If elected president in 2024, former vice president Mike Pence says he has a plan for taking on China. In a Monday afternoon speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., Pence argued the U.S. can only counter the Chinese Communist Party’s influence by recommitting itself to a robust presence on the international stage.
“It is no real surprise that weakness arouses evil,” Pence said.
The former vice president placed plenty of blame on President Joe Biden and his administration, saying the current White House has taken a posture of appeasement when dealing not just with Xi Jinping but with many other malign actors across the globe, from Iran — to which Biden recently approved the transfer of $6 billion in exchange for five American prisoners — and the Taliban, to a revanchist Russia. Pence believes the U.S.’s exit from Afghanistan sent a message to America’s adversaries that the U.S. could not be counted on to defend its national interests and the cause of freedom and democracy.
“The disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan has emboldened the enemies of freedom around the world,” Pence said, “and now war rages in Europe and China increases its military provocations in the Asia-Pacific.”
Pence laid out several strategies for reining in China’s expansionary aims. Among them are building up the size of the U.S. Navy’s fleet, improving bomber readiness, and ensuring the country’s naval munitions stockpiles are up to snuff. Outside the realm of military deterrence, the former vice president addressed the influx of Chinese-made fentanyl flowing across the U.S.’s southern border, efforts to decouple the American economy from reliance on China and its centrally-planned industries, protecting intellectual property from CCP theft, and prohibiting Chinese nationals from purchasing American farmland.
Many of the remedies Pence outlined in his speech sound similar to steps the Trump administration — or the Trump-Pence administration, as the former vice president is wont to call it — undertook. The U.S. has “a new and much tougher stance on China,” Pence said Monday.
This is not Pence’s first speech addressing the threat China poses. In a talk at the Hudson Institute in 2018, he explained how Xi has sought to advance China’s strategic interests worldwide and outlined the concrete actions he and former president Donald Trump took to curb China’s aspirations. Pence made similar speeches at the Wilson Center in 2019 and the Heritage Foundation in 2021. Many political observers often credit Trump with turning the country’s attention toward the CCP’s ambitions, including the former vice president.
“Over the course of our administration, we changed the national consensus on China,” Pence said. “Under our administration, we met China’s military provocations in the Western Pacific with the largest increase in military spending since the days of Ronald Reagan. We were the first country to sanction Chinese leaders for building concentration camps in Xinjiang and for undermining democracy in Hong Kong.”
Despite that record, Pence sees foreign affairs, including the U.S.’s China strategy, as a point of departure between him and his former boss. A senior Pence campaign adviser told reporters Monday morning that he can’t remember a time Trump has “given a policy speech on China in the last two-and-a-half years.”
“[Trump’s] admonition was not to be too tough on China,” an adviser said about the former president’s warning to Pence before his 2019 Wilson Center speech. Disregarding his former boss, the former vice president said, “China is the greatest strategic and economic threat to the United States of America in the 21st century, and we must meet that threat with American strength.”
Pence sees the Biden administration’s foreign policy and the rising tide of isolationism within the Republican Party as a burgeoning threat to U.S. national security and global stability.
“It’s important to note that the choice voters face in this election is actually more complicated than the typical choice between Republican and Democrat visions of foreign policy,” Pence explained. “That’s because some Republican candidates, including my former running mate, are abandoning the traditional conservative position of American leadership on the world stage and embracing a new and dangerous form of isolationism.”
Arguing that isolationism is no different from appeasement, Pence stated that the war in Ukraine directly impacts all other national-security concerns with which the U.S. must contend.
“Beijing watches the war in Ukraine with great interest,” Pence said, “assessing how much aggression the West will tolerate as it maps out its own intentions, especially when it comes to Taiwan.”