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After a two-year stint as the National Security Council’s China chief in the first Trump White House, Matt Turpin has become a leading analyst of Chinese military and political strategy. His weekly commentary on China policy available by email or Substack, is read avidly by government officials and China watchers. Prior to his stint in the White House, Turpin served for 22 years in the Army and retired in 2017 as a lieutenant colonel. From 2013 to 2017, he was China adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also worked on defense technology innovation. Earlier, he was chief of crisis planning for the U.S. Pacific Command.

Q: Usually with these interviews, we start chronologically with your career. But there’s so much interest now with what’s going on in the Trump administration, that I thought I’d start with that. In the first Trump administration, China was clearly the primary target in both the trade and national security areas. Is that still the case? 

A: I think Beijing is the target. It’s fundamentally about how you isolate China and build leverage over time by trying to settle other things. Then you can either construct something big enough so that when you exclude China your system can prosper on its own, or you put enough leverage on China that it has to change. That’s likely the logic.

But if that’s the logic, why would they start with tariffs on everybody? They’re alienating allies and potential allies.

What happened last Wednesday [with the April 2 announcement of ‘reciprocal’ tariffs] was not the start. If we look at what they released on Inauguration Day — whether it was the America First trade policy, or the America First investment policy — it’s almost entirely about what the Chinese are doing. And if you listen to what the administration is saying, it likely perceives that China is the real disruptive force, and there are plenty of other states that are more than willing to hedge and act as go-betweens.

Even though the U.S. during the first Trump term took all these actions against the PRC, China was able to go around those things through third countries. That goes to why the president immediately went after Canada and Mexico. He watched as factories built by the Chinese in Mexico took advantage of what he thought he had renegotiated [in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement], which was something meant to freeze out the Chinese. He found out that that wasn’t the case.

When we think about negotiations [with Mexico and Canada] it will likely be about how they can disadvantage the PRC while they take actions that advantage the United States.

The plan in Trump 1.0 was to get companies to relocate from China, but there was no way every company could possibly do business in the U.S. So, the idea was to make Mexico a place where they could land. But then Trump in this administration has basically torn up the USMCA. 

Obviously, things changed from when they left and when they came back into office. And there are different factions in the administration. I suspect that the position of one group of advisors — maybe [White House trade adviser] Peter Navarro and a few others — is that the rest of the world is deeply problematic. Navarro would obviously consider China the worst, but he’s equally critical of other trading partners.

Then there are others who would likely discriminate between China and other countries and place them in a hierarchy of who is inherently a disruptive and harmful trading partner and who is just taking advantage of the situation. If given the right kind of motivation, carrots and sticks, the latter might become a much better partner of the United States.

Fundamentally you’re watching a tension between those two positions. Even the president probably didn’t make his final decisions until the very end. 

If the purpose of the tariffs is to re-industrialize the United States, then you try to talk to companies, not to countries. You try to get companies to change their behavior, make long term capital investments in the United States to build out factories and hire American workers to make products that Americans buy. For that, you need a tariff wall that excludes everyone. But if your view is that we have an international trading system that could work better, then you want only China excluded because it’s the worst offender. 

There’s a division of beliefs, and my assumption is Peter Navarro won the argument with the president.

Navarro has a more significant role than he had in that first administration. But what about the Treasury Secretary, the Commerce Secretary or others? You would expect some sort of pushback against global tariffs. 

You have cabinet secretaries in office, but almost none of their people are in place. Most of what’s been going on for the last two months across departments and agencies has been emails asking employees to resign. There’s been a lot of churn.

My fear is that in a transition period, adversaries could take advantage of the situation. That creates real dangers. The logic of the administration is that in the long run this will be good for the United States. I’m deeply concerned that that isn’t going to work out very well.

Navarro is in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building [across a narrow alley from the West Wing]. He doesn’t have a staff; he’s sort of a one-man operation. But he’s able to get direct access to the president, while cabinet secretaries are a little farther away and are trying to understand how their departments and agencies work.

In terms of bureaucratic battling, the people who work in the White House have the upper hand. They’re not Senate confirmed; they can start immediately. Given that both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have never served in government before, it takes a little bit of time to get up to speed about how all this works.

Peter was in for the entire first administration. So was [National Economic Council Director] Kevin Hassett. There’s a mismatch regarding who would be more effective and influential early on. I would expect the institutional positions of the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department to strengthen over time. 

How long lasting do you think these China tariffs will be if they are tanking the markets and perhaps even tanking the economy?

I don’t know but let me lay out why I’m uncertain. On the one hand, I remember folks telling us that the section 301 tariffs on China [in Trump 1.0] would never last more than four or five or six months. Obviously, they would be negotiated away because they’re too problematic. Well, that was what, seven, eight years ago? [During the first Trump administration, the U.S. levied tariffs of between 7.5 percent and 25 percent on three-quarters of everything China sold to the U.S.]

Obviously, these tariffs are much grander in scope. [In this round of tariffs the U.S. has placed a 145 percent levy on most everything China sells to the U.S..] We have pretty good evidence that the one thing that President Trump pays attention to is a perception that he’s not competent on the economic side. He responds to that.

Then again, he has held these views on tariffs for about four decades. It may be really tough for him to walk away from this.

What’s your assessment of the Chinese response?

There had been talk that the Chinese wouldn’t retaliate or they would hold their fire. But when it comes right down to it, Xi Jinping feels compelled to retaliate and cannot be seen as weak. He also perceives that he can successfully manage this by being just as aggressive or quick in responding [as Trump is]. They certainly have spent a lot of time thinking through their responses.

But I don’t think their toolbox is particularly good. They’re stuck with going after rare earths or critical minerals. But the reason why they have dominated those areas is because the Chinese government subsidizes production and processing and makes it cheap. They don’t dominate because the minerals only reside in China, or they have some sort of magical technology that only they have.

Once you block exports, it’s not clear they could maintain a monopoly. Others could step into the breach. This is what happened when they did this to the Japanese back in 2010 and 2011. They put a rare-earth embargo on Japan. Japan said OK, I guess we’re not going to buy rare earths as cheaply and they started to find ways to design around the embargo. Within 18 months, the Chinese walked away from it.

Also, as I understand it, U.S. companies don’t generally directly buy rare earths. They buy components that use rare earths. And they can still buy those.

And there will be plenty of trade diversion. From our experience with export controls, we know it is difficult to stop smuggling and the diversion of goods through third markets. Obviously, the exact same thing will happen for them.

What’s the impact of the tariff plan in the national security realm? 

President Trump is calling into question positions the United States has traditionally taken. He doesn’t think the United States should be the market of last resort anymore — that it’s not an obligation for the United States to open up the largest and wealthiest capital market and consumer market in the world. Instead, it is a privilege to sell here, and that’s going to cost you something. 

The other big change from nearly every administration since the Second World War is to call into question whether the United States should be the provider of global common security. The president and a number of his key advisers believe that creates a moral hazard in which countries don’t provide for their own security because they rely upon the United States to do it. Then when something bad happens, they don’t have the necessary capability to respond themselves.

The administration views other countries as having a dependency on the U.S. for security and the United States shouldn’t provide that anymore. That changes a lot of the calculus other states have.

To the detriment or to the advantage of the U.S.?

I think that the administration believes that it will be to the advantage of the United States. But there’s plenty of reasons to see how this could seriously disadvantage the United States.

From the administration’s perspective, they would say that until other countries feel obligated to provide for their own security, they will never provide for their own security. And given the financial situation in the United States, we pair back and prioritize our own set of problems.

My fear is that in a transition period, adversaries could take advantage of the situation. That creates real dangers. The logic of the administration is that in the long run this will be good for the United States. I’m deeply concerned that that isn’t going to work out very well.

What about China geopolitically? This could be quite an opportunity for them.

That’s the way they are already playing it. They came out with a statement that sort of says that if the global economy goes bad, it’s America’s fault — that everything was going wonderfully with free trade and the global trading system until America screwed it up.

Then we saw the Singaporean Prime Minister, who has a long relationship in the United States, come out very critically in his message to the Singaporean people. There was no mention of the context — that the world’s second largest economy has operated in ways that undermine trust and confidence in the global trading system. 

The administration could have approached this in a different way and made the case that China is our biggest problem, that we all need to be working together, and for those who want to follow the rules you have a partner in the United States.

But that is not the approach that the administration seems to be taking. That opens them up to broad-based propaganda and media efforts by Beijing, which will do the same things they have been doing to help the Russians make their case around Ukraine: A global media blitz that portrays the United States as causing these global economic problems. 

It will be difficult to counteract this because of the way in which the administration has approached the issue, and because they have dismantled the things they would have used to counter China. I’m pessimistic about how well this is going to work.

At some point Xi Jinping and Donald Trump will talk or meet. Do you expect some kind of ‘grand bargain’? I suppose the tariff fight puts off a meeting.

Yeah, for some period of time, I think so. 

What do we mean by a ‘grand bargain’? Is this a ‘new type of great power’ relationship [referring to Xi Jinping’s formulation to President Obama in the summer of 2013], that the U.S. and China can divide the world? 

When you nail Beijing down, that’s the outcome they want, but I don’t think that’s in the cards. A more likely outcome is some sort of détente where both sides feel themselves in a weakened position and agree to a truce to bring the temperature down a little bit so each of them can regain some strength to continue this drawn out rivalry. Détente is far more likely than some sort of agreement on how to divide up the world.

What is your sense of Trump’s view of China? He’s known as very hawkish, but my sense is, not really. He just sees any country with a large persistent trade surplus as ripping off the U.S..

That was very true when he came into office, and throughout 2017. He believed the differences between China and the United States were just business and could be resolved. We needed some leverage; we needed to play some hardball, but fundamentally this could be resolved. He heard the national security arguments but didn’t take them all that seriously. 

That began to change as the Chinese began to retaliate on tariffs and directed their efforts so as to undermine him politically across red states and across certain constituencies, particularly agriculture, before the midterm elections. He soured even more with the breakdown in May 2019 of a deal that was almost hammered out. [In May 2019, the U.S. and Chinese negotiators were close to a preliminary deal to end their trade battle, but the Politburo Standing Committee wouldn’t approve the terms, according to Superpower Showdown.]

My sense is that Donald Trump also believes that Xi Jinping lied to him on purpose about Covid, and Xi purposefully did things to spread it to us. That is in the back of his mind; he hasn’t forgotten that. [Trump officials say they believe Chinese officials knew that Covid was spread through the air when they sent a team of officials to sign the Phase One trade deal in Washington in January 2020.]

It’s also incredibly important to keep in mind that he views his job as president as primarily maintaining relationships with other important leaders. Traditionally, that might be interpreted as a U.S. president needing to maintain good relations with allies. President Trump sees it a different way. 

He judges leaders according to those he considers his peers and those who are subordinate or can’t control things and therefore are not worth his time. Narendra Modi, at the time Shinzo Abe, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping are leaders who control their countries. The United States can’t pretend like they don’t exist. You may not like what they’re doing, but you have to deal with them.

He dismisses the European Union as deeply divided and unable to make its own decisions. Is the EU in control? Are member states in control? When he talks to a German chancellor who says, ‘Well, we have to consult with the other members’ — he’s not actually in charge. That’s his frustration.

He’s often accused of cozying up to autocrats.

Donald Trump believes in his soul that flattery costs him absolutely nothing. It costs him in terms of public opinion in the United States, as he gets made fun of for flattering, but he thinks that flattery is an incredibly useful negotiating tactic.

From his perspective, President Biden not talking to Vladimir Putin since the invasion of Ukraine is irresponsible. You have to talk to Vladimir Putin. He is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and he owns the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Let’s switch to Taiwan. How do you interpret the recent military exercises where the Chinese are surrounding Taiwan with ships and planes?

This fits within what has been their long-established strategic approach towards Taiwan, which is to wage a political warfare campaign supported by economic coercion and military threats. They would like to discredit and eventually drive from power a set of Taiwanese leaders through elections in Taiwan. That’s their preferred approach. 

This is what Wang Huning is tasked with doing — take what happened in Hong Kong and create a situation where we can get the outcomes we want in the electoral politics of Taiwan. [Wang Huning is the member of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee responsible for ideology.]

…the major lesson of Ukraine is take the capital rapidly and finish the campaign immediately. Go as hard as you can to get it done; don’t half-ass it… They can’t be in a position where this turns into a long, drawn out campaign with the United States and Japan sitting off their coast and blocking all their economic activity. 

One could view the January 2024 elections in Taiwan as rebuke to China’s strategy because President Lai Ching-te won an unprecedented third term for a DPP presidential candidate. [The ruling DPP, or Democratic Progressive Party, is more independence minded than the opposition KMT, or Kuomintang.] 

But from Beijing’s perspective, the DPP lost its majority in the LY [Legislative Yuan]. The KMT now has a majority. From China’s perspective, the economic pressure and the military threats let them portray the DPP as having a weakened position, and it’s only a matter of time until they’re voted out of office.

I think that they’re misreading the situation, but Beijing thinks that they are being successful. The critical time will be the January 2028 presidential election. If you get a KMT victory in the presidency and a KMT majority in the LY, I think Beijing will be pretty satisfied and will look to partner with the KMT to get them closer to peaceful reunification.

But it is also possible that Lai gets re-elected, and you get a DPP majority in the LY. That could shake Beijing from its position [of peaceful reunification]. Xi Jinping would be in his late 70s then. He thinks this is a problem that should not be left to his successor. 

It doesn’t sound like you think that China is planning to invade or blockade Taiwan within the 2027 timeframe. [Some U.S. officials have warned that Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take Taiwan by that year.]

I don’t have any insight into that one way or the other, and it would be very difficult for us to detect if they had changed their mind [and decided on military action]. But I believe that they are still confident in their approach. They still think they can get the right kind of leaders in Taipei who can be their partner. 

What should Taiwan read into Trump’s moves to settle the Russia-Ukraine war by taking a very tough line against Ukraine? 

They’ve been wrestling with this for a while now. Maintaining spending of 2.3 percent or 2.5 percent of GDP on defense is not good enough; they will likely have to do significantly more. This is where having a legislature controlled by your political opposition is particularly problematic. The KMT is cutting the defense budget and making it very difficult to achieve those sorts of things.

How do you think China weighs military action against Taiwan with Trump as president? Would they think he’s less committed to Taiwan than Biden was, so maybe it’s a good time to move? Or would they think it’s genuinely difficult to figure out what Trump would do?

Regardless of administration, I think their assumption remains that the United States would likely intervene if they initiated a military conflict. And over the past five to seven years, I think they have changed their assumption that Japan would not intervene to one where Japan would intervene. That is independent of whoever is occupying the U.S. presidency. 

That means they’ve got to think through what kind of military action they would take with regards to U.S. and Japanese forces, and they have to do that at the front end. They can’t wait for the United States or Japan to intervene at the time and place of their own choosing. It pushes them towards preemptive action against the U.S..

That is the dilemma we’re in. If it’s just Taiwan and the American people having to contemplate whether they get involved or not, that’s one thing. But that’s different from a preemptive attack where they kill 500 U.S. sailors and hit military bases in Guam and take out the electrical grid in Hawaii. On any given day, there are one or two U.S. destroyers sailing in the vicinity of Taiwan. One-third of the U.S. Marine corps is located in Okinawa — they have to take those things into account.

If you’re planning a military operation, the major lesson of Ukraine is take the capital rapidly and finish the campaign immediately. Go as hard as you can to get it done; don’t half-ass it. That pushes them towards much more aggressive action. 

They can’t be in a position where this turns into a long, drawn out campaign with the United States and Japan sitting off their coast and blocking all their economic activity. 

Even before the tariffs, China’s economy was weakening. How does that impact their foreign policy and their national security policy? 

That comes back to how Xi Jinping perceives his position. I think that Xi thinks that his approach to the economy is the right approach. He also believes that high technology is the way to get out of the problems that he’s in. Therefore, he has to double down on technology investments.

He believes that relying upon consumer consumption and letting the Chinese people make their own decisions on these things fall into welfarism and will weaken China. There are plenty of Chinese economists who don’t agree with that. But he’s doing what he thinks he should be doing, and he believes that the obstacles China is running into are things that he predicted. These are the things that come from the long-term struggle with the United States.

So, he thinks the problems they’re having are attributable to what these hostile foreign forces are doing. It isn’t the bad decisions by him and his cadres. ‘We’re doing the right things. Stick with us. You have to take your medicine.’

I suspect that that is persuasive enough, along with his ability to conduct surveillance and regime security, for him to be pretty comfortable with where he’s at. I don’t think he’s right, but I think he thinks he’s right.

Let’s go back earlier in your career to when you were the chief of crisis planning for the Pacific Command in 2010 to 2013. That was around the time the U.S. said it was pivoting to Asia. For this series, I spoke to the late former Defense Secretary Ash Carter. He said DOD pivoted but nobody else did. He didn’t blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who advocated for the pivot. He pretty much blamed her successor, John Kerry, though he didn’t use his name. 

I think that’s absolutely true. John Kerry’s priority was not Hillary Clinton’s. If Hillary Clinton had a prioritization that our interests reside in the Pacific, and increasingly it looks like China is going to rival us, that was not John Kerry’s view, and I don’t think it was [National Security Advisor] Susan Rice’s view. Those two took the view of let’s keep the old strategy of engagement going. 

You also had a set of folks like [Commerce Secretary] Penny Pritzker, Mike Froman at USTR, [Deputy Secretary] Sarah Bloom Raskin at Treasury, certainly [Deputy Secretary] Bob Work and Ash Carter at DOD, who were deeply disturbed at the direction the Chinese were going in 2013, 2014, 2015 and into 2016. The party was taking a much more aggressive role. 

But there were other signals from the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress [in late 2013] about economic reforms. Some were saying, they’re going to conduct these economic reforms and if they do, the party isn’t going to be as powerful.

So, there was uncertainty and conflicting things being said in both intelligence and diplomatic cables largely because there were conflicting things happening inside Beijing. You had different factions there. Xi Jinping wasn’t fully in power yet. He hadn’t fully consolidated what he needed to do. 

I don’t think the directionality of where things were going really became clear until the end of 2015, early 2016. By that point, you were starting to get a consensus across the Obama administration that what Secretary Clinton had pointed out was probably what needed to be done. Of course, when she won the primary to become the Democratic candidate, that settled it for Obama. The position John Kerry and Susan Rice had taken in the debates lost.

One of the reasons why I’ve advocated that we think of this as a cold war is that you understand what you’re trying to do is win a long-term competition and avoid direct military conflict. I’ve always felt that cold wars are the least bad option when you’re in this kind of long-term rivalry. 

To be honest, President Obama didn’t really weigh in. He didn’t come down on one side or the other. He allowed those discussions to go on. One could say maybe the right thing to do but there was an unwillingness to decide one way or the other until really the end of 2015, early 2016.

During your time at the NSC, the U.S. pushed hard to get countries to reject Huawei 5G equipment. What was the best evidence you saw that Huawei was a national security threat? 

The best evidence was that if anyone wanted to create a global Signals Intelligence network, the best way to do that would be to have a company that produces telecommunications equipment and is obligated to follow the orders of a nation-state’s intelligence service. Chinese law requires Chinese individuals and Chinese entities to comply with requests for assistance from the PRC intelligence services and requires those individuals and entities to conceal their cooperation.

We had certain partners, like Australia and Japan, who immediately grasped the dangers of relying on Huawei, and we had other partners, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom, who feared PRC Government retaliation if they took action to remove the threats Huawei posed to their telecommunications networks.

In 2021, a year after Biden’s victory, you said the U.S. was in a cold war with China. Why did you think it was important to say that? 

For a long time, I had not used that term and part of my rationale was obviously it’s not like the Cold War [against the Soviet Union]. By 2021, I had started to differentiate between capital C, capital W, Cold War and small C, small W, cold war. The idea is that a cold war is a hostile rivalry that involves nuclear weapons in which both sides want to avoid direct military conflict. But their rivalry bleeds over into every other domain of competition. So, you get things like a chip war, a technology war and a trade war. You’re battling for influence.

That’s what George Orwell described in his October 1945 article talking about the impact of the atomic weapons. He laid out how the possession of atomic weapons by great powers will make them unconquerable and push the competition to other places and create a peace that is no peace and a ‘cold war. ‘At the end of the Second World War he was observing that atomic weapons were going to create the conditions where the great powers don’t fight each other directly; it pushes things into other areas. I thought that’s what we are witnessing now.

Last question, one I never used to ask. What is the chance of war between the U.S. and China in the next decade or so? 

It is certainly very possible. One of the reasons why I’ve advocated that we think of this as a cold war is that you understand what you’re trying to do is win a long-term competition and avoid direct military conflict. I’ve always felt that cold wars are the least bad option when you’re in this kind of long-term rivalry. 

What we’re trying to do is avoid direct military conflict. We’re trying to position ourselves in the long term to present our systems as providing better outcomes for our citizens and an example for others to emulate. That’s how you win in the long term.

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