How US Dollars Built China’s Military: James Fanell and Bradley Thayer

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “The first rule of strategy is don’t assist your enemy. And of course, we violated that time and time again,” says Bradley Thayer, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

After aggressively building up and modernizing its military, China now has a larger navy than the United States.

How does the Chinese military compare to America’s overall?

What would an invasion or blockade of Taiwan look like for the United States?

Mr. Thayer and James Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, are co-authors of the new book “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.” They are founding members of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

How has progressive, communist ideology subverted America and America’s military?

Did the United States get distracted by smaller wars and lose sight of the bigger looming conflict?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Jim Fanell, Brad Thayer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Bradley Thayer:
Thank you. It’s our pleasure to join you.

James Fanell:
Thank you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
In a nutshell, please describe the threat of the Chinese Communist Party to America.

Mr. Thayer:
The threat from the Communist Party of China is an existential one to the United States and to the liberal economic order, the world that the U.S. and the British created in the wake of World War II. First, there is the military threat. The Chinese military has been growing exponentially, both in its nuclear capabilities and its conventional capabilities. They have been applying that military might against our allies like the Philippines and the Japanese, and also key U.S. partners like India and Taiwan, which increasingly is coming under the threat of invasion.

There is also the economic threat. We hollowed out our manufacturing capability from the 1990s to the present and sent it to China. With Covid, we recognized the cost of doing that when we had to rely on China to provide our personal protective equipment, as well as pharmaceuticals like penicillin and other drugs. There is the technological threat, as increasingly, China is replacing the U.S. in chip production, aircraft production, and in many other areas. There is diplomacy, with the Belt and Road Initiative and other mechanisms that the Chinese are employing to advance their vision of international politics and what the world should look like.

Lastly, there is the ideological threat, where the Chinese Communist Party, as a communist government, seeks to kill the United States as a bourgeois government and as a state. They seek to replace the United States, eliminating it as the dominant state in international politics. Just as you can’t be a married bachelor, you can’t be a peaceful communist.

We should expect that China will become increasingly aggressive under Xi Jinping or any other leader. Americans should expect that competition between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China is only going to intensify in the near term.

Mr. Jekielek:
What does the word kill mean in the context of America? It’s a very strong word.

Mr. Fanell:
It is a strong word, and it indicates that we’re in an existential battle with a nation that says they want to run the globe. They want to be in control of everything. Because they’re a totalitarian regime, they stand opposed to anybody that would offer an opposing view, like the American and Western civilization.

They have prepared a capability to go all the way, and to actually use physical force if they have to. They would prefer not to use force, as we saw them do in Scarborough Shoal in 2012. They were able to acquire territory without using weaponry. But they are preparing themselves to use military and physical force to achieve their goals.

Mr. Jekielek:
A big part of this is the use of deception and subversion which has been described very openly in PLA [People’s Liberation Army] military doctrine over the past few decades. America and many other nations fell asleep at the wheel. Jim, how did a relatively small communist power become an existential threat to America?

Mr. Fanell:
The origins of this go back to the Cold War. Following World War II, we faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union. We saw China as an avenue, because they were in the underbelly of the Soviet Union, so we thought we could reach out to them. In 1979, we switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing and started this so-called school of engagement. We can call it the Kissinger School of Engagement.

It started to permeate think tanks, the entire federal government, the State Department, the Defense Department, our literature, and our analysis. The idea was, “If we engage, things will get better in our relations with China. They will modernize. They will come along and follow the existing international order.” That went on for 40-plus years. During that time, no one ever stopped and asked, “Is this working?”

Mr. Jekielek:
In your book, you talk about the concept of the end of history in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsing a few years later. There was this idea that liberal democracy has won. Francis Fukuyama, with his book, The End of History and the Last Man, had his prophecy come true. Many people believe this idea. Brad, you could expand on this for us?

Mr. Thayer:
Certainly. We have to recall how remarkable it was during that golden year of 1989, when it seemed it was possible to remake everything,
with the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. At that time, Francis Fukuyama, heavily influenced by Hegel, recognized that it did seem that the key ideas of liberal democracy and free market capitalism were triumphant. That went to our heads, no doubt, and it helped to color our vision and to blind ourselves to the rise of China. That year of 1989 was also historic in another sense, because Tiananmen Square happened. You had a popular movement that was crushed by the Chinese Communist Party.

That year was Janus-faced in so many ways. It showed what was possible in the future, and what Fukuyama had picked up on, but it also showed the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party. Deng Xiaoping, the communist leader at the time, was never going to allow democracy within China, and any democratic elements were going to be crushed. He also recognized China’s profound vulnerability.

Mr. Jekielek:
The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened the same day as the first post-communist elections in Poland, so that juxtaposition is very apt. You talk about the fallacy of this engagement model, which prioritizes the minor war today over the major one tomorrow. That really characterizes so many scenarios over the last several decades.

Mr. Fanell:
Yes, we went from this moment in 1989 to Desert Storm in 1991. From 1991 until this recent pullout in Afghanistan, America has been dominated by wars against terrorism in the Middle East, and there are valid reasons for that. But it transformed the Department of Defense, which during the Cold War had this balanced nature about how to deal with the Soviet Union. We needed a global navy that could contest and keep the freedom of navigation going around the world against the Soviets. We had to have a strong army presence in Europe to make sure that the Soviet tanks didn’t roll through the Fulda Gap and down into Western Europe.

We had a balanced approach to national defense. We always considered two major theater wars and one lesser war as our requirement as a nation for our military defense. But when the Soviets went away, we got involved with these minor wars, that term that we use. It’s not minor to the Americans that died there, so we’re not denigrating their lives.

But in the sense of the survival of the nation, we failed to see that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] was coming. Instead, we absorbed ourselves in these wars in the Middle East so much that we stopped looking forward to peer competitors that were rising. The former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said, “I want to pay attention to today’s events, not future events. I have to take care of what is happening now.” That was a complete 180 turn in terms of what all the previous secretaries had done, which was to look ahead to make sure that we were never surprised.

The 1947 National Security Act was created so that we would never have another Pearl Harbor. We recognized that we had failed on December 7th of 1941. We won the war, but it cost millions of lives on both sides. We said, “We don’t want to go through that again, so let’s organize ourselves in the Defense Department. Let’s have a Pentagon that looks ahead. Let’s have an Office of Net Assessment and look ahead to make sure that we don’t have another Pearl Harbor again.

But when we went into Desert Storm, it had been literally 35 years of not looking ahead. From a naval officer perspective, we stopped thinking about naval issues. In fact, at one point in this 35-year journey, there was a chief of naval operations that publicly proclaimed that he had more sailors ashore in the CENTCOM area of responsibility than afloat.

Mr. Jekielek:
Jim, please tell us about your background. You have always had a Pacific-focused view, which has informed this book.

Mr. Fanell:
I spent 29 years in the U.S. Navy as a naval intelligence officer. During the first part of my career, I was a targeting officer. I worked with the U.S. Air Force, and spent some time in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I did a lot of research and had a lot of deployments on aircraft carriers. Around 1999, I was assigned to the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters.

From 1999 until I retired, every day of my career was spent looking at the Chinese military, and specifically, their Navy. I had successive tours on board the USS Kitty Hawk that was foredeployed to Yokosuka, Japan, where I was the carrier strike group intelligence officer. Then I was the 7th Fleet Intelligence officer. That’s our numbered fleet that controls the Pacific Ocean west of the international date line out to the Indian Ocean.

Then I came back here to D.C. where I was in the Office of Naval Intelligence as the senior intelligence officer for China. Anything that dealt with China through the Office of Naval Intelligence, I got to review and make an assessment on it before it was published inside the Navy. Then I went back to the U.S. Pacific Fleet for my final tour as the director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Previously, no other officer had been leading intelligence operations for the forward carrier, the 7th Fleet, and the Pacific Fleet all together.

I had a unique perspective and did fine-grain analysis of the Chinese naval operations and their air force and really watched them grow event by event. Then I had to come back here and deal with people that did not comprehend what was coming. That was one of the biggest reasons I got involved with Brad, at least from an intellectual standpoint. I had lived through this and watched it out on the pointy end, as they say. But you couldn’t get people back here to recognize the threat and start taking action.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s characterize their growth. You have looked at China under the Chinese Communist Party since 1989. How has the military changed since that time?

Mr. Fanell:
If you go back 25 years ago, the Congressional Research Service put out a publication that talks about the Chinese Navy and the U.S. Navy.
Ron O’Rourke, a brilliant guy and a national treasure, has been doing this work for 30 years. This publication showed that the U.S. Navy had 150 naval combatants more than the PLA Navy, which 25 years ago was basically just a coastal navy that was operating mostly 30 to 50 miles off the coast of China.

Twenty-five years later, the latest report that Ron put out in the last couple of months shows that the Chinese Navy is now over 150 naval combatants greater than the U.S. Navy. They are now the largest navy in terms of numbers of hulls and tonnage. Over the last decade, they’ve produced more tonnage and battle force missiles. The Chinese have more supersonic, longer range, anti-ship cruise missiles.

In just that one area of the navy, they’ve gone from being an inferior, coastal, brown water navy to being a global navy. They are not at the same level as the United States today. But the strategic trend line is very clear in terms of the strategic rocket force, where they have the largest strategic rocket force of any nation on the planet.

Their air force is now the largest air force in the western Pacific and across the board. Xi came in and made major changes to the PLA in 2015. He actually reduced the size of the PLA from 2.3 million to just 2 million. He got rid of about 300,000 people that weren’t directly involved with war fighting. It was that old Soviet model of corruption and he swept that out.

He reorganized from seven military regions down to five theater commands that matches our combatant command structure here in the U.S.
They are almost becoming like the U.S. Department of Defense in terms of their organizational skills. You can tell what’s important to the Communist Party by what they spend their money on. At the People’s Congress, they announce what their gross domestic product for the year target is, and also tell you what they are spending on defense.

When Covid hit in March of 2020, it was the first time in 28 years that the Chinese government had never been able to say what their GDP growth would be. But in that same Congress they were able to say, “We will spend 6 percent of our GDP on the PLA. The next year, it was the same thing. They couldn’t give a precise GDP number, but they were confident that they could grow the PLA by 6.8 percent.

That has been going on for 30 years. The PLA always gets more percentage each year. That’s the reason why the increase of the budget grows every year as compared to their gross domestic product. They prioritize spending on the PLA. When you look at purchasing power parity, they only spend $250 billion a year on defense, and we’re spending almost a trillion. We are spending quite a bit more.

But each year, for every ship that we produce, the Chinese produce five. It has really been phenomenal what they have done. Again, it’s hard to comprehend how this town hasn’t recognized that and said, “We have to do something about this.”

Mr. Jekielek:
The Chinese military is the only military in the world that is designed and structured to challenge the American military.

Mr. Thayer:
We need to take a step back and recognize something which is historically remarkable. China went from about 0.6 percent of world gross domestic product in 1990 to about 18 percent in 2019, roughly one-fifth of the world’s economy. In 30 years it went from a backwater to producing about one-fifth of the world’s GDP. That’s remarkable and that seldom happens in international politics.

Secondly, what is equally remarkable is that the United States funded this.
The United States allowed this to occur. Previous historical examples would be Bismarck unifying Germany around 1870 leading to about 30 years of a rough peace. Then there was Japan after 1868, again leading to about 30 years of difficulty before Japanese aggression and militarism came to the fore.

What we’re seeing with China is historically unique, and that is China’s growth is due to the United States. Its peer enemy funded it and allowed it to grow. Every aspect of its military growth, economic growth, diplomatic growth, science, technology, and space exploration that we are witnessing is due to the Americans. It’s due to the American economy and decisions that we have taken, in conjunction with decisions that Deng Xiaoping has taken.

This great military growth that Jim has identified is largely funded by us. We did that. Wall Street and our investors gave them the money to grow their economy and to build the weapons to kill us. Now, the first rule of strategy is to not assist your enemy. Of course, we violated that time and time again, and that’s really the heart of our book.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is a perfect moment for another quote from the book, “Put succinctly, U.S. decision makers had a profound misconception of the fundamental principle of power politics; the need to sustain U.S. primacy and defeat the threat from the ideology of communism.”

You bring up a concept called threat deflation. Jim, please explain what threat deflation is, and what role it played in all this.

Mr. Fanell:
Right. To understand a threat, you have to have an honest assessment, and intelligence gathering is the foundation of that. With regard to China, we saw the influence of the engagement school seep in over time and essentially absorb and take over the intelligence community.

People were downplaying the threat and underestimating the timelines of when the Chinese would get something. We have a section in the book that talks extensively about PLA aircraft carriers and how they needed them. There was a concerted effort by intelligence to minimize the possibility that the PLA would get an aircraft carrier.

Mr. Jekielek:
To minimize the idea that the Chinese were going for it?

Mr. Fanell:
Yes. Then what actually happened? In 2012, they got their first one, and now they have three. They skipped a whole generation of carriers, because they went from ski jump ramps straight to electromagnetic aircraft launch systems. They just skipped steam catapults entirely. For 70 years, we have been flying off of carriers with steam catapults. We have just gone into the electromagnetic aircraft launch systems, but they just skipped the prior generation. This is all because of threat deflation.

I mentioned the ship numbers. Why didn’t we react to that? It was because people were downplaying the capabilities of these new Chinese ships. We said, “They don’t have the capabilities. They don’t have watertight integrity. They don’t have the kind of maintenance that we do.” We were always downplaying everything.

When the Chinese first sent their first naval escort task forces to the Gulf of Aden in December of 2008 and January of 2009, I still remember reading assessments that said, “They’re going out there and they will have major problems. They won’t be able to steam around. They’re going to have material readiness issues. They will never fly helicopters off their boats. They won’t be able to do vertical resupply, and they’ll certainly never do it at night.”

Where are we at right now? The 45th Naval Escort Task Force is out there right now operating. Every day since December of 2008 there have been three Chinese warships on patrol in the Gulf of Aden escorting Chinese commercial vessels through the Gulf of Aden up to the Red Sea. Now, they have a base in Djibouti and they can do some resupply work there. But all the predictions said they wouldn’t be able to sustain that.

Here we are 15 years later, and they’re sustaining it. You could go down a list of things where people said. “They’ll never do this. They can’t reach that. It will take them 20 years to get this, and 30 years to get that.” In every instance, the inclination of intelligence is to always go in the wrong direction. They are always underestimating.

Mr. Jekielek:
The naval leadership seems hell-bent on showing everything they have to their Chinese counterparts to the point where Congress had to enact laws that would prevent that. Then naval leadership would try to circumvent those laws and still show everything.

Mr. Fanell:
Yes. I was a young officer in 2000. The folks that we researched in this book were here in D.C. in the government, and they were tracking this issue. There was a concern here in Capitol Hill that people would be exposing too much to the Chinese, and that the Chinese were becoming a threat. You had the Cox Report and this growing concern about the Chinese.

They wrote the National Defense Authorization Act of 2000, which instituted all these thou-shalt-nots—the Department of Defense shall not expose this and shall not do these kinds of engagements. A former Senate staffer, Bill Triplett, provided us with this information. He said, “Can you imagine in the Cold War if the U.S. Congress had to write a law to tell the Department of Defense not to engage with the Soviet Union?”

Back then it would have been incomprehensible that you’d have to write a law to tell the Department of Defense not to engage with the enemy. But that’s exactly what the Congress had to do in 2000. We demonstrate and even show pictures that since 2000, the Department has tried to engage. Every year in the annual PLA report to Congress the DOD says, “Here are all the engagements that we have done. Nobody has violated any law.”

They will have their attorneys say, “We didn’t violate the law,” because they’ve found ways to get around it. During that whole process, either in a public way or a policy way, the Department never said, “We must stop engagement because we are aiding and abetting our adversary with knowledge of our tactics, techniques, and procedures on how to fight and win wars.

Mr. Jekielek:
We were talking about the end of history earlier. This end of history mania in effect created a type of intellectual disarmament. Basically, people lost their ability to think critically about this issue. Please tell us about that.

Mr. Thayer:
People certainly did lose that ability. The victory over the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War was so astonishing for so many Americans, and Soviet communism imploded so rapidly, that we basically lost our minds. We had intellectual disarmament or we had a great forgetting. Alexei Arbatov, the Soviet analyst of America said that they were going to do a horrible thing to us—they were going to take away our enemy. That really happened.

At the same time, of course, the enemy did not go away. The enemy, in a very calculating manner, recognized that he needed to save the Communist Party of China. In order to do that he had to make Wall Street a partner, so he had to reach out to Americans to allow manufacturing to come in. He then took a slice of that wealth and reinvested it back in America, Wall Street, and Washington, DC, to essentially win friends and influence people.

The Clinton administration that had run a campaign in 1992 saying that the Bush administration had coddled dictators from Baghdad to Beijing, two years later removed any type of human rights restriction from the renewal of most favored nation status, which is what Deng Xiaoping wanted. That allowed the Chinese economy to move to the next level. Clinton also put him on the path to the World Trade Organization, which was ultimately what they wanted, which allowed rocket fuel into the Chinese economy.

We chose to disarm ourselves. We chose not to see the world through the framework of great power politics or of power politics, as our parents and grandparents had done. As a result of that, we squandered our birthright. We squandered what they gave us. They gave us a Pax Americana. They gave us a period of American dominance, peace, and stability in international politics that should have lasted for 50 years. It should have lasted for maybe a century, as these periods have in the past.

What happened instead? In essence, Clinton sold it. We made those decisions which put us on this path to engagement, which abandoned every principle of power politics in favor of assisting and aiding the enemy, and sharing secrets and knowledge. This happened with the Navy, as Jim has illustrated expertly. This was also done by U.S. manufacturing firms.

It happened at American universities. We were training hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in STEM and other disciplines so that they could go back and essentially replicate that knowledge and apply that knowledge for their own aims. The end of history was for the short term, and it was a triumphant moment. But its cost was formidable, and that accounts for the existential threat that we have today.

Mr. Jekielek:
This was definitely a bipartisan love affair. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, George H.W. Bush sent a message over to Deng Xiaoping saying, “It’ll be okay.”

Mr. Thayer:
Indeed he did. There were two elements there. One was the pernicious aspect that George H.W. Bush had a personal relationship with Deng Xiaoping and therefore understood him. Deng was keen to play on that personal relationship. Deng was a communist and was never going to do anything that Bush wanted, but Bush had an element of naïveté there, fundamentally.

From the standpoint of power politics, Bush had Deng. He had Deng where he wanted him and could have extracted human rights changes on Tibet, or on the treatment of Muslims, or on religious freedom. There was so much that Bush had. Again, it was a time of great vulnerability for the Chinese Communist Party, and yet Bush just let it pass, and that’s egregious. Then Clinton opening the door at a fundamental level was really disastrous.

Mr. Jekielek:
There were a number of these deep relationships like the recently passed Senator Dianne Feinstein had with Jiang Zemin. It seems the human rights reality of any country should inform their ethics. If you look at the human rights of any nation, you will get a sense of how they will deal with you, and you shouldn’t ignore that. But in hindsight, we actually have ignored that.

Mr. Thayer:
We’ve been adrift because we’ve lost the fundamental principles of power politics. We’ve lost the fundamental identification of what statesmanship requires in our relationship with the People’s Republic of China or Russia or Iran. This applies to other states as well and that’s a fundamental problem that we face in our foreign policy. Reagan described the Soviet Communist Party as the center of evil in the modern world in a very famous address in Orlando in March of 1983. We need to have that recognition again.

Instead, what have we done? It’s almost like being an addict—nothing can prevent us from engaging with China. The necessary decoupling, which Trump started, however fitful it was, was a step in the right direction. The Biden administration is now recoupling, or returning to engagement with a vengeance.

In the history of American foreign relations, the end of the Cold War was a tipping point. The quality of leadership that you had before was far superior to what we have had in the wake of the Cold War. This applies to our expectations for our presidents, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state. Part of that is because of our inability to recognize the nature of the CCP threat, and also our vacillation about what to do in the wake of the defeat of the Soviet Union.

Were we going to nation-build? Were we going to solve the problems of the Balkans? Were we going to get rid of Saddam Hussein and spread democracy in the Middle East? What was our relationship with India going to be? What was our relationship with other democracies going to be? It was all very incoherent.

That is very dangerous because it is squandering the value of primacy. As a result, it is squandering American leadership. We could have had the Pax Americana. We could have had tremendous stability in international politics as a consequence of that, working with our key allies and partners around the world to sustain that stability.

Instead, what are we doing? The PRC is directly challenging our primacy. Our allies and partners are looking at us and saying, “What is going on here with Biden? Their fundamental query is, “Are you going to lead, or are you not going to lead? With Biden, sadly, we have the answer to that.

Mr. Jekielek:
In your book, you make the case for American primacy. Then there is Graham Allison’s book and the idea that China is the rising power and the U.S. is the declining power. Many people bought into the idea that this is the inevitable course of history. But the first couple of years of the Biden administration maintained the status quo of the Trump administration, which was to reduce engagement. You also have Putin going to China, declaring their no limits partnership. Now, the current administration is going back to the engagement model again. What is your understanding of this?

Mr. Fanell:
When the Biden administration came in, they had no problem reversing everything the previous administration had done, except in this area of the China policy. They kept that unchanged for a couple of years. We know that in January of last year, Secretary of State Blinken wanted to go to China right when that spy balloon came across and that delayed his visit.

We subsequently learned that in May the CIA director went to China for a covert meeting in Beijing. In June, Secretary of State Blinken went to Beijing, followed by Secretary of Treasury Yellen, and then climate czar Kerry. Henry Kissinger’s last visit was in that same timeframe.

Then you had Secretary of Commerce Raimondo going and talking about reengaging with the PRC. That culminated in this meeting in San Francisco with Xi and Biden, where they announced they were going to resume cooperation, communications, and mil-to-mil engagement.

It was a statement to the world that everything that had gone on for the previous five or six years of the Trump team saying we need to treat China as a strategic competitor was over. We were now back to the pre-Obama vision of cooperation and engagement, which would get us a better life, a better situation, calmness, and peace.

They didn’t say full-throated engagement. They said that we’re going to compete where we can, but cooperate where we must, so they use different language. You hear the National Security Advisor use this phrase,
intensive diplomacy, and that we need to have intensive diplomacy. But it’s all different phraseology for the same core policy that we’ve had for 40 years that has failed.

In a way, we’re returning to the dog’s vomit, to something that we should be rejecting. There’s also a corollary to this engagement, and it’s not just that we should engage. There was a corollary that was very pronounced in the Obama administration, which was, “Do not provoke.”

We used to fly reconnaissance operations every day over the East China Sea and South China Sea in international airspace. We’ve done that in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Part of our nation-state survival is to know what’s going on and have intelligence.

Sometimes you would delay those flights if a president or vice president was going to visit, or vice versa. We would maybe calm them down for a little bit, or not do them so that they could have the state-to-state or chief of state visit. Under the Obama administration, those rationalizations for delaying or canceling an SRO flight started to go down to the level of assistant secretary of state or assistant secretary of defense, and it kept going lower and lower.

The Chinese were well aware of this, and they would play these kinds of visits to get us to back off doing what is required to have our own national defense, like not provoking China in the South China Sea and not sailing our ships close to disputed waters where China is bullying a treaty ally like the Philippines. Our allies and partners saw us back off.

Unfortunately, we’re going to see more of this idea that we must not provoke China. Kissinger and others would say that we should never talk in public about our disagreements with China. We should do that behind closed doors.

It’s funny that they would say that. But when it comes to our friends in Taiwan, they were very public about saying, “Sit down, shut up, and don’t provoke China. Tom Christian gave a speech in 2004 in Annapolis
where he was afraid that President Chen Shui-bian was going to declare independence. They said they tried to talk to him behind closed doors, but finally we had to come out in public and chastise our own ally, Taiwan.

We seem to be more intent on not upsetting the Chinese Communist Party than we are in assuring and reassuring our allies. Think about what happened in Hong Kong. We had a situation in 2019 in Hong Kong where we could have taken a stand. We could have stood up and said, “This is wrong. We’re not going to stand by.”

The administration did make some statements, but was there more that could have been done? Was there economic pressures that could have been applied? We didn’t do those things and it has been a bipartisan failure.

Mr. Jekielek:
At one point, U.S. primacy would not have been up for debate. But today, many people ask if we should pursue this.

Mr. Thayer:
Certainly, primacy once had considerable bipartisan support. But after the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans wanted to use American power for different aims. We could think about Operation Allied Force or what Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the U.K. identified as the first progressive war.

Mr. Jekielek:
There has been a certain kind of hubris associated with the end of history, such as, “We can push a lot harder than before to change these countries toward our system.”

Mr. Thayer:
Colin Powell reported a remark that Madeleine Albright made to him in 1993 when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Madeleine Albright was just into the Clinton administration where she said to him,
“You keep talking about this great army of yours, when are we going to use it? When are we going to use it for progressive purposes? Of course, Colin Powell was appalled that she would see the United States Army as that tool. But indeed, they wanted to use it. Then 9-11 occurred
and Bush and Cheney took it in a different direction.

Mr. Jekielek:
And they fabricated intelligence.

Mr. Thayer:
Yes. The United States goes off in a different direction
in a way that was largely solipsistic. Our allies were scratching their heads about what we were doing. What was actually going on? The logical idea would be to focus on great power threats and protect what you’ve created in World War II and in the Cold War. Preserve that for the next generation, rather than using your power unwisely.

The fact that American power is the greatest force for stability in international politics is not something which is widely recognized at this point in time. We can think about all the wars that might have occurred that did not occur because of American might and its pacifying effect in many dangerous situations like between the Greeks and Turks.

There was the peace that we were able to work out between Egypt and Israel in the Camp David talks, which helped to stabilize that region. There was the role that we have played between Pakistan and India to help stabilize the crises that those states have had. There were many dogs that didn’t bark and that was due to American power.

The other advantage of American power is to create an environment that makes it possible for our economy and our values and our principles to spread in the world. Fundamentally, it is far better than the alternative offered by the Chinese Communist Party and it is tyranny.

We can go around the world and ask, “Would you rather be allied with the United States and the future that it offers, despite its problems? People around the world are trying to come into the United States. They’re not trying to go into China. China would not allow them in the first place, and would certainly not welcome them. Are you looking to the Chinese Communist Party, which offers a future defined by tyranny and oppression?”

When the world is asked that question, the United States is overwhelmingly seen as being the better force, the better ally, and the better partner in international politics. Ultimately, that’s a profound strength that we have because of our ideology. Our ideology is better than communism. It offers greater freedom and greater opportunity to a greater number of people than communist tyranny does.

The 20th century was a battle between tyranny and freedom. Thankfully, freedom won at great cost, but with many setbacks. The 21st century remains the same, and this battle will be fought in this century as well. Whether communist tyranny wins or whether freedom wins is the fundamental issue of this century.

Mr. Jekielek:
America is also fighting an internal battle. Many countries may say, “We don’t want American progressivism. If American progressivism is coupled with foreign aid, we don’t want it.”

Mr. Fanell:
We are seeing that, especially in Asia. In South Korea, there were people in the State Department that were pushing for raising the LGBTQ flag
at the embassy in Seoul. The people in South Korea said, “That does not align with our values. Why are you pushing this on us?” They were pushing similar things in the Middle East to a society that also didn’t accept that. It was not part of their culture or their religion, and yet we were pushing it on them.

The progressive movement is based on totalitarian control. They want to control people and make them follow their ideology. People don’t like that and that’s not the American way. The American way is to say, “Do your own thing, just don’t harm others. Do no harm, and enjoy your life. Pursue happiness, be responsible, and things will work out.”

We have a system that works, and it has been working for 250 years. Now, it seems like we have people in charge of this progressive movement
that are adopting the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. Look what happened with Covid. You could watch what was going on in China where people had to take out their cell phones and show their check mark
to get out of their apartment building, to go into a shopping mall, or to get into a restaurant.

How much did that happen here in the United States? Which states did that? Which states followed the Chinese Communist Party’s model of a social credit system? I remember talking to some folks 10 years ago
who said, “The U.S. will never have a social credit system. We’re impervious to that.”

Yet, we’re seeing ourselves more and more inclined to have a social credit system that asks, “Are you reading the right things? Are you following the wrong websites?” If we go to digital currency where we can track everything that you do with every dime that you spend, then there’ll be certain things that you’re not allowed to do. They will say, “Sorry, Jim, you can’t travel or go to this store. Your children can’t go to this school
because you didn’t behave correctly.”

Mr. Jekielek:
You talk about the lack of education about our adversary’s system, in the context of their military and government strategy. You describe a profound lack of knowledge. People here in DC are not sufficiently educated
on the communist system, how it works, and the doctrines it is applying, like unrestricted warfare, for example. They do not know how horrible and deadly communist ideology has been throughout history.

Mr. Thayer:
That is a critically important point. We do not educate Americans about communism, about that ideology, about its totalitarian nature. As a consequence of that, we don’t understand international politics today. We’re ignorant of the ideology of our greatest enemy.

Mr. Jekielek:
But we understood the Soviets, apparently.

Mr. Thayer:
We did understand, so what caused that change? The end of the Cold War gave many people in the American educational system the excuse to say, “The Soviet Union is gone now, so we don’t need to spend time or money looking at the ideology of communism.” Once the Soviets fell, it was on the ash heap of history. Again, it was the arrogance of that end of history moment.

But we are also in a period of ideological upheaval, where political liberalism and traditional American ideology is confronting progressivism, which is communism in a different guise. The progressives do not want the history of communism taught. They do not want that ideology understood. In essence, many of the fundamental problems that we face about not understanding our adversary is because we are not teaching the adversary’s ideology. That is a rather curious fact.

It’s rather curious, because you would think you would want to know about your enemy. But there’s the negation of the fact that the People’s Republic of China is our enemy. There is also the negation of the fact that they are communists. The period of our internal ideological upheaval as well as the upheaval that we face in international politics are twins. Communism is at the root of both of these struggles.

Mr. Jekielek:
Colonel Matthew Lohmeier was separated from the military after sounding the alarm about the Marxification of education in the military.

Mr. Fanell:
Brad was saying that we stopped doing fundamentals. We stopped teaching the fundamentals of what it meant to be a nation state,
the threats were to that nation state and your own personal survival. When we stopped teaching that in K-12 education, it had an effect on the military.
In my conversations with folks that teach professional military education, they said when they received their professional military education, they still received training on these fundamentals.

But they were finding that the younger officers coming in didn’t have that foundational knowledge about the threat of communism and how the Chinese Communist Party pushes that ideology. They don’t know what that means to our national defense community and how to combat it at all levels.

Because the Chinese Communist Party uses comprehensive national power. It’s not just the PLA by themselves, it also includes the civilian population. They’re engaged with the civilian sector and civilian technology and they are leveraging all of this. Our Department of Defense has to be aware of where those vectors of attack are coming from.

I’m afraid that we are going back to our former engagement policy, as we just described. Imagine you’re on the Titanic heading towards this iceberg that’s going to sink your ship. Instead of diverting away from the danger, we’ve got a bunch of people that are rearranging the deck chairs as if that’s going to save us.

They are just going back and renaming things and repackaging engagement, which is my concern. Wokeism and Marxism in the military is another one of these things. It’s not even a rearrangement of the deck chairs. It’s almost like saying, “Let’s throw some deck chairs overboard and that will save us.” It’s a recipe for disaster.

Mr. Jekielek:
That string quartet from the Titanic film provided some service at the end,
but certainly not in changing the outcome. Let’s talk about what to do in this rather difficult situation that you’ve outlined.

Mr. Thayer:
One of the main reasons we defeated the Soviet Union was because we had a professional military. Samuel Huntington, the great student of civil-military relations, called it objective civilian control. Civilians are in charge, but they leave a domain to the military where they don’t interfere. That’s an objective domain where the military makes its own decisions and ensures that it can execute the orders that civilian leadership gives it.

In contrast, there are politicized militaries, which historically do not fight as well, like the People’s Liberation Army, for example. The party controls them and the party tells them what to do. In the Cold War, we had objective civilian control, and despite the problems that we had, we did very well.

We’re now becoming like the PLA where political pressure and political interference is routine. The great strength of the military that we need to deal with the People’s Republic of China is being eroded. The military is becoming politicized, and that means that we will not be as combat effective in the future.

What needs to be done? In the diplomatic realm, we need to recognize the amount of goodwill that we have. Our allies help us immeasurably. Japan and Australia, despite the problems that they have with us, want to remain close as allies.

Mr. Jekielek:
Our allies like the Compact countries in the Pacific are in danger right now.
Grant Newsham was just on the show talking about this.

Mr. Thayer:
Indeed. We have introduced vulnerabilities through our intentional blindness on this front. But we have a tremendous number of allies, as we did during the Cold War. We have tremendous goodwill upon which we can capitalize, but they’re looking to us for leadership.

We have to have presidential leadership across all of these realms, both diplomatic or military. We need to have dynamic leadership in the economic realm with sanctions and trade restrictions. It is absolutely necessary to cut off Beijing from sources of New York finance from Wall Street.

Lastly, I want to address the ideological component and recognize that freedom is superior to tyranny. We have great ideological strengths to fight them and defeat them, because wherever the PRC shows up, it’s defined by exploitation of people and the environment. The United States is a far superior ally because it has a far superior ideology, and it treats people in accord with human rights and their individual rights. That always makes us a better ally. We need to say that more forcefully time and again. Again, that is going to require leadership.

Mr. Jekielek:
We need to rediscover that ideology to some extent. Yuri Bezmenov talked about the demoralization of American society which has had multiple effects. One is that people are not believing in America anymore, and doing things that are much more akin to what communist China does. Jim, can you address a few things on the military side.

Mr. Fanell:
Brad talked about presidential leadership. That means that we have to have a clear and unambiguous statement that the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China are an existential threat. We can’t just walk down the middle of the road, that will just not work. We have to declare unambiguously that they are a threat, and that needs to permeate the whole of government.

On the economic side, you just had the National Security Advisor
on the Sunday talk shows. He was asked by the journalist, “Why did you slap sanctions on 500 new Russian companies? Why didn’t you do it before?” He explained his rationale, but then he said something really important.

He said, “We have to cut off Putin’s access to funds because that’s what drives his military machine. That’s essential. We have to do that.” But when you ask that same person, Jake Sullivan, “Why aren’t you doing that against the Chinese Communist Party as they are funding and building the PLA,” they just won’t do it.

Mr. Jekielek:
The CCP is also supporting the Russian war machine.

Mr. Fanell:
Yes, they’re supporting Russia. In terms of the military solutions and recommendations that we make, first of all,
we have to restate that the situation is dire and imminent in the western Pacific right now. We’ve had many current and active four-star generals and admirals say that China is close to being able to launch an invasion or blockade Taiwan to catastrophic effect.

It will not only affect Taiwan, but also our sailors, soldiers, marines and airmen that are stationed over there, as well as the people on our carriers, our surface ships, and our submarines.

They will be in the frag pattern if China decides to invade Taiwan. The threat is credible and imminent. We need to do something to dramatically prepare ourselves to build up our conventional and nuclear force structures. It will take time to build the new navy that we need.

In 1940, the United States passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act. At that time, we were the number one ship producing nation in the world. It still took us three full years until we started seeing those aircraft carriers and destroyers being rolled out into the fleet. We are not the number one ship-producing nation in the world today. China is.

China has over 13 major naval ports and we have just seven. One of theirs in the Shanghai region is larger than all seven of ours. We are in a mismatch in the ability to ramp up our military capabilities with the production of weaponry that we haven’t seen since before World War II.

We believe it is imminent that the PRC will take action. Because it will take time to be prepared in the conventional arena, we need to have discussions with our allies and friends in the region about the introduction of nuclear weapons and nuclear munitions.

This is probably the most controversial part of the book. No one wants to use nuclear munitions. But in order to have a deterrent effect on Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, we need to make them go back to their drawing board and their comprehensive national power seminars and calculations and say, “We didn’t think the Americans would do this. What are we going to do, and how do we have to adjust or delay our actions?”

We need to go to our allies and say, “Let’s talk about this, not only in private.” We need to follow through with this. In the last three years China built 350 nuclear ICBM silos in central and western China. That’s a fact. There has been some speculation they may not be fully operational. In my assessment, I believe that those reports were false flags, and that they are very capable and operational.

We need to treat this threat as it is, and we need to alter the status quo in this arena. People say, “That will be escalatory. You’ll be escalating the situation by discussing nukes.” Excuse me, in three years, they just built 350 nuclear ICBM silos that are pointed at the United States of America.

You hear this phrase, “Status quo.” We don’t want to alter the status quo in the cross-strait relationship and the cross-strait balance of power. For 25 years, China has been altering the status quo every day, and yet we sit here and don’t do anything.

The idea that if we do something we’re going to provoke or cause an escalation is a false argument. We need to do what’s required to defend ourselves and our allies. A discussion of these issues needs to be on the table.

Mr. Jekielek:
Jim, how do you respond to the military-industrial complex, these giant multinational defense companies that are over bloated and milking the system? How do you react to that type of criticism? Is this actually being pushed by warmongers that want to make billions of dollars?

Mr. Fanell:
Three things. It is a valid concern. We have made major mistakes in the Defense Department and it is over bloated. If you go back 25 to 30 years ago, there were literally hundreds of small defense firms, and now they’ve all been boiled down into these five big defense-industrial complex companies. In a way, they’ve become corrupt, and they’re not producing efficiently.

As I mentioned, we produce one destroyer, and the Chinese produce five at a quarter of the cost. That is wrong and it should not be allowed. We need to have major reform of the Department of Defense. It needs to be decentralized. We cannot allow retired generals, flag officers, or politicians to back into the system and represent the DOD.

I’ve never been a defense contractor. I don’t work for any defense firm. I have no economic interest. My third point is that we need to have a military that can deter, not a military that can kill and occupy.

There’s a fourth element here, which is endless war. People are tired of being involved with war. I get it. What we’re talking about is not war.
We’re talking about deterrence. We’re talking about what Reagan said, “Peace through strength.” We need to be strong. Strong doesn’t mean fighting the war. Strong means having the capacity to fight the war and
overmatch your adversary.

Right now, our adversary is overmatching us in a critical area. Then you have to explain to Americans that if Taiwan falls, it’s not just the people of Taiwan. What does that mean to their life here? What does it mean to somebody that lives in Ohio or Iowa or Mississippi?

What does that mean to them when Taiwan falls and now all of a sudden computer chips and all that technology is in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party? What does that mean when $5 trillion worth of trade no longer goes through the South China Sea?

The Chinese will say, “We control who can come through because we’re the masters of the universe. If you’re not obeying us, your stuff cannot come through.” Some people might say, “That would be disadvantageous to the Chinese. They would never do that.”

But we’ve seen them do that. We’ve seen them use economic warfare against the Philippines, against Australia, and even against Norway after one of those Nobel Prize events. It doesn’t matter who it is or where it is. They will use economic warfare like a Navy ship would use a gun. They use it that way.

We have to explain to the American people that deterrence force is necessary to ensure that the Chinese cannot inflict total control over us and obliterate us and the American way of life. That’s why it matters.

I don’t want any more wars. I’ve never wanted a war. For the most part, people in the military don’t want to fight wars, at least the people that are wearing the uniform and have to potentially risk their life.

We need the capability to make Xi and his gang of thugs and the Chinese Communist Party reconsider taking these actions. Right now, we are failing miserably in this area. We should not allow people in this town and in these defense firms to make profit on that. We should do what we can to minimize their capacity to take advantage of government contracts in this endless cycle of revolving door access to these big contracts.

We need an output of warships, submarines, aircraft, cyber warriors, and space capabilities. We need all the new 21st century, hybrid warfare capabilities. We need those capabilities.

We cannot keep funding a city where people sit and do nothing. There are too many bureaucrats. There’s too many people that are on the dole. That has to stop, or we will never achieve the deterrent effect that we need.

Mr. Jekielek:
Brad, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Thayer:
America has had difficulties before and we’ve been able to overcome them. We’ve been able to win the wars that we have faced. It’s very important to recognize that victory is possible. The CCP is an illegitimate, communist government. It was imposed on the Chinese people by Stalin.

It has no mandate from the people. Its human rights record, the tens of millions of Chinese people that it has killed, and its hyper-aggressive foreign policies all underscore that it does not belong in the society of nations. It should be expunged from the society of nations.

People of good will around the world should work to overthrow it.
We should eliminate this cancer from international politics. We have great strengths and our enemy has profound weaknesses. We should capitalize on our great strengths, and exploit our enemy’s profound weaknesses.

Marxism is a Western ideology and has nothing to do with China. It was developed by two Germans living in exile. It has nothing to do with the greatness of the Chinese civilization. We have to be confident in victory.
We have to right the ship and ensure that it is ready for the difficult task ahead.

We have great strengths, and they have great weaknesses. If we can marshal our might and return to the ideas of our mothers, fathers, and grandparents, we will defeat this existential threat, just as we have defeated existential threats in the past.

Mr. Jekielek:
Brad Thayer and Jim Fanell, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Fanell:
Thank you, Jan. It’s been an honor and a privilege for us.

Mr. Thayer:
It’s been our pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Jim Fanell, Brad Thayer, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.