Kamala’s Failed African Joust With CCP, Ukraine Exposes America’s Weak Underbelly

Transcript of Peter Navarro's latest podcast

Apr 10, 2023

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Hi. Peter Navarro here. It’s April 10, 2023, and after a short hiatus in deference to Good Friday and Easter, we resume this podcast and substack with a two-part interview with one of the leading, and perhaps most unsung, experts regarding the existential military and economic threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party. The gentleman in question is Alex Gray and he was my top Deputy and the White House for the first three years of my service to President Trump in this country.

This is a long interview that I conducted as guest host on Steve Bannon’s War Room Battleground last week. Because of its length – in my promise to you to keep each of my podcasts and substack short and punchy – I’m going to split it up into two parts.

In this first part, Alex and I rate the success, or lack thereof, of the recent trip Vice President Kamala Harris to Africa within the broader context of America’s imperative to develop a domestic rare earth manufacturing base – and touch upon the lessons we have learned from the Ukraine conflict viz a viz America’s broader defense industrial base.

Then, in Part Two, which will be posted later this week, Alex and I will drill down first on how Taiwan should be preparing to defend itself on what will likely soon be an attempted invasion by Communist China and then walk you through the Pearl Harbor-style dangers posed by Communist China’s soft power diplomacy in the island chains of the South Pacific once controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy. So here we go!

TRANSCRIPT OF RECORDED INTERVIEW. PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS!

Peter K. Navarro in for [STEVE BANNON]. I promised you the best 20 minutes on Communist China yet in the War Room, which does a wonderful job on this. I want to start off by saying that in 2006, I wrote a book called The Coming China Wars. It was the first in my trilogy where there was a whole chapter on how China, communist China, had infiltrated 54 countries in Africa.

And fast forward over time, they've used this thing called debt diplomacy where they go in with a big checkbook and they write a lot of money, build a lot of infrastructure in exchange for two things. One is access to the markets of Africa. And what happens there is they'll come in and start selling their cheap made in China crap, put the local merchants out of business.

So they destroy the merchant sector of African countries. And then what they do with the loans they give to these corrupt dictators is get these countries in debt and then they encumber their NATURAL resources. And so it goes.

And so Vice President Kamala Harris went there last week to try to romance them. And the top line there, Communist China is providing now all of the infrastructure to Africa through Belt and Road Initiative.

And meanwhile we're throwing a bunch of money trying to feed them, give them some medicine and fight terrorism. And it's just not resonating with the people.

What I want to do now is bring on Alex Gray. I have called him in my In Trump Time book the Mozart of Foreign Policy. He's a young man, 31 years old at this point. He was my top aide in the White House. He and I were on the Trump campaign in 2016 and published a couple of really good articles about China as part of that campaign.

And he kind of stepped down. I like to joke. He kind of stepped down. He went to be the Chief of Staff for the National Security Advisor. Robert O'Brien in the White House.

So Alex, let's bring you into the conversation right now. I want to ask you: Did Kamala Harris help or hurt the United States with her trip? What should she have done? And then let's talk more broadly about China going around to the various hotspots, Taiwan and then where you were at in the South Pacific, boots on the ground. So, sir, let's start with Kamala Harris.

ALEX GRAY

Thanks for having me, Peter. It's great to be back on the War Room. Look, Kamala can go and visit as many African countries as she wants. It doesn't make any difference as far as the United States is concerned on our ability to manage the China competition. She can go and strike deals, talk about giving aid to African countries. The problem is, what we're really concerned about in most of Africa is competing with China for key mineral resources, key natural resources, rare earths critical minerals.

The real problem we have is because of the environmental lobby, because of the free market ideologues, we don't have a domestic capacity in the United States to process the rare earth that the military needs to meet its critical requirements. And so Kamala can go and do these goodwill tours, but her administration is the same one that's holding up the permitting for the type of rare earth processing that you and I fought for the whole time we were in the White House.

So I don't care whether she wants to go into a goodwill tour when her colleagues in Washington are keeping us from having being independent of China for the type of critical minerals the F 35 requires or submarines require.

So it's a wholly counterproductive visit.

NAVARRO

Let's note, these rare earths are also a critical component of virtually all the high tech products that consumers buy, whether it's automobiles these days or whether it's their iPhone or anything in between.

So I think Alex's point is well taken. China, by the way, has just on its own over 90% of the rare earth-based materials. And then if they are able to corner the market in Africa as well, they close all of us out.

Meanwhile, we don't have production capabilities. And so this is the kind of thing that those folks just don't understand.

Before we move to Taiwan, we spoke earlier in the day, and you had, like, a top line on, the only way we're going to beat Communist China is fill in that blank for the war room battleground audience, if you would, Alex.

ALEX GRAY

Yeah, Peter, the only way we're going to beat Communist China is to get over this free market ideological stuff you and I dealt with for four years in the White House, where the Ideologues refuse to understand that it's the Trump trade policies that you fought for that I tried to help you fight for.

It's the commitment to a manufacturing economy that can actually sustain our military so we can deter a conflict, and God forbid, if we have to win a conflict, it's having the type of merchant marine that's capable of actually supporting our troops in wartime.

It's having all the critical production capacity. Right now, we can barely repair our own submarines. We've got four shipyards that can do that type of heavy repair in a wartime environment. We would be totally overwhelmed trying to do that sort of thing against a peer competitor like China.

So what I'm saying, Peter, is it's time for the next president to get out of that Bush era mindset and move us towards the Trump heartland.

Let's rebuild the type of economy that we need so we can also have a defense industrial base that can take on Communist China.

NAVARRO

And we also talked a little bit about the Ukraine situation. What has that revealed to you visa vis our shortcomings in terms of our industrial policy that you're advocating?

ALEX GRAY

Yeah, Peter, what I've noticed is we're talking about sending relatively antiquated weapon systems like Javelins that have been around for decades, anti tank missiles, artillery shells, things that are not the type of cutting edge naval and air systems that be used most likely in a Taiwan scenario with the Chinese Communist Party. And we're struggling to even get those in a timely manner to Ukraine.

Whatever you think of the Ukraine conflict, it's shown that our industrial base doesn't have the capacity to surge. It doesn't have the resilience that it needs. And we would be hard pressed right now not only to continue to do what we're doing in Ukraine, where our European allies are not pulling their weight by far, but also we would be incredibly hard pressed to try and do on a much larger scale with much more sophisticated equipment. This type of surge, if we were, God forbid, in a conflict with China.

So I think what this has revealed, Peter, is we have to have leadership in the White House that says no more blind ideological commitment to a mythical free market that, look, we're all capitalists, but we have to get beyond the idea that the free market is going to solve some of these industrial based problems.

You and I, we worked together on the Executive Order 1386, an historic effort to figure out the weaknesses in our industrial base. President Trump signed it.

We have to have top down leadership to figure out how to fix this industrial base because China is not operating on mythical notions. These guys already have a larger navy than we do. They've got the largest merchant marine in the world. And in a real conflict, they're going to be churning out equipment, ships, planes, faster than anyone can imagine.

So we’ve got to be ready!

And that’s all folks…. Please listen to the podcast if you have time and write a review!!