How Taiwan Must Prepare for War, Imperial China Prepares Pearl Harbor 2.0

Transcript of Peter's Taking Back Trump's America Podcast

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Hi. Peter Navarro here, it’s April 12, 2023, and in this episode of the Taking Back Trump’s America podcast and substack, we are going to finish up our interview with Alex Gray, focusing in this episode on both the problems Communist China is causing in Taiwan as well as the South Pacific.

One of the most overlooked dangers now being generated by Communist China is its adventures in the South Pacific where the Imperial Japanese Navy once roamed as it prepared to attack America at Pearl Harbor. Danger Will Robinson danger.

So please listen very carefully to this interview and spread the word.

PETER NAVARRO

Let's shift now to the issue of Taiwan. The joke around Beijing and Shanghai. What do you call American aircraft carrier?  A TARGET!

And the essence of the Chinese, the Communist Chinese, military strategy in the South China Sea and the East China Sea is asymmetric warfare. It's the notion of being able to take down a multibillion dollar aircraft carrier with a million dollar missile.

And so they have the largest missile arsenal in the world. It takes seven minutes to shoot a missile from the mainland of China and hit the palace in Taiwan.

And one of the things I loved when we were in the White House,: You came up with a list of the kinds of things Taiwan could be doing asymmetrically to fight back.

So give me your assessment of what [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy did with the Taiwan president, whether that was smart, and more broadly, what the Biden regime should be doing in terms right now of our Taiwan policy.

ALEX GRAY

Look, the speaker McCarthy's meeting with Tsai Ing-Wen. That's fine. It's just talk. I don't think it moves the needle one way or the other.

I think it is important that the Speaker showed that he's not going to be bullied by Beijing into not having a meeting that he wanted to have because the CCP says, don't do it. So to me, that's fine.

Where the rubber meets the road is one the Taiwanese have to continue to grow their defense spending. They're well below what they need to be at in terms of [DEFENSE SPENDING AS A ] percentage of GDP for the existential threat that they face.

And we have to put pressure on them in a way that we haven't with too many of our allies until President Trump came along. We have to put that pressure on them that we're only going to have their back if they make the type of commitment that we need to see from them to show they're serious about resisting invasion.

Peter, the types of things that they need to do, they're not sexy, they're not the types of things that I think a lot of the Taiwanese generals and admirals want to do. But they're things like they need to be buying sea mines. They need to be buying mobile, portable anti ship missiles that can be put on the back of a truck and moved around beaches to target landing craft. If the Chinese come ashore, they need to be buying Stinger missiles. And I've argued publicly, every police station in Taiwan should have multiple Stinger missiles. The cops should be trained in how to use them, and so they can start targeting the Chinese helicopters that come in prior to the invasion to lay the predicate for the amphibious assault.

They also need to take a page from the Ukrainians in one instance, which is they need to have gun clubs. Taiwan doesn't have a gun culture particularly, but they need to get one because, as the Ukrainians have learned, one of the most potent examples of their resistance has been these groups of volunteers who taught themselves in the years after the Russian invasion in 2014 how to shoot. And they formed up in an organic way, and they've been incredibly effective at halting the Russian advance.

The Taiwanese have to get serious about their own defense and they have to start forming those types of self defense collectives.

So I think these are all tangible things they could be doing. What I'd like to see is the Biden administration holding them accountable and holding ourselves accountable to spend the type of money we need to spend on the type of systems.

You mentioned missiles. Right now, we don't have nearly the arsenal and the stockpile of sophisticated antiship and anti air missiles that we need to have in the Pacific theater to deter and to defeat China. And those are the types of investments that the Biden administration isn't making and needs to be making.

NAVARRO

Alex, on the issue of defense expenditures by Taiwan, is it that they can't afford it or is it something that are their politics sufficiently split between pro mainland and anti mainland that it's difficult to do? Is that what's going on there? Because they're basically relying on the kindness of a United States, which can be an uncertain trumpet, to say the least.

ALEX GRAY

Yeah. Peter, this is a domestic political issue in Taiwan where you have one party, the KMT, that traditionally has been much closer to the mainland and to the Chinese Communists. The former President of Taiwan of the KMT Party, Ma Yinzhou, was actually meeting with Xi Jinping just a couple of days ago while the current President was in the United States.

Just to give you an idea of the divisions within Taiwan. The Taiwanese economy is one of the most resilient, most vibrant, robust in the world. They can spend significantly more than 2% of their GDP on defense. You look at what Israel spends, you look at what some of the countries in Europe spend. There's no reason Taiwan shouldn’t be [doing the same] given the existential threat.  [They should not be spending] anything less than 5% of GDP.

NAVARRO

And by the way, if they develop this and use some of that productive capacity to produce their own weapons, that would generate prosperity and higher wages and all of that. The [SEA] mine thing has always been  a bug of mine because it's the porcupine strategy.

[It’s the] single best way to repel the Chinese because they're going to come in boats.  [Taiwan could] salt those seas with mines.

In the few minutes we have remaining. I want to leverage your expertise. Tell the audience first what you did out in places like Micronesia. And the problem here is the projection of soft power by the Communist Chinese handing out a bunch of money, taking over the governments in the South Pacific and basically setting up the same kind of chain of islands that the Imperial Japanese used to attack the Americans first and then to resist the Americans. Talk a little bit about that, Alex, because you were really out there in the trenches.

ALEX GRAY

Yeah. Thanks, Peter. So I was the first person President Trump created in a role that was Director for the Pacific Islands within the National Security Council. And the purpose of that role – the first time that ever had been created -- was the realization that China was moving in heavily, as you say, through soft power, but ultimately with the goal of establishing military bases all through the islands that US marines and soldiers had given their lives for to recapture in World War II from Imperial Japan.

And so what I set out to do with my NSC colleagues and colleagues throughout the Trump administration was to build a US presence in the region. We really have retreated, taken it for granted and retreated, since the Cold War to resist Chinese domination.

And you describe very well debt trap diplomacy, what they do with Belt and Road Initiative. They take what they call “elite capture.”

They go into these small developing islands and they pay for the elites to go and spend months in Beijing. They wine them and dine them. Sometimes they turn them into formal assets. Sometimes they just exert influence and make them agents of influence when they return home. You've seen this in the Solomon Islands. You've seen this in a little country called Kiribati. The Chinese are determined to take over these islands.

And the reason this matters for Americans is the same reason that mattered to our parents and grandparents in World War II. These islands are strategically located between the west coast of the United States, Hawaii and East Asia.

If you're trying to move US Navy ships and aircraft to Taiwan or the Korean Peninsula in the conflict, you have to get past these islands. And if the Chinese have military bases, if they have access to these islands, they're going to be able to prevent our passage through them. And that's incredibly dangerous.

So these look like obscure spots on the map, but they are a life and death struggle in our effort to keep the CCP from dominating East Asia.

NAVARRO

Is there any sign that the Biden regime has any clue about this? Have they picked up your cudgel and continued your noble efforts, or is that a dead letter?

ALEX GRAY

Well, they certainly have focused on it, but it's [been][much more about climate change and the rights of indigenous people. Some of these things I understand where they're coming from on some of the historical issues that they faced in the region with America’s nuclear testing and things like that. But what they've [the Biden regime has] ignored is the fact that the Chinese are focused on using soft power, using elite capture, using loans to build substantive military hard power bases all across this region. And simply apologizing for past US actions or talking about climate change isn't going to move the needle in terms of our ability to keep those sea lanes open for the US Navy.

So to me, it's been an astrategic approach that's much more focused on ideology than it is on what the United States has to do strategically to continue our preeminent position in the region.

NAVARRO

Yeah, and we see exactly that same playbook where we began talking about Kamala Harris in Africa, talking her progressive woke issues. This has been great. Alex, give us your coordinates. How best can they communicate? You're out there in Oklahoma and very politically involved out there, and that's a good thing. How can the war room posse help you work at the grassroots out there on these issues?

ALEX GRAY

You can follow me on Truth Social and you can also follow me on Twitter and I'll tell you about right out here in Oklahoma. We are at the front lines of Chinese influence in the United States.

The Chinese are buying property all over Oklahoma, buying up our farmland, and we need every Oklahoman to be engaged on this issue.

This isn't just something in the Pacific and East Asia. This is a battle we're fighting at home.

NAVARRO

[THANKS ALEX] We will see you the next time on the War Room.