Interview with Matt Pottinger

CSDS-SWJ STRATEGY DEBRIEFS • 8/2024

Interview with Matt Pottinger, by Octavian Manea

20.12.2024

A significant challenge confronting the United States (US) and its allies is the increasing strategic alignment between China and Russia. Indeed, the ability of the US and its allies to uphold strength and security across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions is largely contingent upon their capacity to counter China’s advancements in Asia and to prevent the emergence of a durable and solid axis among China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. In this comprehensive interview with Matt Pottinger we look at what can be done to restore deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, how to unpack the shared objectives of the newly formed “axis of chaos”, how best to understand the personal rapport between President Putin and President Xi Jinping that fuels this collaboration and what lessons might inform Beijing’s approach in the first island chain.

When talking about Taiwan, a traditional image is that of a porcupine, but in your latest book you speak about “a boiling moat”. Let us unpack this a little, what is the strategic symbolism of a boiling moat?

Matt Pottinger: The porcupine analogy is a useful one, but as my co-authors and I really looked as best as we could at Beijing’s strategy (as far as we can know it) and Beijing’s capabilities, and when we looked at Taiwan’s advantages and the advantages of Taiwan’s friends – not least the US, but also Japan and Australia, and to some extent Europe -, it became clear to us that the great geographic blessing that Taiwan enjoys is the Taiwan Strait. What would Ukrainian people have given to have 100 miles separating them from the armoured brigades and infantry of Vladimir Putin? There is a reason why Taiwan has very rarely been part of China as a political unity over the centuries and millennia – it enjoys some geographic distance. During the research for the book, a Chinese friend pointed me to the Han dynasty statesman Kuai Tong, who had this phrase about how cities with metal ramparts and boiling moats are best left alone. We need a boiling moat strategy. Therefore, we should focus on that body of water and the other waters that surround Taiwan like a moat and make them impassable, full stop. The Chinese military’s centre of gravity in a Taiwan war would be its naval forces and the Taiwan Strait would be its graveyard.

So building on these symbolic lines is something that we should keep in mind in order to deter China?

Matt Pottinger: Beijing can try and is trying to subvert Taiwan through the so-called three warfares – information warfare, legal warfare and psychological warfare. But it becomes much harder to defend against those forms of grey zone warfare if Taiwan is not confident that it can repel a military invasion or a blockade. Therefore, we focus in the book heavily on the military dimensions of this competition, on the cornerstone prerequisite for Taiwan governing itself on its own terms. And this means military capability in Taiwan, and also robust capabilities with Taiwan’s friends in order to persuade Xi Jinping that to attempt a blockade or war would be a bad gamble.

At the core of today’s predicament and the global strategic interactions is the rise of the China-Russia revisionist core. How should the strategic relationship between China and Russia be decoded? Is it something contingent on the personalities of the two leaders?

Matt Pottinger: It is more than temporary. This is not the Stalin-Hitler pact that melted away in a shocking instant for Joseph Stalin. This is not Ribbentrop-Molotov. This is something more profound than that. At the same time, we also need to recognise that this is driven by the men themselves more than by the systems and more than by the enduring national interests of either nation. That is to say that if not for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, I very much doubt that we would be seeing an entente and “no limits” pact like we have seen not only in writing, but in action over recent years, particularly since February of 2022. We should not be dismissive of this pact just because there are many reasons why both China’s and Russia’s national interests are not compatible with this pact over the long term. We should not be dismissive of it just because the two regimes have different ideologies that they operate under. It is going to be very hard to break this entente so long as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are in charge of their respective systems.

In the meantime, we should be planting the seeds for a future when Russia comes to its senses, stops killing its neighbours and realises that it is surrendering its autonomy to a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship to the East. This would be unthinkable to earlier generations of Russians. We should be planting the seeds for that future and be willing to eventually bring Russia back into a trajectory where it can be secure and sovereign without the need to wage war against its neighbours and without the need to surrender its autonomy to Beijing.

There is a big discussion today about the imperatives of strategic prioritisation. How should the strategic sequencing be approached – at a time when Russia and China are increasingly a strategic combo that forces us to face the dilemma of strategic simultaneity problem, a multiple-front predicament?

Matt Pottinger: My view is that prioritising some things and deprioritising other things is the essence of strategy. But we should not be lured into a false dilemma. I think that the false dilemma is one that says that geographically we cannot afford to even help Europe fend off Russia. We should not indulge this false dilemma that says we should accept in essence a military defeat in Europe in order to place greater emphasis on deterrence in the Western Pacific. In fact, we can deter in both places.

Now, if you were to tell me that we cannot fight our own war in both theatres simultaneously, I would say you have got a point and that we have allowed our ability to fight simultaneous wars to atrophy. It used to be a mainstay during the Cold War that we would have the ability to fight on two fronts. But what we are talking about now is not fighting a two-front war. We are talking about supporting Europeans in fighting their war and also enhancing deterrence in the Western Pacific. No one is asking us to commit American troops to fight Putin’s forces.

Of course, Europeans need to do more for themselves. Europe definitely does need to spend more and I think that we should make that very clear and there should probably be some consequences for the failure of some of the laggard countries such as Germany to meet their obligations to the other NATO allies.

But let us just take stock for a second. Europeans are fighting with their lives right now. It is Ukrainians who are fighting and also some brave Russians who have joined Ukraine’s side in this war, not to mention some brave individual volunteers from around the globe. So let us not deprive them of the respect that they deserve and the honour that those sacrifices deserve. We can actually do better in the long run and even in the short run by supporting the Ukrainians in their fight with war material. The alternative which might be a collapse of Ukraine would be more expensive for the US in terms of political capital, in terms of economic outlays and in terms probably of military deployments to Europe because Romania shares a border with Ukraine, and so does, of course, Poland and other NATO member countries. We would be looking at a much less advantageous post-war posture and it would be one that I believe would actually be more expensive than what I believe are relatively modest outlays to support Ukraine in beating back an aggressor.

And this in a way could be an emboldening message, an incentive for the other revisionist actors to test American power in other theatres? I mean, if Ukraine is lost, it could be tempting to try in other parts of the globe, especially in the Taiwan Strait.

Matt Pottinger: Absolutely. Even as Russia has lost reportedly a half a million men to death and injury, they are still present in Africa, in Cuba, they are in Venezuela helping the dictator there steal an election as we speak. So, why do we think that Russia would be satisfied with Ukraine as opposed to doing what it can, working with the other Axis members to which it is increasingly closely bound? That includes, of course, Beijing, which is the decisive enabler of Russia’s war machine, but also North Korea, which is sending ballistic missiles, artillery ammunition and troops. And then Iran, which is providing the kamikaze drones. In addition, we see all kind of insidious activities in Latin America, in the Caribbean where the US has not seen this kind of activity in our front yard since the Soviet Union provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I do not think people are using enough imagination to think about what the world looks like and what it looks like for America’s own security the day after Ukraine falls. Therefore, real prioritisation would mean to prioritise deterrence along all of these axes. That is a much cheaper proposition than taking our chances with a major Russian axis victory in Ukraine.

What are the potential lessons that China is learning from Russia’s war in Ukraine?

Matt Pottinger: Let us go back in time to September of 2022, roughly six months or so into the full invasion of Ukraine. Things were not going well for Russia and Xi Jinping got together with Vladimir Putin in Uzbekistan for one of the roughly four dozen face-to-face meetings they have had since Xi Jinping was elevated to General Secretary of the Communist Party. Back then, the press mistakenly interpreted Xi Jinping’s body language and one of the statements that Putin made for Chinese displeasure with the invasion of Ukraine. It should have been clear at the time that what Xi Jinping was concerned about was Vladimir Putin’s poor prosecution of the war in Ukraine: not the fact that he was fighting it, but how he was fighting it. In Xi Jinping’s eyes it was very important for Putin to win this conquest.

It was only about six months after that, in March of 2023, that Xi Jinping paid a visit to Putin at the Kremlin and made that extraordinary statement as he was bidding him farewell that “there are changes occurring that happen only once in a century on the world stage and we are the ones driving that change”. He was basically admitting that those two men together are the architects of destabilisation around the world. The Chinese material support for the Russian war machine began to skyrocket that same month and it has not really abated. We have seen the unprecedented NATO statement this summer declaring Xi Jinping the decisive enabler of Russia’s war.

So one lesson is that wars are very deliberate, but their consequences are highly unpredictable. Xi Jinping should not bet on a short sharp war succeeding and therefore he is going to need to prepare, and I believe that there is ample evidence that he is preparing for the possibility of what he would call protracted warfare.

A second lesson would be in the realm of information warfare. We can see the contempt that Chinese have for the Russian information and cyber warfare plans, starting with the early phases of their full-scale invasion. If it does invade Taiwan, Beijing is going to try to not make that mistake. It is going to do everything it can to try to cut undersea cables – which it has already demonstrated – and to fry satellites, which is why it is important for Taiwan, together with commercial and other government partners to be capable of replacing satellite constellations quickly.

Another lesson that Xi Jinping has probably drawn, which is a negative lesson from our perspective, is that nuclear blackmail is very effective. We need not let it be so effective. But every time Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear sabre, you can hear people jumping under their desks at the State Department. Beijing is going to view as useful or at least potentially useful the threat of nuclear holocaust. I do not think it is a credible threat from Xi Jinping, but he is going to be tempted to make it, having seen how scared too many European and American diplomats are whenever Vladimir Putin rattles that sabre.

There is also another facet of Mao that I suspect could be useful in decoding today’s Chinese strategic behaviour – “Mao, the insurgent”. To what extent has China become an “insurgent power” or an enabler of disorder, enabler of disruption, targeting key pillars of international order? Their fingerprints are literally everywhere: enabling Russia, slowly physically controlling the South China Sea through salami slicing tactics, supporting Hamas and Iran. Should we see these operations through this lens of spreading and enabling chaos globally?

Matt Pottinger: Beijing is the centre of the new axis which I like to call the “axis of chaos”, borrowing Xi Jinping’s own use of the term “chaos”. I am thinking of one speech he gave in January 2021 where he talked about how the key feature in the world today can be summed up in one word, “chaos”, and he goes on later in the speech to talk about how global trends are in China’s favour. So this is a guy who hates instability at home, but instigates chaos abroad and that is why you are seeing him reaching into Latin America to support Venezuela and reportedly to try to build military bases in Cuba. And this is coming from a regime that claims that Americans have a Cold War mentality.

It is why they are hosting delegations from Hamas, which has its support from Iran, and Iran certainly treats Hamas as if it were a proxy. Beijing is ramming its huge armada of Coast Guard vessels into the much smaller boats commanded by the government of the Philippines as a way to try to intimidate people across South Southeast Asia and in order to try to demonstrate that the US is feckless. The US should be supporting directly at the invitation of the Philippines those resupply missions to small islands right off of the coast of the Philippines that Beijing is trying to capture coercively.

In many respects, Beijing now plays the role that the Soviet Union played during the Cold War – it is an agent for instability everywhere except within its own borders.

You are a former Marine. But the campaigns you served in were of a different character than the character of a potential campaign in the first island chain. Today, the Marines are leading the way in terms of transformation. How do you see the reinvention of part of the US Marine Corps as a first island chain-centric sea denial force? We have seen also a lot of push back against this direction. On the other side, an argument could be made that the trends that we see in the Ukraine war for the Black Sea validate the logic behind the Marine’s Stand in Forces and Maritime Littoral Regiments.

Matt Pottinger: I think our former commandant, Dave Berger, was brave in really making dramatic steps to try to acquire new capabilities that would allow Marines to fight China. And I think that the sorts of capabilities that we have seen demonstrated on the battlefield in Ukraine supports his arguments for the types of capabilities we need to incorporate.

Now, the main criticism that General Berger received has been for giving up certain capabilities that have been really important to the force structure of the Marine Corps for decades. He had to make those sacrifices because the Congress would not raise his budget. In fact, for three years in a row we have seen the US military budget decline – it is now just hovering slightly above 3% of GDP, which is less than half of what we were spending typically over the course of the Cold War. Even in peaceful decades like the 1980s, we were spending something like 6.8% of GDP. So I think that the answer here should be to give the Marine Corps and our military generally a greater budget so that it can maintain its traditional force structure and weave in these new capabilities, but without sacrificing its ability to serve as America’s so-called 9-1-1 force. Marines have to respond to the emergency phone call, have to be capable of being the first ones into a fight and to be able to sustain themselves without outside support for 30 to 45 days and then to be able to be resupplied to sustain a fight.

In conclusion, I understand the arguments on both sides. I think that that we should actually make the pie bigger so that we are not cutting out critical pieces of that pie. But we also should not be sacrificing the integration of new capabilities, given what we are learning from the battlefield in Ukraine which are essential.

In your book you make a very important point about parity. There is this classic image in international relations – of neutralised power when the power is balanced between two rivals. But such an understanding can be very misleading. Why is parity a danger zone? Something to be avoided at all costs?

Matt Pottinger: There is this very nice phrase that we use as a matter of habit, which is called balance of power. It leaves a misimpression in our minds because a balance of power gives us this image of a scale perfectly and evenly balanced, therefore it achieves its equilibrium point because of the equal weighted on both sides. But historians who have really studied the causes of war closely – I am thinking here in part of the great Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey – concluded that the more evenly matched two rivals are, the more likely they are to fight in a war. In fact, the times when you have a sustained peace are when there is a clear imbalance of power favouring one side over the other. I think that a lot of people in Washington D.C. do not understand that.

The key point is, while it might please our senses to see a scale that is evenly balanced on an equilibrium point, in the relations between nations, particularly the relations between rivals, that is an omen for war. A balance of power incentivises war, it does not stabilise the situation. Conflict often erupts when nations disagree about their relative power and this is something they are more likely to do when they are closely matched. War in some ways becomes an act of measurement, to try to settle the matter of who actually does have superior might. War in itself becomes that act of accounting that settles the question of who is dominant. So what we should want is preponderance of power. The reason that we have had peace in the Western Pacific for all these decades since World War II has been because the US has had the preponderance of power in that region.

Now what we need to do is to recognise that many of the advantages that we held have eroded, but also recognise that many of the advantages that China has gained are actually predicated on platforms that are quite vulnerable, particularly in an amphibious assault required to control Taiwan. In this sense, there are things that we can acquire to offset Beijing’s military might that are a lot less expensive than the capabilities Beijing has invested so heavily in.

Let us remember that the Ukrainians sank something like a quarter of Russia’s Black Sea fleet using asymmetric capabilities such as remote-controlled jet skis packed with explosives, that are way cheaper than the warships that now sit at the bottom of the Black Sea. So this is the sort of thing that we need to be acquiring.

But as we acquire those capabilities and put them in place, and I love Admiral Paparo’s phrase evoking a “hellscape” in the Taiwan Strait, we must also not allow to atrophy the existing platforms that we have that are also quite fearsome. This includes not only our attack subs, but also increasingly our longer-range missiles than what we allowed ourselves to build until President Trump wisely left the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty. And also our long-range bombers, our B-1B bombers, our B-52s, B-2 bombers, that can carry a load of anti-ship missiles that could be fired from a standoff distance.

__________