The Biden administration will have to make fast policy changes if it is to limit China’s growing military power, argues Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, in a pitch that is gaining bipartisan momentum.
From Chinese export controls on the rare earth elements used to produce F-35 fighter jets to an outsized U.S. economic dependency that fuels the growth of China’s military, Cotton called for the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to work with Republicans on an urgent solution.
“Beijing could ground our most advanced jets at almost any time, just by cutting off access to a few key inputs,” Cotton said Thursday at a Reagan Institute virtual discussion. “We don’t have to sit by and blindly accept the status quo. … That is rapidly allowing China to gain, and if we don’t change, surpass us to become the world’s largest economy and the world’s strongest military.”
Cotton cited national security threats, including China’s threat to impose export controls on rare earth elements and its advances in artificial intelligence, semiconductor production, and quantum computing.
“China has a virtual monopoly on rare earth mining and processing,” he explained.
“There’s nothing rare about rare earth elements,” Cotton added. “They’re all over the world, it’s that we chose not to mine them and process them and manufacture them. It’s time that we reversed those choices.”
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American Enterprise Institute China analyst Zack Cooper told the Washington Examiner that Cotton is spot on and there is bipartisan support to address the issues he is raising.
“The U.S. is going to have to come up with a strategy on China that merges security and economics and technology,” he said.
“Tom Cotton is definitely pushing the envelope,” Cooper added. “He’s pushing towards some discussion that I think a lot of people in Congress on both sides of the aisle think are necessary.”
The call to look at policy actions to reverse the national security threats posed by China are part of a report Cotton released Thursday titled “Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War.”
Reagan Institute Director Roger Zakheim told the Washington Examiner that President Biden’s decisions on China are of critical importance.
“At the end of the day, this is about President Biden and his view and his approach and his understanding of the threat and how the United States should manage it,” Zakheim said. “That’s what we have to watch.”
Zakheim also warned about conciliatory Democratic attitudes toward China.
“There are things to watch out for,” he warned.
“There’ve been calls on the Democratic side to find areas of cooperation,” Zakheim said. “Sen. Cotton, in his report, I think, expressed some wariness with this call for cooperation.”
In the report’s introduction, Cotton warns about an oft-mentioned Democratic priority, climate change.
“China’s leaders eagerly propose to cooperate on, say, climate change because they believe naive, credulous American policymakers will offer concrete concessions for distant promises,” Cotton writes.
He added Thursday: “This evil empire preys on and spies on Americans.”
‘Confront it’
In describing China’s economic model, Cotton detailed a system of “debt peonage” spreading throughout Asia and Africa, whereby coercive loans have granted China rights to raw materials and strategic ports.
He said China’s goal is to reduce those countries to “security vassalage.”
“We have to confront it on every front everywhere we find it, if we want to remain a free, prosperous, secure country,” Cotton said.
In his nomination hearing, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed China would be the department’s No. 1 challenge, and last week, Austin created a China Task Force to assess the full range of China policy.
Former President Donald Trump’s last Senate-approved defense secretary, Mark Esper, repeatedly spoke about the China threat and visited the Asia-Pacific region to boost new partnerships.
Congress, too, put money behind the effort, approving some $6.9 billion to fund the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative,” designed to invest in partner security infrastructure and foster relationships across the region to counter China’s influence.
Diplomatically, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was slated to participate Thursday in a call with U.S. allies in the region — India, Australia, and South Korea. Meanwhile, the U.S. finally reached a new defense basing agreement with Japan.
Nonetheless, Cotton warned that even Pacific allies are putting economics ahead of security.
“You already see countries like Australia and South Korea and Japan and Vietnam and India wanting to cooperate and trade even more closely with China,” he said.
Those will be harder to counter, Zakheim said.
“How you manage kind of those areas of the U.S.-China economic integration that are relevant to national security that are not core defense industrial base issues, that’s a harder challenge,” he said.
Cotton has an answer for that, too, giving the defense secretary a role in an interagency committee on foreign investment to ensure the Treasury Department addresses the national security concerns related to investing in China. Those tasks have traditionally fallen under the purview of the treasury secretary, however.
Cooper said even conservatives may be open to a larger government role for the sake of national security.
“It used to be on the Right that if you were talking about industrial policy, that that was a dangerous term to be throwing around,” he said.
“Free market types would be very critical,” he added. “There’s a growing recognition that there’s no way around some greater government involvement in these markets, both to protect against malign interference in those markets, but also to make sure that we can be competitive in certain critical industries that are vital, not just for economic purposes but for security purposes as well.”
Despite worries and watchful eyes on the Biden administration’s first moves, Cotton left the door open to some kind of bipartisan solution — even though Washington has been short on those in recent decades.
“Our nation has the political will to conceive and execute this strategy on a bipartisan and long-term basis,” he writes in the report’s introduction. “Indeed, the scope of the Chinese threat likely will have a unifying effect on our politics.”
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Cooper agrees.
“What you see is a fair amount of agreement on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “The China problem is something that both parties need to work together on, and that is what differentiates China from basically every other issue in the world.”
