A top former Trump administration official said over the weekend that communist China could be deterred from invading Taiwan but only if the U.S. takes the appropriate steps right now.
Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger made the remarks during a Sunday interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan while talking about his new book “The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.”
“What is clear is that the dictator in Beijing, Xi Jinping, intends to try to take Taiwan, to annex it, by force if necessary,” he said. “We also know that this would be catastrophic for American prosperity and security. But my co-authors and I are actually quite optimistic that this is a war that can be deterred, but it means that we’ve got to take some steps urgently.”
“These are workable steps,” he continued. “It doesn’t require massive new investment. We’ve got the technologies we need.”
He said that Taiwan, Japan, and the United States needed to take specific steps to deter China’s plan to invade the country.
“For starters, we need to invest more in munitions making,” he said. “OK, so one of the things that the Chinese government is looking at is, would we be able to stay in a fight more than just the first, you know, the initial battle that would be involved in taking Taiwan? If they don’t think we have the industrial base — and right now we haven’t optimized our industrial base to do that.”
“I don’t think many Americans realize, our defense spending right now is less than half of what it was in the 1980s during the Cold War, and that was during the Reagan administration. We didn’t have to go to war, partly because we put the money into that,” he added. “Our military, in terms of manpower, is smaller today than it was on the eve of World War II. So, we have to put more money into it. But we also have to do things to optimize our defense spending so that it’s not guaranteed profits, no matter how inefficient the manufacturers are. There are things that we can do to super charge our military manufacturing to take advantage of our innovative base.”
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