U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI 8) is Chairman of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, as well as Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation. He also serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Federal Newswire
What made you run for Congress?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
A colleague of mine has an ongoing joke where every time you speak on the House floor, whoever is sitting in the Speaker's seat says, “for what purpose does the Gentleman seek recognition?” We joke that if we were being honest, we would rise and say, “I seek recognition because I never got it as a child and I'm trying to fill that void in my soul through public acclaim and public service.”
But the reality is, I was always interested in the world outside Wisconsin and America. Even as a very young student, I gravitated towards foreign affairs, foreign policy, [and] foreign languages. When I was in college I didn't know what I wanted to do, but it was through the study of foreign languages that I started to go abroad.
I was doing an internship at a think tank studying terrorist targeting methods, and we had invaded Iraq the year prior. 9/11 happened when I was a senior in high school, but I didn't come from a military family, so I didn't rush to join. But the more I started studying why we were in Iraq and what our response was to 9/11, I just became fascinated by it. I became fascinated by the Middle East. I started studying Arabic, which was my minor in college.
I realized along the way that the best way for me to apply those skills and pursue my passion was to serve in the military. This had the added benefit of allowing me to serve my country and pay back the debt I felt I owed to my family, my state, [and] my community, but also to test myself. I felt like there was no better way to see what I was made of mentally [and] physically as a leader than becoming a Marine Corps officer and taking on that challenge.
For me, it was a great way to combine a lot of things into one. The decision to join the Marine Corps, besides the decision to marry my wife, was the best one of my life. It led to almost two decades of public service, and whether it's as a Marine, Member of Congress, or as a staffer, I view it as the same thing. I view my life's mission as defending the country and deterring war…I can tell you that while deterrence may be hard, war is hell. It really doesn't matter what my title or my job is, that remains my passion and I just try to pursue it.
Federal Newswire
What are you focusing on as the Chair of the House Select Committee on the CCP?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
The mission as I interpret it… was to do two fundamental things.
The first is a communications function. It's to explain to our colleagues, and by extension to the American people, why any of this matters. When it comes to the economic and technological side of this competition, and even the military side, there's no cost-free way to beat the CCP.
It's going to require serious investments, and can require some political investments in terms of extricating ourselves from our dependency on China in key areas. If we don't answer why the CCP is a threat, why it's not just a distant threat, why it's not just a problem for Taiwan, and that it's a right-here-at-home threat to American sovereignty [and] national identity, we're never going to muster the support necessary to get big things done–we'll just slowly lose influence, until all of sudden we wake up and we've lost the new Cold War.
The second is a more practical legislative function. We were tasked with coming up with a series of bipartisan policy recommendations and submitting those to the committees of jurisdiction–a kind of blueprint of how Congress can start to lead when it comes to competing effectively with the CCP. We've done that.
We submitted a report on the military aspect, on the human rights aspect, and most recently on the economic and technological aspects of this competition.
Sometimes I bristle at this euphemism of “strategic competition,” because I think it understates the nature of what's happening. This isn't a polite tennis match. It's an existential contest for what we want the future to look like.
I have no doubt that the CCP would love for us to destroy ourselves, and would love to replace us as the world's dominant power, and to reshape the global order in a way that reflects their Marxist-Leninist system and their techno-totalitarian genocidal values. That's what it's all about: communication and practical policy recommendations for the Speaker.
Federal Newswire
What factors brought the Committee together now?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
China, or the CCP more accurately, has been waging a cold war against us for quite some time; an ideological and economic war. Now we have an unprecedented military buildup since…at least 2009 when Xi Jinping [was Vice-President], when they started to make all these expansive claims around various islands in the Pacific and started to militarize those islands.
The point here is we are responding to aggression…We did not start that aggression. Our strategy is a defensive one to maintain the status quo and rules-based international system.
Why did it take us so long to wake up? I hate to say it, but I think this was a bipartisan bet that was made on integrating China into the global economy. There was a certain logic to it, that by doing that China would moderate its political behavior The only problem is that it did not work. We fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. We repeatedly attempted to wish away the “Communist” part of the CCP.
But what happened is, American manufacturing was decimated in the process. Our power eroded over the course of 20 years relative to the CCP. A lot of people got rich off the effort, and I think there's a continued resistance in the corporate and Wall Street world to talking openly and honestly about China for fear of losing money.
Maybe a more charitable way to put that is that, after two decades of pursuing China's integration of the global economy and pursuing this naive responsible stakeholder theory, we've found ourselves very dependent on China, and there's no easy way to extricate ourselves. We are conjoined twins with China economically, and figuring out the balance of selective decoupling is a difficult thing to do.
I do think both parties are starting to wake up, but we haven't actually done the things we need to do.
The reason for that is domestic progressive politics. There's a faction on the left that says any criticism of the CCP is tantamount to anti-Asian racism and therefore we can't get tough with the CCP, which is absurd because the biggest threat to individual liberty in China is the Party. The Chinese people are the victims of the CCP's aggression, and we have no quarrel with them.
I can't think of a more chauvinistic and, dare I say, racist regime than the one that's actively committing a genocide right now.
We're still not moving fast enough, and there's still some cleavages between the parties as a result.
Federal Newswire
What were the goals of your delegation visit to Taiwan?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
I'm just struck at how successfully they navigated that transition [from a military dictatorship to a democracy]. It's hard to find an example of a society like that, that has navigated a transition to now being one of the most free, open, vibrant, and flourishing democracies in the world. They just had an election last month, which was raucous and vibrant, but it succeeded despite the rampant attempts by the CCP to interfere and undermine the election.
This point has a broader significance, because there are those in China, and particularly in the CCP, who say that democracy is fundamentally incompatible with Chinese culture and tradition, and Taiwan stands as a massive repudiation of that claim.
On my most recent trip I was struck by a few other things.
I think the government under President Tsai’s leadership and what will soon be under president William Li's leadership is making progress preparing militarily. They've extended conscription from four months to a year, but they're waiting on us to deliver weapon systems they've bought. They're very successful economically, they don't need charity, but we haven't delivered.
The backlog remains somewhere around $200 billion, and particularly when it comes to key systems like harpoon missiles, which you need to sink Chinese ships, we just have to be moving faster.
The good news is if you ever just walked the topography in Taiwan…you're struck by some obvious things. One, it's an island. There are only a few beaches where you could land a sizable force, and by the way, once you do, the terrain is absolutely hellacious. Good luck trying to transit over some of the mountains, which are highly vegetated. It makes me believe that if we acted with a sense of urgency, we really could make this a difficult, if not impossible problem for the PLA to solve in a military sense.
The final thing I'd say is in light of the CCP's attempts at election interference, I think it should give us a sense of urgency to make sure something similar doesn't happen in the United States. I particularly worry about an effectively CCP controlled app like Tiktok being the dominant news platform for young Americans leading into an election cycle.
Federal Newswire
What threats are presented by TikTok ?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
If you analyze what Xi Jinping and the CCP leaders have said, they specifically and repeatedly talked about the value of short-form video as a means of influencing foreign societies–an extension of Jinping's “magic weapon,” to use his phrase, which is a United Front Work; a combination of espionage, influence operations, and coercion. By the way, the United Front Work Department dwarfs the size of our State Department. He made various reforms when he took power to make the UFWD report directly to him.
I think we should view it in that context, even though the initial concerns about TikTok were more about surveillance–could it track your browser history and everything on your phone? Those concerns are valid, but I think the real concern is TikTok's emergence as a news platform for the younger generation and the opacity surrounding its algorithm.
With a lack of algorithmic transparency, we simply don't know how much influence the platform has over our kids. It is owned by Chinese company, ByteDance, that is beholden, like every Chinese company [to the government]. But particularly, a national champion like ByteDance [is beholden] to the Party, has apologized for not following appropriate Party direction in the past, and vowed to do so in the future.
That's simply an unacceptable state of affairs. It would be as if at the height of the Cold War…we had allowed the KGB and Pravda to buy NBC, ABC, and the New York Times.
We have to learn the lessons from the Senate's failure to pass a bill. The RESTRICT Act was well intentioned, but I think it granted too much authority to the Executive Branch, which could be weaponized against American companies, and [instead] have a more narrowly tailored bill that allows for a ban or a forced divestiture.
What I would say to Republican investors who have an ownership stake in ByteDance, it would seem to me they would want TikTok to go public in America, not on a crappy Hong Kong market.
The only way for that to happen is if there's a complete separation between ByteDance and Tiktok. Then you can have Chinese TikTok and you can have TikTok America with full algorithmic control.
Then we could just have a separate fight about the corrosive impact of social media in general, which goes beyond TikTok and includes all the American social media companies that are increasing anxiety, depression, and suicide among our youth.
Federal Newswire
What challenges concern you the most?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
In terms of what's shifted the American people's view on China, I think it is Covid origins, but it's also fentanyl and the fact the precursors are coming from China. [I] remain deeply skeptical about the Biden Administration's dialogue on counter narcotics cooperation. We've seen that movie before, and to me…we need to be much more aggressive than how we traditionally approach this, which is just scattershot sanctions on random Chinese companies or officials.
I think we need–and I'll get in trouble for saying this, but what the hell–is [to see this as] almost a modern-day flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. I mean, it's killed over a million Americans; [about] 60,000 a year. It is horrific. Even in my community way up in Northeast Wisconsin, we've had cartel murders. We've had families destroyed.
It's an all-hands-on-deck effort. We need to have a clear redline that we enforce. I think we need to be prepared to do things that really hurt the CCP if they continue to allow precursor exports, to include dismantling the firewall. I think there's a lot of things we can do.
Obviously securing the southern border [is critical], because a lot of this is coming through there. Going after WeChat Pay as a means of financing the fentanyl production. I would put that in the Top 3.
Then anything we can do to demand accountability when it comes to Covid. Has anything disrupted our lives more than that? And the CCP has not been held accountable at all. It's absolutely unacceptable.
Federal Newswire
Where can people go to follow your work?
Congressman Mike Gallagher
I write a lot of obscure op-eds. I have a Twitter @RepGallagher and my website https://gallagher.house.gov.
