Producers’ Pick | Josh Rogin: White House Sabotaged Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip

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This is the Brian Kilmeade Show. The FBI and MI5 out of Great Britain came to America and said to everyone that the risk of doing business in China is is intense. They steal our intellectual property.

They sort of take and then turn over and send you out. Our universities here are infected and they in China have learned a lot of lessons by what's going on in Ukraine. They are watching and they are going to try and figure out how sanctions won't affect them and they're going to wait for their time with Taiwan.

And they're a risk because they can disrupt our supply chain. And that was Congressman Brad Winstrup who is a medic in the army and he was just talking on Fox and Friends this weekend talking about the dangers of China and how it all goes to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, says I'm going to go visit Taiwan in about a month. And when President Biden was asked about that, he's not for it. And now China is outraged by it and they're threatening something severe will happen if she in fact visits Taiwan. Josh Rogan joins us now, author of Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi and the Battle for the 21st Century, Washington Post columnist.

Josh, welcome back. Why is China so upset that the Speaker might go and what do you think our reaction should be? Well, Brian, to be clear, you know, the Chinese Communist Party gets upset every single day about every single thing. And, you know, we can fall into this trap of, you know, falling for this, you know, fake outrage every time a couple of congressmen want to go to Taiwan. Or we can tell them that Americans have the right to go wherever they want, whenever they want, whether or not it offends the delicate sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn't matter, right? That should be our policy, first of all.

Okay. And how dare they? And who do they think they are to tell any US representative whether or not they can go to Taiwan, which is a democracy where congressmen go all the time. But the reason this became such a mess is because the Pelosi staff and the White House couldn't get on the same page. They couldn't agree on whether or not this was a good idea right now. And, you know, the administration says, well, you know, do we really want a crisis at this moment? We got a lot going on. And the Pelosi staff says, well, that's what's always going to happen.

So what are we just never going to go? And in a way they're both right. But the point is that you would think a Democratic House, you know, leader in a Democratic administration could just get on the same page, could have a talk about it and figure out what America's policy is. But because they're so disorganized and discombobulated, we look like we don't know what we're doing. And then the Chinese ramp up the threats and make everybody scared and take advantage of the fact that we're so dysfunctional. That's what's going on. So when this was posed to the president before he was diagnosed as positive for COVID, this is what he said.

Well, I think that the military thinks it's not a good idea right now, but I don't know what the status of it is. Really, that's not helpful. But it shows weakness. It shows equivocating, doesn't it? And you understand how they view it. You would say you were in Japan for a long time.

You really got to know this region. Well, that's exactly right. You know, what Biden did was, first of all, he confirmed the trip, which was supposed to be a secret. So the whole point is that you go, you don't tell the Chinese too far in advance, because then they have time to threaten you for a bunch of months, and then everybody gets all scared and you don't go.

So the whole point is to keep it a secret until basically you touch down. So Biden blew up that plan, first of all. Second of all, he revealed that the administration has these concerns, but his staff had been trying to work it out with Pelosi behind the scenes quietly. So he really screwed up the negotiations at the same time because, you know, they're trying to convince Pelosi, hey, listen, let's just delay maybe after the election when you're not really speaker.

I mean, she'll be speaker, but she won't be speaker. It'll be okay. And then Biden blurts it out and Pelosi people are like, what the heck? And they're like, now they feel like they have to go. So it's just a mess.

Okay. And this is what the Chinese love best when we don't know what we're doing, because then they can go around and be like, oh, look at, you know, look at this situation and look at the Americans and they're the aggressors and everyone else in the region doesn't know what's going on. This fits into like the broader strategic confusion about our Taiwan policy, Ryan, which is really the big problem, which is that when President Biden opens his mouth, he says, yeah, we're going to defend Taiwan.

He said it three times already publicly. And each time the White House has to walk it back and be like, well, we don't know. We have this thing called strategic ambiguity.

So we're not going to tell you one way or the other. And to everyone else in the region, they're like, what are we supposed to make of that? How is that American foreign policy where the president and his staff say two different things and how are we supposed to plan for that? And again, this gives the Chinese the advantage, which they shouldn't have, because everybody knows that if China attacks Taiwan, that's going to be terrible, terrible for the world, terrible for Taiwan. It's going to make this whole Russia Ukraine war look like a walk in the park.

OK, it's going to be bad. So we should increase our deterrence, in my opinion, be clear that we're going to defend Taiwan, in my opinion, and then, you know, tell the Chinese that, hey, since that's a free democracy and we're a free democracy, we'll visit whenever we want and you'll just have to lump it. That's what I think our policy should be. But it's not.

I hope it is in the end. I know we show weakness, but we could save it by going. And he could say that it's unbelievable that, you know, for one thing, I haven't heard speaker posts say anything negative about President Biden ever. So you got to think that they could have worked this out behind the scenes. Also, the president is never like he gets walked back, but he never corrects. He got walked back with Taiwan, but he kept saying the same thing over and over again.

So it never acknowledges it. Well, to be honest, Brian, I agree with Trump with I'm sorry, with President Biden on this. I do, too.

Taiwan. I think he's right. And I think his staff is trying to rein him in. And he's the president of the United States. And if he thinks we should defend Taiwan, then ultimately he's going to make that decision. But we have this thing called strategic ambiguity, which is supposed to preserve the status quo by not telling anybody what our policy is. And it's very clear to me, at least into a lot of other people, like Secretary Mark Esper, who just got back from Taiwan, Secretary Pompeo, who just got back from Taiwan. And a lot of Democrats, too, say, listen, this situation is getting really dangerous.

And, you know, I was in the region last month and it was clear to me from all the Chinese generals promising to attack Taiwan that the Chinese are planning to attack Taiwan. Doesn't mean they're going to do it today. Doesn't mean that they can do it today.

But as soon as they believe they can get away with it, they're probably going to try it. Okay. And what we do between now and then is really important. We need all these other countries in the region to join us. And when you have the president of the United States and his staff and the speaker of the House saying three different things about what our policy is, that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

What is that? What do you think China? What have you heard is China's takeaway from Russia's troubles in the Ukraine? You know, what they're learning is how not how to do it better.

They're practicing how to do it better. So, first of all, they learned about nuclear brinksmanship because Putin threatened to nuke us. So the Chinese are building hundreds of new nuclear weapons.

For what reason? To brush us back if we try to interfere on Taiwan. Then they learned about sanctions. So now they're taking all their banks out of our system and preparing to get sanctions. Then they're hoarding food and supplies and fuel and grain so that if we try to cut off their economy, they can just be fine for a while.

And then what they're going to do is they're not going to make Putin's mistake, which was to slowly attack Kiev. They're going to do it fast and it's going to be brutal and thousands of people are going to die. And that's why we have to stop it. And the only way we can stop it, by the way, is to make sure that they don't think that they could pull it off.

And that means arming the Taiwanese to the teeth with the stuff you need to defend from an invading army. And we're not doing that right now. We need to speed it up and fast. That's unbelievable that we're not doing it. I thought we were doing that.

We had some advisers on the ground. A little bit. Yeah. OK. I thought it was going to be some more significant.

Not enough. You say a couple of other things in terms of what China is doing with their zero COVID policy. Why are they not backing off that? They see it destroying their economy. They see what they have to do to their own people.

What are they doing? Are they going to continue to do this in Shanghai and other places? Yeah, I mean, Brian, listen, we have to be careful when we analyze the Chinese Communist Party's top leadership, because it's kind of a black box.

But what the concern is, is that they can't they've eliminated their ability to change course. In other words, Xi Jinping is about to be crowned for his third term, which essentially makes him a dictator for life in China. He's killed or jailed anyone who might challenge him. So in that system, if you're the guy who's like, hey, wait a second, this zero COVID policy is tanking our economy and it's crazy because the variants don't work that way anymore. If you say that, you're going to die or go to jail. Your whole family's going to go to jail.

So no one says it. So we're in a dangerous situation where the Chinese Communist Party may not be able to admit a mistake ever, which means they just double down forever. Now, that's what the Biden administration is worried about when Nancy Pelosi is like, oh, I'm going to go to Taiwan today. They're like, wait a second, what if the Chinese are so crazy at this point that they're going to feel compelled to overreact and then we're going to have a crisis? We could have a war.

I'm not saying that's not a legitimate thing to think about. I'm just saying that we can't overreact to that. And at the same time, we have to realize that these guys are thugs. They're basically operating like a mafia organization right now. And the way to deal with criminal organizations is to apply the law and to do the right thing and to show strength.

And, you know, that requires America speaking with one voice and leading the world. And that's where I think the Biden administration is falling. Not only are they not immune, Brian, but what I discovered is that a bunch of them, over a dozen of them were thrown into these fever clinics. These are Chinese government medical quarantine centers. It looks like a prison, acts like a prison, walks like a prison, talks. It's a prison, OK? And for them to scoop up American diplomats and their family members for testing positive for COVID and throw them into these COVID fever clinic prisons, that's outrageous. That's against the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

They've been doing this for years. The embassy is trying to fix it now. Not to mention 40,000 U.S. citizens in Shanghai who got locked down, couldn't get food, couldn't go to work and leave their apartments. You know, the Chinese government abuses its people horrendously to one degree or another.

If you're a Uyghur, you're probably in a camp. If you're just a regular Chinese person, you're just monitored everything you write and think and and do, dings your social credit score. But for Americans in China, the situation is getting really, really bad. And the ability of the U.S. government to protect Americans, China is going way down.

And I heard your lead. And when you think about doing business in China, what are these corporations doing? How are they, you know, investing in China and putting Americans in money invested in China and moving their corporate, our supply lines to China, while every piece of data you see, every trend is going really negative. OK, because the Chinese Communist Party is becoming more aggressive, more repressive, more expansionist and more interfering in our lives. And that's that's what's really going on in the U.S.-China relationship.

And the Pelosi kerfuffle is just one small piece of that. So when I hear these Treasury experts and these economic experts say, well, let's just remove it. If you want to get inflation down, let's remove some of these Chinese tariffs. They don't work anyway. I'm thinking to myself, OK, if they don't work, why did China want him off so badly? And why did Biden take forever to take them off because he undid everything else Trump did?

What is your take on Josh? Do these tariffs strike home? Well, Brian, you hit the nail on the head. It should tell you something that the Chinese, the thing the Chinese Communist Party wants most is for the tariffs to go.

Now, if they were useless, if they didn't exert any pressure, then why do they care about them so much? So that's one thing. The other thing is that it wouldn't help inflation. It's such a tiny bit of money. It's not even the things that are causing inflation. The tariffs are three years old. So it's not going to do anything.

So that's just a lie. The truth of the matter is that the reason that there was so much lobbying money in Washington going into the Treasury Department and the committees that run this stuff is because Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce want to do a favor for the Chinese Communist Party so they can get a favor in return and make money on their short-term balance sheets while increasing the risk of American investors in a Chinese Communist Party that's building the machine that's attacking our democracy and our way of life. The corruption of that scheme is not well understood by most Americans, but that's what's going on. You've got Wall Street firms who are trying to get access to the Chinese market to make a little bit of money before the whole thing goes kaflui, and they're willing to sell out America's national security to do it. That's what the tariff debate is really about.

It's not about whether or not we're going to get inflation down 0.00003 percent if that even is true. It's about are we going to continue to fight China's economic aggression, which is pointed at us, which is aimed at our prosperity, or not? And if we are, then we've got to keep the tariffs and actually do more. We've got to do more investigations. We've got to keep on them about all of the things they're doing wrong, the intellectual property theft, the trade subsidies, and we have to realize that Wall Street is playing on the wrong side of the fence. They're helping the Chinese Communist Party raise our money from us to build the machine to attack us.

That's crazy. That's what we've got to stop. That's the big weakness in our U.S.-China strategy. Yeah, a couple of things. We have Josh Rogin, our guest here from The Washington Post, offering his expertise in the region. Just worth pointing out, something we kind of understood, but evidently the Pentagon's been studying all the intercepts with China aircraft and ships in the Pacific region over the last few years. In their conclusion, China's been significantly more aggressive and dangerous over the last five years.

That, according to General Milley, I'm not sure why he had to do a study on that. Just looking at the news, we've been seeing that. What's the significance in them going public with that as he goes to Indonesia over the last few days, first time in a long time? You know, there's just no part of the U.S. government that isn't waking up to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is becoming an increasing problem in ways that affect free and open societies all over the world and in ways that affect our lives. The spying is one part of it. You saw FBI revelations this week.

It's just everywhere you look. I'm not even going to start on the pandemic, which, again, came out of China, was covered up by the Chinese, no investigations. But put that aside.

Let's say you never got COVID. You must realize at this point that we've got a problem here. Now, the fact that Mark Milley is saying that, OK, well, the spying has gone way up.

Yeah, that should be pretty obvious. But it just goes to show you that we're always sort of thinking, oh, well, what's going on with Saudi Arabia? What's going on with Ukraine? China is the long-term challenge.

And the more attention that Americans have, the more awareness that Americans have about their plan to change our world order in ways that benefit them and make the world safe for autocracy and repression and against us, the community of free and open societies, the better. So I think the fact that he's talking about it more. But no, I don't think anyone's surprised. Right.

Yeah. They said talking about it more that General Milley, what are we going to do? We're going to invest in our Navy and kind of respond.

Are we going to? That's one message that could be sent as much as we want to put our hand out. They look at that as weakness. We learned that with Iran as well as Russia. But, Josh, the other thing is that a lot of people point to is the fact that President Biden's got this rich experience in China. It talks about how well he knew President Xi when he was second in command. But he doesn't talk about how his son has business interests over there for years. Do you think that matters when it comes to foreign policy?

What is your what do you deduct from this? You know, of course, it matters because the Chinese Communist Party seeks to not just corrupt our leaders, but to corrupt their families and their children. And they're not the only ones that do it, by the way. The Russians and the Saudis do it, too. But the Chinese do it more. OK. And they corrupted Neil Bush, you know, the son of the brother of George W. Bush, son of George H.W. Bush, and they corrupted Hunter Biden. OK. And I'm not even talking about the things that I'm talking about, the things that he's admitted to and the deals that he's already been talking about.

And there's plenty in the open source without even wondering what else is out there that shows us that he was trading on his family's name to make money from China for things that he had no business being involved in, you know, skills to apply to. He's got Josh, I got to end it there. But you have a blizzard of knowledge and opinion and extremely valuable. I have no idea why you're not on CNN every hour. Josh Rogan, thank you.