American strategists eager to counter threats from China should not marginalize Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to former President Donald Trump’s top adviser for U.S. policy toward Beijing.
“We’re dealing with tentacles of an octopus now,” former White House deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation. “It doesn’t make sense for us to say, ‘Well, let’s ignore the tentacle that’s grabbing a big chunk of Europe,’ or, ‘Let’s ignore the one that’s that’s now starting to squeeze the Philippines, and just focus on the tentacle that’s starting to surround Taiwan’ … because it’s the same frickin’ octopus, OK? This is an axis with Beijing at the center.”
The question of whether and to what degree the United States should support Ukraine has proven contentious on the Right. Some influential former Trump administration officials and congressional allies argue that the war diverts limited U.S. resources and attention away from China, the more important long-term challenge. However, Pottinger argued that the U.S. and its allies have the resources to thwart Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
”There’s this fatalism that has creeped into the dialogue, partly this idea that, ‘Gee, what can we do? It’s, you know, Russia is a big country. China is a big country,’” he said. “Think about it this way: The United States, together with our allies … are a $60 trillion economy each year. … Russia is a $2 trillion economy. … If you add Beijing and the other axis of chaos members, like Iran, you add North Korea, throw in Venezuela, throw in Cuba for fun … all of those combined are about one-third of the $60 trillion democratic alliance. I think we can dig a little deeper, OK?”
Pottinger argued that the U.S. needs to adopt a more confrontational posture toward China and its junior partners, on the grounds that Xi has taken conciliatory gestures as an invitation to show more aggression.
“He’s waging proxy warfare against us in multiple theaters, [with] more theaters, possibly, to come soon,” Pottinger said. “The China policy even of the Trump era — which was, I think, fine for that time, it was a very important shift that President Trump led — it’s now out of date, in light of the fact that Beijing is leading proxy wars against us and our allies in multiple theaters.”
Chinese military textbooks dating back to 2018, the former Trump administration official recalled, have identified “chaos” in Europe as a strategic priority.
“Beijing wants to render Europe in chaos, and it wants the United States to eventually be irrelevant,” he said. “And so, what’s following since then is the strategy we’re seeing play out right now. Beijing is trying to shatter Europe — shatter it into a bunch of little pieces of crystal.”
Pottinger has suggested that if Trump returns to power, the former president would “focus on trade” in his approach to China. Yet he also has noted, in a recent interview with ChinaTalk, that “President Trump became pretty fed up with things that were not only related to trade, but that went far beyond trade.” Trump, for his part, claimed that President Joe Biden has mismanaged trade relations with China while failing to intimidate American adversaries.
“We are very, very close to World War III, and he’s driving us there,” Trump said last week during his debate with Biden. “And Kim Jong-Un, and President Xi of China, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, all of these, Putin, they don’t respect him. They don’t fear him. They have nothing going with this gentleman, and he’s going to drive us into World War III.”
Biden’s team has been at pains in recent years to establish military-to-military dialogues with China to mitigate the risk of a crisis spinning out of control. Pottinger, however, argued that Xi manipulates Biden and other U.S. officials by playing on their fear of an “accidental” military escalation — even while sending Chinese military forces to initiate an array of risky close encounters with U.S. forces in the region.
“In orchestrating these close encounters, Beijing has a psychological advantage over Washington: It knows that accidents don’t really lead to wars,” Pottinger said. “Beijing may calculate that even a mid-air or at-sea collision with [the] U.S. military entails limited downside risk and appreciable upside potential since it might persuade Washington, ever-fearful of the mythic accidental war, to reduce its military patrols in the western Pacific.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
A more muscular approach by the U.S. and its allies could mitigate that risk, he added, but it will require Western allies to accept the need to devote more resources to their militaries.
“So what I’m saying is enlarge the pie,” he said. “We have the smallest U.S. active duty military that we’ve had since the eve of World War II. …We are in a major crisis, a 1930s-style crisis, and we’re making decisions that we don’t need to be making about a small amount of resources when we can increase that amount of resources.”