Three things from this week’s pod with Mike Gallagher:
Despite the balloon, not enough work has been done to depict to the American people the threat posed by Communist China.
Victory in Ukraine is critical to deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Cutting defense doesn’t have the votes to pass.
Gallagher chairs the new House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party, and the picture he paints of the challenge ahead is frightening. As Communist Party Secretary General Xi Jinping grows ever more bellicose, significant chunks of both the Republican and Democratic parties are downplaying national security challenges, threatening to cut off U.S. assistance to Ukraine and mooting major cuts to defense. (The State of the Union was par for the course, with more than an hour wait until a brief mention of China and Ukraine.)
But Xi is watching Ukraine closely right now, looking at the efficacy of western weaponry, and gauging the will of the United States and Europe. Then, in less than a year, we’re looking at elections in Taiwan and the likely victory of the party most skeptical of relations with the mainland. “Xi Jinping will conclude that he can't achieve reunification of Taiwan with the mainland via political warfare, so he has to consider actual warfare,” explains Gallagher. Then the U.S. election comes along, with all the attendant infighting, division, and the weakness that projects.
Add to that proposed cuts to the U.S. Navy — under the Biden plan, the Navy bottoms out at 279 in 2027. In other words, as we plan disinvestment in our military modernity and strength, China will continue investing in its military power, with the odds of a confrontation at their moment of maximum strength and ours of maximum weakness. How does that end?
There are plenty of know-nothings who will insist that the fate of Taiwan, like that of Ukraine, is of no matter to voters in Indiana and Ohio. They are lying… Why? Because victory for China in democratic Taiwan is only a stepping stone to domination of the Pacific — critical to the U.S. economy, prosperity, and security. Perhaps few spare a thought for the million Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps or to the abasing of companies like Disney and national sports teams like those of the NBA before Chinese demands. But prostrating all of America before the Chinese Communist Party cannot be an attractive prospect; bowing down before concentration camp commandants is surely unappealing even to the most isolationist among us.
Those are the stakes.
h/t Jim Geraghty
HIGHLIGHTS
So, about that Chinese spy balloon…
MG: Let's just say there's no secret EMP hiding in the balloon, well, it's still a massive embarrassment. It still makes us look weak. I wouldn't be surprised if it was deliberately time to coincide with Secretary Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing, which he postponed. I think that's the right call, but that's right out of their playbook.
They've been really emphasizing the fact that this is not the first time this has happened. My first point is I've talked to a few high level Trump administration officials about this in the last 24 hours. They all are saying they're not aware of any incident, whether it was in Guam or Hawaii, of something like this happening. I don't know what's going on with that. That would be a bigger scandal if the Pentagon indeed was tracking one of these balloons and none of the civilian officials, whether it was the Secretary of Defense or Mass Security advisor or Secretary of State, were aware of it at that time.
Then my second point would be if indeed this is the third or fourth time we've seen a Chinese spy balloon over US territory, why then we have a more thought out standard operating procedure for how we take it down or how we disable it or how we better yet corral it, collect it.
How will you define the success of the new China select committee you chair?
MG: I think one measure of success will be that the committee still exists in the next Congress, even if control of the House changes hands. That will be a reflection on whether we were able to do this in a bipartisan fashion and prove our value over the next two years. The second thing is, I think there is a set of legislative and policy metrics building on the work of the China task force. The China task force under Chairman McCaul's leadership did a great job of collecting all of the existing off the shelf China related legislation that exists in the House and putting it all together in one place.
I do feel like our most important job is to explain to our colleagues and the American people why any of this matters. Why should someone care about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party? Maybe that's easier to answer when there's a big Chinese spy balloon hovering over a nuclear facility or a ranch in Montana.
I think the American people need to understand the way in which the Chinese Communist Party is trying to, if not destroy us completely, undermine us and render us subordinate, humiliated and wholly irrelevant on the world stage. I think the first task is just to point out the pattern of aggression. It's not an isolated incident in a hot air balloon. It's not an isolated incident on an American campus. It's not an obscure dispute over territorial claims in the South China Sea. It's a pattern of aggression against America, against our sovereignty, against our allies. The stakes are existential.
What happens in Xinjiang will not stay in Xinjiang. There's a saying in Silicon Valley that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. In Xinjiang we see a glimpse of the future that China wants, not just for the rest of its own society, a future of total techno-totalitarian party control, but increasingly a model to export. That's what they're willing to do to their own citizens. Imagine what would happen if they take Taiwan.
How do you define the battle ahead?
MG: I know I'm going to get hammered for this, but I believe on some level we're talking about good versus evil. If we don't believe that our values are good in a self-evident way; freedom, liberty, self-governance, the things which the CCP is trying to undermine, and if we don't believe that things like genocide, total party control, a lack of people to make decisions about their own future are bad ... Even put aside sort of the highfalutin ideological aspect of this. If we don't believe it's bad that over a hundred thousand Americans are dying from fentanyl every year and the precursors of that fentanyl are coming from China, then I don't know what we stand for anymore on the world stage.
If they're able to realize their ambitions, just even in their own backyard in Taiwan, first island chain, they can hold the rest of the world economically hostage. That means every time you see an American company self-censor, whether it's the NBA not allowing people to say anything in support of Hong Kong or Disney whitewashing genocide in order to produce Mulan in Xinjiang province, well, imagine that on steroids. That's going to be every American company afraid of angering their overlords in Beijing.
Given the manifest threat, why are some GOP members arguing for defense cuts?
MG: I don't know if it's defense in general, but it's sort of support of Ukraine in particular. I think one is sort of the hangover from the impeachment stuff. It was very confusing. I think it sort of left a bad taste in people's mouth about Ukraine or corruption in Ukraine. And maybe that made some members skeptical about the idea that we should defend Ukraine from an invasion from Russia. Maybe that's one thing driving it. I don't know. The other thing is I think some people believe this idea that in order to confront China effectively, we just don't have the bandwidth or the resources to confront Russia.
Then maybe the third thing is, and maybe this is the most ... I don't know, there's a grain of truth in this, I guess, is that there is a lot of waste in the Pentagon. The answer is not then to indiscriminately cut the Pentagon across the board because we're still not spending as a function of GDP anywhere near what we were spending during the Cold War. I think the threat posed by communist China is more sophisticated and challenging than that posed by Soviet Russia, though they may be less overtly military bellicose.
Why is Ukraine relevant to Taiwan?
MG: If your concern is that we're spending too much money in Ukraine or that this is a precarious situation that could escalate, particularly that it could escalate to a strategic or nuclear level, then all the more reason to ensure that deterrence does not fail across the Taiwan strait, because we don't want a February 24th scenario to play out in Taiwan. We don't want an administration that's going to rely solely on the threat of soft power, mean tweets and the vague threat of sanctions to deter. In Ukraine we saw that fail spectacularly. It has been costly in terms of blood and treasure and it would be better if deterrents work. The lesson of Ukraine is that hard power deters and we need to arm our partners and allies before the shooting starts. That's our best way of preventing World War III in the Indo-Pacific would be my first point.
The second point I'd make is that I actually think we have a massive opportunity right now. What has Ukraine exposed? Well, we burned through seven years worth of javelins in the first couple months. We just don't have adequate stockpiles of key munitions. Our defense industrial base is so fragile. If we can fix that, if we can move to multi-year procurement for javelins, for harpoons, if we can fix our foreign military sales process, which any foreign relations committee alum knows how messed up that can be at times. We've got $19 billion worth of backlog FMS items for Taiwan right now. Makes no sense. If we can use this and learn the right lessons and rebuild freedom's forge, replenish our stockpiles, and then the triple bank shot is to convince some of our more problematic allies, I'm thinking Turkey and then non allied countries like India, which rely on Russian weapons systems that are fraught with vulnerabilities, to replace their kit with American systems. Then things get really interesting. Then I think we have the opportunity to once again be the arsenal of democracy.
Then on a more immediate level, I think Xi Jinping is going to school on what's happening in Ukraine. Remember they sign this no limits partnership and they constantly echo each other's rhetoric when it comes to color revolutions and the threat posed by the west. If Putin's successful, I think that makes Xi Jinping more ambitious in terms of his belief that he can make a move on Taiwan and nothing would happen. The thing that makes Taiwan a difficult island to invade, because it's an island, make it more difficult to resupply more difficult than Ukraine to resupply. There, I think we have an even greater sense of urgency to put certain systems in Xi Jinping's way to put hard power in his path before it's too late.
Ukraine is exposing major problems with our stockpiles for any conflict ahead…?
MG: Let's say we were able to hold the PLA off for the first three to seven days of the conflict. Well, we're going Winchester. We're expending a lot of our rounds. In any war game I've played, we run out pretty quickly. Then you need to surge assets. You need to send ships sailing from the west coast of the continental of the United States to the theater. That takes time and they'd be doing it in a contested fashion. I don't see how that works. You're right to reference the 2011 NATO campaign in Libya. We ran low on precision guided munitions right away. These tend to be the type of things that always get shortchanged in the NDAA process or in the appropriations process. They're viewed as bill payers for other more exquisite weapons systems. We really need to rethink that.
What’s next?
MG: I think the next phase is to scrutinize American money that's going to Chinese companies and figure out a way in which we are not directly or indirectly subsidizing communist genocide or Chinese military modernization. I think that principle is obvious, putting it in practice is a little bit more complex, but I think we can get there. That's going to be one of the goals of my committee to emerge from at least these first two years with a framework for selective and strategic economic decoupling that makes sense.
The Speaker has said defense cuts are on the table…
MG: I can promise you that I won't vote for it. There's more than five members who are in that same boat and the numbers above 50 if not a hundred. I just can't fathom a scenario in which, as part of a debt ceiling increase, we're cutting defense. I've never voted for a debt ceiling increase. I think there's far more sensible things you can do.
The other thing I've been asking the talented lawyers I work with to give me an answer on is why are we talking about cutting defense if we're willing to just spend upwards ... It's going to cost, you may not call it a direct spend, 300 billion to $750 billion magically forgiving student debt. Why is it that we can just find trillions of dollars for all of this domestic pork, the butter, but the guns are always the first thing to get cut. It doesn't make any sense to me.
The director of Central Intelligence and a senior Pentagon official both said there will be war with China within a couple of short years…?
MG: I believe we've entered the window of maximum danger. Xi had moved up the his target date for the PLA being capable of taking Taiwan to 2027 over a year ago. I don't know if there's something new in what [DCI] Bill Burns is referring to, or maybe he's just publicly talking about it for the first time. The Menahan memo, this was the Air Force General said he feels like war is imminent in 2025. Then we have the Davidson window, a reference to former commander Phil Davidson who said in his last testimony before the Senate before he left, that within the next six years, he thinks they can make a move on Taiwan.
Listen, the honest answer is nobody knows. There's a lot of variables. Obviously, the Chinese are dealing with the lingering impact of COVID zero. They had internal unrest recently, massive protests that they suppressed pretty effectively. I think the worst things to get for Xi Jinping, and they get really bad in the 2030s demographically, economically, I think the more aggressive he'll get in the short term
I think things really heat up starting in January of 2024. I say that because that's when the Taiwanese have their elections. By all accounts, I think the DPP will win. Xi Jinping will conclude that he can't achieve reunification of Taiwan with the mainland via political warfare, so he has to consider actual warfare. Then we launch into our own presidential election process, which is going to be a mess. We're going to be internally divided. That's what worries me. The final variable on our side is we have a lot of these big defense bills that are coming due like the Columbia class submarine, a massive cost.
We're considering cutting our Navy. Think about this, the Biden plan that they came out with last year would've cut the Navy to 279 ships, have it bottom out by 2027. At the worst possible moment, our priority force would be at its weakest. That's what worries me. That's why I think we're in the window of maximum danger. If you disagree, I still think it makes sense to act with a sense of urgency to move heaven and earth in order to persuade Xi Jinping that his operation or his attempt to take Taiwan by force will be unsuccessful.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Gallagher press office Twitter address: Rep. Gallagher on the CCP spy balloon: "This is exactly why @SpeakerMcCarthy created the @CommitteeonCCP -- to push back against CCP aggression in bipartisan fashion. This isn't just an over there problem...it's a matter of defending our own interests and American sovereignty."
Blinken Postpones Trip to China After Balloon Is Detected Over U.S. (NYT, February 3, 2023)
Chairman Gallagher outlines China committee’s agenda (Roll Call, January 24, 2023)
The Real Reasons for Taiwan’s Arms Backlog – And How To Help Fill It (War on the Rocks, January 13, 2023)
Gallagher plans to call Disney's Iger, NBA's Silver to testify before new China select committee (Washington Examiner, January 11, 2023)
McCarthy Floor Remarks on Establishing the China Select Committee (Press Release, January 10, 2023)
China and the US are locked in a cold war. We must win it. Here's how we will (Mike Gallagher and Kevin McCarthy, Fox News, December 8, 2022)
Gallagher Statement on Passage of the House Rules Package (Press Release, January 9, 2023)
GOP prepares to battle itself over defense spending (Politico, January 9, 2023)
The CEO of TikTok will testify before Congress amid security concerns about the app (NPR, January 31, 2023)
Air Force general predicts war with China in 2025, tells officers to prep by firing 'a clip' at a target, and 'aim for the head' (NBC, January 27, 2023)
Dump Investments in Troublesome Communist Holdings Act (DITCH ACT) (Mike Gallagher, December 1, 2022)
Prohibition of Agricultural Land for the People’s Republic of China Act (Dan Newhouse, May 26, 2022)
Leader McCarthy against CHIPS act: “The Senate passed a bill that took a small, discretionary program and turned it into a $280 billion blank check, including $79 billion in mandatory spending on corporate welfare to be handed out to whoever President Biden wants.”