Drawing on his experience in government and his long focus on China, former U.S. deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger discusses how President Xi Jinping’s alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran’s leadership and other authoritarian actors is reshaping global security.
Pottinger, China Program chairman at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), explains what China is learning from the battlefield in Ukraine and why those lessons matter for Taiwan and the wider international order. At the core of the conversation is a warning about deterrence: Preventing future wars, Pottinger says, depends not only on military capability but on sustained political resolve.
The following interview was conducted on January 27 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Ia Meurmishvili, IAM editor in chief: Let’s start with the big picture: Where do you think U.S.-China relations are at this point, and where do you think they’re heading?
Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser: U.S.-China relations have been deteriorating over a period of more than a decade. That’s mainly due to the grand global ambitions of China’s dictator, Xi Jinping. He joined with Vladimir Putin in a sort of proto-alliance, what they called a “no limits” pact. He has continued to wage information warfare, political warfare, economic warfare against the West writ large. Things have stabilized a bit under [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump, but I don’t think that they are going to get better. I think that Xi Jinping is continuing to back the Russian war in Ukraine. He is the “decisive enabler” of that war, to borrow a phrase that NATO adopted as an organization just a few years ago.
He is the main backer of the theocracy, the ayatollah’s dictatorship in Iran. And, of course, [he is] the main economic supporter of Iran by being the main buyer of illegal Iranian oil, money that does not go to the people of Iran but goes to the regime, which just committed its own Tiananmen massacre earlier this month, killing, it sounds like, perhaps tens of thousands of its own people who were protesting economic and political and cultural conditions in their country. …
Xi Jinping … was the primary backer of [President Nicolás] Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator who is now going to face justice in a courtroom in the United States.
So the structural problems in the relationship cannot be papered over by summits or warmer diplomacy like we’re seeing right now between President Trump’s administration and the government in China.
IAM: Do you think China is being more cautious now that some of its allies are losing power? Do you think China is reacting to these changes?
Pottinger: Communists don’t have real friends, right? They have fake friends. And Xi Jinping is running out of fake friends, both at home, in his domestic system within the party, and also abroad. Remember, he was also … supporting [former President] Bashar al-Assad, the Assad regime in Syria. Assad now lives in hiding in exile somewhere in Moscow. Maduro was one of the so-called friends of Xi Jinping, and he’s now in a jail cell in New York City. [Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is gunning down thousands of his own citizens to try to cling to power. If God is willing, we will see Xi Jinping lose that friend now, soon.
And then what about his friends at home? The kid that he grew up with, who was a few years older than him and was sometimes referred to as Xi Jinping’s older brother, was the top general of China. They grew up together. Their fathers served in the communist revolution together as comrades in arms. Xi Jinping appointed and elevated and sustained his so-called older brother in the top military slot, number one general in China, until last week when Xi Jinping purged him as part of the terror, Xi Jinping’s terror, that is gripping the senior ranks of the People’s Liberation Army. …
Xi Jinping is someone who really admires [Soviet dictator] Josef Stalin, who views Stalin as a role model. … I think he’s trying to overtake his philosophical mentor Josef Stalin by wiping out his entire officer corps. We should be very wary of Xi Jinping and not underestimate him but also realize he’s running out of friends at home and abroad.
IAM: He still has one friend — that’s Vladimir Putin. And he’s helping Russia and its war in Ukraine. How do you look at that friendship? Is it an alliance that the U.S. and the West should be concerned about? Or is it a marriage of convenience because China needs to weaken the West through Russia?
Pottinger: What may have started as a marriage of convenience has become now a marriage of necessity because these two men, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, have handcuffed themselves together. … They now need one another because they have gone into what for Russia, in particular, is a very unwise alliance.
It is an unequal alliance. Russia is in the role of the junior partner, bleeding and dying on a battlefield; killing men, women and children in Ukraine; and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of its own men. And for what? It’s such a tragically misbegotten strategic blunder on the part of the Russian leader, but now he is more and more dependent on Xi Jinping. And Xi Jinping is not sacrificing. …
Xi Jinping is sitting in the background, watching Russian men die on the cold plains of eastern Ukraine. And Xi Jinping only acquires greater and greater leverage over Russia with time. Access to cheap, below-cost energy and, of course, Chinese goods and services and technology and financing are what Russia’s relying on just to keep its economy from capsizing.
IAM: Do you think President Xi is looking at what’s happening in Ukraine? Do you think he’s drawing any lessons, especially as it relates to Taiwan?
Pottinger: One of the lessons that was drawn early in the conflict when Putin invaded in February of 2022 was that war is a lot harder than it looks — or that people imagine it to be when they’re drawing on their whiteboards. It is hard: the human factor, the factor of resolve, all of the unknowns, the brutality of weather. Basically it was a story of grave miscalculation on the part of Vladimir Putin. And so China, we see reflections of that in some of the early writing coming out of China. China was clearly shocked, like much of the world, that things went so badly for the Russian invasion.
But since then, what we’ve seen is Beijing learning. They have limited numbers of soldiers on the ground. They’re called mercenaries, but the Ukrainian leadership has identified at least a couple hundred Chinese soldiers. They’re embedded with the Russians. They’re learning about drone warfare. They’re learning about some of the changing technologies in war and trying to bring those lessons back to China to inform their political warfare and potential real warfare against Taiwan.
I worry that Xi Jinping has just gotten rid of all of his generals, or most of them, because some of those generals, including Zhang Youxia, his “older brother” who’s now in a dungeon somewhere, he was someone who actually had combat experience, unlike Xi Jinping, unlike most of the Chinese military.
Usually generals who have combat experience are a little bit more reluctant to commit to warfare because they know that war is a lot harder than people think. So I do worry that with this younger generation of generals that Xi Jinping is rapidly promoting to replace the scores and scores of generals that he’s purged, that we might end up with naive men who are gung-ho about going to war, and that creates a significant risk of a crisis.
IAM: Do you think the U.S. is doing enough to deter China from acting militarily against Taiwan?
Pottinger: Deterrence has two major components. One is capability. If you want to deter an adversary from attacking you or one of your allies, he has to know that you have the capability to actually back up your words. And the second component is resolve, [the] will to fight. … I think the U.S. is improving on the capability side.
If you look at President Trump’s defense strategy, one of the key pillars is ensuring that we get better and more efficient at our research and acquisition of weapons systems, that we’re able to produce munitions much faster. This is a long overdue set of reforms that I’m very hopeful is going to kick into gear fast enough to persuade Beijing that the United States has the ability not only to fight, as we already have, but to fight for a long time.
Because if it doesn’t look like we have the ability to fight for more than a few weeks, Xi Jinping might say, “All we have to do is gut it out,” just like Vladimir Putin is trying to gut it out for almost four years on the battlefield in Ukraine.
We keep hearing headlines about how Ukraine is gradually losing territory and so forth. I am actually of the view that it may be that we’re at this moment where it’s darkest before dawn.
The Russians are in a meat grinder right now. … They were losing, according to the NATO secretary-general, more than a thousand men per day in December. And they have not gained very much territory for all of that sacrifice. The Russian economy is a shambles despite the propaganda that you read.
So we just have to not lose heart. We have to be grateful for the sacrifice that the Ukrainian people — just the incredible bravery and resolve that they’re showing every day to keep the entire free world safe. They are the tip of the spear for the free world. …
U.S. resolve is the second component of maintaining deterrence. And that’s where I would like to see more. The president’s national security strategy had a good section on Taiwan. I’m confident the national defense strategy in its classified version, which I’ve never read, is quite clear. … It pays for the president of the United States to also signal resolve, not to sound meek on the question of Taiwan.
IAM: How optimistic or pessimistic are you about a war potentially erupting between the U.S. and China?
Pottinger: If deterrence holds, we should not have to fight. So that means signaling resolve in addition to continuing to spend more on our military, continuing to fix acquisition, to fix our defense industrial base. … President Trump the other day called for a roughly 50% increase in American defense spending. … That would put us back in line with where President Ronald Reagan was in the 1980s, spending on defense as a percentage of gross domestic product. So I’m very heartened by the fact that is a very good signal of resolve.
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