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March 22, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:19
Why CCP Leaders Fear the Exposure of Their Immense Wealth: Col. Grant Newsham
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You hear all the time, Mr. Trump is Putin's stooge.
Well, let's think about it.
Of all the presidents that were involved in Ukraine, it was Mr. Trump who gave lethal weapons to the Ukrainians, particularly Javelin missiles.
And in the war since then, the Russians have suffered well over half a million casualties, many of those dead.
In this episode, I sit down with China expert and retired U.S. Marine Colonel Grant Newsham.
America was pushing businesses into China at the same time the Chinese were telling their army to be able to defeat a country with aircraft carriers.
They meant the Americans.
Take a week and read the Chinese media, the English language versions of it, and the venom directed at the United States.
That'll give you a pretty good sense of what our prospects are for really establishing a decent relationship with the Chinese communists.
I just don't think it's possible.
Newsham describes the unique strategy he sees in Trump's actions vis-a-vis China and how America can leverage what he describes as the regime's kryptonite.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Grant Newsham, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
I'm glad to be here.
Grant, so tell me about Trump's diplomacy.
Well, he's accused of a lot of things.
He's accused of one being a stooge of Vladimir Putin.
He's accused of being in it for himself.
But the real insult that's thrown at him is he's transactional.
And if you think about it, well, I would hope he's transactional.
I want every...
President to get the most he can for the United States, for us, when he's dealing with foreign countries.
And presumably all presidents do this.
It's just with Mr. Trump that it's considered an insult.
We like to see ourselves as altruists, but we aren't.
And even when we are acting like we think altruistically, we're getting something of value.
It can even be the psychic satisfaction of...
We're not appearing as altruists.
And we want people to appreciate what we do.
So we are getting something.
And I think Mr. Trump has correctly observed that most of his predecessors have not been very good at cutting deals.
And America is left giving a lot but not getting much out of it.
So what I wrote in the article is pretty much stating, well, of course he's transactional.
Every president is.
It's just he may be a little better than most of his predecessors.
And as you point out, it's what he's transactional about that's the issue, I think, right?
This is really the nature of the accusations, isn't it?
One of the main things we're talking about in terms of transactionalism is the idea is that America will hand over the lives of its young men and women, and in exchange, what do we get?
You know, when you're talking about the lives of our citizens, the lives of our young people who joined the military in particular, well, we ought to get something back for that.
It better be worth it.
Not because...
America's a great nation, and we've always done this since World War II.
But rather, you know, it needs to be clearly in America's interests, and we need to get something from it.
Otherwise, you're just using our young people as really a dispensable bargaining chip.
And too often, it seems like the elites on both coasts are quite willing to do this.
But Mr. Trump is rightfully saying, look, if you want our support, well, you're going to have to do everything you possibly can to defend.
Defend yourself before you expect us to sacrifice our own people for that.
And that's a pretty basic sort of dynamic or equation.
The fact that Mr. Trump raises this, he gets all sorts of attacks, and he's accused of what have you, but he's just properly doing a cost-benefit analysis as any businessman would, and really as any leader of the United States would.
What is America getting out of these things that we do?
And to take another example, Afghanistan.
We were there 20 years, blew at least a trillion dollars, maybe two trillion.
And what was that for?
What exactly did America give, and what did we get in return?
And I would say we gave an awful lot more than we got.
And he's pointed this out, and he's been attacked for it, but what I'm getting at is being called transactional.
It shouldn't be an insult.
In fact, it actually should be a pretty good thing.
When it's young people, when it's America paying the bill, you want to get something useful in return.
One of the accusations that I keep hearing, frankly, is this idea of being too friendly with dictators.
How do you view that?
Being friendly with dictators, that's another insult thrown in Mr. Trump's way.
But when you think about it, let's take Putin, for example, of Russia.
You just hear all the time, you know, Mr. Trump is Putin's.
You know, Stooge, he's a recruited asset of the Russians.
Well, let's think about it.
Of all the presidents that were involved in Ukraine, you had Bush, Obama, Biden.
Only one of them gave the Ukrainians the ability to actually kill Russians.
It was Mr. Trump who gave lethal weapons to the Ukrainians, particularly Javelin missiles.
And as a result, Putin's initial assault on Ukraine in 2022 was blunted with the help of these weapons, and in the war since then, the Russians have suffered well over half a million casualties, many of those dead.
What you would call an asset behaving in a particular way.
So that's a funny sort of...
Putin isn't getting his value for money, I would say, if this is what Mr. Trump has done to him.
But also there's just the nature of negotiations, particularly state-to-state relations, and from leader to leader.
Mr. Trump is just recognizing the reality of negotiations.
Other presidents have done the exact same thing.
Obama was very friendly, superficially at least, towards Mr. Putin.
George Bush said that he looked into Putin's eyes and he could see his soul, that it was somebody you could deal with.
So this is, as I said, it's nothing unusual.
If you want to get a deal done, you have to make some concessions in how you refer to people, and that's all.
So whenever he's called that, you really have to question the people raising those allegations.
I was at an event yesterday with the leadership of the House Select Committee on the CCP, Chairman Molinar and Ranking Member Krishnamurti.
And Krishnamurti said something interesting which kind of caught my attention.
He started talking about the concept of comprehensive national power, which I don't hear a lot of politicians talking about often.
And I often reference this as an explanation as to why...
The Chinese regime never goes for win-win.
It's part of their ideological view, how they view themselves versus others.
I want to comment on that.
Is it possible to actually make a good-faith deal with the Chinese regime?
No. There's really no empirical evidence to suggest you can.
And I say, go back to the founding of that regime, or take more modern times.
And it's just not possible.
It's not the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
There's a Chinese expression that translates as, you die, I live.
And in some respects, it is peasant thinking.
But it does reflect very much the Chinese Communist Party's view of things, is that it sees this very much as a zero-sum game, as a word some might use.
Whatever China can get, it will take, and it will not make concessions, because it does very much view this as a fight to the finish.
And Xi has said this.
If you actually read the translations of his speeches, both spoken and written, he's clearly saying that the Chinese system cannot survive if the American system survives.
One of them's got to go.
And he has referred to the United States, the U.S. system, particularly these ideas of freedom and human rights and the things we hold dear.
He refers to these as the enemy, as something that must be destroyed.
As I said, where's the evidence that you can cut a deal with the Chinese that works?
They always use the word win-win, but it does mean that the Chinese win twice.
No evidence that this can happen, but there's still plenty of people on our side who think there is some sort of accommodation we can reach, sort of a live and let live.
These days it's referred to, again, as detente, like was said with the Russians.
The idea being, well, we don't like each other, but we just have to reach an agreement where we can get along.
It's not ideal, but it's the best we can do.
But it helps if the other side is willing to do that, and the Chinese are not willing to do that.
Everything they do is designed to take down the United States, to destroy the free countries, and to weaken them.
And you just cannot deal with a regime like that.
And this is a unique regime that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth.
And we have to recognize this at some point, that chasing a deal is a fool's errand at best.
And while we're chasing it...
They're attacking us, weakening us, and putting themselves in a position where we may find ourselves unable to respond when the time comes.
Grant, one quick sec.
We're going to take a break, and folks, we'll be right back.
And we're back with Colonel Grant Newsham, Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Security Policy.
Very briefly, you just...
Explain this concept of comprehensive national power and how the Chinese regime uses it.
Well, it's almost a way of amassing, accumulating every possible chip, everything of value on Earth so that you control it.
And the way the Chinese would look at it is if they have something, the other side has less.
And so their comprehensive national power is strengthening.
It could be buying lithium mines in Africa.
Well, if you get control of these, you've deprived the other side of it.
You've hurt him.
It could be fentanyl.
Killed 70,000 Americans in one year, and you've made a ton of money from this, well, your comprehensive national power has gone up because he has 70,000 fewer people, many of those of military age, and you've suffered no punishment at all.
So this, from a Chinese perspective, is definitely a win-win for China.
And it really applies in every area.
It's not just for military things.
It could be the number of PhDs that That China produces, the number of STEM graduates they have, and seeing the dumbing down of the United States.
Now, if you see the U.S., they're in chaos, like we saw during the riots in 2020.
The Chinese don't just look at this with disinterested spectators, but they see, very good, they're weaker.
We're stronger.
And it very much is the idea is to drive down your opponent.
It's not a competition, but rather it is to build yourself up by driving the other side down.
It's not to have a fair competition and like two rental cars competing against each other.
Another example, take the Pacific Island nations.
The Chinese have insinuated themselves into the Pacific Islands, have immense influence now, and that means that America has less.
America has been beaten down.
Latin America, you look at these graphics that are easy to find compared to 20 years ago, you see it's all blue because this is where America was, say, the main trading partner.
Now it's almost all red.
Once again, the Chinese look at this not as a fair fight, but rather as setting the other guy up for failure.
And the same thing applies to Africa and many other parts of the world.
He certainly views himself as the consummate dealmaker and has shown himself to be an effective dealmaker in the past.
And I can't help but think back to the tariff negotiations that happened back under Trump 45 in his first presidency.
What was notable to me was that it seemed like the first time that I was aware of where the Chinese regime was actually leveraged into a position it didn't want to be in.
And is that a kind of negotiation?
I mean, how do you view that?
Because maybe there is a deal to be had, it just needs to be done that way.
That is the only way.
It's not sort of a normal negotiation where both sides compromise.
Neither side leaves quite happy.
But rather, it has to be one where you have an overwhelming advantage and you take it.
And there's nothing to be gained from being sort of concessionary by saying, well, yeah, I've got four aces, but I don't want to hurt the other guy.
Don't want to embarrass him.
Believe me, they won't do it to us.
But you have to do that when dealing with a regime like the PRC.
And then, as importantly, you have to be very careful about making sure the deal is enforced.
And if it isn't enforced, well, you pretty much just wasted your time.
And if you allow the other side to wriggle off the hook...
Well, why did you even bother?
But it has to be done ruthlessly if you're going to have any success at all.
And Mr. Trump was dealing with the Chinese.
I think it may have taken him a little while to get his feet on this.
And that's not unusual.
Suddenly you become president.
What do you do?
That's not an easy job to have.
But his was the first administration to actually look at the Chinese as the enemy which they declare they are.
And they actually did use economic pressure against the PRC instead of every other administration which said, well, we've just got to accommodate them and they'll gradually liberalize as they get.
More prosperous.
But Mr. Trump realized that wasn't the case, and his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, was very good on this.
And they did do a lot of good things to try and use our economic advantage to get the Chinese to behave a certain way.
It may have been a lost cause, no matter what they did, but they did at least try.
And you can see from the Chinese response, the Chinese Communist response, that they didn't like it, but ultimately...
COVID came along and they were able to kind of get away from it.
And, you know, back to this Mr. Trump's ability as a dealmaker.
In my lifetime, I think the most impressive deal that I've seen cut at a state-to-state level is the Abraham Accords.
Between Israel and UAE and also Bahrain, for starters.
And nobody saw that coming.
Nobody in all the experts, the chattering classes, would have said this is impossible.
And he pulled that off.
So I'm always willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this.
Just see what he can come up with.
The Chinese regime, you could argue, is expert at what's called unrestricted warfare or asymmetrical hybrid warfare.
Sometimes it's described as that.
In the U.S., you argue that we have a tool of this nature that is the kryptonite for the Chinese regime.
So tell me about this.
What it is, it's a weapon that the Chinese leadership has created by itself.
And basically, it's the wealth which Xi Jinping and the top dogs in the Chinese Communist Party have amassed, both in China, but particularly overseas.
You know, the overseas real estate, the bank accounts, the businesses which they and their relatives own, their relatives with green cards.
Who live in the countries they call their main enemy, and establish setting up bolt holes for themselves.
But this is immense wealth.
And the Chinese give some hints now and then about how much wealth has been moved out of the country, and it is in the many trillions of dollars.
But as I said, it's the top people in the Chinese Communist Party who have really done well for themselves.
And keep in mind that in China, by their own admission, there's about 600 million people who live on $5 a day.
And there's a lot of people who live on a lot less of that.
So how are they going to feel if the evidence of this massive theft by the top leadership is exposed?
If, for example, America and, say, the Japanese and the Free Nations put economic sanctions on China and they make life difficult, well, in communist regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party, they're glad to have the regular citizens.
Absorb that punishment.
Well, they do very well themselves, and they'll always have enough food and a nice place to live.
So they're glad to diffuse the pressure and the pain.
But when the pressure is, in fact, exposing their wealth, that makes it very personal to them.
And that could be a matter of life and death.
You know, either lose their position or worse because of popular unrest, popular anger over this.
But even within that regime, there's all sorts of factionalism and infighting.
Well, if you can use somebody's corruption, somebody's wealth and relatives overseas to expose it and bring them down, that is the one thing, though, that really scares them.
And we've seen some evidence in the past of just how much it does frighten them.
We're actually supposed to be doing it, like cataloging this.
The U.S. government is supposed to be developing a detailed report on this.
Well, they're supposed to, but apparently in the United States, when Congress passes a law, compliance is voluntary, it seems.
And what I'm talking about is a law which Congress passed in late 2022, requiring the intelligence community and the Secretary of State to produce an unclassified report on the
wealth of the Chinese Communist Party's leadership.
They had to do it within a year.
So now they're
It's late.
It hasn't come out.
They're well over a year late.
So the requirement is there, and one asks, well, where is it?
It hasn't come.
Now, one of the ironies is that the senator who pushed this piece of legislation the most was Senator Marco Rubio, who is now the Secretary of State.
We will see this report.
And then, of course, there is the question of actually doing something with it.
That's the important thing, is not to just produce it and hope somebody notices it somewhere.
But when you have the information, then you have to put it in front of the right people for consideration.
And I would suggest the right people are the 1.4 billion Chinese, the vast majority of whom don't have overseas bank accounts, real estate.
And that will be the real test.
And I would point to around 2013 or so, Bloomberg actually produced an excellent report on some of this wealth and included the wealth of some of Xi Jinping's relatives.
And I have never seen the Chinese Communist Party leaders respond the way they did.
They were furious and for good reason.
And Bloomberg basically rolled over.
But the point was made.
And it showed the vulnerability that is there to be, really to be exposed and to be used as a tool, actually.
Grant, I can't help but remember, right around that time, there was another series of reports that was done by the New York Times.
This was as the Hu Jintao regime was making way for the Xi Jinping regime, but Xi had already, you know, amassed his power.
This is thinking way back a good number of years, but they won a Pulitzer for this.
They exposed the wealth of Wen Jiabao, who curiously was, frankly, probably the only reformer of the bunch.
I didn't hear as many protests about that particular exposure.
That's very interesting.
I think one conclusion to draw from that, or an inference, is that The Chinese leadership didn't mind having that exposed so much because it allowed them to get rid of a troublesome person.
But it shows how within those circles that there is this backstabbing and sort of, what do you call it, fighting that makes the exposure of wealth extremely dangerous.
So this report needs to be equal opportunity.
Oh, it has to be.
And there's just so much to work with on it.
It is shooting fish in a barrel.
Getting the information is not that hard.
Any competent financial researcher could do it.
We spend $100 billion on intelligence each year.
You think they should have some ability.
U.S. Treasury is good at it when they put their minds to it.
It's not hard to get the information.
But then getting it out is always the...
Trickier, but it's not at all hard.
One idea that I've proposed is to make it a sort of a weekly show.
You can put it out on Voice of America or Radio Free Asia or some platform that's accessible.
And so you put it out every Friday, say Friday afternoon.
And today it's going to be this guy.
Here's pictures of his overseas homes.
Here's his bank accounts.
He's got this much money, etc., etc.
And you could get all sorts of people interested, particularly in China, in, you know, dialing in to see, well, who's it going to be this week?
And that would make a lot of people pretty darn nervous.
And this is just one example of how you could put the information out in a sort of a fun way.
Well, Grant Newsham, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Well, thank you.
I always appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you all for joining Colonel Grant Newsham and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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