Ep 183: Tom Cotton on China
Tom Cotton, U.S. senator from Arkansas and author of Seven Things You Can't Say About China
Aaron MacLean:
The war in Ukraine, trouble with Iran, economic turbulence. There's a lot going on in the world today to keep track of, but for the serious analyst of America's security challenges, one issue looms over all the rest, China's rise and what to do about it. Today, we are welcoming back to the show one of America's most prominent leaders on this issue and most prominent critics of the Chinese Communist Party, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He's going to talk about his latest thinking there, and also about how China connects to all those other problems, including the war in Ukraine.
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Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Senator Cotton served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, in Afghanistan with the provincial reconstruction team. He also served with the Army's old guard, the third Infantry regiment. Went on to ... sorry. Important part of the story is that Harvard Law preceded all of this, and then after the Army, went on to the House of Representatives and the Senate. He's the author of several books, most recently, the number one New York Times bestseller, "Seven Things You Can't Say About China."
Senator Cotton, welcome back to the show.
Tom Cotton:
Thank you, Aaron, for having me back on. Yeah, the Army came after Harvard. I had to redeem myself, which I did by joining the army.
Aaron MacLean:
As your bio indicates, like a lot of folks born around when you were born, though maybe not enough, you served in wars where the enemy was various forms of radical Islam, Islamic extremism. You are still a leader on this issue today. You're still focused on it today. You're outspoken on your views on Iran, but you are also one of the Senate's most prominent leaders, if not the most prominent leader, on China. I wanted to ask you on a personal level, when did you start paying attention to China? When did it occur to you that this might actually be the defining at least foreign policy issue of our time?
Tom Cotton:
Well, first, you're right that we can never take our eyes off the threat from Islamic terrorism, and China is not neutral in that fight either. China is one of Iran's closest allies, buying cut-rate oil from Iran over the last four years. It's allowed Iran to fund its campaign of terror against the United States and our friends throughout the Middle East and really around the world.
China does pose a different kind of threat, though, than Islamic terrorism. China is an economy almost as large as ours. It's a continental nation like ours, and it has the at least possibility and certainly the ambition to replace the United States as the world's dominant economic and military superpower. Iran and no Islamic terrorist group could aspire to that. They aspire to mayhem and death and destruction. Let's just say I've never been deluded about the nature of the Chinese communist regime.
I remember, and I write briefly in the book about this, that Jiang Zemin as part of his grand tour of the United States in 1997, came to Boston and came to Harvard, and I was an occasional columnist and editorialist in the student newspaper, and that was one of the few occasions in which I found myself siding with all the liberal students on the editorial pages as opposed to writing the lonely conservative dissents. They, like a lot of liberals back in those days, wanted to condemn Jiang Zemin and criticize Harvard for welcoming him to campus because of the oppression of China's own people, and most notably in those days, their ongoing genocide against the Tibetan people. That was the same year, in fact, that Seven Years in Tibet had come out in theaters and ended Hollywood's showing of China in any negative light.
So, I've never been deluded or ignorant of China's crimes against its own people, against its neighbors, and ultimately against the United States. Obviously, once I got into the Congress and especially in the Senate, on the Senate Armed Service Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, I learned much more about the extent of those crimes and offenses against the United States, against our citizens, against our businesses, against our way of life. A lot of what I've learned over the last 10 years in the Senate, I've synthesized in this small book, "Seven Things You Can't Say about China," to try to ring the alarm about the threat China poses, not in the distant future, not in some abstract way, but today, to you and your family and to our way of life.
Aaron MacLean:
So, you point out that when you were a student journalist at Harvard, that there was a common cause between campus liberals and conservatives like yourself on this issue. I feel like I've noticed that from time to time, China can present as a bipartisan issue. There are these longstanding human rights concerns and labor concerns that have gotten the left's attention. On the right, perhaps we've been more interested in the security concerns, but also in certainly the human rights side of the story. In your experience in the Congress and the Senate, is that bipartisan character still noticeable on this issue? Are there divergences there, or is this still something that brings Americans together more than puts them apart?
Tom Cotton:
Well, it brings Americans together by and large. If you look at public opinion polling, communist China is about as popular as syphilis. One point I make in the book, though, is that however bad you think communist China is, however much of a danger you think it is, it's actually worse. I will say, though, on the left, you've seen some shifting of opinion, as you've seen shifting of opinion on the left more broadly over the last 30 years, to be more sympathetic towards China, in part because they're ideological fellow travelers, and some of the techniques that communist China uses to suppress dissent and use censorship, you've seen the left in America and across the Western world try to emulate.
Thomas Friedman notoriously said that he wishes you could be China for a day. I think some of that is, again, is the transformation of the Democratic coalition to an elite, overeducated, socially and culturally liberal party, as opposed to more of an older working-class lunch bucket party. Some of the people who were the best Democrats on China in the Congress tended to come from that tradition. They came up through the union organizing tradition, but then when you get the social justice warriors and the Squad types in Congress who see everything through the lens of racism and sexism and imperialism, and apply that to foreign policy as well, you get people who don't see China as such a threat, see America actually as the bigger threat to the world. You see that obviously in the Middle East as well, that somehow the Jewish people in Israel have been turned into the oppressive colonial settlers in the eyes of the left. Just take a look at what happened a little over five years ago.
When I was the first to ring the alarm bell on the unknown pneumonia coming out of Wuhan in China and saying that we should halt travel from Wuhan to the United States or halt travel from China to the United States. When Donald Trump did that after about a week, then he was denounced by Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and other Democrats as a racist and a xenophobe and a nativist and all the rest. Where I think, if you, again, if you went back to Democrats who are more part of the union and trade background that you had more of before the new left arrived on the scene, a lot of them would said, "Well, this is common sense. Of course, we should do this."
Aaron MacLean:
Well, let's talk about the flu-like illness that emerged from Wuhan China in that episode, because I think it illustrates not just your policy views, but the things you've done personally on the issue. Take us back to December '19, January '20, what you remember about that period, how you first came to follow this issue closely, and you mentioned calling for the travel ban. I remember also you asking some pointed questions about the origins of the virus and coming into a fair amount of turbulence and criticism as a consequence of that. Just how did you first start following this issue? Why did you think it was going to be important?
Tom Cotton:
The very first reporting I saw on it was in John Ellis's morning newsletter news item, which is an indispensable news source from around the world. John was collecting news sources from East Asia, the kind of publicly available news reporting that any of us can follow, but I don't necessarily follow every day when I wake up. I started reading those sources and then started looking from other sources about it probably right after the New Year's. I remember very clearly when I communicated to my team in the Senate that we needed to start looking at this from a more serious and official standpoint over Martin Luther King Day.
Tom Cotton:
weekend in 2020. So that would've been mid-January the second or third weekend of January, I was home in Arkansas. We had just started the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. I think we'd just been sworn in the Thursday before MLK Day, which meant the Senate floor was totally consumed with that silly trial. And my team and I, of which you were an inglorious member, were spending most of our time trying to figure out exactly what was going on in China. Why China was imposing its own travel bans. Why they were saying everything was under control while they were welding the door shut on high rise apartment, be it buildings keeping people stuck there. It was clear to me something was up in addition to my general skepticism anytime communists are talking.
So I immediately called for, again, the most obvious and common sense solution to impose the travel ban, which again, I think Trump did before the end of month, within a week or so, which obviously can't stop the spread of a global pandemic, but it can certainly stop it from arriving and give you a little more time to prepare for it.
But again, the apologists for Communist China as well as liberal ideologues you know rushed to condemn me and President Trump first about the travel ban and then the suggestion by mid-February that we should be looking at the labs in Wuhan. And I didn't have classified intelligence. There was none at the time, to my knowledge. I didn't have any specialized medical or scientific knowledge. Just look at the facts. There was no bats in that food market. They had fingered for, I don't know, like a bat kissing at Aardvark or something, creating a global pandemic. And these giant labs were known to research novel bat-based corona viruses. And the director of the lab was nicknamed the Bat Lady for goodness sake. And they had a long history of shoddy safety practices.
And everything since then has proven that, right? And more intelligence agencies have come around in that view as well. Again, it's just a common sense view that most Americans share. But you had Chinese apologists rushing to condemn me, many of them financially beholden to China or just the idea that, oh, you're accusing China of doing this, that's inherently racist or xenophobic, as if you couldn't make the same accusation if a pandemic like this started in say, a European nation. And again, that's the ideological element of soft on China liberals. Is that because it's happening for what's a racial minority in America, and they superimpose their woke views on foreign policy and their hackles get up very quickly. And you see this time and again since then as well. The Select Committee and the House of Representatives had to be named the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. I believe it couldn't just be on China or Communist China.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, strategic competition with the Chinese.
Tom Cotton:
Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, the longest committee name in the history of Congress. Because otherwise the Democrats wouldn't cooperate wih it because they viewed it as racist and nativist and xenophobic. And we see that repeatedly in the Senate as well. Anytime you try to get a Democrat on board with legislation, they're always wanting to tweak the preamble or change this language. Because they're so super sensitive of the idea that they might slight a supposed racial minority.
Aaron MacLean:
In addition to the origins of the virus, the travel ban, there was another controversial theme in those weeks that I think is largely passed from the conversation. I'm actually curious to know if you still subscribe to this view, but I remember at the time you saying publicly... And I want to make sure I get this right here, so correct me if I go wrong of course, but what you were seeing in the way that the Chinese were managing travel patterns was that there were bans on internal travel to do with Wuhan in China. But for several days, if not weeks after those internal travel controls had gone into place, international travel for Wuhan was still flowing.
And at the time you made the case, which in a way was, I mean, I'll be candid, it was kind of shocking to me at the time. And then I think if you look at your book and you take to heart your view and your analysis of the Chinese regime and Xi's leadership of it, becomes less sort of controversial and shocking. That this was a decision with a strategic purpose, that the objective facts of the case were such that it was in China's interest for this virus to spread internationally. However, it had gotten out of the bag. Once it was out of the bag, it was in China's interest for it to spread internationally, even if common sensically, they wanted to slow it spread domestically. Do you still subscribe to that view? Do you think that analysis still holds?
Tom Cotton:
I don't remember the exact timeline, but I believe that's about right. I think the very early days of the virus outbreak, maybe as far back as around our Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2019 coincided with the Chinese New Year, which is a large source of travel inside of China. Maybe that was early 2020 as well. And that seems to have played some part in spreading it outside of Wuhan and its province. And yeah, I think the timing was right that China had imposed various travel restrictions from Wuhan or out of that province inside of China, but had not shut down international air travel from Wuhan. And again, it would make total sense if you're Xi Jinping or other communist leaders in China to think, well, if we're going to be dealing with this virus, the rest of the world, especially the West, is going to have to deal with it too.
In fact, we'll probably deal with it better because we're a totalitarian country really, that can impose draconian restrictions and not face the kind of political blowback that you ultimately saw throughout the West. Rightly so in many places. And I know that to many American ears would sound very off-key note like, who could do this? And I would remind you that we're dealing with communists here. Of course, they would do this. They do it to their own people. They harvest organs from living dissenters. They are stealing children out of Tibet and Xinjiang provinces and moving them into Han Chinese families around the country to ethnically cleanse those peoples from the map. Xi Jinping is not some cuddly father or grandfather. Of course, he would do this. Just like of course they would unleash a fentanyl epidemic on America that kills tens of thousands of our kids. They're not at all hesitant or reluctant to do such a thing.
Aaron MacLean:
This Covid episode, broadly speaking, China's role in it, what does that teach you about the nature of the regime and then how does that feed into your view of the party's overall objectives? That's been a theme of this show since its inception. Trying to understand what China is ultimately all about. You lay that out in some detail in the book. What are they after?
Tom Cotton:
Well, the first chapter of the book, the first thing you can't say about China is that China's an evil empire, which of course hearkens back to what Ronald Reagan said about communist Russia in 1983, and they're very clear about their ambitions. They want to replace the United States as the world's dominant economic and military power. As senior Chinese officials told President Trump's delegation during a state visit to China in November of 2017, they view a future in which China names the tune and everyone else dances to it. And the United States' role in that world will largely be a low cost commodity provider to China's economy, providing oil and natural gas and farm products at affordable rates to Communist China. And if we don't like that, then they can just get all their food from Latin America and all their oil and gas from the Middle East.
They're very clear about what their ambitions are. I think the brutality of the regime, their indifference to human life and even common decency is revealed by their actions in the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. But also the degree to which they have infiltrated western society to include American society is revealed as well, because you did have so many apologists rushing to man the ramparts on behalf of China. Many of them were in the media or celebrities or so forth, but plenty of them were in the government as well. I just think about Tony Fauci and his opposition to a travel ban, his opposition to cutting off research funding, going to that very lab from American taxpayers.
There's so many elements of American society that are beholden to China or that China has leverage over. That's why they've infiltrated our country in a way that Communist Russia never did. Sure, Communist Russia had KGB spies in Washington, and of course they tried to fund various front groups, but they had very marginal influence compared to how China has burrowed its way into western society and government.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, let me ask you this. I mean, some would hear what you just said and respond with something along the lines of, okay, well maybe China has imperial ambitions, set aside evil or otherwise. Let them. If they really want to run the show in the Western Pacific or East Asia, what business is it really of ours? As you just point out, we have deep and wide economic links. We'll continue to trade. They can mind their part of the world, we'll mind our part of the world. Why would we take a strong view on a question like Japan or the Philippines where we have treaty alliances? Why are we moving in the direction it seems of taking a strong view of Taiwan? What's it to us?
Tom Cotton:
Well, first off, their ambitions aren't regional. Their ambitions are global. They've made that perfectly clear. They made it clear to President Trump's delegation in November of 2017. But also their actions go far beyond. They're near abroad, if you will. Why is China so deeply invested in infrastructure projects from the Adriatic to the Baltic? Why are they essentially trying to turn Sub-Saharan African nations into vassal states, into cheap commodity providers for that matter? Why does China have such a large presence in Latin America? We got good news a few days ago that American investors were buying the ports on both ends of the Panama Canal that were previously owned by a Hong Kong company. Which may have been one thing before 2020, before Hong Kong was reduced to an appendage of mainland communist China. But it's just an example, again, of the global ambitions they have. And we should not stick our head in the sand about the threat that poses. We are over here on the other side of the world. We in the United States have only something like 4% of the world's population, 6% of its landmass. Yes, we're a quarter of its economy, but that depends in parts on our ability to trade with and in the old world, in Europe and Asia and Africa and Australia.
And it's always been a core, maybe the core national interest that we do not allow any power, any combination of powers to unify the people, the land, the resources of the old world, because that could obviously be deployed against us here in the new, at a minimum, to turn us into the kind of economic vassal state that communist China aspires to do so. And would communist China ever invade America, try to conquer us and occupy us? Probably not. You wouldn't want to rule it out. But they can change fundamentally the nature of life that every living American understands and appreciates, and maybe we don't appreciate it enough, the advantages that we have of being the nation that calls the shots for the world, being the nation whose currency is the global trading currency of the economic and political influence we have when almost every capital in the world ask itself before undertaking some big endeavor, "What will Washington think about this?" That's what China hopes to do. It's not content just to be the master of its near abroad, so to speak.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, let me ask you to spell that out in a little bit more detail then Senator. What would it mean to the average American in place like Little Rock or Phoenix or wherever, for China to assume that role of primacy in the world? What would it mean in particular in a world where China is working on perfecting the employment of technology at home, whether it's facial recognition, various forms of spying and data analysis to control its own population? Again, it's not, I think so easy to say that well, suddenly we would wake up one morning and that would just be the way we all live here, we wouldn't necessarily wake up on a Monday and we'd all have our own social credit scores. But just try to provide an experiential look what an average American would kind of face in this new world.
Tom Cotton:
Well, for China to do this, it would probably have to seize Taiwan, as I write about in the book that it's really the linchpin of China's ambitions. If that were to happen, as I say in the book, you'd probably have an immediate global depression. So life savings would be wiped out, mass unemployment, empty shelves at Walmart or Sam's Club, grocery stores. Because of the presumptive severing of economic ties between China and the West. They would either destroy in that effort to seize Taiwan or control the vast majority of the world's semiconductor manufacturing, which are absolutely vital to modern economic life. Everything from the device on which you're listening to this podcast, to cars, to tractors, to manufacturing machinery, all of which again would cause a deep economic depression around the world.
If they succeed in replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency, that would mean higher borrowing costs for all Americans, for your mortgages, for your cars, for small business loans. It would mean, again, vast disruption in global trade that you wouldn't be able to afford the things that you today can't afford, less so after four years of Joe Biden, unfortunately. And just much less freedom of action in the world for our businesses to buy and sell the things that, again, we're all accustomed to, whether it's the things that you make here on the job that helps put food on the table for your family and it's in abroad, or the things that we need to import from abroad as well.
So it's hard to overstate the consequences of China displacing us. It's in some ways much worse than if communist Russia had won the Cold War because communist Russia never had the kind of deep economic integration with the West that communist China does.
Aaron MacLean:
Earlier you identified this principle of American foreign policy or statecraft is pursuing the goal that a hostile power or coalition of powers can't achieve hegemony in Eurasia. On this question of the coalition, there seems to be a debate right now on the right between a vision of Russia and China in a kind of axis that probably also includes Iran, North Korea. We might toss in places like Cuba as we move down the list. And this view holds that these countries on some level think of themselves as an axis, see themselves as having if not a shared positive vision, then certainly a shared negative vision and what they're negative about as us the United States. That's one view.
Another view, and I guess these are not totally contradictory because you could claim that you're moving from the first view to the second view by means of policy, seeks, I've heard it described as a "reverse Kissinger." That is to say that Nixon went to China in the early seventies, split the Chinese off from the Russians, and introduced a kind of mobility and balance of power logic into the Cold War that hadn't existed before, which ultimately contributed to America's success. And the goal now would be to flip Russia against China, to pull them apart and draw Russia more into the American column. What are your views on this debate? First of all, of course, feel free to reject the premises. I mean, if you don't agree with the terms of it say so, but where do you come down in all of this?
Tom Cotton:
I think the latter view overstates what Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did, even if you think that it was the right thing to do. Russia and China at the time were already divided and split. So much so that as I write in the book, Communist China had attacked Russian positions on their border at one point in the 1960s, Mao was so fearful of a nuclear strike by Russia that he fled Beijing. So Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger didn't engineer the split between Russia and China so much as they acknowledged it and tried to take advantage of it. It's very hard to imagine a split between Russia and China today, at least as long as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are in charge of those two countries. They see themselves as natural ideological allies, as revisionist powers. And as you say, what they're trying to revise is America's power and role in the world.
They have junior partners to be sure in places like Iran and North Korea. As I mentioned earlier, China has helped prop up Iran over the last four years through all of its oil purchases and other investments in Iran. And now North Korea is explicitly propping up Russia's war effort in Ukraine. As we look at this group of revisionist powers, we obviously, in my opinion, need to take China most seriously because they do pose the most serious long-term threat. They're the only country with an economy that's big enough and wealthy enough they can aspire to replace American power and influence in the world. But we have to be mindful of the threat that all of them pose to us, that Iran currently poses having conducted a campaign of terror against the United States and our citizens and our friends for almost 50 years, that Russia right now poses not just in Ukraine but around the world, and the North Korea poses as well. A nuclear power, we have to remember that has missiles that can reach all of the continental United States.
China is the most serious threat to our way of life in the long term, but it's far from the only, and there's no, as far as I can see, imminent threat or imminent break between any of these countries. And the way to confront them all is to be strong and resolute in the defense of our interests. Unfortunately, after four years of Joe Biden and really 12 out of 16 years of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, we're not nearly as strong as we should be, and we've got a lot of work to do over the next four years to try to rebuild our strength.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, another controversial issue on the right, right now, of course, is what to do about Ukraine. You're somebody who thinks a lot about China and Chinese policy. What do you take the Chinese interest in Ukraine to be? There's well-documented support of China by China of the Russian war effort if largely indirectly through dual-use technologies, economic support, etc., as Russia undergoes this period of isolation or relative isolation. If you're sitting there in the Politburo room with Xi and the gang, what do they want to see happen here in Eastern Europe?
Tom Cotton:
I think they want to see Vladimir Putin win. That's clear from Xi's statements, it's also clear from their support for Russia's war efforts, which are more extensive than even you just suggested, Aaron, it's pretty clear that when Joe Biden drew a line about technology transfers and other kinds of support, Xi stepped right over it and Joe Biden did nothing to enforce it. And again, it's not as sensational as Obama's red line fiasco in 2013, which President Trump tried to reverse himself somewhat in 2017 and 2018 when he bombed Syria for gassing its own people. A red line he didn't even draw, but he understood that he needed to support. It's still known by the people who are in the know, so to speak, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollahs, Kim Jong-Un. And I think Xi feels like he got away with it, that he got away with being what was an all-purpose friend or an all-weather friendship or whatever it is they called it.
Aaron MacLean:
Unlimited partnership.
Tom Cotton:
Yeah, some such thing.
Aaron MacLean:
No limits' partnership.
Tom Cotton:
Yeah. Sorry, I think it's pretty simple and straightforward what they want. And remember, Vladimir Putin's ambitions were not just to seize the rest of the provinces he took in 2014, he wanted to take all of Ukraine, he wanted to topple its government and he wanted to annex it back into Russia. Some people say, well, he wants to reassemble the Soviet Union. And I think that is probably understating the scale of his ambition. He wants to reassemble the greater Russian Empire and views himself in the Tsarist tradition, not in the Soviet tradition. And as Zbigniew Brzezinski famously said, that without Ukraine, Russia can't be an empire. And with it can be. And I think Xi probably sees that if Putin can do that in Ukraine, then he can do an ideologically similar thing in Taiwan if he's allowed to do so.
Aaron MacLean:
So what do you advise us, America as the prudent course ahead then with regard to Ukraine?
Tom Cotton:
Look, I think the war is going to have to likely end in negotiations. I think those negotiations probably won't be satisfactory to many people. Certainly not the maximalists either in Kiev or Moscow or Washington for that matter. Wars only end in one of two ways, they end on the battlefield or they end in negotiations. And at this point, I don't see a battlefield victory for either Russia or Ukraine. Could have had one in 2022 when Russia was on its heels before it had gotten on war footing before it didn't mobilized more soldiers. Ukraine had great... After winning the Battle of Kiev in the winter and spring of 2022, it had breakouts in Northeastern and southern Ukraine. But Joe Biden was always scared of his own shadow and he pussyfooted around for three years. And it's clear in retrospect that his strategy, if you can call it that, was to ensure that Ukraine didn't lose but restrain them from winning.
So at this point, the forces are dug in too deeply and Russia has certain advantages in mass as it's had throughout history. Now, they're making extremely incremental gains in Eastern Ukraine right now. And I mean very, very incremental gains. I think President Trump sees that and he sees that in the long term, time is not on Ukraine's side because of Russia's greater mass. But also Ukraine needs to stop the fighting because of the strain it's put on its economy and on its demography as well. From those killed in action, those wounded in action, the wide scale scattering of Ukrainian refugees across Europe. What he doesn't want to see, what we should do everything we can to avoid is a third invasion of Ukraine in the future. Russia invaded once in 2014 and invaded again in 2022, both under democratic presidents, I would point out.
And that any kind of truce or ceasefire needs to provide Ukraine with the means to protect, as Vice President Vance said, it's sovereign independence in the long run. We may end up recognizing the reality of Russian troops on Ukrainian soil, but that doesn't mean we recognize the legality of Russian troops on their soil. That's still our posture today in Georgia, in North Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was our posture towards Soviet domination of Germany for a couple of decades after the war. And still in some ways is our policy in North Korea. Say it was our policy throughout the Cold War in the Baltic States, that we never recognized the legality or sovereignty of Russia over those nations. Just like we don't have to recognize it today in Ukraine, even if we recognize the reality that Russian troops are there.
Aaron MacLean:
I want to be respectful of your time, so I'll make this my last question. But obviously people should read the full book, but if there were only one chapter that somebody had time to read, I would advise the seventh thing you're not allowed to say about China, which is that China could win. We've actually covered a fair amount of material that's in that chapter over the course of our conversation today. It's harrowing reading. And I wanted to ask, not to try to end on a falsely optimistic note, but I wanted to get your take on what China's economic struggles might mean for the future and for us. As it appears to be flirting with this period of secular deflation. They've got real issues that they are dealing with. Does that make you perhaps more optimistic than you were a few years ago? Do you see warning signs in it both, what's your take?
Tom Cotton:
China certainly has very severe economic challenges. Some say that China could be entering a period of long-term stagnation that Japan entered into 35 years ago. It may be the case. In the short term though, I don't think that's something that should make us more optimistic. If anything, it might make China more dangerous. A cornered, threatened animal oftentimes is more dangerous than one running free in the wild. And I do think because of the economic challenges that it faces internally and its own demographic challenges as well, thanks to the barbaric one-child policy, that it actually might make Xi Jinping and senior communist leaders more aggressive towards Taiwan, as a way to deflect attention and blame away from their own mismanagement inside of China. And also they see that the relative power of communist China to the United States could be peaking. That you could in the long run, in the span of the rest of our lives if not Xi's life, you could see the power gap both in economic and military power began to widen again where the United States regains.
If we make the right choices from an economic standpoint and a defense standpoint, well, we regain a much clearer advantage over China. So given their internal challenges right now, and if you think the relative power gap is about as small as it's ever going to be, why not take a shot at the jugular in Taiwan if you're Xi? And that's why I think it's just so vital that we not only rebuild our own defenses, but make sure that Taiwan is building there as much more rapidly as possible. And a very successful second Trump term in the Western Pacific would be handing over power to the next guy with the peaceful status quo in place on January 2029 across the Taiwan Strait, with an American military and a Taiwanese military that's much stronger relative to the People's Liberation Army. And therefore much more likely to deter China from ever thinking about going for the jugular.
Aaron MacLean:
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, author of Seven Things You Can't Say about China, thank you so much for coming back on the show. And I very much appreciate it. It was a great conversation.
Tom Cotton:
Thank you, Aaron.
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