Ahead of this week’s GOP primary debate, Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, urging the debate organizers to pose questions about the candidates’ stances on TikTok, U.S. financial flows to Chinese military firms, and how they would deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Gallagher has staked out a position against Donald Trump in the primary, and a recent report says that Ron DeSantis has sought his counsel on China.
“For Republican candidates struggling in Mr. Trump’s shadow, this is their best opportunity to differentiate themselves,” the Wisconsin Republican wrote. “Mr. Biden remains blinded by his party’s belief that climate change, not China, is the biggest geopolitical threat facing the U.S. As a result, his administration is reviving diplomatic and economic engagement with China as a core pillar of American grand strategy.”
But in Milwaukee last night, the Republican candidates for president were asked a question about climate change long before anyone asked about the premier geopolitical threat facing Americans. And the debate moderators posed only one question specifically about China, prompting one very brief answer before the conversation moved to a different topic.
The absence of a lengthy discussion of China’s malign behavior shouldn’t surprise anyone who has paid attention to the campaign up to now. The topic typically doesn’t crack the top of the list of voter priorities. To the extent that GOP primary candidates have talked about China thus far, they’ve mostly done so in broad terms and have not yet drawn contrasts with their opponents.
That said, yesterday’s fracas did bring out some of those differences on the candidates’ views on China policy, at least as it intersects with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On that topic, Nikki Haley delivered a memorable applause-inducing line slamming Vivek Ramaswamy’s lack of government experience.
“You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows,” she said, reprising attacks that she had made in statements and interviews in the lead-up to the debate. She was pointing out Ramaswamy’s controversial takes on foreign policy, including his willingness to signal to China that it could annex Taiwan in the late 2020s once America stands up its own semiconductor industry and his recent comments that he would cut off military aid to Israel.
Her exchange with Ramaswamy came during a portion of the debate focused on Ukraine. Ramaswamy argued that supporting Ukraine distracts from “the real threat we face today, Communist China,” while Haley maintained that the “no limits” partnership between Russia and China means that degrading the capabilities of the former will hit the latter, too.
But when the debate’s sole question premised on China came a few minutes later, it didn’t elicit too much discussion about the threat posed by Beijing. In fact, it didn’t lead to much conversation about China at all.
Turning to North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Fox host Bret Baier asked, “How would you deter China as a President Burgum?”
Burgum called it “the No. 1 issue that we’re facing,” and he gave a detailed enough answer, ticking through President Biden’s effort to seek rapprochement with Xi, the administration’s campaigns against fossil-fuel production, the need to transfer anti-ship missiles to Taiwan, and a comment about how the withdrawal from Afghanistan led to the invasion of Ukraine.
He concluded by arguing that the U.S. can “absolutely” police the southern border while aiding Ukraine but that the president has wrongly allocated resources to new IRS agents instead of Border Patrol officers.
When Baier next went to Tim Scott, with the same question about deterring Chinese aggression, the South Carolina senator picked up where Burgum left off. “Let’s fire the 87,000 IRS agents and hire or double the number of Border Patrol agents,” he said, segueing into a comment about a trip he took to Yuma and why he believes the U.S. should complete the border wall: It’s critical to stopping the flow of fentanyl into the country.
“As president of the United States, I will make that border wall complete,” he said.
From there, the debate moved on to a question about whether the candidates would use military force against Mexico’s drug cartels.
That’s an important question, and it led to an informative exchange. But another important and, perhaps, obvious question given Beijing’s recent saber-rattling — whether each candidate would respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with U.S. forces — went unasked and unanswered.
When that portion of the debate ended for a commercial break, an ad from TikTok aired.