Robert Gates on the Military’s Relationship with China
The former Defense Secretary under George W. Bush and Barack Obama talks about Xi Jinping's relations with the PLA, Taiwan and how the U.S. should deal with China and Russia.
BY BOB DAVIS — NOVEMBER 19, 2023 The Wire China
In a Washington where even mundane decisions have become bitterly partisan, Robert Gates stands out as a reminder of a bipartisanship that was once more commonplace. Gates has held the most senior national security positions in government under Republican and Democratic administrations. He was CIA Director under George H.W. Bush. Later, George W. Bush named him Defense Secretary and Barack Obama kept him on the job. (Gates was literally a Boy Scout and served as president of the organization for two years after he left the Pentagon.) Gates’s experience with China dates from the normalization of U.S.-China relations under President Carter and continued through decades where the U.S. sought engagement. Recently, he has expressed deep concern that U.S. politics have become too dysfunctional to meet the China challenge. This interview is part of Rules of Engagement, a series by Bob Davis, who covered the U.S.-China relationship at The Wall Street Journal starting in the 1990s. In these interviews, Davis asks current and former U.S. officials and policymakers what went right, what went wrong and what comes next.
Q: I thought we’d start with a contemporary question. What do you make of China’s positioning when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war?
A: At the beginning of the war, they tried briefly to position themselves as a potential intermediary or peacemaker. But they quickly moved off of that into more one-sided support for the Palestinians, ignoring the Hamas attack.
This illustrates that the slowly building relationship between Beijing and Israel before this war was pretty tenuous and thin, particularly compared to China’s aspirations in the Gulf region, where they see real opportunities to disadvantage the United States and advance their own interests. That larger equity weighed significantly more heavily than trying to maintain the very young outreach to Israel.
Now there is a scuffle between the U.S., the Philippines and China over a reef called the Second Thomas Shoal where the Philippines have an internationally recognized claim. They put a World War II era ship there and the Chinese apparently are ramming it. Do you think they’re testing the U.S.?
This is a continuation of their years-long pushing of their position in the South China Sea, vis-a-vis the Philippines and Vietnam. Their first push on Philippine maritime territory reefs was in 1995 when they tried to take a reef. Then the Philippine Navy, backed by a couple of American destroyers, forced the Chinese away. But they came back a year later and we didn’t respond. Had we responded, we might be in a different place today.
Let’s talk about when you were in office. In your book Duty, you talk about a trip to Beijing in 1980 with CIA director Stansfield Turner to implement the intelligence cooperation agreement regarding radar sites. What were your early encounters with China like? [During the Carter administration, the U.S. worked out a deal with China to monitor Soviet missile launches from radar sites near the Soviet border.]
My general reaction was one of incredulity. We were staying in the former Dutch ambassador’s house, not too long a walk from Tiananmen Square. The notion of two or three CIA people wandering openly in and around Tiananmen Square at that time seemed a little jolting, to tell you the truth.
I had been Brzezinski’s executive assistant when we normalized relations with China in 1979, so I had been an eyewitness to that process and the arrangements established at the time in terms of continuing to supply arms to Taiwan. [Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter’s national security adviser.] Brzezinski told me that at the very end of the negotiation Deng Xiaoping complained to him about the provisions about continuing to provide arms to Taiwan. Brzezinski basically told him to take it or leave it: That was going to be a part of the deal or normalization couldn’t go forward. Deng essentially acceded to that — not happily, grudgingly, but normalization was more important.
Later, when I was secretary of defense, I was once braced by a Chinese official at the Shangri-La conference about our arm sales to Taiwan. [The Shangri-La Dialogue is an annual meeting of senior defense officials in Asia.] I went through that story — that this provision was in there from the very beginning. I didn’t feel that the Chinese were in any position to complain because they had agreed to this provision as part of normalization.
His reaction was interesting. He said, ‘Well that’s because then we were weak, but now we are strong.’
How significant were the radar stations?
The deal on the radars was one of the things that Carter and Deng Xiaoping agreed to during Deng’s visit [to the U.S. in 1979]. That remained hugely secret until I did my first book From The Shadows, where I wrote about that visit to China with Turner.
[The radar stations] were very significant. It was bizarre to go to a PLA facility and see young PLA officers being trained by Americans on how to read telemetry, which was top secret back in the United States. We were teaching the Chinese how to do it because sharing information was the basis of the deal.
I would use that example with my Chinese counterparts when I became secretary. Why can’t the military relationship at a professional level have the same kind of stability, and be above the political ups and downs, in the interest of both countries? They never really responded to that, but I thought I had made a telling point. It was clear that they wanted to use the military relationship, ironically, as the punching bag for the arm sales to Taiwan.
And this was, telemetry on Soviet launches?
Soviet missile tests, yes.
As far as you can tell, how good is U.S. intelligence when it comes to China?
As was the case with the Soviet Union, I suspect that our intelligence on their military capabilities and on their economy is pretty good. Our intelligence on what goes on behind closed doors, at the party leadership level, is probably difficult to come by. It’s a very, very hard target.
You were saying that they seem to be allergic to military-to-military cooperation. Why do you think that is?
You have to parse it. Their argument is that there is a way to avoid incidents at sea and that’s for us to stay out of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Their view is that to have an agreement on that issue would in some way legitimize our presence in the South China Sea. [In the recent summit between Presidents Biden and Xi, the U.S. and China agreed to resume military-to military talks but it was unclear how fulsome they would be.]
Recently Xi Jinping removed defense minister Li Shangfu and the heads of the missile force. What do you make of that?
Xi has been fighting corruption in the military since he first came into office in 2013. He’s purged thousands of officers, many generals and my former counterpart, [Xu Caihou], the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. A few years ago, he was removed from his post and sentenced to death for corruption. The only way he escaped being executed was that he died of cancer before that could happen.
I think the defense minister was involved with the Strategic Rocket Forces, when he was on the Central Military Commission. That’s one of the reasons that we sanctioned him — it was the things that he was buying and selling. [In 2018, the U.S. sanctioned Li Shangfu for purchasing combat aircraft and missile equipment from Russia which was itself under U.S. sanctions.] Xi also fired both the commander and the deputy commander of the Rocket Forces.
My guess is [that] there’s a huge corruption scandal associated with the Rocket Forces. He just only appointed these guys eight months ago, so it’s got to be somewhat awkward for him. I think it’s strictly based on something they did wrong, and my guess is it’s corruption.
When you were visiting China ahead of Hu Jintao’s visit to the U.S. in January 2011, the Chinese rolled out the J-20 [The J-20 was a copy of a U.S. stealth fighter.] I happened to be with Treasury Secretary Geithner at that time, who was there too. What he said stuck with me for years. ‘Well, which is more scary?’ Geithner asked, ‘That Hu Jintao knew about the rollout, or Hu Jintao didn’t know?’
Our view in the Defense Department — and certainly the people who were with me — was that the military had asserted for itself a degree of independence under Hu Jintao that Xi was determined to fix. The general sentiment in the intelligence community, as well as in the Defense Department, was that the civilian leadership had not known about the ASAT test that the Chinese carried out and had not known about the J-20 rollout. [In 2007, China launched a ballistic missile to destroy a non-operational Chinese weather satellite as a way to test its anti-satellite capabilities.]
These were things that the PLA did basically to create difficulties in the U.S.-Chinese relationship, because they didn’t want it to get any better. But it also displayed a degree of independence from the Party that Xi was determined to correct. A lot of the crackdown that we saw in the early years under Xi, which has continued, was to make sure that he’d brought the military back under the full control of the Party and his own control.
Do you think there’s a parallel with the spy balloon? The U.S. has said through various leaks that they don’t think Xi knew about it.
That’s quite possible. My guess is that it was one of those things where the senior leadership is briefed on a program and then they pay no attention to the details and how it is implemented. My understanding is that winds drove that balloon off course and it ended up being in the United States.
I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I would bet that the senior leadership knew they had balloon spying — there had been a number of these spy balloons over the years in a number of different places —but they were unaware of the specific balloon that ended up in the United States.
You write at the end of that book, Duty, that Beijing learned from the Soviet experience and had no intention of matching the U.S. ship for ship, tank for tank, missile for missile. But in your recent Foreign Affairs piece, you say China now boasts of having more warships than the U.S., although of poorer quality. What changed?
Xi Jinping changed [China’s approach.] Their position for many years was to have a very modest number of strategic nuclear weapons, for example. That was sustained until fairly recently. This is part of Xi Jinping’s abandonment of ‘hide and bide’ and shows a willingness to challenge the U.S. in a much more open way. [Under Deng Xiaoping and his immediate successors, Chinese foreign policy was guided by the notion of ‘hide your strength and bide your time.’] So, you’re going to wind up with probably more than a tripling of their deployed strategic nuclear weapons by 2025 or 2030.
Xi has greater global ambitions than his predecessors. But I also think it’s part and parcel of him having a large enough military that if he does decide to go after Taiwan, the U.S. is deterred from reacting because of the potential for a catastrophe.
During an earlier conversation I had with Bush National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, he said in 2008, U.S. intelligence picked up an order from Hu Jintao for the PLA to be prepared to take military action when it came to Taiwan. At the time, the Chinese were afraid of an election in Taiwan where the DPP candidate was talking about independence. Now, there’s talk from the U.S. military about a similar order from Xi when it comes to 2027. Do you think it’s possible that’s simply how the Chinese react when there’s an election coming up in Taiwan where they think there’s an independence-based candidate?
The order is partly because the military is not ready to do anything against Taiwan, and partly it’s a warning to the U.S., but especially Taiwan, about not moving toward independence. My view is that it was thrown out as a marker; I don’t think there’s any way the Chinese are ready by 2027. The likelihood of the Chinese moving militarily against Taiwan in the next two years is pretty low.
Why is that?
First, he’s got a lot of other tools at his disposal that pose a lot less risk in terms of bringing pressure to bear on Taiwan. There’s obviously cyber. And given the magnitude of the bilateral economic relationship between Taiwan and the mainland — that can be squeezed. Family relationships and visits can be squeezed.
One of the most daunting tools that Xi has, which was deployed for the first time after the Pelosi visit [to Taiwan in August 2022], was imposing both maritime and air-exercise zones that blocked commercial, maritime and air traffic in and out of Taiwan for a period of time. The size of the maritime zones just happened to be athwart the lanes leading to major ports: same thing with the air exercises and the major airport. For all practical purposes, commercial traffic into and out of Taiwan was pretty seriously disrupted for a week or so.
[Xi] has set this goal to see Taiwan brought under the mainland. He believes it’s part of his destiny — that’s how he gets up there in the pantheon, sitting right next to Mao.
He can do that any time he wants and for the period he wants. That is not an activity, I think, that will provoke the United States or Taiwan to react militarily. So, the risk of war by imposing these exercises and disruptions to Taiwan’s economy is much lower than just declaring a blockade or something like that.
And he could declare a quarantine, which basically says you can’t ship any more weapons into Taiwan. Do we challenge a quarantine? That takes us back to 1962 [and the Cuban missile crisis.] Are we going to fire the first shot?
I also think he’s got to have picked up on at least some aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As I said in the Foreign Affairs article, both Xi and Putin share the narrative that the West is in decline and that they’re only going to be in a better and better position. Xi feels like he’s got some time.
One of the lessons of Ukraine was how fast the United States was able to assemble an international coalition, both in Europe and Asia, and the speed with which they imposed draconian sanctions on Russia. He’s got to worry about the implications of that for Taiwan.
The second thing is, he’s got to wonder whether his military is anything like as good as they say they are. Or are his military more like the Russian military, kind of hollow with incompetent generals at the top?
And the third thing is: will the Taiwanese fight as hard as the Ukrainians have and bog the Chinese down in a long war?
People don’t fully appreciate how difficult an amphibious invasion of Taiwan would be; how narrow the beaches are where you could have an amphibious operation, where you could land significant numbers of troops. You’re talking about a body of water that’s twice the distance that we had on D-Day, while the magnitude of the operation would be much bigger.
This would be a huge operation on the part of the Chinese and that’s a little daunting. He has set this goal to see Taiwan brought under the mainland. He believes it’s part of his destiny — that’s how he gets up there in the pantheon, sitting right next to Mao. But he’s got until probably 2035 to see if he can make that happen. And who knows what happens in the United States, as he looks at our problems and our paralysis and growing isolation. My guess is he feels like he’s got some time.
What’s your view of this administration’s efforts to build and reinforce alliances in the Pacific? I’m thinking of the Quad, AUKUS and the easing of tensions between South Korea and Japan. [The Quad refers to the grouping of India, Japan, the U.S. and Australia. AUKUS is the U.S.-U.K. effort to build nuclear submarines with Australia.]
I’m very supportive of it. It’s what they ought to be doing. China promotes this with their bullying behavior to these nations in Asia. That’s why [these countries are] willing to participate.
Other countries and our allies also see our paralysis, see our growing isolationism, and remember [former President] Trump’s attitude toward alliances. Virtually all our allies are hedging against a lack of American leadership and military strength going forward. That’s one of the reasons why the Japanese are doubling their defense budget, and why other countries are willing to enter into these alliances and relationships, and why you have a better relationship between South Korea and Japan, and why you have Australia wanting its own nuclear attack submarines and so on. You’re seeing the same thing in a lot of European countries.
Given that Taiwan is the world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, I would have expected it to be at the leading edge on defense electronics and anti-submarine warfare, in the same way that Israel developed an anti-missile system when it feared missile attacks. But I don’t see any real evidence of that.
The Taiwanese military is basically still the KMT [Kuomintang] army. Until very recently, their whole structure has been aimed at someday retaking the mainland. Getting the senior Taiwanese military to abandon the quest for super-modern, big stuff — warships, advanced aircraft and so on — has been very tough. Trying to get them to understand and to adapt their plans to what our military refers to as Taiwan becoming a ‘porcupine’ — of having smaller-scale capabilities that create enormous problems for any force trying to occupy Taiwan — has been a struggle. We’ve only begun to make some progress on that, both in terms of the ask list, but also frankly, in the thinking of the senior Taiwanese military people.
The Biden administration’s overall international framework is one of autocracies versus democracies. You’re critical of that pairing. Why?
Like during the Cold War, you have to put your national interests first. There are going to be times when we are going to have to work with authoritarian governments that share our concerns about either Russia or China or whatever. That includes, frankly, most of the countries in the Middle East. That’s just a reality that we have to face.
We always have to be a voice in support of human rights and democracy, including with the authoritarian countries that we need to do business with. But our national interests come first. If that requires dealing with leaders you wouldn’t want to bring home to meet mom, then that’s the way it is.
The truth of the matter is the Biden administration is taking that approach, whatever the rhetoric. The best example of this is how far President Biden has moved in terms of his attitudes towards the leader of Saudi Arabia [Mohammed bin Salman].
You go back in your career to the Reagan and Bush eras when the hope was that engagement would lead to significant changes in China. It did economically, but politically it’s been disappointing. Should something have been done differently?
It’s important to step back and look at the whole span of the relationship. The reality is that the first half of this relationship, from the early ’70s until the early ’90s, was strategic in nature and aimed against the Soviet Union. There wasn’t really a significant economic component to the relationship during those times. But there were a lot of exchanges in the intelligence and military arenas.
When the Clinton administration came in, they wanted to take a different tack in terms of putting more pressure on China on human rights. [They wanted] more democratization and reform than had been the case. [Secretary of State] Warren Christopher made a trip to Beijing [in 1994] to present this ultimatum — if you want to have a stronger economic relationship with the United States, you have to do these things. The Chinese basically told Christopher to go pound sand. And the Clinton administration essentially abandoned that aspiration and turned to the economic relationship.
That’s when you see the subsequent support for Chinese membership in the WTO and the encouragement of American businesses to invest in China.
This is where Xi Jinping has made a huge miscalculation by abandoning ‘hide and bide.’ Deng’s policy, followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, avoided doing things that would provoke the West or arouse the concerns of the United States. The Chinese were interested in expanding the economic relationship, and cooperative arrangements with universities and scientists. This was all about fostering Chinese growth.
‘Hide and bide’ masked Deng Xiaoping’s real intent, which was to build China into a significant world power and the dominant power in Asia at a minimum. His policy, which his first two successors followed, was not to do anything to provoke the United States.
When Xi abandoned ‘hide and bide,’ he did exactly what Deng feared. He provoked the United States; he scared the United States. All of a sudden, we discovered we were behind in certain areas. The Chinese were outbuilding us in terms of ships and they were doing this, that and the other thing. He provoked an economic reaction from the United States and a military buildup that won’t see fruition for several years.
If we made a mistake — and it was a huge one — it was in our belief that a richer China would become a freer China. The irony is that may not have been wrong. Xi felt like the Party was losing control, with all of the entrepreneurs and the Jack Ma’s of this world. That’s one of the things Xi has been trying to reverse.
So do you think the engagement policy, which has been criticized in this country as naive, was actually working? And that Xi was worried that not only was the economy changing, but that politics were changing?
There’s merit to that argument. I can argue both sides, but if you just look at Xi’s actions, he clearly felt the Party was losing its grip inside China. And if there is a shibboleth in China, it’s Mikhail Gorbachev. They look at the Party losing control in the Soviet Union and its collapse.
Xi came in believing that the Party was losing control, and he was determined to reverse that. It was a little bit like Putin believing that the center was losing control in Russia. He took away the election of regional governors and said they would be appointed by the center. He called in the oligarchs and said, ‘I know you stole all our money but as long as you stay out of my way, you can keep it. But don’t cross me.'
In some ways, Xi started to do the same thing in 2013. It’s pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that he thought things were slipping out of control — meaning independent forces were becoming powerful inside China.
I looked back at the U.S. National Security Strategies that have been published since the Reagan era. Except for the Trump administration, they pretty much all say that a prosperous China is in the U.S. interest. Do you think that’s still the case?
A prosperous China with Xi Jinping in charge is not in our interest. An authoritarian government in Beijing that intends to displace the United States as the preeminent power in the world, and the preeminent influence economically, politically and even militarily — that kind of a government is not in our interest.
If that’s the case, should the U.S. try to hobble the Chinese economy?
There are practical limits to what can happen there. One of my favorite statistics is that last year, U.S.-Chinese trade was $720 billion [According to Census, the actual total was $690 billion.] That’s the most in history. In the last normal year of the Soviet Union, 1986, total trade between the United States and Soviet Union was $2 billion.
So, our connections with China go far beyond anything that we had with the Soviet Union. China’s role in the world economically is different from anything that existed during the Cold War. China is so much richer and so much more economically integrated with the rest of the world.
Imposing draconian sanctions against China at this point would have economic repercussions in the United States and around the world. China is the largest trading partner now of more than 120 countries. They own, invest in, or manage 100 ports in 60 countries, including several in this country.
So, trying to hobble the Chinese economy, except in narrow areas where their acquisition of certain technologies can be used to disadvantage us militarily, is a fool’s errand. [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan’s description of a ‘small yard, high fence’ is the way to think about how this relationship moves forward in the future.
In some ways, the Chinese are doing more to disadvantage their economy internationally than the United States could by arresting foreign businessmen, by hobbling — to use your word — all the organizations in China doing due diligence for Western acquisitions or investment and shutting them down. Potential investors can’t get information on Chinese companies. So, you’re seeing lots of firms not pulling out of China, but not making any new investments in China. If they’re making new investments, they’re making them in Vietnam or India or the Philippines, or someplace like that.
Bottom line, a strategy to hobble the Chinese economy, except in some very narrow areas, is unlikely to work and probably would end up antagonizing a lot of countries around the world.
Trump’s former US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer has talked about assessing tariffs on China until trade between the U.S. and China is balanced. Do you think a policy of assessing significant tariffs would be useful?
I’m not an economist, but I’m very skeptical that it actually would produce the results that he claims. For one thing, how would you deal with Chinese goods that are sent to Mexico, assembled there and then brought into the United States? There are so many ways to get around things like tariffs. Among other things, you would see prices on a lot of consumer goods in the United States rise pretty dramatically.
Your Foreign Affairs article seems to say the biggest threat we face isn’t Xi and Putin, but U.S. dysfunction and structural problems, particularly economic ones. And you call for strong leadership. That struck me as a hope for a different country than we have at the moment. How do you see the U.S, going forward in terms of dealing with the challenge from Xi and Putin.
The core of moving forward in a constructive way, in terms of deterring Xi and Putin, is already present. That is in the bipartisan consensus on the Hill, particularly with China, that we need to be reacting more strongly — and to a certain degree with respect to Putin also. How do you take that predominant view and translate it into long-delayed legislation to fix some of the problems that we have in terms of the defense budget, our role internationally and so on?
Compared to almost any other problem, you have a bipartisan view as a foundation. What I’m looking for are actions on the part of the United States that disrupt or challenge the Xi-Putin narrative and belief that the West is in decline and that the United States is paralyzed and can’t solve any big problems because of that paralysis.
Do you see that same bipartisan view toward Russia as you do with China?
I would say so, apart from a number of Republicans in the House. There’s still a very strong majority in the Senate and a majority in the House that see Putin as a real problem.
Do you think of Xi Jinping as an aberration or did we just miss the increasing challenge from China?
You could ask the same question about Trump.
I don’t know. If he were to disappear tomorrow, I would wager that one significant change would be a pretty quick return to a more collective leadership and the avoidance of one person having so much power. But in terms of the role of the Party, whether that would change, I just don’t know.
Bob Davis, a former correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, covered U.S.-China relations beginning in the 1990s. He co-authored “Superpower Showdown,” with Lingling Wei, which chronicles the two nations’ economic and trade rivalry. He can be reached via bobdavisreports.com.