole thing. So I'm pretty sure we're going to make Jack Squad on YouTube for this one.

Our sponsors is even more important. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find all those codes. Again, please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system, software, and tiny habits that I use every single day. It's a free course, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. You can't really build relationships when you need them.

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