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Congressman Michael Gallagher is a Republican who represents Wisconsin’s 8th congressional district. In December, Representative Gallagher was appointed as chairman of the Select Committee on China, a new body aiming to analyze various military, national security, and economic policy issues related to China. Before joining Congress in 2017, he served on active duty in the United States Marine Corps and worked as a staffer on Middle East and Counterterrorism on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has a PhD in International Relations from Georgetown University.

Q: What is the goal of the new Select Committee on China?

A: There are at least three goals initially. One is to connect the dots in terms of exposing the pattern of aggression that we’re seeing from the Chinese Communist Party. This isn’t just an isolated incident in the South China Sea or on a university campus. This is, in my opinion, a whole of society, new Cold War, being waged against us. And it’s up to our committee to connect the dots for our colleagues and make the case to the American people for why this matters, why we need to invest money and resources and energy into preparing America over the short and long term to win this competition before it’s too late.

The second goal I have, and it reflects the intent of Speaker McCarthy, is to make this a bipartisan effort. We don’t want this to be a Republican only effort. The China Task Force [a previous China-related House body] was Republican-only because the Democrats refused to participate. We want them to participate. And if you look at the members we have on our side, they’re all serious sober members, there are no bomb throwers. I believe our foreign policy is stronger when it rests on a bipartisan foundation. That’s not to say we won’t have meaningful disagreements. I think more than anything, the CCP fears us actually mustering a bipartisan, whole of government response to their aggression. 

Third, the near-term goal is deterrence. We tend to think about that in a purely military sense, or something that only the executive branch or the Pentagon does. But Congress has an important role to play in deterrence. The goal of deterring CCP aggression should remind us that ours is a defensive strategy. We’re not trying to take territory. We’re not trying to remake foreign societies in our image. We’re trying to defend the frontiers of the free world from totalitarian aggression. And, indeed, for perhaps more isolationist members of Congress on the far left or on the far right, it’s important to remind them that we are indeed trying to prevent, not provoke World War III.

What are the first few priorities on your list for the committee?

The most important priority, and this is an area where we’re going to be playing a supporting role to the Armed Services Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee, is to learn the right lessons from Ukraine, and apply them to East Asia to prevent Taiwan’s future from becoming Ukraine’s present. There’s been a lot of bipartisan happy talk about arming Taiwan to the teeth to help them defend themselves, but it hasn’t actually improved our denial posture on the ground. There is a $18-19 billion backlog: [Foreign Military Sales] items have been approved, but not delivered to Taiwan. So clearing that and turning Taiwan into a porcupine, in my opinion, is the single most important thing we can do to enhance deterrence in the short term. 

Now, Taiwan also has to be part of a broader strategy in the Indo Pacific that extends throughout the first island chain [a string of islands in the Pacific including Taiwan] and southern Japanese islands, and the Northern Philippine Islands, as well as Northern Australian territories and our own territories, be it Guam or Alaska or some other territories in the Pacific. That’s the hard power component. While we won’t be in the lead, the Select Committee can play a unique role in explaining to the American people why this matters. Why should they care about Taiwan? By extension, why should someone in Northeast Wisconsin care about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party?

The second thing is when it comes to the question of economic statecraft and selective economic decoupling, we have a few issues in the next six months where we can have a massive impact in Congress. Obviously, TikTok is a big topic of discussion right now. I’m in favor of a ban or forced sale: I have a bipartisan bill on that. We have momentum. The Select Committee, through hearings, through briefings with members, can really make the case as to why a ban or forced sale is needed and pass something out of the House of Representatives and then put pressure on our Senate colleagues to do the same. It’s bound up in this broader issue of cross border data flows for which there’s no regulatory structure. That’s a unique issue no committee is working on right now. That’s something we can grab and talk about the model that the late Shinzo Abe [former Japanese prime minister] talked about, which is the sort of ‘data free flow with trust’ model. If we’re banning Tiktok and WeChat, and certain CCP controlled apps, how do we simultaneously deepen our digital and technological partnership with allied countries and countries that aren’t official allies, but which we need over the next two decades to be successful vis a vis China. India is probably the one that comes to mind — India, Japan, some others. 

The least understood, but perhaps most insidious form of CCP aggression is United Front work. And it’s hard to understand it, because there’s no good analog here in the United States. It’s a combination of espionage and influence operations. Xi Jinping has referred to this as his magic weapon. It goes all the way back to the founding of the Party; it’s part of their core DNA. So where we can have an impact in the short term is making people aware of the nature of CCP United Front work and identifying steps to counter United Front work. That’s a theme that we intend to weave through our hearings, and it will lead to some legislative action items. For example, I’ve long felt that we need to reform our our FARA laws, or Foreign Agent Registration Act laws, and our Lobbying Disclosure Act laws, in order to account for the way in which the CCP corrupts various domestic institutions or uses former members of Congress and high paid lobbyists to do their bidding. So those are some immediate things we can do. 

One other issue that we’re going to look at, but I haven’t decided on what the appropriate legislative solution is, is this issue of transnational repression. The New York Times just came out with a big story about CCP police stations in the United States. That to me is an infringement on our sovereignty. So really digging into that — having some field hearings and then coming up with what’s the right solution. Is it a local law enforcement issue? Is there a federal role? 

And then Chinese land purchases in the United States. My sense is that we actually got the CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] reform right for land purchases by giving them enhanced authority to scrutinize those investments. But the regulations operationalizing the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), which is CFIUS reform, are insufficient. So we have to apply some pressure to the CFIUS process and potentially a legislative fix so at least we have a more robust way of scrutinizing Chinese land purchases in the United States, particularly where they’re near military bases. 

… It’s reasonable to say that American dollars, particularly the health of American retirees, should not be dependent on the success of genocide or PLA military modernization.

And then there are outbound capital flows. There again, I don’t yet know what the right answer is. But if CFIUS reform represented us taking a closer look at China’s investment in the United States, the next phase of decoupling is going to be looking at American capital flowing into China in general, and Chinese tech and defense-adjacent companies in particular. So what’s the right mechanism for screening outbound investment? Is it a reverse CFIUS? Is it just a hard prohibition on tax-advantaged entities like university endowments and local pension funds from investing in China? Is it just taking all the various entities lists and export control lists and harmonizing them into one list that’s actually enforced by [the Departments of] Commerce and Treasury? There’s probably three or four options on the table. We want to debate those. And it’s reasonable to say that American dollars, particularly the health of American retirees, should not be dependent on the success of genocide or PLA military modernization.

What are the lessons the U.S. can take from Ukraine and apply to Taiwan? Are there any differences or similarities you see between the two situations?

A few stand out. One is that hard power deters. In Ukraine, the administration relied on soft power to deter with what they called integrated deterrence, which basically boiled down to the vague threat of sanctions combined with mean tweets coming out of the State Department. Vladimir Putin ignored that and invaded. So recognizing the naive utopian assumptions underlying integrated deterrence, and making sure that we don’t build our deterrent posture in United States Indo-Pacific Command on those same naive assumptions. That is lesson one, hard power gives you your best chance at deterrence. Not just the threat of hard power punishment, but hard power in place that could deny Xi Jinping his objectives. 

Another lesson is that you need a lot of ammo to win wars. We just burned through seven years worth of javelin [missiles] in the first few months. And we’re now learning that we just don’t have the industrial base capable of producing munitions at the scale we need. So we need to produce and stockpile munitions in United States Indo-Pacific Command before the shooting starts. That to me is the second big lesson. 

And the third, and here’s where this reflects a change in the character of war versus the endurance of the nature of war, is I do think certain technologies are going to change the battlefield. Loitering munitions [aerial weapon systems], in particular, which really represent this bigger phenomenon, which is the democratization of airpower. That’s something we’re gonna have to invest in. And to get on the right side of the cost curve, do to the PLA what they’ve done to us in the last few decades. They built the largest Navy in the world, but the real concerning thing is the rocket force, which is their anti-Navy. I’ve advocated for building our own anti-Navy. And that gets us on the right side of the cost curve. 

The final one would be when authoritarians and dictators tell you that they might want to invade a country, you should listen. And not ignore it just because you are mirror imaging your own value set onto societies that don’t share those values.

Do you see the committee going to Taiwan in the next year?

I do. It’s important to go. It’s entirely in keeping with various pieces of legislation, the Taiwan Relations Act. I intend to go myself and once we get actual Democrat members, I’d love to lead a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan, potentially do something like a field hearing out there. It’s important for members to see the topography, myself included. That is a big blind spot for me right now. And it sends a strong signal of support for our friends in Taiwan.

You talked about selective decoupling. Can you describe what you mean by that, and where are the lines you want to draw?

It is admittedly very hard to draw. That is what makes this competition far more complex than the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Some things are obvious to me. I don’t think we should be dependent on the largesse of the CCP when it comes to advanced pharmaceutical ingredients. That completely undermines our deterrent posture. They can cut off the flow of life-saving drugs to Americans in a conflict. That’s a bad situation to be in. I don’t think we should be dependent on the CCP for energetics — those are the propellants, explosives and pyrotechnics that we put in our weapon systems — which we are in many cases right now. And then, of course, there’s this bigger issue of microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing. It’s reasonable for us to want to stimulate domestic semiconductor manufacturing. 

Where the line gets harder to draw is lower end goods. I don’t have any problem with Wisconsin farmers selling soybeans to China; we’re probably all wearing something that was made in China, I don’t have a problem with us buying textiles made in China. That’s not necessarily an industry we want to onshore right now. 

One of the goals I have for the committee, and it’s probably going to be the product of two years worth of work, because it’s so complex, is to come out with a framework for selective decoupling. And I suspect even in that framework, in the best version of it, there won’t be a clear line, but it will have more details than we have right now. And a framework would certainly help me, and it would help a lot of my colleagues in thinking through this aspect of the competition. 

And then we have got to ask questions where the answers are less obvious to me. Do we have a problem with Chinese capital being invested in the United States, if there’s Chinese limited partners and various funds, as long as it doesn’t give them access to sensitive IP or come with strings attached in the form of, you only invest in this, you won’t invest in that? Do we have a problem with that? If that money is being invested in projects that are good for America? I don’t know. I’d like to engage the venture capital community. I’d like to engage all the major asset managers in order to understand how they think about this problem. 

… part of the committee’s work is going to be reminding people that we’re the good guys. We have to believe in the self-evident superiority of the values of the free world.

But again, to go back to something I said earlier, I think a useful framework for us is that one, we should take a hard line on forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft. And then reversing the arrow, we should not be funding communist genocide and military modernization. So those would be my overall guardrails on the conversation.

There are many U.S. companies, Tesla and Apple, for example, which are deeply enmeshed and integrated in China. Do you think those companies should be pulling out of China? 

They certainly should not be profiting off of forced labor in China. And that’s a matter of legislation now: the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is causing all these companies to take a hard look at their supply chains and make sure that they don’t rely on forced labor and genocide. So that is a useful starting point. 

Should these companies not be in China at all? I’m not saying that right now. A lot of companies are naturally looking at the risk posed by the hard turn that the CCP has taken under Xi Jinping and thinking, well, it’s probably not a great idea to concentrate all of our advanced manufacturing in southeast China. So they may conclude, for reasons that have less to do with what I say as chairman of the Select Committee and more to do with just their bottom line, and how they price risk, that they want to diversify their supply chain.

Where we want to ask some hard questions of the Teslas of the world, or of the Apples of the world in particular, is what strings come with having that footprint in China? Certainly, wherever you have a company that seems to be loath to work with certain American entities in general, and the American military in particular, but is running into the arms of the CCP to build AI centers in Beijing — that’s a cause for concern. Because at the end of the day, these are still American companies, and they should act as such. 

I always remember something General Joseph Dunford [former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] said at the Halifax forum five or six years ago. He was asked about the Maven controversy at Google where the Google employees didn’t want to work with the [U.S.] military, because ‘the military is bad, but China’s not bad.’ And he turned to the audience and said something so simple, but it crystallized it: ‘We’re the good guys. You have to remember that.’ 

And so part of the committee’s work is going to be reminding people that we’re the good guys. We have to believe in the self-evident superiority of the values of the free world. Whether it’s just kind of decline-ism, or self loathing, or the product of a coordinated ideological campaign against us by the CCP designed to weaken our will to fight and convince us that our best days are behind us, right now, we start this competition not believing that we’re necessarily the good guys, and that we deserve to win. And I want to change that as chairman of the committee.

How do you see working with the Biden administration?

There are some areas where we can really work together. I salute the AUKUS agreement, for example. I think it’s a massive win for America and our allies. But there, we have early concerns. We have mixed signals coming out of our own shipbuilding industrial base about our ability to build our own subs and help the Aussies build their subs. I have not yet seen a plan for short-term technological cooperation with the Aussies. So the AUKUS framework is great, but I want to apply some productive pressure on the administration to make sure we’re getting the most out of it possible. 

Some of the recent export controls on chip components, I thought were great. But there seems to be no strategy for bilateral trade in the Indo Pacific. I don’t know why they excluded Taiwan from the Indo Pacific Economic Framework. To be fair to them, both parties seem trade hesitant right now. But I’d love to be able to use the committee and use Darin LaHood (R-Illinois), who’s our member from Ways and Means in particular, to say, okay, obviously, we’re not going to resuscitate [the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama era trade agreement between the U.S. and several Asian countries] anytime soon. But why not a free trade agreement with Taiwan? Is there a possibility of a digital trade agreement in the region that draws on the best lessons of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the [North American Free Trade Agreement] modernization? Is there a gold standard trade agreement with a post-Brexit U.K. that could have a docking provision that other countries could enter? That’s interesting to me. 

There are people like Ely Ratner [Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs] and Tarun Chhabra [Senior director on the National Security Council], who are clear eyed and good on this issue. But the administration to me seems internally divided on China. There’s that camp, the more realistic camp. And then there’s the climate-change cult led by John Kerry. And, at times, those two things are contradictory, and they result in a misplaced sense of priorities. The climate-change camp seems to want a more cooperative relationship with China and thinks that Xi Jinping cares about promises made at COP 27 [the UN climate conference], which is a profoundly naive view of the world. And it creates a kind of policy incoherence. 

As I’ve said earlier, integrated deterrence is jargon that serves as a smokescreen for under-investing in conventional hard power. And I’ve been very critical of integrated deterrence. So there’s gonna be some tough conversations with the administration, but we want it to be bipartisan. With my record, I don’t think I’m a bomb thrower. We want them to testify for the committee. And we’re all just trying to figure this out. We’re trying to put America on the best footing possible to win this long term competition.

I don’t think it serves our interests to gloss over the stakes and the scope of this competition or whitewash some of the terrible things we’re seeing coming from the regime in Beijing, whether it’s genocide, whether it’s this massive military buildup, whether it’s transnational repression. 

Where does your own focus on China come from?

We should recognize the absurdity of an Arabist and an Arabic linguist who spent most of his early career in the Middle East now chairing the select committee on China. And admittedly, I myopically kind of bought into the consensus, which was the responsible stakeholder hypothesis [the idea associated with former U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick that China could emerge as a responsible member of the global community as its economy grew]. 

It wasn’t until 2015, when you saw the Office of Personal Management (OPM) hack, and I got a letter from OPM saying my military records were compromised — I started to talk to one of my closest friends, Matt Pottinger, who had been a journalist in Beijing and became deputy national security advisor. We were in the same specialty in the Marine Corps, and I took over his team in western Iraq in 2008. And I remember him talking about China at the time. I’m like, “Why are you focused on China? It’s all about the Middle East. It’s all about the threat of Salafi jihadists from the Middle East.” But he convinced me that this is something I had to take more seriously. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized that this was the main effort, or the preeminent national security challenge of our time. So I spent the first two years of my time in Congress, as a freshman, having breakfast with him once a month, and just going to Matt Pottinger master’s degree school. And that’s where I formed a lot of my thoughts on it, and why I’ve made it focus over the last six years.

Are you still in contact with him?

Yeah, every time I have a question, I reach out to Matt. I’ve had some other friends that have been really helpful. I did a Center for a New American Security (CNAS) fellowship with Oriana Skylar Mastro, who’s an Air Force reservist and a scholar at Stanford, and just one of the smartest people in the universe on the PLA. And she both helped me survive my Ph.D. program and also was a person I reached out to and continue to reach out to all the time for thoughts on this. John Garnaut in Australia, he was ahead of the curve on all this. His speech and essay, Engineers of the Soul, is a seminal text on this whole thing. I worked for H.R. McMaster [former National Security Adviser and lieutenant general] in a previous life. He and Pottinger were responsible for the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and so, H.R. is a mentor and a friend and is someone who shaped my views on this as well. Though he wouldn’t describe himself as a sinologist — he’s more of a military defense expert — he obviously thinks deeply about these issues. I don’t claim to be an expert. I have some expertise on an obscure part of the early Cold War that I wrote a useless dissertation on. But other than that, I just have a really solid group of friends that helped me understand how to think about these things.

Some critics of a more hawkish policy approach would say that these policies will lead only to escalating tensions. What’s your response to folks with that view? 

I think the concern is misplaced. Whether it’s Ukraine, or you can extend the historical record back a little bit: Strength gives us our best chance at deterrence. Now, that doesn’t mean we should be needlessly provocative with our words. And ultimately, I believe in the Teddy Roosevelt school of foreign policy, where you speak softly and carry a big stick. But I don’t think it serves our interests to gloss over the stakes and the scope of this competition or whitewash some of the terrible things we’re seeing coming from the regime in Beijing, whether it’s genocide, whether it’s this massive military buildup, whether it’s transnational repression. 

And indeed, we have a playbook from the latter stages of the old Cold War to guide us. [Former President Ronald] Reagan didn’t hesitate to call the Soviet Union out on issues that he felt were important, whether it was human rights or military issues. At the same time, he constantly tried to communicate with the Russian people. And that’s our best playbook going forward to prevent us from lapsing into sort of a reflexive hawkishness, or being needlessly provocative when we can’t back it up. One, we need to invest in hard power, so that we can back it up. And two, constantly make the distinction between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people. We have no quarrel with the Chinese people. And indeed, I would submit that the Chinese people are the primary victims of the regime in the form of the CCP. It’s the CCP that presents a threat to our interests. It’s the CCP that presents a threat to the region. It’s the CCP that’s intent on altering the status quo, and risking war in the process. And again, ours is a defensive strategy. So there’s a way to manage it. And you see it in Ukraine. The administration is so concerned about provoking Putin, that they’re always a day late and a dollar short. We can’t deter ourselves. We need to have confidence that we can win this competition and that deterrence can work.

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