- Over the last 25 years, while the United States fought costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the People's Republic of China has been expanding its influence, its economic relationships, and even the reach of its military.

Today's guest offers a sober look at the challenge China poses to the West and offers a strategy to guide America's response.

He's Michael Sobolik this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Michael Sobolik, a Senior Fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council.

Michael is also the author of a new book, "Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance."

He joins us today from Washington, DC.

Michael, thank you so much for being with us.

- It's a pleasure to be on the show today.

Thanks for having me.

- There's a ton that we want to talk to you about today, but I want to start sort of really foundationally.

You describe the Chinese Communist Party as the principle threat to the United States and American national security and American interests in 2024.

Why is that?

- Because Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have made it abundantly clear they see America that way.

And I think this is something fundamental about national security that's easy for Americans to forget sometimes.

We go about our days, whether you live in Dallas or Des Moines or Topeka or New York or San Francisco, you go about your day taking care of your family, buying groceries, paying your bills, and the thought never occurs to your mind that you stand in the way of a totalitarian geopolitical adversary.

But that is how Xi Jinping views America.

All you have to do is read his own speeches and his own remarks that he gives to his comrades in Beijing.

He is trying to "rejuvenate the Chinese nation," to borrow his phrase.

And in order to do that, he needs to remake the world order that the United States has built up and maintains.

So whether we like it or not, America is locked in a zero-sum competition with a Leninist authoritarian party, the Chinese Communist Party, and there's no getting out of it.

We have to buckle up and compete to win in a cold war with these guys.

- You know, so how do you respond to those who would say, though, that they might view us as that threat, but the United States doesn't need to view them as that kind of threat?

- That perspective is quite popular in Washington today.

And I think the assumption is you can choose whether or not you are in a cold war.

And I think this is where the Biden administration is trying to steer US-China relations.

Whenever the President talks about responsibly managing competition with China, the goal is to try to make sure that competition doesn't berine into the conflict, be a responsible stakeholder on the world stage.

But the reality is it only takes one country to decide that you're in a cold war with another country.

That's not a dual-party decision.

That's a single-party decision.

And if the Chinese Communist Party has decided that they are in a zero-sum conflict with the United States, we do not have the option of trying to engage in a positive-sum relationship with Beijing.

We can try to tell ourselves we can, but it's a Pollyannish fiction and it makes the world more dangerous.

The best thing for us to do is to try to deter the CCP from its belligerence and its aggression.

If we try to treat them as if they are a responsible stakeholder, not only are we going to be disappointed, we're going to leave the road open for their belligerence, and that's even more dangerous.

- So you describe China as an imperialist nation.

What does that mean in 2024?

- The word imperialism gets thrown around a lot these days.

We often talk about Russia being an imperialist power, which I think there's an easy case to be made based on their war in Ukraine.

We often don't talk about the People's Republic of China as an imperialist power.

And I find that to be quite odd.

In the book I wrote, "Countering China's Great Game," I started researching the dynastic foreign policy of China.

Now it's easy for anyone to hear that sentence and for their eyes to immediately glaze over because China has not been a dynastic nation for a very long time.

The first dynasty was established in 221 BC, and the final dynasty collapsed around 1912 AD.

It's a long time, and it was also a long time ago.

But China was an imperialist power during that time.

From the first dynasty to the final dynasty, China expanded by a factor of four, territorially, and they launched wars of conquest often.

They had a tribute system that was a soft despotism, a soft imperialism, to control their near abroad into Central Asia and the Middle East.

And today, when you look at the Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy, primarily the Belt and Road Initiative, which is a global infrastructure connectivity project, it echoes those imperialist chapters in its history.

No, China's not trying to conquer every square inch of the world like the Nazis were during World War II, but they are seeking a sort of political imperialism.

They are trying to exert political dominance across the entire world, including in our own Western hemisphere.

And that is crucial to understanding what they're trying to do.

They're not just this disinterested defensive power trying to get security.

They're trying to get power, and it stems from this long imperial history that they've had.

- So you refer to China not as China throughout the book, but as the Chinese Communist Party.

Why is that an important point to make?

- That distinction, perhaps it's a wordy distinction.

And whenever you talk about policy, words matter, because when you brief members of Congress, they only have so many minutes to spare because they're very busy people.

So every single word matters.

Usually, fewer words are better.

But that distinction is an important one to make because America has no qualm or no quibble with the people of China.

If anything, the Chinese people suffer the most under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

And China itself, the Chinese Communist Party in particular, will hide behind their own people.

For instance, whenever the United States calls out Beijing for human rights abuses, what Chinese diplomats will often say is, "You have offended and hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people," which is an absurd talking point, but they will hide behind their own people as a defensive mechanism.

So it's really important for American diplomats and for policymakers to be specific.

We have no issue with the people of China.

The entity that threatens America is the Chinese Communist Party, the single-party dictatorial entity that governs the People's Republic of China.

- You know, I don't think we can talk about China's role in the world, or the Chinese Communist Party, without talking about Taiwan.

And some of the conversation around Taiwan and China and the United States reminds me of the early rhetoric, early in the Cold War, about a year of maximum danger.

And there are some voices in the United States who warn that China's threat to Taiwan is imminent.

Where do you come down on that?

How immediate a threat do you think China is, militarily, politically, to Taiwan's independence?

- If you look at what Xi Jinping is doing right now, he is preparing the Chinese people for war.

And you can look at a variety of different metrics to come to that conclusion.

China is stockpiling food.

They are rejiggering their policy on military reservists to make it easier to call them up quickly.

They are locking down their supply chains for critical minerals and critical technologies.

They are seeking redundancy for energy oil imports.

They have a slew of policies that they have implemented that are putting them in a resilient posture in a time of war.

I think it was Matt Pottinger, former Deputy National Security Advisor in the Trump administration, who made this case in the "Foreign Affairs" magazine not that long ago.

If you accept that proposition that the senior leadership of the CCP is preparing the people of China for war, then I think America comes to a really uncomfortable conclusion.

We might be running out of time to deter Beijing from attacking and trying to absorb Taiwan.

I don't know if it's going to be this year.

I don't know if it's going to be next year.

I think that granular level of prognostication is a bit counterproductive because you're just playing the parlor game of predictions.

That's a dime a dozen, everybody has an opinion.

But the bottom line is we need to make sure that Xi Jinping never wakes up on a morning and decides, "Okay, today's the day.

I think I can outmaneuver the Americans, outfox them, and get Taiwan at an acceptable cost."

Which means we need to deter the People's Liberation Army.

We need to make sure that we can deny their war plans.

And based on our lackluster military investments over the past few years, that's not going to be easy to do.

- So what are America's options if, in fact, China seizes Taiwan, militarily?

In other words, deterrence does not work.

- If deterrence fails, we are going to have a very simple policy choice, but it's not going to be an easy one to make.

The simple choice is, you write Taiwan off, you do not engage, you do not try to eject the People's Liberation Army from that island, and you essentially allow them to win.

Or the United States enters the conflict with the intention of winning.

Those are the two primary choices that American politicians will have.

I suspect that there's a possibility that depending on who is in the Oval Office, that we could try to muddle through with a third option, which is trying to have our cake and eat it too.

Maybe we don't send American troops, but we try to have this huge sanctions campaign to try to punish China, to try to isolate them diplomatically, and then we try to claim some sort of puric victory by saying we punished the PRC, but we don't actually try to reverse their gains.

I think that would be an enormous mistake.

If deterrence fails, America needs to step in and reverse the course and make sure that the People's Liberation Army does not take Taiwan.

If China gets Taiwan, if the CCP gets Taiwan, they will not stop there.

They have border disputes in every single direction, including in the South China Sea.

And their political star will be on the rise and their military projections will be unlike it is now if they take and retain Taiwan.

We cannot allow that to happen, and we need to make sure that we're in a position to win if that is required.

- You know, Michael, the book itself is so much bigger than just the issues in the cross-Taiwan straits.

I want to open the aperture a little bit here 'cause you're really discussing Chinese grand strategy, what America's competitive strategy could be encountering China.

You spent a fair amount of the book discussing the Belt and Road Initiative.

You mentioned it already in this interview.

But for the folks at home, I think we maybe want to linger here just a little bit.

What is the Belt and Road initiative and why is it so central to China's position in the world?

- The Belt and Road Initiative, or in its abbreviated sense, the BRI, is Beijing's attempt to remake the world.

It is Xi Jinping's effort to reorient the economic focus of the world away from the West and toward the East, away from Washington and toward Beijing.

The way that China has done this primarily is through entering the Global South and the developing world with low-cost infrastructure projects that Washington, Tokyo, Europe, and other nations and other bodies have not been willing to finance.

Now, one of the reasons Beijing is able to do that is because they don't have good governance or anti-corruption standards attached to their foreign aid, like America does.

On balance, I think that's a good thing that America tries to tie good governance to taxpayer-funded projects, but the Chinese Communist Party has no proclivities to do so, which means they can wire and network the developing world at a very low cost, which gives them political influence in Southeast Asia, in Central Asia, in the Middle East, and Africa.

And frankly, in the developing world, too.

Western Europe and especially Eastern Europe is tied into this project, and that changes their political calculus with how willing they are to go toe-to-toe with the CCP over geopolitical or human rights issues.

They're also doing this in our own hemisphere in Latin America, particularly with Argentina and Venezuela.

What does this mean practically for Americans?

This is the road that is going to allow the People's Liberation Army to become a global military force.

We are already seeing Beijing militarized Belt and Road Initiative projects all around the world.

It's partially to isolate Taiwan, but it is also to blunt America's ability to be a functioning global power.

That's a huge problem.

We don't want to live in a world where the PLA, the Chinese military, is able to outmaneuver and outflank the US military.

That is why the Belt and Road Initiative is so dangerous if we leave it unaddressed.

- You know, one of the things that I find so fascinating about this discussion is that it's a kind of state craft that China's practicing that I think the United States was more comfortable thinking of in terms of world building after World War II, that we seem less comfortable with that now.

Is it something about being the, you know, in the 1990s, we talked about the United States as a hegemon.

China was a rising power.

Are we less likely to take on those types of international projects now because of our position in the world or because of something like our domestic politics?

- I think it's both.

And I think this is one of the difficult parts about American foreign policy right now.

On the one hand, it's not the 1990s anymore.

America has been humbled on the world stage, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a mess.

It left our credibility in tatters, and you better believe Vladimir Putin was watching that and it absolutely impacted his calculation on whether or not to further invade Ukraine.

The other layer here is we really believed, in the 1990s, I think, after we so decisively won the Cold War, that we had the ability to be this global policeman in one way or another, and we thought it would be easy to do that.

And it hasn't been easy and we failed many times.

And that has impacted our domestic politics.

You see this resurgence of isolationism in the United States today.

Part of that is understandable, I think.

If America has big foreign policy failures, it's natural for voters to question the elites in Washington and to say, "Well, wait a second, you say we're in a new cold war, but look at our foreign policy track record over the past few years."

I think that skepticism is really understandable and that burden falls on policymakers to make the case, number one, for why America is still strong, and, number two, how we can responsibly execute and win a cold war.

We have to make that case.

- So, again, it seems that BRI is more dangerous than Taiwan possibly being seized.

From a foreign policy point of view, what can we do to counter BRI?

You have just described something that sounds very frightening, actually.

- Maybe this could sound odd.

I'm gratified that that danger is coming through in this conversation.

I wrote this book because I think Americans are sleepwalking into a cold war that could very easily turn into a hot war.

And I think your connection to Taiwan and the BRI is also a sound one.

Taiwan is the immediate danger, but the long-term danger is the Chinese Communist Party successfully becoming a global imperialist power.

The one good thing that America has going for it right now is because the perennial pitfall of being an imperialist nation is overreach, overstretch.

China had that issue time and time again during its dynastic era, which is why I studied this so intently and so closely while writing "Countering China's Great Game."

They're doing it again today, which means we have a lot of opportunities to exploit Beijing's weaknesses.

They have exposed flanks in their foreign policy.

One example of this, we could go in many different directions, there's an ongoing genocide inside of China right now in the region of Xinjiang, its westernmost territory.

They are conducting a genocide against Uyghur Muslims and have been doing so for seven years.

This genocide is connected to the Belt and Road Initiative.

If you look at a map of China, half of the CCP's Belt and Road trade routes in Eurasia run through Xinjiang.

And those trade routes were constructed at the exact same time the reeducation camps for the Uyghurs were being reconstructed.

That's no accident.

Xi Jinping has described this territory, Xinjiang, as a hub of the Belt and Road Initiative.

If you have to commit genocide for your biggest foreign policy project to function properly, that's a sign of weakness.

It's not a sign of strength.

America can target this because a lot of this Belt and Road commerce is denominated in US dollars.

And even in the cases when it's not, both transactors on either side of that trade want to access the global financial system that absolutely is denominated in the US dollar.

We can leverage our monetary dominance, much like we did after 9/11, and force American banks to know who their customers are.

If you are profiting from genocide-linked BRI trade, you should not be allowed to access the global financial system.

We made that case after 9/11 to go after terrorist financing.

I think we need to do the same thing to target this BRI financing that is linked to a genocide.

It's a huge vulnerability for Beijing.

We should start exploiting it.

- So as you said, you have studied all these issues intently.

What is your sense of how many Americans are aware of all of these developments that we're talking about here?

Do you have any sense?

Is this on anyone's radar?

A few people's radar?

Nobody's radar?

And again, I'm talking the American public, not politicians, and we could get into that if you wanted to, but talk about the American public's perception of what you're describing.

- I would venture that the overwhelming majority, and by that I mean 95% or more of Americans have never heard of the Belt and Road Initiative ever.

And frankly, there's a reason for that.

No American president has made the case to the American people that we are in a cold war with an adversary today.

American presidents or candidates for president will often talk about how China is stealing American intellectual property, how they're infiltrating our schools with Confucius Institutes, which I think more Americans have heard of, but no president or candidate for president has ever made the case to Americans that the world is becoming very dangerous right now and we are in fact in a zero-sum conflict with the Chinese Communist Party.

There's a reason Americans are not aware of this, and I think it falls at the doorstep of our leaders at the highest levels.

We need, when I say "we," I mean the policy community in Washington, the burden is on elected officials on the Hill and in the White House to make this case to Americans because it is the job of the federal government to ensure national security.

It's not Americans' fault that they, more likely than not, have never heard of this project before.

That falls on Washington.

It is their duty and responsibility to make sure that we can win a cold war and that Americans are aware of what that will entail.

- Yeah, Michael, you and I chatted a little bit about this, getting ready for this episode, and you just said, you know, no American president, meaning no Democrat, no Republican, has identified this.

What do you think explains this moment of bipartisan comity, right, where both parties seem so reluctant to engage in calling the Belt and Road Initiative out for what it is?

- I think there are at least two layers of it.

On the one hand, I can tell you, my perspective on the Belt and Road runs against the grain of conventional wisdom in Washington.

Most of the China policy experts will, for one reason or another, count off the BRI primarily because, if you look at the monetary investments, China just isn't investing in as many infrastructure projects today as they were eight years ago.

That's true, but the BRI is not primarily an economic project.

It is a geopolitical project.

And what those analysts will ignore is how it's being militarized right now.

So I think that's one reason for it.

I think another reason is that it's not politically popular to tell the American people that the world is getting dangerous and we might need to sacrifice to win a cold war.

That's not a message that most people will use if they want to win a campaign in America.

The political incentives basically encourage our elected officials to continue doing what they've been doing, which is to kick the can down the road.

And, listen, politicians are great at kicking cans down the road.

(chuckles) Pick your policy issue, it happens everywhere.

And usually, what's required to wake politicians up, and in turn to wake Americans up, is a crisis.

And that's not good.

We had a big crisis in 1941 when Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

We had another huge crisis in 2001 on September 11th.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is to try to mobilize this awareness so Americans can shift and understand that we have a threat that we can get ahead of before the crisis comes.

The crisis could be Taiwan, it could be a conflagration in the South China Sea, but there is a crisis coming.

And if we can get ahead of the curve and forestall it, that's going to be safer and, frankly, less expensive for the pocket books of Americans.

But if we continue to wait, the price of reckoning with the CCP is going to continue to go up.

- Michael, we could talk to you all day, but unfortunately we are out of time.

He's Michael Sobolik.

The book is "Countering China's Great Game."

Thank you for being with us this week.

That is all the time we have.

If you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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