Gabriel Noronha is the Executive Director of Polaris National Security. He served as a special advisor for the State Department's Iran action group and special assistant for the Senate Armed Services Committee
Federal Newswire
What did you take away from your time in the Senate?
Gabriel Noronha
The Senate very much views itself as the only thing in the world that matters. George H.W. Bush used to say that the Senate is the country club … and it's a much slower deliberative body. Which is good because there's some ideas that come to us a little half-baked from the House.
Now the problem is sometimes the Senate just doesn't do anything on a subject. Look at entitlement reform or health care. Anytime one party has 60 votes–which has only happened once in my lifetime–that's really been the only time people have been able to pass legislation.
Now there's reconciliation, which allows you to push massive spending bills through Congress [with fewer than 60 votes].
Federal Newswire
What was your experience at the State Department?
Gabriel Noronha
I'd been warned that [while] the career folks are some of the smartest people in government, which they absolutely are, they also have a mind and a will of themselves. The opportunity is, if you can convince the career people that what you're doing needs to be done, you can bring people on board who will fight with you. If it's something that they fervently disagree with, it's going to be a really tough time getting it through the building.
Ultimately, my view was the ideas on Iran and China made sense. We could change the world for the better. We could change our relationship with China and reset it for the better.
It took a lot of hard work. but I think it convinced not only the US government but a broad swath of the US public as well, that the way we had conducted business didn't make sense and we needed a radical reshift.
We did a really interesting public relations campaign on both China and Iran. We had the top Cabinet officials, the Attorney General, the secretaries of defense and state, the National Security Advisor, and the CIA director give keynote addresses in 2019-2020 on in-depth policy about the US-China relationship. [They were] really trying to make the intellectual case of why we needed to change.
This was put into a compendium that the State Department released. People should go check it out. It's a wealth of intellectual knowledge, facts, and statistics of everything that could get declassified out of the US government. It's a set of documents I think is going to live for a long time for historians and others to study how the United States came to think that we need to reset this policy.
Federal Newswire
What are the key priorities of Polaris and what is in your China portfolio?
Gabriel Noronha
Coming out of the Administration I was working closely with Morgan Ortagus, who was the spokesperson for Secretary Pompeo and President Trump. We said, “we've made a huge number of wins across the world and the public doesn't always pay attention to foreign policy, so they don't always understand what and why things happened.” We wanted to explain to the American people, and we wanted to try to preserve the gains we made, make sure we don't go backwards, and help the incoming Administration succeed on things like the China challenge.
China is too big an issue for Republicans or Democrats to fight about the entire time. It is an existential issue, so we focus a lot on what keeps Americans safe. How can we continue to have US leadership around the world and make sure that the next generation of Americans is as safe and well positioned as we are today?
One of our focuses in the Middle East is how can we advance the Abraham Accords–how can we protect Israel and their right to survive? Obviously the central challenge there is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
On China it's a lot about educating the public on the full scope of what the Chinese Communist Party is up to again. It's a whole-society threat from the [perspective of] military, intelligence, surveillance, and public health.
One of the central challenges is economic competition and infiltration. We see this with the tech sector especially, but really across a wide spectrum. We're seeing significant risk with the Chinese government gaining leverage and control over the US economy, and also of the US being able to control what we do or do not do on China policy.
Federal Newswire
What are the action areas you’re focusing on with China?
Gabriel Noronha
We do a lot of events with candidates. We take them to the southern border so they can see for themselves everything that's happening there… and actually learn that individuals come from all across the world. There are hundreds if not thousands now of Chinese individuals coming across the border. Instead of going through San Francisco airport or Dulles, you can just go into Mexico and come up the border. You don't need a visa and you can still get in.
Then we do educational briefings with different candidates. We have about an 80 page national security bible that walks them through everything from China's naval fleet [compared to] the United States’ naval fleet. We had about 296 ships in 2000 and today we're at 193, I think. China is way ahead of us and rising rapidly, 91 in 2000 and 296 today. The Chinese fleet has massively overtaken us and they're on track to hit 400 ships by 2025.
A lot of members of congress take a year to five years to get up to speed on these things. We think it's important that they get to Congress fully equipped. One thing I've noticed is even though these candidates receive these briefings, most of them have no idea of the sheer scope of the problem that we're facing, and these are some of the most informed people in our country. The American public I think really deserves to know the full scope of this...
Federal Newswire
What are a few things you inform new members about on China?
Gabriel Noronha
Any conversation about China that doesn't start with fentanyl is missing a big part of the picture–110,000 Americans killed in 2021 and then another 100,000 killed in 2022. We know that most of those precursors are made in China.
I went on maidenchchina.com which is an e-commerce site in China, searched for fentanyl precursors, and found them on the website. They say they offer discreet shipping to Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Mexico, Prague–wherever you want it. They will get it there and they have screenshots showing successful purchases [to those locations]. Hundreds of Americans are dying every day.
I think foreign policy has to look at how we are helping Americans here at home. Getting the fentanyl epidemic under control, and stopping the precursors coming from China has to be at the top of the list.
Number two is, not only how do we prevent a war over Taiwan, but if it comes down to it, how do we win?
The unclassified war games show that 10,000 American sailors may die in the first week of a war. What troubles me a lot is also that we know that we would run out of long-range munitions about 10 days into that war, according to the open source estimates. That means 10 days in, we're fighting with a hand tied behind our back if we don't get the munitions supply chain right, now.
A lot of this all starts with defense spending. If we don't have the budget for the readiness of our troops, and the budget for opening new weapons production lines [then it puts us into a precarious position]. We're not at war today,... but we're in a cold war whether we wanted it or not.
Federal Newswire
What other areas is Polaris focused on?
Gabriel Noronha
When I took my economics courses, the first thing they tell you is that economics is a study of how we satisfy unlimited desires with limited means. I think that is the perfect [framing] when it comes to our munitions. We do not have unlimited weapons. We do not have unlimited missiles and warheads. We do have, it seems today, almost unlimited threats to the United States.
One of the things Polaris works a lot on is the Middle East. Today the question is, how are we addressing the threat from the Houthis attacking international shipping? There are some people who say this is a distraction from our problems in China and East Asia. I would say a lot of what our policy there is about is protecting international shipping and the rights to freedom of navigation.
The way I think about it is, yes we have to be involved, but we have to end these wars quickly and decisively. The worst possible outcome is that you have wars that drag on and without positive direction.
Federal Newswire
Is overwhelming force in a conflict the best way to keep our armed service members safe?
Gabriel Noronha
Absolutely. I feel badly for our service members in the Middle East who've been sitting ducks. There have been over 80 attacks on our service members in Iraq and Syria. We only responded four times. It doesn't feel good when you're on the other end of ballistic missiles and drones coming at you and you're not allowed to respond.
Federal Newswire
What are the steps to reestablishing security at the southern border, creating deterrence packages in Europe, and becoming energy independent?
Gabriel Noronha
The border is not our first line of defense. It's our last line of defense.
We have 31 provinces [in Afghanistan] where ISIS and Al-Qaeda are now present. They're metastasizing. We're not doing strikes there anymore. And we've seen over 400 immigrants from Afghanistan cross our border. Over 500 from Yemen, 600 from Syria, 600 from Iran. That's a problem that starts over there.
I think Israel is our first line of defense in a lot of these areas in the Middle East. They're an incredible counterterrorism partner.
Understanding that if we have these strong alliances, [for example] if we help NATO beat back the Russians, that prevents a massive refugee crisis in Europe, which overflows into the United States. Ultimately, if we can work with countries and partners in the Middle East to stabilize those areas, that means we don't get massive flows of those people.
Same with Latin America. Venezuela saw over five million displaced people because of communism destroying that country's economy–and that has also destabilized Colombia and Brazil. It comes back up to the border.
We think the rest of the world is not our problem. It will ultimately always come to our shores.
Federal Newswire
What are your views about the policy of reciprocity with China, or establishing a practice of, what we aren’t allowed to do in China, they wouldn’t be allowed to do here?
Gabriel Noronha
One of the first things that Matt Pottenger did when he came in as Deputy National Security Advisor is, he went down this huge checklist of things and said, “okay here's what China allows us to do and here's what we allow China to do, let's just balance this.”
We saw that the CCP might holler and scream at all these things. We said, “Look, you can fix any of these things overnight–just give the US companies freedom to act like we give to Chinese companies. Allow our reporters to go report wherever they want. We're happy to have a free, open relationship if you agree to common rules of the road.”
That was a really important rebalancing when it comes to the economic relationship. I always think about how you can increase US leverage over that relationship. The Chinese have had leverage over us for a long time.
The Chinese have access to 85-90% of the whole clean energy supply chain for solar panels and electric vehicles. We have to extract ourselves from these dependent relationships.
That's how you will get China to be really wary about crossing us or invading Taiwan, if they're afraid about their own economic vulnerabilities.
Federal Newswire
How can a President hit the ground running when dealing with Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran?
Gabriel Noronha
One thing I always look at is what gets the Chinese the most furious and anxious. I've seen it in their technology companies when we've threatened to cut off access for semiconductors and exports on things for their top security companies. That is when they come begging to Washington and they fly to us rather than us to Beijing.
We need to go proactive and ban TikTok, or at least force it over to US ownership. Look at any of our technology that the Chinese government is relying on today–they are trying to replicate and steal it immediately so that they do not have to continue relying on us.
I think cutting off all access almost overnight, just to stop that process happening and slowing them down is going to make sense. They can then come into Washington and negotiate a more favorable deal, but it shouldn't be us considering whether to do this.
We can negotiate a relationship of equals. That relationship of equals involves things like them cracking down on fentanyl. It means them not trying to infiltrate every element of American society. That I think is possible for us to get to a position where we can have peaceful coexistence like they talk a lot about. But they do not want peaceful coexistence. They want subservience in the United States. We have to get to an actual, real peaceful coexistence. We have to approach them from a position of strength and force them into a relationship of equals.
Federal Newswire
Where can we go to keep up with your research?
Gabriel Noronha
I'm @glnoronha on Twitter. I talk a lot about Iran, the Middle East, and China. You can also go to www.polaris-us.org.
The China Desk Podcast is hosted by Steve Yates, a former president of Radio Free Asia and White House national security advisor.
