Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept
(Robert Spalding, June 6, 2021)
Transcript available below
About the speaker
Robert Spalding is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work focuses on U.S.-China relations, economic and national security, and the Asia-Pacific military balance.
Spalding has served in senior positions of strategy and diplomacy within the Defense and State Departments for more than 26 years, and is an accomplished innovator in government and a national security policy strategist. As Senior Director for Strategy to the President, he was the chief architect of the framework for national competition in the Trump administrationâs National Security Strategy (NSS). He has earned recognition for his knowledge of Chinese economic competition, cyber warfare, and political influence, as well as for his ability to forecast global trends and develop innovative solutions.
Spaldingâs relationship with business leaders, fostered during his time as a Military Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, allowed him to recommend pragmatic solutions to complex foreign policy and national security issues, which are driving positive economic outcomes for the nation. Spaldingâs groundbreaking work on competition in Secure 5G has reset the global environment for the next phase of cyber security in the information age.
Spalding is a skilled combat leader, promoter of technological advances to achieve improved unit performance, and a seasoned diplomat. Under Spaldingâs leadership, the 509th Operations Groupâthe nationâs only B-2 Stealth Bomber unitâexperienced unprecedented technological and operational advances. Spaldingâs demonstrated acumen for solving complex technological issues to achieve operational success, was demonstrated when he led a low-cost rapid-integration project for a secure global communications capability in the B-2, achieving tremendous results at almost no cost to the government. As commander, he led forces in the air and on the ground in Libya and Iraq. During the UUV Incident of 2016, Spalding averted a diplomatic crisis by negotiating with the Chinese PLA for the return of the UUV, without the aid of a translator.
Spalding has written extensively on national security matters. He is currently working on a book concerning national competition in the 21st Century. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, War on the Rocks, FedTech Magazine, Defense One, The Diplomat, and other edited volumes. His Air Power Journal article on Americaâs Two Air Forces is frequently used in the West Point curriculum.
Spalding is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has lectured globally, including engagements at the Naval War College, National Defense University, Air War College, Columbia University, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and other Professional Military Educational institutions. Spalding received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Agricultural Business from California State University, Fresno, and holds a doctorate in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He was a distinguished graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, and is fluent in Chinese Mandarin.
Transcript
Robert R. Reilly:
Hello, and welcome to the Westminster Institute. I am Bob Reilly, its director and host for this program. We are very happy to welcome General Robert Spalding, who is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute where his work focuses on U.S.-China relations, economic and national security, and the Asia-Pacific military balance. General Spalding retired from the U.S. Air Force as a Brigadier General after more than 26 years of service. He is a former B-2 Stealth Bomber pilot.
General Spalding completed his career as the Senior Director for Strategic Planning to the President at the National Security Council and was the chief architect for the National Security Strategy (NSS). He is a former China strategist for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He has lived in mainland China both as an Olmstead Scholar and as the military attachĂ© at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He is a fluent Mandarin speaker. General Spalding earned his doctorate in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri. He will speak to us today on the subject of his recent book, âStealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.â General, welcome to the program.
Robert Spalding:
Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak. The book that I wrote, Stealth War, actually was completed in April of 2019. I retired from active duty in the Air Force at the end of November 2018, so it did not take very long to write because it was all in my head. I had spent the last you know six years of my career focused on U.S.-China competition and I had learned a lot of lessons. My career started with the movie Top Gun, and I remember watching that and getting excited about flying jets. Before that I really had not considered any military service. I tried to join the Navy. They would not take me so I ended up in the Air Force, and really, really enjoyed my time there.
But you know I was planning to get out in 2003 when I had this opportunity to go to China, so I applied for this program called the Olmsted Scholar Program. And it is a program in the military that was founded by a retired two-star army general who had served in World War II in the China-Burma-India theater and really felt that the officers who worked for him needed to be much more astute with regard to understanding foreign languages, and other cultures, and the way that other people made decisions, other countries made decisions. And so he got the military services to agree to send just a few officers out each year to study in foreign universities.
[It] could not be in a university where they taught English, it had to be taught in a foreign language, and so I spent a year at the Defense Language Institute learning Chinese and then went and lived in Shanghai, China. I got there in 2002 and I stayed there for two years from 2002 to 2004, and it was an outstanding experience. My year at the Defense Language Institute prepared me well. I could speak fluently when I hit the ground and my Chinese only got better. And we traveled, I and my family, wife and two sons, traveled all over the country and loved it.It was a really exciting time in China because they had just entered the WTO, so all my neighbors were living in China, building factories for their companies in the Shanghai Special Economic Zone, and China was growing like gangbusters. If you had any experience with China at the time, it was said that they had all the high-rise cranes in the world working in Shanghai and around the country, building great skyscrapers. So the jin mao building was already in Shanghai just 10 years earlier where I lived in Pudong, which was the new area of China east of the Huangpu River. It was all fields, and so in the last ten years they had built that up into really a thriving side of the city.
And I told my wife when I left in 2004, we need to come back when I retire, I want to work here. This is a fantastic place, but the Air Force was not done with me, and I spent the rest of my career – while my colleagues were focused on the Middle East, I was focused on China. So in addition to flying the B-2, I worked in the Office of Secretary of Defense, working on the archive agreement between the People’s Liberation Army and our military, really the first agreement of its kind to get access to the Chinese archives to look for the missing from the Korean War.
And then along the way as I progressed in my career, the Air Force decided that they wanted to send me back to China to be the defense attaché, and so that started a series of assignments, first at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York where I met a lot of industry leaders, financial leaders, really captains of industry for the United States. I went from there to be the advisor on China policy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. So I was advising the Chairman, who is the senior military adviser to the president, on what his policy should be, and this is where I got introduced to really military diplomacy.
I had a lot of State Department colleagues, colleagues from all over the interagency, who I would work with at the National Security Council on the Policy Coordination Committee or in the Obama administration it was called the Interagency Policy Coordination Committee or IPC. And we basically discussed the issues that the National Security Council was dealing with. At that time one of the biggest issues was the islands in the South China Sea, and the President was very concerned that China was going to come in and reclaim Scarborough Shoals just like they had on the other four features. It was during this time that of course the Philippines brought their case at the International Court in the Hague, and the International Court ruled that those islands were illegal. And I was there when the Obama administration made the decision to tell Xi directly not to militarize the islands, and saw the assurances just like everybody else did that they would not.
But you know one of the things that I think we were concerned about at least on the military side is, number one, how do you deter or dissuade the Chinese Communist Party from militarizing those islands that they have just built because they wanted aircraft carriers in the South China Sea and they did not have them and this was the next best thing, and they have been looking for that since the â80s, but how do you persuade them not to militarize? And I think our position was, well, you better not tell them because we have no way of actually enforcing that short of putting JDAMs on those islands, which I do not think anybody would advocate, you know going to war over illegal islands in the South China Sea. I think was the farthest from anyone’s minds, but really, when you think about [it], because the military was the one that they were looking to come up with options, when you look to the military for options, those are really kinetic options and so Dempsey at the time was not too keen on that.
I think that over time we recognized that there was very little that we could do and the president continued to remain concerned. And I think this is when I started to really begin to understand that the China that I had visited as a young major was not the China that I saw in 2014 when I got to the Joint Staff. And so we started looking at this and it was along the way of researching what we should do about the islands in the South China Sea that I happen to get an email from somebody I had met in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations that had been an investor in China and had run a large fund billion dollar fund and had exited China around 2012 or 2013 because he did not like the direction it was heading. And so he sent me a briefing, and this briefing had been put together by one of our audit agencies, and when I opened the briefing I was blown away.
And I talked about it in the book because everything that I understood about warfare was basically turned on its head. I had spent my entire career understanding warfare at all levels, and you really felt that I had a good grasp on how and why and what you need to do in order to justify military action and to how that military action translates into political outcome. That is, of course, Clausewitz’s view on warfare. It is war is politics by other means.
And you know I felt like as a B-2 pilot, which is really kind of at the strategic end of national security because we were the ones to go in and take down the integrated air defenses, to really allow follow-on forces to flow in, and in fact during Kosovo we were the ones that were tasked with taking down Milosevic’s network that was supporting him, and really forcing the the Serbians to capitulate, using just the B-2, and we did that by taking out assets that were valuable to the cronies that were supporting Milosevic, so I had a good grasp of at least how warfare could be applied in a political sense.
And here was something so radically different from the way that the United States goes to war that it really took me by surprise, and kind of as I said swapped [my thinking], you know in other words it broke my mind. And you know one other thing I should mention in here is I had finished my PhD in Economics, which I had pursued while I was at Whiteman Air Force Base as a B-2 pilot because I thought I was going to get out of the military and go to Wall Street, and so I had a good grasp of economics. And this, kind of paired with my understanding of warfare at the strategic level, really made this briefing I think come alive for me in ways that it did not for other people.
It had been briefed at the National Security Council, but was not really recognized for what it was, and what the briefing showed – and I talked about in the book – is this widespread attacks of U.S. companies, small, medium and large throughout the United States that was related to technology or market share that the Chinese Communist Party wanted. And it was going on basically under the under the radar. Nobody knew this was happening, and the reason I knew nobody knew that this was happening was because I took the briefing to Strategic Command and I briefed the commander and the vice commander and they were shocked, but the staff was skeptical so we went back, we reworked the briefing, and really started. That is when we started looking into Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which at that time was called One Belt, One Road (OBOR), and really started to put the strategic pieces together for what the Chinese Communist Party was doing.
And in tying that to these actions that they were taking at the company level throughout the United States and that is when we briefed that briefing is when we we really got the recognition by senior four stars throughout the military of what exactly was happening, but there again was a problem with it and that is that they recognized it was a tremendous challenge for the United States, but it was not their challenge. Their challenge was bombs, their challenge was fighting. This was not fighting with bombs, this was warfare on a completely different level. It was using, as I say in the book, ones and zeros and dollars and cents. It was using finance and economics and trade things that they were never schooled on.
We talked about diplomatic, information, military, and economic as the levers of national power at War College. And we discussed that throughout professional military education, but in terms of the application of that power and how that might be turned towards political outcomes, that is not anything that we teach in any kind of professional training even at the highest level, and so I went and we started going and talking to the Commerce Department, Treasury Department, Department of Justice, FBI who is working on this, who has a concept that is going on? And the answer was nobody, and so we were not really looking at it from competition or warfare perspective, we were not looking at it at all.
In fact, the data that we needed to really understand was going on was in the private sector. It was not even in the government and that is because the government does not do a good job collecting data with regard to these types of things in a domestic sense. We collect a lot of data internationally, but we are prohibited by law to really look at the country, internal to the country because of posse comitatus and the restrictions on intelligence collection on Americans. And so what we had is a widespread conflict going on, economic conflict within our own country, that the intelligence community was not aware of.
We, along with the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. brought this up. The intelligence community – and if you understand the intelligence process and how the intelligence community work, they are very much focused on kind of the weaponry coming out of China and the things were would be considered con traditional warfare. They were not interested in, say, the economic malfeasance of China or say, for instance, the widespread shipment of fentanyl into the United States, which you would think it would be considered an act to war if you understood it was happening on a systemic basis because, again, most of those things we reconsidered in the area of domestic criminal behavior or maybe even international criminal behavior, but not even on the level of a racketeering or say like a RICO charge. We are talking about looking at individuals who are shipping fentanyl in and understanding that from a criminal perspective rather than trying to look at it as a systemic issue. That is just one example of some of the challenges we faced.
And so that led to the development of an office in the Air Force called the Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis. We started looking at the defense industrial base, the supply chain. This was 2015, 2016. I was transferred to Beijing where I was a senior defense official and shortly thereafter found myself in the White House as a Senior Director for Strategy, working on the architecture and framework for the National Security Strategy (NSS) and so as I did that, I started to pull on a lot of these resources that we had in the Pentagon that we had started to work on, and during my time in the Joint Staff, [I] really had a good team. I had really the ability at back in 2017 to pull in information from the private sector because we had built those bridges with the Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis, and this is what led to the National Security Strategy (NSS) that came out in December of 2017.
And along the way I also did a report on 5G that got leaked to the media, and that is a whole different story really, understanding the use of data by the Chinese Communist Party. You know, just briefly, their goal, what they are trying to do in their own words, is become the Saudi Arabia of data because data drives artificial intelligence, development, and machine learning, and really is going to position the country that has the most data and is the kind of the lead in technology. And so you know as I kind of look back on my time in the military, that story, that understanding of a different way of looking at warfare is really what comes through in Stealth War.
That book has quietly sold over 50,000 copies. Now, you would think that you would have heard about a book that sold 50,000 copies, but you know its message is one that is not well liked by mainstream media, and the reason is most of mainstream media is consolidated into five very large corporate enterprises that quite frankly have a lot of Chinese money invested in them. And if you want to understand just one idea with regard to what makes it so different and so effective, when we connected the world, when globalization and the internet really brought the world together, what happened is it unleashed the the Chinese Communist Party’s brand of political warfare in a way that had never been capable before.
You know, me as a B-2 pilot, the airmen really have a hard time other than in cases like Kosovo, rare instances where you are able to go after [the enemy]. You know bombing has never been successful, and the reason bombing has never been successful is because if you bomb a society – and Warden talks about this in the five rings theory – if you bomb a society, they tend to get mad at the people who are bombing them, not the government for not capitulating.
What the Chinese Communist Party realizes [is] what Silicon Valley had built was this enormous mechanism for influencing behavior at the individual level, and they sought to take control of that and grasped the handles of that, and really they were boxed out because Apple and Google through Android and iOS own the predominant share of the operating systems of the smart devices that have proliferated. And that is really what drives our economy today.
But with 5G, you know, they could take that smart phone and make it a smart city, and in making a smart city, what that looks like is that rather than using your smart phone to call an Uber, you just call an Uber. I want an Uber and a camera picks up your face, picks up your voice. You may have an Alexa at home. You may have a Google Assistant. You have Siri on your iPhone. If you have it through that mechanism, you start to get away from the smartphone, and the city really becomes interactive. This was happening already in 2017 when I was a defense attaché in Beijing. You could order your food on your phone, but then put your phone away, walk into a restaurant, camera recognizes you and the server greeted you by name and hands you your food, completing your transaction. This is a world of 5G. This is the world that China wanted to build.
And this is why when the president was meeting with the leaders of China, they said look, you guys are done. We can collect all the data. There are no legal restrictions. There is no place that the eye of the Chinese Communist Party cannot look. We can look at every corner of our country and not only can we look in every corner of our country, we can look in every corner of your country as well. That is what we are doing and so if you think that you are going to you know be the lead just because you have been the lead, you do not understand technology.
And quite frankly, they are right. Most of DC does not understand technology. I think that is why Silicon Valley is quite frankly disgusted with DC. I think DC is starting to become frustrated with Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley does not understand how you maintain a power balance in a society to prevent it from becoming authoritarian. DC was built like that. Silicon Valley was not. Silicon Valley was built for authoritarianism because as you accumulate data, you accumulate power, the power to influence individuals, because you understand their wants, their needs. Now, when you couple this by having control over access to goods and services, you can begin to incentivize them to behave in ways that you like.
This is what China is doing and increasingly they are doing it in the United States. If you do not believe me, go back and think again to [the] NBA when Daryl Morey writes a tweet about Hong Kong and almost gets fired. In fact, in my book I talk about Roy Jones, who works for the Marriott Corporation, much lower salary than Ray, than than the general manager of the Houston Rockets. He was making I think fifteen bucks an hour and got fired because he liked to tweet about Tibet. [The] Chinese Communist Party called up the Marriott Corporation, told him to apologize and deal with Roy Jones. Three days later he was fired, so if you do not believe that that influence extends into the heart of our democracy, then you just have not been paying attention. I think with that I would like to open it up to any questions or comments.
Robert R. Reilly:
General, that was a very alarming series of remarks. I just want to comment that I cannot imagine that your book on Stealth War could be any more concise than it is or any more alarming than it is because you cover every aspect of China’s whole of government assault on the United States, whether it is diplomacy economics, military, 5G etc. They have this whole of government approach, which the United States does not seem to be capable of no matter how many interagency groups it might have in the government.
Now, your strategy on the National Security Council (NSC) was a huge wake-up call. I think it did a great deal of good as we can recall President Trump was the first one to sort of get tough on China. Now, it seems to me that so successful was the strategy that you put together that the new administration seems to be following it more or less, but President Biden has been not backing off on the tough policy that President Trump instituted, including economic measures and more recently insisting on a more thorough investigation of COVID-19. What do you think about that? Is it consistent or is it deviating in certain aspects?
Robert Spalding:
Well, it is. I think one of the things that they have said is they are doing a wholesale review on all the policies. I think you are right for the most part. They are keeping them intact, but you know the concerning part and the part that really continues to be a challenge for the United States is the private sector, which is entirely incentivized by the graft that the Chinese Communist Party is able to pull off, whether it be through investments in U.S. corporations or through U.S. corporationsâ investment in China. This continues to be a problem and they continue to put pressure on the Biden administration.
Now, they were doing the same thing in the Trump administration. The difference between Biden and Trump is that Trump I think sensed you know personally that we had a problem, but you know he had within his cabinet those that wanted to continue the status quo and those that did not. I think Biden now faces a challenge, not just within his own administration but also now coming steadily from the bureaucracies, who have kind of woken up to the challenge.
And so those permanent party members of the federal government that are, you know, like me have now started to consider more carefully what the Chinese Communist Party is doing [because it] really starts to create drag on the system for any kind of change away from an aggressive push on China. So I think the court is still open on how the Biden administration will work, but so far I think it is fairly consistently applying the measures that the Trump administration implemented as they pertain to China.
Robert R. Reilly:
Now, one of the chapter titles in your book is âcapitalist magical thinking,â in which you deal somewhat with this business orientation. Now, it is interesting that over certainly the past decade the U.S. public opinion regarding China has experienced a sea change and a large majority of the American people are very alarmed by China’s behavior and by the danger that China presents to the United States. But what you have just said seems to indicate that this capitalist magical thinking continues in our corporate community. Is that right?
Robert Spalding:
That is right and that is because the Chinese Communist Party, you know, has a lot of levers at their disposal to kind of coerce the corporate sector to do the things that they want, so when, for instance, when the Trump administration increased the tariffs, there was a corresponding devaluation of the yuan, which tends to negate the effects of tariffs, so the Chinese Communist Party, being that they control the financial system in China and being that they can turn off the spigot and turn on the spigot in terms of [the] exchange rate with regard to the yuan, really puts them in the driver’s seat when it comes to our economy, which is an open economy.
You know the Federal Reserve basically lets the dollar float and has to because that is how the dollar remains a store [of value], of basically a reserve currency for the world. If it was not traded on markets, then people would lose confidence. That is why the yuan represents less than one percent of any financial transactions anywhere, because nobody trusts the Chinese Communist Party in the exchange rate of the RMB.
So I think this ability to control the economy is a huge problem for the United States because the corporate sector while it cannot be bullied by the U.S. government, it certainly is bullied by the Chinese Communist Party, and the executives whose salaries correspond to their earnings are very easy to manipulate when you are looking at quarterly profits. So I think that is what the Chinese Communist Party has.
You know we when you say capitalist magical thinking, we do not have a free market economy, global economy. It is [an] economy that is severely impacted by a country that does not believe in free trade. It does not have a free floating currency and so this magical belief that we have a capitalist system globally is just incorrect. And you know I made the comment that if you are going to invest in a Chinese company, you might as well invest in something like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme because it is the same kind of system. It is not a system that’s open to audit, and it is in total control of the Chinese Communist Party.
Robert R. Reilly:
Speaking of that, General, you speak in the latter part of your book about your conversations with Roger Robinson, who was on the National Security Council during the Reagan years, and was a colleague of mine back then, in which he was one of the chief architects of the economic policy that put such stress on the Soviet Union that it eventually collapsed.
We recently did a Westminster program with Roger and he was saying some of the same things as you have, but particularly that China is very adept at exploiting U.S. capital markets because U.S. capital markets have – I think he said something like 50 [percent] of the world’s capital and we are not doing anything to restrict their access to it. So in effect the United States is helping fund [them], whether it is their actions against the Uyghurs or the military build-up, by allowing this access. Now, it seems to me that would be something that could be fixed by legislation. Was that part of the discussion when you were on the NSC and do you think there is going to be any movement in that direction?
Robert Spalding:
So there is a good book just came out from Josh Rogin. Josh was a reporter at The Washington Post and he did a lot of background investigation with regard to the Trump administration. I can tell you I had discussions with the Treasury. I had discussions with the Chairman at the SEC. All things that were mentioned in terms of the challenge that the Trump administration had was that Wall Street controls the Treasury and the SEC.
Robert R. Reilly:
I found that out about telecoms. The telecom industry controls NTIA and were solidly behind the leak of my paper on 5G. So the financial industry from Wall Street controls the Treasury Department and SEC, and they do that by placing people that are close to that. You know that Mnuchin came out of Goldman Sachs. So did the SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, and so when you are trying to get a different outcome and you are hearing from the guys on Wall Street, saying do not stick your hands in to our cookie jar, you are not going to get a different outcome, so the Treasury part and SEC fought restricting access to capital markets.
We all knew what was going on. The people that you know, the people like Roger Robinson knew was going on. I knew it was going on. We had several engagements, discussing what was going on, and in fact, you know the president finally had to weigh in with regard to the Thrift Savings Plan to prevent military pensions from going to invest in the weapons manufacturers for the People’s Liberation Army. So we knew was going on, but that is the nature of an open society, that DC can get lobbied by everybody from Goldman Sachs to the Chinese Communist Party. And that is part of our system and it is one of the reasons that the Chinese Communist Party has been so successful in implementing their brand of political warfare.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, I understand how Treasury and other agencies could be captive to Wall Street, but what about the U.S. Congress? That is where the action would have to be in terms of legislation. Did you get any Hill reaction to your book and any invitations to some chats with congressmen?
Robert Spalding:
Yes, and I have talked to a few of the caucuses, mostly on the Right. I have had very little interaction with Congress on the Democratic side, although I have had some. One of the things that you find â there is another good book just came out in â20. [It] seems like these books came out all in 2020. It is called The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl, and she does a good job in kind of laying out why congressman and congresswomen and senators go to DC but then do not do the bidding of the citizens that sent them there. And that is because of our political process, which is very much aligned towards where the parties have power over the agenda and voting of the candidates that go to DC. In fact, you know I had one former member tell me to my face that he was told by a donor to his campaign in no uncertain terms if he did not vote according to the party, that he would be primaried out the very next time.
So what you have is on the Democratic/Republican side a lot of people that just go there and do what they are told. And so you end up – if you look at it from an industry’s perspective, the way that you make a lot of money in the politics industry is to ensure that there is hyperpartisanship because then it really gets people upset, and so they will donate money to whatever side they think aligns with their beliefs. And then there is this money spent on ads. It is spent on competitive political consultants, and you end up with a system where a minority through the closed primary process gets their candidate on and then a minority, not over 50 percent but some what less than 50 percent of the voting population, votes for this candidate. And then they go to DC and they basically do the party’s bidding.
And so you know in many ways because our Constitution really enables this type of behavior it has become one of the ways that the Chinese Communist Party goes after us. It actually helps perpetuate this partisanship by inserting itself through social media and other means into the dialogue in ways that are imperceptible to Americans. And so our open system, when you have an open system and you allow a country like China that is all about political warfare, and the political warfare that they do is not designed to let you know it is them involved.
They just want you to be distracted. They want you to be internally conflicted. They want you to not be united. They are looking for a country like America, not to implement policies that allow for their citizens to thrive. They do not want to see economic growth in the United States. And so you know the way you do that is by basically contributing to this hyper partisanship in a way that is really not perceptible and social media and in the internet and the way that we have developed technologically really enables that to be deployed on a widespread basis.
They do not have to do it themselves, they can hire the political consultants, they can hire the media firms to do this just like anybody else can. And they can hire people to hire those firms. And they can play paid political consultants. So you know if you think about it, it is like you have an air force and then part of it you put up for hire to bomb your own citizens. That is kind of the way that our system is.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, generally, I understand those pressures. Nonetheless, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus forming over the dangers China represents and I recall a bipartisan consensus regarding the Soviet Union during the Cold War, not that it was unanimous. But nonetheless it was generally understood that the Soviet Union was the principal threat to the United States, and one of the elements of our strategy included public diplomacy and broadcasting, books, magazines, cultural programs and so forth that were quite effective.
Really now that is an element that the Chinese are employing with some great success. When I went back to the Voice of America recently for a little while, I had an illuminating discussion with the division director for Latin America in the Caribbean, who spoke of the penetration of the Chinese into Latin American media where they offer packages, obviously in Spanish or Portuguese at no cost, covering issues the Chinese want covered from the orientation that they want to put across. And that relieves the local stations of all the costs of producing something like that itself, and so she was very alarmed by the success that they were having, and now obviously Latin America is not the only part of the world in which that is true.
Now, you were in Beijing as the defense attaché. You speak fluent Mandarin. Could you detect any penetration in Chinese society or in the leadership of any American public diplomacy efforts, particularly the Voice of America language services?
Robert Spalding:
No, just the opposite. In fact, you know I was alarmed at the Pentagon when I realized that our own diplomats were using the Chinese Communist Party talking points, and so the Chinese have been very effective at blocking any type of penetration of us into their system, but fully penetrated ours. So I think public diplomacy is such a huge, important issue and you know, of course, when you talk about the Uyghurs or talk about Hong Kong, China gets upset. Then they yell at the ambassador. He does not want to be yelled at, so he goes to the public diplomacy person on the staff [and] says, âHey, you know letâs calm things down.â
That is why we had something called the U.S. Information Agency during the Cold War. [It] was an independent agency just for public diplomacy and the State Department could not tell them to shut up and so they were in. And actually, the Reagan administration poured a lot of money in that. Dr. John Lenczowski talked a lot about the importance of public diplomacy and VOA and Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe were important, probably key components to winning the Cold War. And in fact, many leaders from former Soviet states when they came over to the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union praised the VOA and Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia as being their lifeline, the thing that allowed them to hold out hope. We have meanwhile cut funding to it, we have not stressed it, and it is the only way I think that we begin to fight back offensively in this war of ideas.
Chinese people do not even know what democracy is. In fact, I will just give an example. I was in Taiwan last year, covering the elections in January 2020 as an election monitor, and I remember walking around Taipei and I wanted to ask somebody for directions on how to get to the the political rally. I went to the rally for both the Guo Min Dang and then the DPP, and I realized I did not know how to say âpolitical rally,â and you know the reason I did not know how to say political rally [is] because I had learned Chinese from the context of the Chinese Communist Party. There is no such thing as a political rally in China, so I did not have that vocabulary to pull on or to draw on. Neither do the people in China. They do not understand what democracy is. They understand the word âdemocracy,â and what they would tell me when I was living in China is that democracy is not for the Chinese people because they have some kind of cultural flaw that prevents them from appreciating democracy.
I thought that was a little bit strange, but of course when I first got to China, I did not understand the level to which the Chinese Communist Party wanted to indoctrinate their people, beginning in kindergarten through every grade of school, and then you follow that up with media and social media and the great firewall. And really, so they live in a bubble, and not only [do] they live in a bubble in China, so the effect of not allowing things like Twitter and Facebook in China is that the only social media that Chinese people use, Chinese language speakers in China, is Chinese social media.
And so what happens is when they actually can leave the geographic boundaries of China and travel, say, to the United States, maybe they go to university or work in a business. They tend to stay on the social media in China that is all monitored and censored by the Chinese Communist Party, so in many ways by preventing Chinese citizens from having access to any kind of social media within China, they have effectively been able to extend their great firewall beyond the borders of China because their citizens just stay on the same Chinese-owned social media.
And then you get to the United States or any of the Latin American countries that you are talking about. Most of the radio and television media that is in the Chinese language is owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, not to mention how they influence the indigenous language media of those countries as well. So yes, public diplomacy is a huge element of this ideological warfare and we are not even playing in the game.
Robert R. Reilly:
I am afraid that is right, General. I was actually at the U.S. Information Agency back in â81, â82 and the destruction of that agency I think is one of the real tragedies most people did not know [about], but its lost is grievous exactly in the ways in which you have just spelled out. Now, you are an Air Force General, so let us talk a little about Chinese military capabilities, the build-up that they have been undertaking.
We recently had on the program Lieutenant General Ben Hodges and he said that the naval shipyards in China are producing new warships at the rate that the United States was at its height in World War II. And you would, I am sure, be intimately familiar with the Chinese Air Forces and the general military posture. Can you comment upon this? Oh, yes, I should also mention General Hodges said as other military leaders that he expects a war with China within five years and that he senses the Chinese military is spoiling for a fight. What do you think of that?
Robert Spalding:
Well, the benefit that the Chinese Communist Party has is that they are fighting in their own backyard, particularly when it comes to Taiwan, and so one of the things they did was rather than build up very expensive, sophisticated force like the United States with F-35s and $11 billion dollar aircraft carriers and multi-billion dollar nuclear submarines, they heavily relied on very low cost but effective intermediate-range conventional ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, so long range fires that they can basically within a matter of minutes really just destroy most of the U.S. forces in the region just by pushing a button.
And then not to mention they can just literally saturate the island of Taiwan with munitions. Yes, their navy is pouring a surface combatant out every four to six weeks. The numbers they [have] surpass the United States Navy now and yet they are managing to do this while at the same time spending less than two percent of gross domestic product because of the purchasing power parity of the Renminbi, and so they are not breaking the bank to do it.
One of the things they did learn was the Soviet Union was spending at upwards of 40 percent of GDP on the military, and they said this is not the way to go. We need to keep our people employed. We can build a military. So rather than cutting a bigger piece of the pie, we will just make the pie bigger and we will keep the same the piece of the pie small so that we are not impacting the people’s lives, but we will just grow the pie larger. That is what they have been doing.
So they have grown their economy over fourteen times since I was there back in 2002, enough to be the number two economy in the world, and so it is through this mechanism of really not going from a butter to guns to guns to butter, but really saying butter to guns but growing their overall economy through this method of economic warfare. At the same time they have aided and abetted Iran, North Korea, and Russia. So who are the major military adversaries of the United States? Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and so in many ways they have encouraged this great military build up after the end of the Cold War of the United States in order to get the us to do some of the same things that the Soviet Union did.
Now, the Soviet Union primarily relied on oil as its chief revenue and you know, of course, Roger Robinson talked about basically cutting the price of oil that and that really impacted the Soviet Union. The Chinese have essentially the supply chain of the world and they use the coronavirus as a means of strengthening their control over the supply chain as everybody else closed up their economy. So they have been very, very effective at growing their military power in the context of an overall social construct that enables them to maintain control of the society. They have learned the lessons of the Soviet Union. They are not going to repeat them, and their goal for us is not only to see us be less committed, competitive economically over time, but really less effective militarily.
It is interesting to note that the Black Sea fleet, which was the prize of the Soviet Union, parked its ships. There was no war after the Cold War. It parked ships and its officers enlisted were starving in Crimea, and ultimately had to scrap their ships and sell them, sell the scrap to buy to buy food in order to feed themselves. This is what happened to the Soviet Union, and in the Chinese Communist Party’s mind this is what is going to happen to the United States over time. They just have to let this strategy play out.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, I have asked a number of Chinese experts this question, so I will ask it to you. The Chinese strategy had been sort of âspeak softly and build up over the years until you change the strategic equation,â and that Chairman Xi just needed to continue with that strategy during China’s military build up and economic growth, and after say another ten years it would be too late for the United States to do anything. And the reaction I have gotten is that the Chinese judgment of the leadership is that it is already too late for the United States. Do you think that is correct?
Robert Spalding:
I think it is. You know and I do not know that Liu, who is Xi Jinping’s chief economic advisor, agrees with him, but Xi Jinping has all the power, and I think Xi Jinping really sees now that the PLA is ready as a military force. I think he senses that China has everything it needs to isolate itself from the United States, and really has all the technology and economic [power] and more importantly a consumption-based economy that he can rely on now to create indigenous economic growth. And so you know what are you gonna do with a bunch of conventional and ballistic and cruise missiles when you build them? Well, you gotta use them.
The People’s Liberation Army very much has been spoiling for a fight. China is now ready to cut itself off from the rest of the world, and actually that is why the trade agreement did not come off with Trump, because Xi Jinping does not care about it anymore. He has got the things that he needs, so when Ben Hodges said it is probably going to happen in the next five years, I tend to agree with that. I think the Chinese Communist Party is going to move on Taiwan. I do not think they are going to have really any resistance at all because [of] the firepower. I mean if you could just see the numbers when you look at [it], I mean it is going to be raining artillery rounds on that island and nobody, nothing is going to be safe, and so it is almost like they could issue an ultimatum to Taiwan and say hey, save your people, capitulate.
Now, the question is what is going to happen afterwards? You know I think the United States is going to have to make a choice and I think it is really going to come down to how are we going to ensure the safety of the people of Taiwan because I do not think the Chinese Communist Party carries one licking about the people. They want the dirt. That is a sad thing to say, but if you understood the Chinese Communist Party, you would understand that comment, and then that means who is going to look to the 23 million or so people on Taiwan? It will not be the party, that is not what they do. And so you know what is our role? How do we facilitate the survival of those people when their lives are threatened by religious regimes? So I think that is something that we are gonna have to keep in mind and really hopefully we can help those people that want to get off.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, as you are keenly aware of the strategic significance of Taiwan, you will recall that Japan, beginning in the 19th century, occupied Taiwan because it understood the strategic significance of the island. Today, they are talking about and concerned over Chinese pressure on the Senkaku islands, which Japan has authority over. But what if let us say when China resumes control over Taiwan, really puts Japan in a very difficult strategic situation. Are they capable of doing anything to prevent that today?
Robert Spalding:
Well, they have already said that officially that they are not going to do anything. They face the same predicament of U.S. forces in the region. As you know Chinese have their bases zeroed in, so I really think what you are possibly facing in Japan, maybe Korea, maybe even Taiwan is this realization that one way that they can create some deterrence is to go nuclear, and so I would not be surprised to see a number of these countries very quickly establish a program and go nuclear as a means of deterring a Chinese attack.
I mean one of the challenges that we face is the U.S. extends its nuclear umbrella to the region, but it does so by not actually having any nuclear weapons within the hands of its allies and that has been the policy of the United States, but unfortunately, the way that we were able to get the Soviets to back down in Europe was to actually have nuclear weapons in Europe. And in fact, the INF Treaty, which eventually the Russians cheated on, but really the reason the INF Treaty came about was because the United States introduced nuclear cruise missiles into the theater in Europe and forced the Soviets to recognize that if they wanted things to be toned down, they would have to tone things down themselves. So great wishes and dreams do not strategy make. And if you want to prevent a war in the pacific and you are not willing to introduce nuclear weapons into those countries, then you face the prospect of a war.
Robert Reilly:
On the other hand the growing consensus about the dangers from China seems to be at least having an incipient [alliance], the possibility of an alliance, the so-called Quad group (Australia, the United States, India, Japan) that has got to be of concern to China if this turns into a military alliance with some teeth. What do you think?
Robert Spalding:
Well, so one of the things that the United States was able to do through its alliance system was really isolate the Soviet Union from the economies and societies and political systems of its allies. At the same time it was able to help with the economic growth of its allies, which strengthened the value of the overall military alliance. What the U.S. is facing in the Quad is that you have got the Chinese, you have got the number one economic relationship with Australia and in India and in Japan. And more importantly, the U.S. has invested enormous resources and attention on China from an economic and financial perspective, but not from a military perspective, and so they go into India and they say, âHey, be our friend, be our military ally, but yet I am going to pour all my economic and financial and political focus into our collective adversary, China. We are going to grow their economy, we are going to make their politicians successful because we are going to give the Chinese people jobs. Meanwhile, the people in India we are not even going to send you vaccines.â
So I think what we found is that military alliances have to be comprehensive alliances, they have to be economic, financial, trade alliances as well. And to the extent that we just want Australia and Japan and India, the Quad, to be an alliance, an effective military alliance, at the same time every one of our economies is more aligned with the Chinese economy. We find that there is an imbalance there that makes what the Quad could be ineffective. As long as we continue to pour money and resources and time and attention and trade into China and expect the Indians to be strong military allies, I think we are sorely mistaken. We need to be strong economic, financial, and trade allies with India and the other economies of the pacific as well if we want them to be effective military allies.
Robert R. Reilly:
General, you spoke just a short time ago and also in your book about [how] the Chinese economy is a Ponzi scheme. Could you talk a little about the vulnerabilities of China and also, of course, the population report, [which] recently came out, and [how] China is now changing to a three-child policy because it understands its vulnerabilities from an aging population perspective? Okay, so what vulnerabilities do you think that exists there that could be taken advantage of?
Robert Spalding:
Well, I mean so one of the ways that they keep the people mollified and focused away from politics is to continue to grow the economy every single year. In order to do that they need to be connected to the global economy and to extract technology, talent, innovation in capital, mostly capital. In that case, Roger Robinson is right, the Belt and Road Initiative is an incredible way, a means for dealing with their population decline and that is by sending their excess males out through the Belt and Road Initiative to intermedial with the populations that have healthy demographics and create this essentially economic ecosystem.
That is what the Belt and Road Initiative is about. It is about creating opportunities for China to deal with its demand demographics problem and to create access to resources while creating markets for Chinese goods. And so I think they have an answer to that. We tend to look at those types of things and say, okay, well, they are not going to make it. Well, if you look at who their partners are in the developing world, they have some of the best demographics in the world. Pakistan is one good example. Some of the countries in Africa also [have] very good demographics, so really heavily weighted to young people where China is heavily weighted to old people.
The other thing that the Chinese Communist Party did in enacting the one child policy is it created enormous infanticide for females, and so they have a severe overpopulation of young males. And the Belt and Road Initiative is one way for them to leverage those young males to create new sources of Chinese citizens. Some analysts have said that China is really more an empire than it is a nation, and one of the things that it fears most is separatism, and thus this hideous crackdown on the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and also the long-standing policy of a kind of cultural genocide against the Tibetan people.
Robert R. Reilly:
Was it your perspective when you were there and now that that this is a fear that really drives them?
Robert Spalding:
Well, you know I think I do not know so much of fear as [it is] a necessity. Their need to enforce conformity is extremely important and it has been as it was for Jiang Zemin in going after the Falun Gong and same thing for Xi Jinping. You know as you are rising as a leader you kind of point out a group and you go after them, and that is what those two did. I tend to agree with this idea that China, you know, they try to portray it as having this long history of being one, homogenous culture. It is not and you know it has done a great job of basically rewriting history to make places like East Turkestan and Tibet and other, you know, soon to be Taiwan, [and] other places in that are that were not historically Chinese, not Han Chinese at all, and then saying that those have always been Chinese territories, and so, yeah, they are more an empire than anything.
And the other thing, this other predominant idea within the Communist Party, this idea of the Han Chinese as being kind of the predominant race. When you actually get into the DNA within China, you find that there is a whole mix of cultures or a whole mix of different races in there that because of their name or where they come from are considered Han Chinese. And so the Chinese system is one of absorption, and it is interesting to think that we were going to embrace China and have them become more like us when in reality what happens is if you embrace China, you tend to become more like them, and so this kind of trend towards homogeneity is really what the Communist Party wants.
They want a system that is stable. They want a system where people do what they are supposed to do, and they feel like they have created the perfect system to encourage that. It is not a Confucius system, it is not a classical Chinese system, it is a Marxist-Leninist system. Let us no make no mistake about it. They are not some neo-Confucianist [group], they are Marxist-Leninist, and Xi Jinping himself will proudly tell you so, he being the most Marxist-Leninist of them all, and if anybody that studied those systems knows how they work and China just does the same.
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, General, let me close with this question. Some people observed that whereas the Party continues to try to enforce an orthodoxy in Marxist-Leninist thinking and indoctrination programs about which you have spoken, that not many people believe in Marxism-Leninism, that it is really a defunct ideology so far as the people are concerned. So what replaces that? And one of the answers seems to be, well, nationalism, pride in China, and that Xi Jinping is able to take great advantage of any perceived insult to China or a threat from the United States, and that this works, that it really rallies the Chinese people to the side of its leadership.
Now, you not only obviously in your position in Beijing had interaction with Chinese military, but from your Olmstead Fellowship you had a lot of interaction with Chinese people. What did you learn from that regarding things like this?
Robert Spalding:
Yeah, I mean I think the thing that motivates people more than anything is can I have a job, can I raise a family, can I send my kids to school, can I have a roof over my head, you know, can I have what we would have considered, you know, 30 years ago this idea of the American dream? If I can, I do not need anything else. When I am in a society where the Party says, hey, if you stick your nose in places where you should not be, you are gonna get it cut off, people tend to — as long as the life is good for them — not to really care too much about politics.
Now, when things are not going well, that is when the nationalism comes into play. What the Party can do is basically say, hey, the reason things are not going well is because, you know, the Americans have done it, and so it really forces the anger of the people who are just like us. They want to raise their family and give their kids a better life than they had, that is it, and that is how people are the same all around the world. So you are right, the Marxist-Leninism does not appeal to him, the American dream does, and what has happened is we have exported the American dream for this cockamamie idea that if we made China rich, they would not want to go to war.
Well, let me tell you something. People that are Marxist-Leninist, which is what the Chinese Communist Party does, will never stop wanting total control because that is the way the system is built, and so you know they are going to use their people as a great lever in that and the way they do it is by basically keeping them mollified right up until the time that they are not, and when they are not they turn that political ire on the United States.
And so I think that you know our thing as Americans is we never come together unless there is an outside threat. Otherwise, we are busy fighting with each other. And I think from the Chinese Communist Party view if they can just keep us there, they can just keep us Americans focused on each other and fighting with each other, then they are going to be just fine because what they will be able to do is force a slow erosion of our society from within, and that is their goal. And so the Chinese people as long as they have a job and you know everything is good they do not really care. I mean it is just it is human nature.
Robert R. Reilly:
Alright, let me sneak in one last question because what you just said in defining the the aims of the Communist Party in China to separate Americans and keep us fighting against each other happens to be exactly the same strategy pursued by Russia. How would you define what seems to be a developing alliance between China and Russia that should worry us?
Robert Spalding:
Well, yeah, I mean I think that the Russians really I do not pay much mind to because they just do not have the throwaway to the Chinese. So they have a lot of nuclear weapons, yes, but ultimately the Russians are going to do whatever Xi Jinping wants them to do, that is just the nature of the relationship. It is very much a big brother, small brother thing. Putin can talk a big talk, but ultimately he is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. He knows it, they know it.
Yeah, I mean to the extent that we were to offer Putin an alternative, and do it in a way that I think was good for America strategically, like what we originally did with China, I think that would be a good thing, but it would have to be very carefully orchestrated. And unfortunately, I do not think American national security experts have that kind of nuance anymore. I think you know Nixon was kind of one of a kind when it comes to that.
Robert R. Reilly:
General Spalding, thank you very much for your quite frank and certainly distressing remarks about China and the threat it represents to the United States. I would like to thank everyone for joining us for this program, and I invite you to go to the westminster-institute.org website to see the other lectures available to you both on the subject of China, Russia, and other issues. Thank you for joining us today. I am Bob Reilly, your host.