This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Dan Blumenthal is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as Senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the US Department of Defense, and is author of The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.
Federal Newswire
What have you learned about China that you included in your book?
Dan Blumenthal
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party believe that they're on a roll, and they're doing really well. Their time has come, and it's their time to march to the center of world politics.
In my book, I go through their grand ambitions and the roots of those ambitions. There's a decent amount of history as to why Chinese leaders today think that China's rightful place is to be at the center of world politics.
Some of their problems seem hard to surmount, [like] demographic issues–which are now much better–the fast aging of China, the different fiscal strains that are bringing a shrinking workforce, and the debt that is weighing down the Chinese economy.
Then the book also gets into how I believe the Chinese overcame the crisis of leadership succession in 2012, because there was a real challenge to Xi Jinping's succession, which I think is not that well known.
Bo Xilai, who was a very ambitious leader of Chongqing and other provinces throughout his career, made a bid to usurp the power of Xi Jinping and take over the leadership of the CCP and China. He was brought down through a scandal that his wife was involved in. But my belief when I was writing the book was that China and Xi Jinping were still dealing with the fallout from leadership divisions, and much of his purges and so-called anti-corruption moves were to take out his opponents.
In my view, that has created a dynamic in which the purges can't really stop, and the purges get Stalin-esque.
They're managing real problems. There's a duality of ambition and power, without a doubt. But they also are facing closing windows. [It’s] a real juggling act to keep it all together.
Federal Newswire
Can you explain the Taiwan project you’re currently working on at AEI?
Dan Blumenthal
Chinese external policy when it comes to Taiwan, the Philippines, the US, and Japan is very much informed by Xi Jinping's own near-death experiences, and knife-fighting inside the CCP. That's part and parcel of how he views domestic politics. That's how he views international politics, as very competitive, ruthless, and a fight to the death.
Washington, DC is obsessed with the Taiwan issue. There are good reasons for that, but we can't take our eye off other ambitions the Chinese have. The project that we've undertaken [includes] a report called, “From Coercion to Capitulation: How China can take Taiwan without a war.” We put ourselves through an exercise–what we would do if we were the Chinese strategic planners tasked to take Taiwan without starting a major war in the western Pacific.
We go through in rigorous detail the political pathways of political warfare, economic coercion, and low-intensity uses of force like the Chinese used in the South China Sea, and like we're seeing in the Taiwan Strait. So, [it may look like] a maritime encroachment, shipping inspections, use of warfare to say that the Taiwan Strait is Chinese waters, information attacks on the United States and Taiwan, and physical sabotage in Taiwan.
[They want to] create a feeling of chaos on the island such that people lose confidence in the Taiwan government over the course of a coordinated and intensified four years.
China has been quite successful in hybrid warfare around its periphery. So, they think they can succeed with respect to Taiwan.
Federal Newswire
How do you think the government will handle this?
Dan Blumenthal
We've built a really strong team of young Chinese linguists and strategists, and we're going to go through a series of planning exercises to look at what happens. One of the things missing in a lot of the discussions is some of the basic geo-political assumptions that China would have to take into consideration.
A big one is, if China is going to put 250,000 troops on the island of Taiwan, they're going to have to decide to either attack Japan to get rid of US air power–because nobody's ever done an amphibious landing with their enemy still being able to function in the air the way we would be able to function–or take the risk of not doing so, a major geopolitical decision by Xi Jinping. [It] would start World War III. We would be in it, no matter what. If that happened, they would change the world.
How would China think about going to war with Taiwan, the United States, and Japan, and how would Taiwan and Japan think about a new style of defense? The bottom line is, we think that a short-of-war campaign can succeed. We need strategies to undermine it.
Federal Newswire
Would an invasion of Taiwan also draw in the Philippines considering how much China has amped up its encroachment on the Philippines already?
Dan Blumenthal
If you're Xi Jinping… it's a decision to start a world war, and it would involve the Philippines and Japan.
Federal Newswire
Are there from the war in Ukraine that apply to Taiwan?
Dan Blumenthal
I'm really just going through the process of learning the lessons myself. The competition between Russia and Ukraine is twofold. One is drone versus electronic warfare and who's adapting more quickly. I think that would pertain in the maritime theater as well, different kinds of drones and electronic warfare. But that's a very quickly changing calculation all the time on the battlefield.
The other is missiles versus counter-missiles. The Ukrainians shot down a lot of Russian missiles, things are changing. That threw a lot of people off, in terms of how many land attack cruise missiles and even close-to-hypersonics the Ukrainians managed to shoot at. The missile war did not go the way that I think most people watching the missile counter-missile competition in Asia thought they would.
The geography gives Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines interesting options when it comes to drone warfare in the air and missile warfare in their theaters. There are a lot of problems we can cause China if we learn the right lessons.
Federal Newswire
How might the nuclear weapons capabilities affect the equation?
Dan Blumenthal
The Russians have been threatening the use of nuclear weapons, probably more than any country has since 1945. I think with the Chinese, they're sitting there watching how you can shape Washington in terms of Washington wanting to de-escalate even the conventional arms transfers to a partner, under the threat of nuclear weapons.
I think we're moving into a very dangerous stage where the Chinese are going to be conducting coercion under a new nuclear shadow, shaping responses in various capitals about how far we want to go with even helping allies by arming them. That would be the other lesson we have to assimilate carefully.
Federal Newswire
Where can people go to follow your work?
Dan Blumenthal
I'm on Twitter, @DAlexBlumenthal. I put a lot of things up on LinkedIn as well.
The China Desk podcast is hosted by Steve Yates, a former president of Radio Free Asia and White House national security advisor.
