The challenge the United States faces in confronting China on the global stage is “almost overwhelming” and exceeds some of the worst historical crises the country has ever encountered, former Trump administration national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said during an appearance Thursday in Washington.
“I’m not sure America has faced a threat like Communist China in our history,” O’Brien said in a conversation hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
“Maybe the Revolutionary War, when we fought the British who were the leading superpower in the world at the time?” he said. “I think that the threat that we face from China is far more serious than we faced against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.”
O’Brien said he believes China’s ultimate plan is to force the country’s “Marxist-Leninist” ideology on the rest of the world.
“They have an ideology that they believe they can use to organize, to govern the world,” he said. “So it’s a danger to all of us, to our kids and grandkids. It’s a danger to everyone around the world, because they see themselves as being able to govern the entire world based on their ideology.”
Future US-China policy
O’Brien’s remarks come at a time when experts are trying to parse what U.S. relations with China will look like in the next presidential administration, whether it is a second Trump term or a first term for current vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
In a report issued Thursday morning, Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggested that future U.S. policies toward China will likely trend in the same direction regardless of who wins the election.
“U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan is likely to maintain its broad contours under a Harris or a Trump administration,” Lin wrote.”The Harris and Trump teams share the view that China challenges and threatens the established international order, peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States. ‘Managing’ China or ‘winning’ against China will be a top priority for the next U.S. administration, as intense U.S. competition with China will likely continue.”
However, Lin pointed out several areas where a Trump administration might differ, including by implementing harsher trade policies and imposing more far-reaching crackdowns on Chinese influence operations in the U.S.
What is unclear, she said, is the degree to which Trump would continue to nurture some of the Indo-Pacific region alliances that the Biden administration has been working to strengthen, and whether he would continue U.S. support of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own.
In his remarks Thursday, O’Brien touched on all of those subjects.
Not speaking for Trump
O’Brien served in the administration of former President Donald Trump first as a special envoy for hostage affairs, and then as national security adviser from September 2019 until January 2021.
During the 90-minute appearance on Thursday, O’Brien made clear he was not speaking for the former president.
“Anyone who says they’re speaking for Donald Trump, whether it’s on personnel or policy, is not speaking for Donald Trump,” he said. “Donald Trump is going to speak for Donald Trump.”
However, his observations about China might provide some insight into the mindset of people likely to populate a second Trump administration, should the former president win reelection in November.
O’Brien said that a future Trump administration would be focused on signaling American economic, diplomatic and military strength to China and combating what the former president sees as China’s unfair practices. Those include theft of intellectual property, flooding Western economies with Chinese goods subsidized by Beijing, and keeping the value of the Chinese yuan artificially low.
“President Trump has said what he’s going to do,” O’Brien said. “He’s going to raise tariffs on the Chinese and send a strong message that we’re not going to tolerate intellectual property theft any longer. We’re not going to tolerate the dumping, we’re not going to tolerate the currency manipulation, and we’re going to have an incentive for American manufacturers to come home.”
China’s ‘relentless’ aggression
O’Brien said that when he was in the White House, he saw that China is tireless in its effort to expand Beijing’s influence, whether by using its military to harass its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific region or by engaging in espionage and influence operations.
“Every time we fought them somewhere — espionage at a Confucianist institute that we got closed, if it was a cyber intrusion, if it was some sort of military action against our allies — every time you shut that down, they popped up somewhere else. I mean, they operate across every spectrum. They’re in space, they’re in the air, they’re in the sea, they’re on the land,” he said.
“They just operate in every sector. They’re attempting to wear down the free world, and they’ve done a pretty good job of it.”
AK-47s in Taiwan
Earlier this year, O’Brien sparked an angry reaction from Beijing when he suggested arming every military-aged male in Taiwan with an AK-47 in order to resist a potential Chinese invasion.
On Thursday, he repeated the suggestion, saying, “Every military-aged male should have an AK-47 and two [ammunition magazines]. Make sure they’re interoperable so you can get your follow-on ammunition from the patrols that you ambush and kill when they invade your country.”
The object, he said, is to “strike a little fear into the hearts” of China’s leadership. “You may invade, but every time you walk down the street, every window’s going to have an AK-47 pointed out.”
He went on to say that under the first Trump administration, “China did not harass Taiwan the way that they’re doing it now.” He said that under a Harris administration, “You’re not going to see the kind of strength that you get from President Trump that will keep Taiwan free.”
US alliances
O’Brien said that in his view, it is essential that the U.S. continues to cultivate close alliances in the Indo-Pacific region. The “good news,” he said, is that those alliances are strong.
“You take the combination of the ‘Quad’ with India, Australia, the U.S. and Japan; you take the Japan-South Korea-America trilateral alliance; you take a look at AUKUS, with the U.K. and Australia and the U.S.; and the treaty alliances with Thailand and with the Philippines,” he said.
“Those alliances scare the Chinese, because they see us operating together,” he said. “And together, we can contain, and we can push back against the Chinese. When they drive wedges between us, that’s where they get the big advantage.”
Return to nuclear competition
O’Brien said it is becoming increasingly important for the U.S. to revitalize its nuclear “triad” — the combined capacity to launch missiles from air, land and sea — because in addition to the threat the country faces from Russia, China’s nuclear capacity is surging.
“If we don’t take steps soon to both modernize our triad and expand our capabilities, we’re going to be in real trouble, because you have the Russians with 1,250 or 1,500 strategic weapons. They’ve got about another 2,500 tactical nukes that they can deploy. And the Chinese are going to have 1,500 strategic weapons pointed at us, and who knows how many tactical weapons.
“That’s going to be a 2- or 3-to-1 overmatch on us, and that’s not a recipe for deterrence,” he said.
“We’ve got to get back in the nuclear game,” he said. “It’s unfortunate, because we thought that was a day that was gone — that we were past that. But our adversaries have decided that they’re going to still play it. It would be nice to say, ‘Yeah, we don’t want to play that game.’ But we have to have an effective deterrence.”