Matt Pottinger: “We are now in the foothills of a great-power hot war”

There has been a tortuous debate in Washington foreign policy circles for several years now about whether to call the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China a “new cold war”. Those in favour argue that only the language of the last Cold War captures the scale and the stakes of the struggle now underway between the world’s two most dominant powers. Those against point out the many ways in which this contest – and the geopolitical context in which it is being waged – is different from the last great superpower stand-off and worry that using the phrase will only antagonise Beijing and accelerate the confrontation.

Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser under Donald Trump and is widely seen as the architect of his China policy, says this debate misses the point. “I would argue that we are now in the foothills of a great-power hot war,” he told me on 12 July by video call from his home in Park City, Utah. This was a reference to a comment by the late Henry Kissinger, who acknowledged in 2019, after resisting the comparison for many years, that the US and China were in the “foothills of a cold war”. But that was before Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping declared their “no limits” partnership in February 2022, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine later that month, before the US had ramped up tariffs on imports of Chinese high-tech goods, and before the scale of Xi’s ambition to remake the global order had become clear. Pottinger argues that a new cold war is now the best-case scenario.

“If we are going to prevent a catastrophe, then we need to recognise that the middle path between outright hot war on the one hand, and abject capitulation on the other, is something cold-war-like,” he said. “That is a competition between hostile adversaries, but where we try to avoid either of those terrible extremes, and even if you recognise that there are significant differences between China and the Soviet Union, we learn the lessons of the Cold War in order to help things stay cold.”

Pottinger, 51, is now a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he has just edited and published The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, a book on how to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. He argues that to do this, the US must start with a clear-eyed appraisal of Beijing’s ultimate goals. “The United States has been hoping to maintain something like the status quo for quite a number of years now – whether that is in the Taiwan Strait or in our relationship with Beijing,” he said. “But as we keep resisting any change to the status quo, Xi is out there changing global dynamics at high speed.”

Xi often talks about how the world is currently undergoing changes “not seen for 100 years”. The pace of that change has only increased in recent months. In June, Putin and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, signed a collective defence treaty that resurrected their countries’ Cold War alliance. In July, Nato leaders at the alliance’s summit in Washington agreed for the first time that China was a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war against Ukraine. As the Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, bluntly summed up the situation, “China provides dual-use equipment, microelectronics, [and] a lot of other tools, which are enabling Russia to build the missiles, to build the bombs, to build the aircraft, to build the weapons they’re using to attack Ukraine.”

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As Pottinger put it: “Beijing has graduated to waging a full-blown proxy war against the United States and Europe.” He believes China’s support for Iran should be viewed in the same terms. “Beijing is the number one financial supporter of Iran. It is the main buyer of Iran’s sanctioned oil. It provides diplomatic cover for Tehran, propaganda support, and has hosted some of its terrorist proxies, namely Hamas, in Beijing – so we are in new territory.” It is long past time for the US to acknowledge the scale of the challenge it confronts. “We’ve hit the snooze button several times, and now we are facing something worse than a cold war. We are looking at a proxy war being waged against us and our allies.”

Pottinger studied East Asian languages and literature at the University of Massachusetts before becoming a journalist and moving to China in the late 1990s, where he worked for seven years as a correspondent for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. In 2005, with the US embroiled in the “war on terror”, he joined the US Marine Corps and completed three combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service.

After leaving active duty in 2010, he founded an Asia-focused corporate risk consultancy in New York before joining the National Security Council as senior director for Asia at the start of Trump’s term in the White House, in January 2017. He was promoted to deputy national security adviser in 2019 and remained in that role until 6 January 2021, when he resigned in protest at Trump’s failure to rein in the armed mob of his supporters who stormed the US Capitol. Pottinger later testified against Trump at the House Select Committee investigation into the attack, where he said Trump’s response was like “fuel being poured on the fire”. He recalled receiving concerned messages from US allies in the aftermath about the health of American democracy and said it had harmed US national security. “I think it emboldened our enemies by helping give them ammunition to feed a narrative that our system of government doesn’t work,” he explained, “[and] that the United States is in decline.”

During his time in the White House, Pottinger oversaw a significant shift in Washington’s policy towards Beijing, which included the imposition of a series of tariffs on Chinese imports under Trump, who railed against the US trade deficit with China and called himself a “tariff man”. Observing Xi at close range during this period, Pottinger found that he was not a “reckless gambler”, but rather a careful, methodical leader, who was relentlessly focused on what he wanted to achieve.

“There is a Chinese phrase which means: take a step, then calculate before taking another step,” which, said Pottinger, captured Xi’s approach. But he also came to view Xi as having “a bit of a messiah complex in believing that he – and he alone – can save the Chinese Communist Party and ensure victory in its age-old mission of spreading socialism”. Pottinger believes Xi, now well into his second decade in power, is becoming bolder because he sees “weak resolve everywhere he looks abroad, except in the form of his ally, Putin”.

The Chinese leader’s own words, particularly the internal speeches and documents intended for consumption within the Communist Party, offer the clearest insights into his world-view. As an example, Pottinger pointed to a speech Xi gave in 2018 on the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, when he said that Marx’s ideology was “not meant to be kept in books on shelves; it was meant to change the world, and that is the mission we have inherited”. Or there is an earlier speech, in 2013, which was kept secret for six years, when Xi warned senior party officials to brace themselves for a “long, difficult struggle” that would culminate, as Pottinger summarised, in the “demise of capitalism and the triumph of socialism as practised by a single-party dictatorship”. He summed up Xi’s message to party members in recent years as this: “Don’t get weak-willed, shake off your soft-bone disease, as he calls it, and get yourself some spine, because our mission is clear, and we are recommitting ourselves wholly to achieving that mission.”

What, exactly, that mission means when it comes to Taiwan – the self-governing island claimed by Beijing – is an increasingly urgent question. Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027, and while he has often stressed that what he calls “peaceful reunification” remains his preferred approach, he has begun to signal his impatience. When Joe Biden told Xi during their meeting in San Francisco in November 2023 that the US was committed to maintaining peace and stability in the region, the Chinese leader responded, “Look, peace is… all well and good but at some point, we need to move towards resolution more generally.”

In The Boiling Moat – which takes its title from a first-century Chinese history text that cautioned against attacking well-defended frontier cities “protected by metal ramparts and boiling moats” – Pottinger and his co-authors argue that the US and its allies have 24 months to marshall the required weapons systems and rebuild their capabilities in order to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. This means immediate efforts to surge munitions to Taiwan and reinvigorate America’s industrial defence base. Only “unmistakable strength in the form of military hard power” will ensure that China is “not tempted to resort to force,” writes Pottinger. “This is what kept the Cold War cold in the last century. This is what can keep Xi from rolling the iron dice of war in this one.”

Pottinger does not believe that deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan means scaling back aid for Ukraine, as a vocal group within the Republican Party now argues, most notably Elbridge Colby, who is widely tipped to become national security adviser in a second Trump presidency, and the party’s vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. “I do not buy the argument that if we turn our back on Ukraine, things will work out well for the US and Europe,” Pottinger told me. “We are going to end up paying vastly greater sums of money in the event that Ukraine is conquered by Putin just to hold the line at Poland and the Baltic states. So this is a penny-wise, pound-foolish policy.”

The greater impediment to deterrence if Trump is re-elected may turn out to be his own transactional “America First” instincts. During his previous term, Trump liked to compare Taiwan to the tip of his Sharpie pen and China to his desk in the Oval Office, according to the then national security adviser, John Bolton – implying that Taiwan was too small and too far away to defend. He repeated that sentiment in an interview with Bloomberg on 16 July. “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away,” Trump said. “It’s 68 miles from China.” Trump likened the US to an insurance company, and suggested, “Taiwan should pay us for defence.”

Given his own experience in the Trump administration, I asked Pottinger what we should expect from a second Trump presidency, if he is re-elected in November. “I think that if President Trump pursues a policy direction similar to his first term, then things can work out reasonably well,” he replied, referring to his administration’s focus on economic competition with Beijing. “If he indulges the minority, isolationist voices in the Republican Party, then we are much more likely to end up in a war.”