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As President Trump’s third national security advisor, Robert O’Brien cut a very different figure from his two predecessors, hard-charging Gen. H.R. McMaster and uber-hawk and defense intellectual John Bolton. O’Brien was known for quiet competence and harkened back to more traditional Republican appointees. Along with his deputy, Matt Pottinger, O’Brien helped steer the administration into a more confrontational approach toward China, particularly as Covid spread from China to the U.S. Before taking the job, O’Brien, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer, was a Trump hostage negotiator and had struck up a friendship with actor Sean Penn who worked on hostage releases. Earlier in his career, O’Brien was legal advisor to a United Nations Security Council commission that decided claims against Iraq after the first Gulf War. He was a major in the Army Reserve’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. This interview is part of Rules of Engagement, a series by Bob Davis, who covered the U.S.-China relationship at The Wall Street Journal starting in the 1990s. In these interviews, Davis asks current and former U.S. officials and policymakers what went right, what went wrong and what comes next.

Q: Let’s start with your speech in Arizona in June 2020, where you said that counting on engagement to change China was ‘the greatest failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s.’ Was it worse than missing the signals of an invasion in Korea, worse than Vietnam, or invading Iraq after 9/11 or missing the warning signs around Osama bin Laden? If that’s the case, what should the response be?

A: We’ve had plenty of foreign policy mistakes since the ’30s but we haven’t had a situation where we’ve created an existential threat to America. China has become an existential threat to our way of life, to the way our kids are going to live, our grandkids, our great-grandkids. 

The Chinese Communist Party is relentless, and they’ve got tools and resources that none of our other adversaries have had. The Iraqis didn’t have them, the Iranians don’t have them — not even Nazi Germany in World War II. They’ve got a massive population. They’ve got a massive economy. They’re hell-bent on building a military that outclasses and outsizes ours and they’ve got a universalist ideology, which is a communist ideology infused with Chinese nationalism.

Dr. Kissinger was a friend of mine and a mentor. Henry would tell you that his opening was important because it helped us in the Cold War, and I agree with that. But Henry would say the real crisis with China started when we let it into the WTO under favorable terms during the Clinton administration. Now Henry is gone, so he can’t defend himself. But I think he felt the WTO was a wrong turn, in that engagement allowed China to develop economically in a way that could support its militaries, espionage, and IP structure that really did America damage.

I don’t think we have faced a challenge like this since the Revolutionary War. Then, we were fighting the world’s greatest superpower at the time, Great Britain. The Chinese are a very capable foe and adversary, and they have tremendous resources that they can deploy against us. We didn’t see that with the Russians, we didn’t see it with the Germans. We just haven’t seen a threat like the one we see with China.

I have two kids in the military. One is an Army officer [Judge Advocate General’s Corps.] ; one is an Air Force pilot. I don’t want to see them go to war. The way to deter war is through strength. It’s not about who’s got the most aircraft carriers, or the most fifth-generation fighter planes. It’s not about international bragging rights on how big your army is. It’s about getting the fruits of strength, which is peace.

Should the goal of the United States be regime change in China? 

We need to be very modest when it comes to regime change with China or Iran or Russia. During the Cold War, when the president was with [Soviet dissident] Nathan Sharansky and writing letters to Andre Sakharov and encouraging Russian dissidents, we weren’t trying to change the regime per se. We were trying to be a beacon of liberty and a beacon of democracy. 

[We need to be] a place that the Chinese people can look at and say, ‘Hey, there’s a better way of life beyond the Communist Party of China. There’s a shining city on a hill where there are free men and free women and free markets.’ But that doesn’t necessarily mean active regime change against the Chinese Communist Party. 

You believe that U.S. policy went wrong with China acceding to WTO. Do you support trying to expel China from the WTO, or removing what’s called permanent normal trading relations? [PNTR generally assures China the lowest tariff rates extended to all WTO members.]

We may have to decouple from the Chinese. That’s just the reality of it. In the Trump administration, we tried the Phase One trade deal. We had to put tariffs on to get the Chinese to the table and be serious about the deal. But as soon as it was inked, the Chinese started violating it.

Chris Wray, the director of the FBI, has talked about the theft of intellectual property, describing it as the greatest transfer of wealth and human history. China used that to eventually hollow out our manufacturing and move that wealth from America to China. During the time we gave the Chinese preferential trading status with the WTO, they engaged in the greatest heist in human history. 

Part of it was that we were witting because company after company moved their manufacturing facilities out of the Midwest and the Eastern seaboard and moved them to China. It was a terrible combination.

You say we have to decouple. Does that mean withdrawing preferential trade status? The Biden administration has left the Trump tariffs on China in place and added some others. Trump is now talking about 60 percent tariffs on China. Is that the way to go? 

The Chinese have abused the system so badly over the years that they have decoupled from us. They’re trying to make Beijing the chief supplier of the entire world. They don’t want to buy things from us. They don’t want to buy our farm products. So, they’re decoupling from us at a high rate. 

I’m not normally a tariff person, but when one party is using currency manipulation and unfair trade practices, and IP theft, we’ve got to take action to defend ourselves. Trump was the first president to do that with the tariffs. I compliment the Biden administration for leaving them in place. I think they’re going to have to be a lot higher.

You came in as National Security Advisor right before Covid, when the administration was negotiating the Phase One trade deal. It appeared at that time that foreign policy objectives took a back seat to a trade deal. Did you feel at the time that you were forced to hold back on foreign policy issues, like Xinjiang or Hong Kong? 

I became National Security Advisor in September 2019. One of the first things we did is co-host with Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and the U.K., an event on human rights in Xinjiang. We had the Customs and Border Patrol issue a withhold-release order against Xinjiang companies for forced labor. We were on that issue even with the Phase One deal going on. We also signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law.

Certainly there were elements in the administration, including [Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin and even [U.S. Trade Representative] Bob Lighthizer, who is a clear-eyed negotiator and a tough guy, who had the feeling that maybe this time the Chinese were serious — that the tariffs had caught their attention and they’d abide by the Phase One deal, and it would lead to a Phase Two and Phase Three deal, so we could get the trade deficit down and end IP theft. It turned out that the Chinese weren’t interested in that. They thought this was just another way to play along, extend the game, and not take their obligations seriously.

Then Covid hit. Of course, they knew about Covid as we were finalizing the Phase One deal and didn’t tell us, which is shocking. They sent a major delegation over in January and we had a big deal at the White House. [Chinese Vice Premier] Liu He was there. The President attended the lunch to celebrate the Phase One deal. And, literally, they knew in Wuhan and in Hubei province that Covid-19 was raging, and they didn’t tell us.

I think they put us at risk by bringing that big delegation. No one got sick from it, but it showed the level of the conspiracy and cover up. I said publicly at the time that it was bigger than Chernobyl.

You think it was a coverup at that point?

100 percent.

You don’t think that at that point that Xi hadn’t been informed? 

Whether Xi was informed and signed off on the cover up, or the Party apparatus started covering it up, they knew there was human-to-human transmission. They cut off internal travel in China very early on, but a lot of foreign travel from Wuhan was allowed to continue. We finally had a travel ban in January [2020 on China], which I think saved thousands of lives, if not hundreds of thousands of lives in America. But they knew a month beforehand.

They shut down their whistleblowers. They took down information off the internet about the disease. They refused to allow our CDC folks into China. They stonewalled. And then they tried to use PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] and ventilators to extract concessions regarding our bans on Huawei, and to get political concessions from countries that wanted PPE or ventilators.

Lighthizer wrote a book where he gives the Chinese credit for carrying out a number of provisions in the Phase One deal, though they haven’t come anywhere close on the promised purchases of U.S. goods. If Trump were to win, do you think it would make sense to re-engage on a trade deal and try for a Phase Two version? 

We’re past that, given Covid, the spy balloon, the intelligence collection via TikTok. I was on a Fox show with Lighthizer and Bob came out for decoupling. I think his view has changed and I think President Trump’s going to rely on him [if re-elected]. Peter Navarro is in the same boat. Some of the folks he’s going to rely on now are far more hawkish now than they were, including [former National Economic Council director] Larry Kudlow.

The true colors of the Chinese communists started to emerge under Xi in a way that you didn’t see under Hu Jintao and Deng Xiaoping. He’s much more of a Maoist, much more of a nationalist, much more of a Marxist-Leninist hardcore communist. The whole idea of ‘hide and bide’ is gone. [Deng’s famous direction on foreign policy was for China to “hide your strength and bide your time.”] You saw the attack on the Indian patrol in the Himalayas, which was particularly brutal. You saw the increased threats against Taiwan. I think there’s been a real change.

You’re an advisor on international affairs. You can’t go to China [O’Brien and other Trump administration officials have been banned from the country]. Does that affect your ability to do work?

I’ve been to China enough and fortunately our firm is very successful. It was more of a shot across the bow at [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken and [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan to say that, hey, you guys can’t go back to Goldman Sachs or Wall Street, where China still maintains a lot of influence.

The Trump administration took action when the Chinese imposed their national security law on Hong Kong, but it was relatively mild. A more powerful signal would have been, say, to cut off the Hong Kong banks from the international financial system. Do you think that should be U.S. policy?   

That option has to be on the table. I think we took pretty strong action with the Hong Kong Democracy Act. We sanctioned a Central Committee member for the first time in history [Politburo member Wang Chen] and sanctioned some of the leaders in Hong Kong. 

I would be in favor of cutting off the banking relationship, but I think Treasury is concerned. We have to be careful about how we use sanctions. We overuse sanctions and underuse them at the same time. We typically sanction a lot of governments and a lot of individuals, but they’re half-measures, so we don’t get the results we want from them.

…Xi Jinping has learned the lesson from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Don’t think it’s going to be a walkover. If China invades Taiwan, you’re going to see a massive show of force.

But at the same time, sanctions create a perception that the dollar shouldn’t be the reserve currency in the world. So, my view is if you are going to use sanctions, go hard. Try and change behavior and do it on a serial basis, with one measure after another, rather than trying to sanction all the Bond villains at the same time, so to speak.

At the end of the Trump administration, General Mark Milley [former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] says he twice contacted Chinese generals to assure them that the U.S. government was stable. Did you know about that? Did you encourage him?

I did not know about that at the time. I certainly would not have encouraged that at the time.

Trump has said it amounts to treason. Do you agree with that? 

Look, I don’t know enough about what happened, because I only learned about it after we left office, but I remember hearing about it and calling [Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo and asking if he knew about it. Mike didn’t know about it. Then Mark, to his credit, acknowledged that it happened and said those were routine conversations between himself and other chiefs of defense.

I don’t know what was said in the phone calls. It’s not something that was a subject of principals or deputies meetings at the NSC.

After January 6th, you didn’t resign. There were press accounts at the time that you considered it. 

I talked about this extensively at the January 6th committee and that transcript has been published. I was not thinking about resigning at the time. You take these jobs through the good days and bad days. January 6th was obviously a bad day. It’s something that was very unfortunate.

I tweeted about it in real time. On my personal Twitter account, I condemned the rioters and the mob at the time. But you don’t take these jobs just for the days the hostages come home, or we sign the Abraham accords, or for the state dinners. You take the job for the tougher days as well. 

We had a government to run for another 14 days. The President needed my advice and counseling. The President wanted me to stay and so I was not personally considering resigning.

By the way, we got a lot done those last 14 days as well. On the 19th Secretary Pompeo designated [China’s actions in Xinjiang as] genocide which Tony Blinken had talked about on the campaign trail, but I personally don’t think the Biden administration would have done.

The genocide declaration was a day before you left office. Was it meant to box in the Biden administration? 

I don’t think it was meant to box them in, but it was the right thing to do. They haven’t reversed it, but my gut feeling, watching how they’ve run their foreign policy, is that they’re very afraid of escalation and provoking — other words for appeasement. So, I don’t think that that would have happened under the Biden-Blinken administration if we hadn’t done it. 

What was it like to deal with the president’s tweets?

You don’t manage the president’s tweets. The president’s use of Twitter was a very effective tool of diplomacy and foreign policy and obviously very unorthodox. I can recall one time as a hostage envoy, before I was national security advisor, a government helped us get a hostage home in return for a favorable tweet from the president. That showed the currency the president’s Twitter account had.

Part of my problem was that my computer in the West Wing did not have Twitter on it because my office was in the SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility]. My personal phone with the Twitter account on it was in a lock box outside the door. So, I had staff bring in tweets as they came because oftentimes the president would call and say, ‘What do you think of the tweet?’ And if I hadn’t seen it, that wasn’t good situational awareness. So, I made sure that my staff printed out the tweets and brought them in and put them on my desk as soon as they happened.

I didn’t view my job as having to explain foreign policy to the president or explain what his policy should be or educate him. I felt my job was to give him the best advice and counsel and get him the best options from the government. Once he made a decision, our job was to make sure the cabinet agencies and departments implemented those decisions. 

In March 2023, you visited Taiwan. You said China could invade in a year or two. It’s now 2024. Is it your view that they might invade next year?

We should look at it not so much as a Normandy-style invasion, but a coercive attempt to unify with Taiwan. It can involve a blockade. Taiwan has very little fuel storage capacity. I think it’s 12 or 14 days. 

You could see the PRC trying to block energy imports into Taiwan, or use gray-zone tactics, cyber-attacks, or take some of the outer islands. There are a lot of tools the Chinese could employ to pressure Taiwan to reunify against its will. Of course, the most devastating would be an amphibious invasion. First of all, a lot of Chinese soldiers would die, a lot of ships would be sunk. It would also be devastating, of course, for the Taiwanese. 

Admiral Davidson had a famous Davidson window that went to 2027. We’re well within that window. [Testifying before the Senate Armed Services committee in 2021, Adm. Phil Davidson, then the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said that China could seek to unify with Taiwan within six years.]

I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job deterring China. We’re particularly vulnerable during a transition to a new administration. That’s not assuming President Trump will win, but even a transition from a Biden One to a Biden Two administration. It could be a time when the Chinese seek to press their advantage, when we’re otherwise occupied with domestic politics and cabinet secretaries are being shuffled in and out. 

Whether it happens now or two years from now, Xi Jinping has said it’s part of his legacy to unify with Taiwan. We have to take him at his word and do everything we can to complicate the lives of the Chinese planners and make it so costly that he decides not to proceed down that path.

Once an invasion happens, it would be brutal because Xi Jinping has learned the lesson from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Don’t think it’s going to be a walkover. If China invades Taiwan, you’re going to see a massive show of force.

The question will be, will the Replicator program be in place early enough? [The Pentagon is working on a project to be able to quickly field thousands of drones that could swarm enemy soldiers, planes, and ships.] Will we get our submarines maintained and repaired and back out to sea? Do we harden aircraft hangars in Okinawa? 

Then how will the Chinese strike in cyber? Will they strike at San Diego and shut down the San Diego Power grid? Will they take out Japanese and Philippine spaces? We just don’t know, but we have to be prepared for it all and be prepared to win. If Xi Jinping thinks he’ll lose and we’ll win, he won’t invade. 

During your visit to Taiwan, you had to deal with a press report saying you had said the U.S. would never let Taiwanese semiconductor factories fall into Chinese hands. That was interpreted to mean blowing them up. 

The Communists ran with that. When I got to Taiwan, they said that the U.S. wants to attack Taiwan. It’s ridiculous. The only people who want to attack Taiwan are the Chinese Communists.

Obviously, TSMC is creating about 90 percent of the advanced semiconductor chips that the world economy runs on. Now that’s changing with the CHIPS Act, and with the new fabs being built in the U.S. and Europe. [The U.S. is providing about $39 billion to companies building new semiconductor plants in the U.S.] But we’re still probably four or five years off from being totally dependent on Taiwan for our chip needs. If China got hold of the manufacturing at TSMC intact, they would control the chip market and control the world economy.

I don’t think anyone is going to allow that to happen. I don’t think Taiwan semiconductor engineers and employees want to get involved in that sort of thing. Whether they sabotage their factories or shut them down or disable them, or whether other countries have to take steps, I don’t think the Chinese will be allowed to invade Taiwan and grab a hold of the world semiconductor supply as booty.

It’s somewhat similar to what Churchill faced after Vichy France surrendered and moved the French fleet to North Africa. The British fleet had to destroy the French fleet. They gave the French options to sail to the U.K. or Canada or scuttle the fleet themselves. The French turned them down and said they wouldn’t turn over the fleet to the Nazis. But Churchill couldn’t be sure of that, so the French were given a warning, and the British fleet destroyed the French fleet at the cost of, I think, 1,500 or 1,700 French sailors.

The British admirals, I think, cried. Churchill had tears running down his face when he walked into Parliament. He felt that he’d be ostracized in Parliament for having destroyed the French fleet. And he walked into a standing ovation from Labour, Liberals, and Conservatives. I think that’s the moment that Hitler understood that this guy’s ruthless, and he’ll do what it takes to save democracy and save the world from Nazism. 

A U.S. president could be faced with a similar situation with TSMC and Taiwan chips. The free world is dangerously dependent on Taiwan for advanced chips. TSMC is a great company and makes a great product that everyone wants to buy. But unfortunately they’re making a great product in a very dangerous neighborhood.

As part of Taiwanese policy, should the U.S. drop its position of strategic ambiguity? Do you think the U.S. already has because Biden has four times said that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s assistance.

I think we’ve still got strategic ambiguity because every time Biden said that, except the last time, Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken ran out and walked it back. That’s creating ambiguity itself, right? Maybe they’re trying to restore strategic ambiguity. That would be a pretty clever way to do it.

But I also think about what would have happened if President Trump said something four times, and I went out and walked it back, after the first time walking it back, I would have been walking out of the White House. I don’t think I would have been around. 

It’s less about what we say about strategic ambiguity and what we say about the policy and more about what we do. The Chinese are very astute. The way to re-instill strategic ambiguity is to get our submarines repaired and out to sea, get this Replicator product done and build hypersonic missiles.

I had an interview with Bush National Security Advisor Steve Hadley who said there was a similar situation in 2008. The Chinese were worried about the Taiwanese declaring independence and Hu Jintao ordered the Chinese fleet to build the capabilities to invade. What’s the possibility that this is the way the Chinese operate? When they think the Taiwanese might declare independence, they order their military to get prepared. But that doesn’t mean that they have the intention to invade. Maybe we’re over-interpreting what they’re doing.

Up until Xi Jinping, it may have been the case that it’s a kind of kabuki theater. We’ll tell the fleet to prepare to sail, but they’re not going to sail. 

But Xi Jinping is a different kettle of fish, and a dictator for life. He said that he’s going to take Taiwan. He said he’s going to unify with Taiwan irrespective of what they do. It’s not dependent on an independence declaration or some sort of red line that the DPP crosses. We have to understand that this is a different time in 2008 and the Chinese are serious about taking Taiwan. [The DPP, or Democratic Progressive Party, is Taiwan’s independence-minded ruling party.]

Look at his scenario. He’s got a declining demographic. He’s got economic problems. And he’s facing a U.S. that is technologically far more innovative than China. He’s wondering, ‘How do I change the chessboard? I can add another 30 million Chinese with Taiwan, I can grab TSMC and control 90 percent of the world’s nanochip market.’ The one thing the Chinese have not been able to do is steal the technology to produce these nanometer chips.

So, looking at it from Xi Jinping’s perspective, he’s thinking, ‘I can intervene in history, I can block some of the trends that are negative for China.’

Let’s talk about the Biden administration for a bit. If Trump were to win, what parts of Biden’s policy toward China would a Trump administration keep and try to expand, and what parts would it reject? 

I don’t want to sound immodest, but I think the Biden administration has kept a lot of our policies in place. The Quad [a grouping of the U.S., Japan, India and Australia] was strengthened with us. I’m glad to see that the Biden administration continued strengthening the ministerial sessions. 

AUKUS was a good move, but I think it was executed terribly, at least initially. I know people like to poke at the French but France is an important Western power. We could have gotten into AUKUS in a way that didn’t alienate the French the way it did. But now that it’s up and going, it’s certainly a worthy project. [The Australia-UK-U.S. group plans to produce nuclear submarines for Australia. When the project was announced, Australia canceled a deal with France to purchase diesel-powered subs which outraged the French.]

I don’t think everything the Biden administration has done is bad. I appreciate the CHIPS Act, which Pompeo and I supported and got criticized for by some of our free-market friends. We have to have some incentive for chip makers to come back to America. But I think everything they’ve done is a continuation of our policy. 

What I wouldn’t do, as Biden has done, is allow them to fly a spy balloon over the U.S. and collect information on every nuclear site in the U.S. and bring it back to China, which we now know happened. They denied it at the time. I don’t think we’d allow them to continue to buy farmland around our military bases the way they’re being allowed to do. 

We’d have a much tougher line on China than the Biden folks have. Their tendency in international affairs is to apologize for America. They believe that if China hates us, we must have wronged them horribly at some point. If we apologize enough and are accommodating enough, they would like us and treat us fairly. That’s never going to happen with China or Russia. 

Do you agree with your former deputy, Matt Pottinger, that China has crossed a red line in its industrial support for Russia. If so, what would be the proper response? 

Unlike [Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen, I’m not hoping for a prosperous China right now because they’re using that prosperity to build tanks and aircraft and fighter jets to kill young American men and women.

Ukraine’s a whole different subject, but it’s this idea of half-measures. We have sanctioned the Russian Federation’s central bank, but we don’t sanction commodities, we don’t sanction agriculture, we don’t sanction oil and gas. We have to put secondary sanctions on the Chinese. The Chinese are scared of that. We have to make the Chinese have a choice of participating in the U.S. economy or participating in the Russian economy Pottinger and I raised with the Russians the Treaty of Peking in 1860. The Russians then took huge swaths of land from the Chinese. That’s all part of the century of humiliation for Xi Jinping. Don’t think that Xi’s not coming back for this territory at Russia’s expense, whether militarily or by forcing them to do it because they’re totally dependent economically and are becoming a vassal state. The Russian-Chinese alliance is an unholy alliance and it’s not going to end well for the Russians.

Do you think there’s a way of splitting the Russians off from the Chinese, especially if they’re still fighting in Ukraine? 

Until we get the Ukrainian situation solved, we’re not going to have a chance to make a run at Russia. When we were in office — and there was no Ukraine invasion when we were in office — we certainly thought about a kind of reverse of what Kissinger did with China.

It certainly isn’t possible unless the Russians end the war with Ukraine. But if you got a resolution of the war, you could try and figure out how to explain to the Russians that it’s not in their best interest to be so cozy with a country that believes Russia has got tens of millions of acres of their territory.

A reverse Kissinger? How would you propose settling Ukraine? 

It would be presumptuous for us to propose how we settle it. I don’t think the U.S. or Europe should tell the Ukrainians what to do or what not to do in a new negotiation. But every war ends in a negotiation. Right now, there’s no incentive for Putin to come to the table.

Some of these wicked wave attacks [by Russian soldiers] are killing thousands of Russians. The flower of Russian youth is being destroyed by this war, and Ukraine’s as well. One of the ways you convince Putin to come to the table is to give aid to the Ukrainians with weapons they need, and don’t do it too-little too-late like the Biden administration has done for three years.

It’s also fully sanctioning the Russians. Sanction everything. See if the Chinese want to keep doing business with them and face secondary sanctions.

If you put massive sanctions on them and take their 12 million barrel a day oil production down to 6 million barrels a day, that would be massive. That’s the sort of thing I think would bring the Russians to the table.

If Trump were to win, you’re widely seen as someone who might go into the administration in a very senior position. I assume a lot of foreign governments are calling you to get your advice on what a second Trump administration would look like. What do you tell them?

We’re very careful about talking to foreign governments. I’ve got a lot of friends who are ambassadors and foreign ministers and national security advisors from my time in office. The first thing we tell them is that President Biden is still the president, so you should conduct any diplomacy with the Biden administration. 

But I say that if you want to see what Trump 2.0 would look like, look at the last two years of Trump 1.0. He’s going to have all kinds of people who have expressed interest in serving. I never comment on my own situation. If he wants me to help him, I’ll salute and say yes but I think there are lots of really qualified people.

I ask this question in most every interview. It was long U.S. policy, although not in the Trump administration, that a prosperous China is in the U.S. interest. Do you think that’s the case? 

I don’t think so. Xi’s a dictator for life. He’s very different than Hu Jintao or Deng Xiaoping. We’d like to see the Chinese people prosper. We’d love to see the Chinese people free. I think China can be such a force for good in the world. They’re hardworking. They’re clever. Some of our greatest immigrants and some of my best friends are Chinese Americans. But under people like Xi Jinping, who are very nationalistic, who want to use aggression to change international boundaries, who support everything we’re against, it’s hard to root for their economy because you’re really rooting for the CCP. Unlike [Treasury secretary] Janet Yellen, I’m not hoping for a prosperous China right now because they’re using that prosperity to build tanks and aircraft and fighter jets to kill young American men and women.

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