The challenge the United States faces in confronting China on the global stage is "almost overwhelming" and exceeds some of the worst historical crises the country has ever encountered, former Trump administration national security adviser Robert C. O'Brien said during an appearance Thursday in Washington.
"I'm not sure America has faced a threat like Communist China in our history," O'Brien said in a conversation hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
"Maybe the Revolutionary War, when we fought the British who were the leading superpower in the world at the time?" he said. "I think that the threat that we face from China is far more serious than we faced against the Soviet Union in the Cold War."
O'Brien said he believes China's ultimate plan is to force the country's "Marxist-Leninist" ideology on the rest of the world.
"They have an ideology that they believe they can use to organize, to govern the world," he said. "So it's a danger to all of us, to our kids and grandkids. It's a danger to everyone around the world, because they see themselves as being able to govern the entire world based on their ideology."
O'Brien's remarks come at a time when experts are trying to parse what U.S. relations with China will look like in the next presidential administration, whether it is a second Trump term or a first term for current vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
In a report issued Thursday morning, Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggested that future U.S. policies toward China will likely trend in the same direction regardless of who wins the election.
"U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan is likely to maintain its broad contours under a Harris or a Trump administration," Lin wrote."The Harris and Trump teams share the view that China challenges and threatens the established international order, peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States. 'Managing' China or 'winning' against China will be a top priority for the next U.S. administration, as intense U.S. competition with China will likely continue."
However, Lin pointed out several areas where a Trump administration might differ, including by implementing harsher trade policies and imposing more far-reaching crackdowns on Chinese influence operations in the U.S.
What is unclear, she said, is the degree to which Trump would continue to nurture some of the Indo-Pacific region alliances that the Biden administration has been working to strengthen, and whether he would continue U.S. support of Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own.
In his remarks Thursday, O'Brien touched on all of those subjects.
O'Brien served in the administration of former President Donald Trump first as a special envoy for hostage affairs, and then as national security adviser from September 2019 until January 2021.
During the 90-minute appearance on Thursday, O'Brien made clear he was not speaking for the former president.
"Anyone who says they're speaking for Donald Trump, whether it's on personnel or policy, is not speaking for Donald Trump," he said. "Donald Trump is going to speak for Donald Trump."
However, his observations about China might provide some insight into the mindset of people likely to populate a second Trump administration, should the former president win reelection in November.
O'Brien said that a future Trump administration would be focused on signaling American economic, diplomatic and military strength to China and combating what the former president sees as China's unfair practices. Those include theft of intellectual property, flooding Western economies with Chinese goods subsidized by Beijing, and keeping the value of the Chinese yuan artificially low.
"President Trump has said what he's going to do," O'Brien said. "He's going to raise tariffs on the Chinese and send a strong message that we're not going to tolerate intellectual property theft any longer. We're not going to tolerate the dumping, we're not going to tolerate the currency manipulation, and we're going to have an incentive for American manufacturers to come home."
O'Brien said that when he was in the White House, he saw that China is tireless in its effort to expand Beijing's influence, whether by using its military to harass its neighbors in the Indo-Pacific region or by engaging in espionage and influence operations.
