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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] How does the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cognitive warfare manifest in the West? How prevalent is it? And how can Americans recognize it?

Few understand this elusive subject better than Robert Spalding. The CEO of Sempre, Spalding is a retired Air Force brigadier general and B-2 stealth bomber pilot, former senior director of strategy at the National Security Council, and author of “War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination.”

“We have these enormous political warfare and psychological warfare campaigns happening in the United States. We have nobody that’s responsible for responding to them,” he says.

In this episode, he breaks down how the CCP is influencing Americans and weaponizing resources like rare earths. And he explains why key vulnerabilities in America’s networks could be exploited in ways devastating to the United States.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Robert Spalding, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Great to be back.

We’ve interviewed multiple times over the last six years. I still remember the first time we were actually talking about rare earth and trade. In this case, it was this new trade agreement that the Trump administration, Trump 45, had made with communist China. Tell me what is happening with the Trump approach to trade and how that connects with all sorts of different policies, including communist China?

What’s interesting about interviewing back then was I think we were still in the first Trump administration and it was still pre-COVID. So you can’t just look at what the president is doing. You have to look at the evolution of the president through COVID, through the loss of the election in 2020, how his thinking has evolved, how his recognition of Washington, D.C. has evolved, because I think all of that contributes to the way he’s acting today. I think he recognized a lot of things that are going on in our society that, you know, really were highlighted by COVID.

But there’s political warfare, there’s psychological warfare going on with a communist party in China that wants to see the downfall of the United States and uses political warfare to create hyper-partisanship within the United States. And then you have, in essence, the president learning his lesson the first time. I think what he learned was not only is the world a bad place, Washington, D.C. is a bad place, and more importantly, he has to be bold. He has to be aggressive. He has to make decisions.

And I think the other thing is he surrounded himself this time with people that, rather than trying to control the president, like, you know, a lot of the people that were around him, we need to control and we need to constrain him. I mean, they’re actually allowing him to do the things that he does best, which is, in essence, be the chief negotiator, the chief foreign policy strategist for the United States, the chief national security strategist for the United States. He’s doing those things, and he’s being very successful at it in ways that are throwing off the rest of the world.

And I think the reason is that he had that opportunity to go and see for himself how the world is working against us, how D.C. and, in many respects, New York are working with the world to undermine the United States. And how do I begin to disassemble all this? I think, you know, it’s very scary for the establishment because they have been very comfortable in the way things have been working. But I think he’s been very successful in slowly dismantling. And the biggest thing is really trade.

What is happening with this Trump trade policy and how much is it focused on the Chinese Communist Party?

The truth is that it’s focused on what is the right policy for the United States, regardless of who the trade partner is. And I think that’s the piece that I believe people are shocked about. You know, the biggest problem people have is with, oh, you know, we shouldn’t punish our allies like the Europeans. And there’s no recognition of how trade policy developed, you know, what was the rationale for, you know, why we went the free trade route. So it’s almost like free trade is an indisputable global good and therefore it’s an indisputable national good, and therefore anything that strays away from free trade is bad. It’s gone from doctrine to dogma.

After the end of the Cold War, there was never a look at, okay, do these things that we did post-World War II continue to make sense in a national sense for the United States from a national security perspective or even from an economic perspective? And even like the Fed economists, these are very smart people that spend a long time in their university programs creating an economic model. They all have their own economic model that their Ph.D. was based on. But yet there’s this one universal, absolute truth that they all agree with, which is that tariffs are bad.

And I think the president, not being an Ivy League trained economist with a Ph.D. and a model, is just taking his Brooklyn, New Jersey upbringing and saying everything that we do is transactional. Actually, when you go around the world and you meet with people that aren’t Americans, there’s this understanding and belief that everything’s transactional and you do everything that’s in your own best interest. And I think that works on a personal level, but it also works on a national level.

And so the bottom line is I think we strayed into this thing that was absolutely dogma, that free trade is always an absolute good. And we stopped looking at the impacts that it had, both from a national security perspective in the United States—rare earth metals, perfect example—and from a prosperity advantage to the American people.

So one of the big things that I think the Chinese did so well is attack the Gini coefficient in China. They attack this idea of wealth disparity, like super poor and super rich. Is there economic opportunity? I’ve been on factory floors, factories that have shut down because of widespread competition from China. And there’s been no response from the federal government in protecting these people.

And that allowed China to say, look what we’re doing with the Chinese people. We’re giving them jobs. Now, they don’t care about freedom, but that’s OK because we’re giving them jobs. And I think this is a central problem of the 21st century for Western liberal democracy: what are the kinds of things that the Founding Fathers were looking for?

It wasn’t just freedom; it was also economic opportunity, the ability to pursue your interests. And they knew at the time, like, they understood quite clearly that the federal government had a role to play in protecting industry in the United States. That if they didn’t do that, some business owners were not going to be able to do that. And they’re not going to be able to do that collectively because they’re all going to be competing with each other.

So if there wasn’t some role of the federal government in protecting them, then it would be lost. And Alexander Hamilton is a perfect example. He said that we have to have tariffs for national security. We have to have tariffs to protect our industry. And I think D.C. just completely got out of that. And then I think this idea that free trade is a universal good was the problem.

I’m going to touch on a bunch of things that you talked about. One is the Gini coefficient; that, of course, is a measure of how wealth is concentrated kind of at the top or spread out. And so that’s actually something that Secretary Scott Bessant has been talking about, that that’s actually been shifting in America. So maybe we can touch on that.

But this was just as a commentary: I’m remembering, to be rich is glorious. This was Deng Xiaoping’s motto, right? How the Chinese Communist Party is going to maintain power. And that was the deal: don’t touch politics and we’ll let you basically increase your economic opportunity and your wealth. Just don’t touch politics or you’ll get destroyed. That was the deal.

But then that’s also shifted, and that’s interesting too because, as we’re seeing in communist China, that Gini coefficient is rapidly shifting in the opposite direction again, which is really interesting. So anyway, you touched on a bunch of things here. And finally, the rare earths piece. But let’s take your pick. What would you like to jump in on here?

With the rare earths, the funny thing is I remember Hu Jintao going to Africa, making all these deals for natural resources, like cobalt and all of these different things that are being used for things like EV batteries and thinking, OK, this is not really good. Then recently we had the Taiwan president. They were planning to transit through New York on the way to South America on a trip. And the president said no. Why did the president say no? The president said no, because the Chinese said no, because of rare earth magnets that we need to produce F-35s. This is a bad strategy. It’s bad policy on the part of the United States to leave ourselves open to blackmail. And it finds its way now directly into the things that we can do.

The other thing is, you know, we reversed the NVIDIA chips going, you know, we basically banned NVIDIA chips from going to China. Now we turned them back on. Why do we turn them back on? Because the Chinese said, hey, we’re going to cut off rare earth magnets. So this is a direct attack on our sovereignty. It’s not using any weapons.

It’s not using the refrain of General Mattis that it’s all about lethality. Actually, no, it’s not all about lethality. National security is comprehensive, and it starts with your industrial security and starts with not having to depend on, you know, in many ways, an enemy to supply things that are absolutely critical for your national security.

We interviewed about six years ago in 2019 for the first time. And we were actually talking about rare earths. I went and looked; I was kind of curious what we were talking about back then. But we were talking about rare earths specifically. And you were, at the time, you advised the Chinese not to use that leverage point that you were just describing. By the way, do you know for a fact that these are the reasons? Or is this your kind of interpretation of what happened?

Not as a fact, but you can see, you know, as soon as they met, all of a sudden the flow of rare earth magnets started to flow to the United States.

And these rare earth minerals are in everything.

Everything, right. Absolutely. And they’re certainly in everything that we do from a weapons perspective. I think what I learned in my time in China was to not try to do what an intelligence analyst does, and that is look for the smoking gun. Like, where is the Chinese Communist Party’s order that this isn’t going to happen? Because, quite frankly, they have a lot of levers that they can pull to make sure that rare earth magnets don’t flow. It doesn’t have to be an obvious thing that you can see. What you have to look at is, you know, what are their interests and what is happening in the world? And you can see a tie. So no, I don’t.

Did I know that Xi Jinping said we will not ship any rare earth magnets to the United States until they do these things? Wouldn’t it be nice if Xi Jinping would tweet those things, right? Because then we’d know. We have the opposite situation here. The president is very clear, very transparent. If he wants something, he basically puts it out on X. But the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t do that, and they will never do that. They have some of the most impeccable security policies, I think, that have ever been devised. You can’t take a cell phone into a communist party meeting. They don’t do that.

What we can see is, okay, what is the outcome that’s happening? Now we’ve reversed the NVIDIA thing. Rare earth magnets are flowing. I don’t have some crystal ball where I can actually see what Xi Jinping is doing, but I can tell, I know what their interests are, I know what they want, and I can see what’s happening in the world, and I can put two and two together, and I would hope that other people could do that too.

One of the biggest mistakes that we made in the West in a lot of ways is assuming good faith from the Chinese Communist Party when we have many decades of evidence that bad faith is the norm? In fact, it’s hard to find examples of good faith when you look at it in retrospect, right? So why is it that we assume good faith? Why is it that we just don’t assume bad faith unless we have robust evidence to the contrary?

What’s the saying? I can’t remember who said it, but countries don’t have friends, they have interests. And I think good faith or bad faith really, I think, in some respects, you could say is irrelevant. What is the interest of the United States, and how do we pursue those interests? And in the case of the United States, you know, we know we need rare earth magnets.

We know that the Chinese have basically cornered the market on rare earth magnets. And that basically means that at any time, and we should have known this 10 years ago.Some people did. That’s why I always say this is a problem for us. At any time, they could say, OK, this is going to be the thing that I use to get the United States to do what I want when I want them to do it.

The reason I mentioned the bad faith is there’s people out there where you share some sort of moral commonality. There’s a trust that’s been developed over time. You have certain expectations of a person. That’s a reasonable thing to factor into your decision-making. What I’m saying is that we factored in a belief that there might be good faith in a trade deal, when there’s never been any evidence there’s ever been good faith in a trade deal.

Right. Like we even wonder why we make trade deals. But my point is that sometimes you get drawn into this debate on whether or not there is good faith or bad faith. And I’m just saying, the problem is we get into these moral debates and then we don’t make any headway on what we actually must do from a policy perspective. Because people have a problem with that. Here in D.C., people have a problem saying the Chinese Communist Party is bad.

Some people would say I wear a tinfoil hat. I absolutely loathe the Chinese Communist Party and think they absolutely seek the destruction of the United States. OK, this is tinfoil hat wearing, Rob, to a lot of people here in D.C. Then, OK, don’t think about that. Just think, OK, what is the topic of rare earth magnets? Is it vital to the national security of the United States? Yes. Is it in our best interest that we don’t rely on one nation, whether or not you agree that they’re bad or good?

I think a reasonable person could say, yes, that’s probably a bad policy. OK, then what do we do to solve it? Then trade policy, tariff policy, industrial policy, the Defense Production Act, Title III, all of these tools that we have in the arsenal that we put into law for national security reasons, they’re there, and they should be used. Where we have people here, and I would say a lot of economists at the Fed would say, no, no, no, we don’t want to do industrial policy, kind of like we don’t want to have tariffs. We don’t want to do industrial policy because we want to let the market work.

Well, the market doesn’t care about the national security of the United States. Oftentimes, the market only cares about one thing, and that’s profit. And if the profit is served because the Chinese have skewed the market in order to capture the supply of rare earth magnets, that’s what’s going to happen.

The Chinese Communist Party is using different methods of warfare against the U.S. right now. What do you see in play right now the most? What are the most obvious routes, other than this rare earths warfare?

Yes, I would say that the rare earths are an element of it. But in reality, let’s go back to the beginnings of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union had a method to their madness when it came to destroying societies from within so that this communist element could arise. And that’s exactly what happened in China. The Nationalist Party had better trained forces, they were supported by the United States, and the Chinese Communist Party basically turned the population against the Nationalist Party, in some respects for a lot of good reasons. If you look in Taiwan, you see the same elements of that. It is, how do you mobilize the people against their own government?

The thing that’s different, the thing that’s new, is the iPhone. The iPhone pops up in 2007, and even though these two PLA lieutenant colonels wrote about unrestricted warfare in 1997, it really needed the iPhone and 4G networks to come together to create the beginnings of the mobile economy. This is where Apple came from. This is where the Fang Fangs came from. Facebook.

All of these social media platforms, these very large tech companies, they’re all centered around this ability to take data about you, from you, and then coalesce it back into things that are attractive to you, but then also begin to change your perceptions, your behaviors, your attitudes, right, leading to TikTok. But then beyond TikTok, it’s, you know, now incorporating AI. So now we’re getting to this world that not only the technology is there, but the economic consolidation when it comes to media platforms has occurred as well. And so while the Chinese Communist Party deliberately built these systems in China, they kind of organically formed in the same manner in the West.

So the Chinese Communist Party uses TikTok to basically propagandize the U.S. population, but TikTok is also used in American politics. So now there’s this reticence to get rid of it, right, within the political system. It is endemic to who we are as a people now, these platforms. And these platforms are also the same platforms that our enemies are using to destroy support for, you know, our constitutional republic.

That’s warfare, right? If you go back to my thing about lethality, I write about it in my book. Francois Jullien wrote the Treatise on Efficacy, and I talked about this before. He did a strategy between the West and the East. He says that the West picks a goal and then musters her resources and goes for it.

In the East, in China, it’s all about where the trends are going, how do I align myself with those trends so I can be carried away by them. This is what the Chinese Communist Party did, and it’s how they are using the trends. I started with the iPhone, 4G networks, now 5G networks—all the tech companies that are taking all of this data—the consolidation of media.

Now, we have five major corporations that control all of the legacy media in the United States for the most part. By the way, the legacy media basically takes other media that’s not legacy and says, okay, they’re tinfoil hat wearing. With people like The Epoch Times, it’s the same thing, right? They try to diminish the influence of these other media platforms because they want to be the ones that provide the messages.

And then there’s alignment of the messages from them, the tech companies, and the Chinese Communist Party. There’s an agreement that we don’t want decoupling. Economic decoupling is bad. Economic coupling is how the Chinese Communist Party has the ability to influence our political process, our media, through Hollywood, through all of these messaging, and enables them to do so slowly. And it doesn’t happen overnight. I think this is the reason people don’t recognize it; it’s because it’s a slow process of changing attitudes about democracy and freedom.

I still remember the perfect example of this: Arnold Schwarzenegger. So here’s a guy who immigrated to the United States, had all the opportunities in the world, and then in the height of COVID, he’s saying, looking in the camera, and says, screw your freedom. Like, take that back to when he gets to Muscle Beach and is able to become this, you know, bodybuilder movie star. Would Arnold Schwarzenegger have felt that way?

No. You can go back to interviews he’s had. He’s so thankful that he came to the United States and had the ability to achieve his dreams. But in that moment, freedom to him was the worst thing in the world. And you think about it: what does the Chinese Communist Party want you to believe? Freedom is bad. Like, universally, Chinese people believe this because that’s what they’re taught. But the power and warfare in this day and age is the ability to get somebody who more or less thinks they live in a free system to say, I don’t like living in a free system. I actually like that one better. That is magic.

I’m reminded of the congressional testimony that you gave about a year ago. There was a question from Congressman Burchett.

Congressman Burchett: (recorded audio)

How does the CCP shut down criticism of its human rights abuses, for warfare against America?

It uses our own media. One good example is its attack on the Falun Gong. It’s basically convinced the entire academic university system in the United States that they are a brainwashed cult. They’ve done the same thing to our media institutions. And so, you know, that is the way they do it, by controlling our own narratives within the—

You’re saying that they’re not a brainwashed cult.

I think they’re just a group of people that are dissidents of the Chinese Communist regime.

I agree with you too.

In China, there are underground Christian churches. In the more isolated areas, there are the Uyghurs who have their own faith, and Tibetans as well. But then all across the country, there is the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. The CCP has a very deliberate, active approach to basically demonize and delegitimize these faith-based groups.

It’s a standard communist tactic to basically not address the problems or the challenges that might be brought up by the fact that the Falun Gong exists in China, but rather demonize them because they’re actually concerned about them as a political movement in China. And I think this is going on all the time, not just with the Falun Gong; it’s going on with other groups.

And I think what’s happened in the 21st century with the rise of the smartphone and the internet and mobile networks and the cloud and all the tech companies is there’s been a convergence in this capability to do this at scale. The thing that the United States is very good at, as evidenced by the missions in Iran, is that we can operate on a global scale militarily. And I think the Chinese Communist Party, when you look at them as even the People’s Liberation Army, they’re the armed component of the Chinese Communist Party.

But even when you talk to them individually, when you talk to their senior leaders, they are much more aware of the political warfare aspects of their mission and much more capable at that than I would say they are at the type of strike we did in Iran. So while they’re global in their reach, meaning the Chinese Communist Party, the way that they operate is through political disinformation, through belittling their opponents, by creating doubt in the minds of people about, you know, people that they want to impugn. And they’re doing this everywhere. It’s not just with Falun Gong. They’re doing it in Taiwan. They’re doing it in the United States. They’re doing it in Europe. They’re doing it for their own benefits.

And they’re using these tools, these social media tools and legacy media in some regards through their relationships financially, through their relationships in a technology sense; things like ByteDance and TikTok, their investments and things like—they’re invested in Reddit, for example. You know, Tencent is invested in Reddit. They are literally, if you look throughout our media system, our information system, our technology system, they are invested there.

So they’re plugged in in a financial way. They’re plugged in in an information flow way. What the Chinese Communist Party, again, let’s take Troyes back to its roots, goes all the way back to Marx. The Soviet Union was the one that was sending out the Comintern to train that. The Chinese Communist Party became, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the holders of that mantle and now are the ones.

And by the way, they have a much more effective approach to doing it because it’s a much softer approach. The Soviet Union was a little bit harder. It was much more military. China is much more—it’s kind of the panda approach to communist infiltration because it’s friendly. It hugs you. It doesn’t want to hurt you. It wants to make you think it’s friendly. And why can’t it be friendly? Because it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And they never want to go to war. They just want to do trade that’s in their own interest. This is the problem.

They forget to mention that they put them into cannibalism-level poverty before they do the lifting.

See, but you’re just saying that because you’re a cultist. See, that’s what they would say. And by the way, none of that stuff exists. In fact, we’ve had people come over, and they will attest to it. Very important people will come over and attest that this is not happening. This same thing is happening here in the United States. For me, when it started happening with COVID and I saw it, I’m like, oh my God. What is it that you saw? It’s this convergence of this ability to create messaging, you know, in many cases based on fear, that gets people to basically suspend, number one, suspend their natural distrust of the government.

Americans have always had a natural distrust of the government. Then all of a sudden it’s like, the government cannot lie to me. The government can do no wrong. I must do what the government says. Oh, by the way, you must do what the government says. And if you say that you distrust the government, you’re a bad person. All of a sudden, the fourth estate became part of the establishment of the government. And now whatever the government says, they repeat. And again, what happened in China was deliberate.

What happened in the United States was the result of economic consolidation tied with data and information, computing, and communications. It’s all essentially aligned in the same type of centralized information control. One is based on more or less monetary means, economic benefits, and the vast, enormous wealth of the tech companies in the United States. And in China, it’s the Communist Party. But the net effect of both is a centralization of information. And that centralization of information and the fact that we are tightly coupled with the Chinese Communist Party means that sometimes, both messages get through, at least on our side.

On their side, it’s blocked. Because there’s no X platform in China, there’s no Facebook in China. So there’s a one-way messaging flow. So while we have our own things, MAGA’s bad, then other things can come in, decoupling’s bad, this Cold War view is bad—anything that basically would sensitize you to being wary of the Chinese Communist Party, all of a sudden that’s a bad way of thinking; that’s a wrong way of thinking.

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The Silent War of Cyber, Resources, and Opinion | Gen. Robert Spalding