Michael Pillsbury Gains Prominence as President Trump Confronts Xi on Trade

By Alan Rappeport

Michael Pillsbury has spent years trying to understand China’s motivations. His realist view has made him one of President Trump’s top advisers on how to interact with Beijing.
WASHINGTON — Michael Pillsbury had just finished a rib-eye salad at the Cosmos Club on Tuesday when he received a text message from the White House: “The president is trying to reach you. Call back.”
A day later, Pillsbury huddled in the Oval Office with President Trump and senior members of the White House economic team ahead of a pivotal weekend meeting in Argentina between President Trump and Xi Jinping.
For more than an hour, President Trump, Pillsbury and advisers including Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Larry Kudlow, Jared Kushner and Peter Navarro, who joined remotely from California, strategized about negotiations with China that could determine the direction of a trade war that has gripped the world’s two largest economies, spooked global markets and shaken diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington.
President Trump and Xi are expected to dine on Saturday evening at the G-20 summit meeting in Buenos Aires, where they will talk about the possibility of a trade truce. 

The United States has imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the rate of some of the levies is set to increase to 25 percent in January, from 10 percent. 

President Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on all Chinese imports — an additional $267 billion — if a compromise cannot be reached.
President Trump has received conflicting advice from his trade team about how to approach China but it is Pillsbury’s counsel that the president is most likely to keep in mind.
He has emerged as a key sounding board for President Trump, who has publicly referred to Pillsbury as “the leading authority on China” on multiple occasions. (Three times, by Pillsbury’s count, who said sales of his 2015 manifesto on China have soared as a result.)
Ubiquitous on Fox News in recent months, Pillsbury’s book “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” has become a lodestar for those in the West Wing pushing for a more forceful response to the threat that China’s rise poses to the United States.
“We could not have shifted the entire apparatus to this confrontational mode with China if it wasn’t for the intellectual architecture of ‘A Hundred-Year Marathon,’” said Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist who recruited Pillsbury as an adviser during the transition and used to hand out copies of his book around the White House.
The book, which was published while Pillsbury was advising the Obama administration as a Pentagon consultant, presents an accurate view of China as a clever enemy with a stealthy plan to overtake the United States as the dominant world power by 2049 — a century after the People’s Republic was founded.

In his book, Pillsbury describes China’s approach as one of deception, in which its leaders use America’s belief that it can democratize China to “mislead and manipulate American policymakers to obtain intelligence and military, technological and economic assistance.”
Pillsbury plays into this argument with President Trump, arguing that the clash between the United States and China has evolved precisely because President Trump’s agenda to restore America’s “greatness” is so directly at odds with Xi’s own political doctrine for modernizing China, known officially as “Xi Jinping Thought.”
“They take ‘Make America Great Again’ very seriously,” Pillsbury, referring to the Chinese, said in an interview this week. 

“To them, it’s a violation of the new model of great power relations, it’s a violation of the new era and it’s a violation of ‘Xi Jinping Thought,’ if you will.”

Tall, bald and broad-shouldered, Pillsbury has served the United States government in varying levels of prominence as a Chinese and national security expert in administrations dating to Richard Nixon’s. 

Fluent in Mandarin with a doctorate in political science from Columbia University, Pillsbury, 73, gained notoriety among China specialists for his ability to gain access to Chinese intelligence and military officials and his knack for finding and translating archived documents that shed light on China’s thinking.
And, like some of those in the Trump administration, Pillsbury also once considered himself a “panda hugger” — someone who thought that China could become an economic and political ally whose growth should be supported.
But Pillsbury began to take a darker view of China — and its ambitions — later in his career, after interviews and discussions with top military and intelligence officials in Beijing. 

And he has found a soul mate in President Trump — whose relentless desire to upend America’s trade relationship with China and protect domestic power has produced a trade war that has no natural path to resolution.
Pillsbury was brought into President Trump’s orbit during the transition period in 2016, after the president-elect spoke by telephone with Taiwan’s president, breaking protocol and angering China.
He has worked closely with Matthew Pottinger, the senior director of Asian affairs on the National Security Council, and the White House considered offering him a formal role, according to a former official, but there were concerns about his ability to get a security clearance. 

Pillsbury said that it remained a possibility and that he would like to be the ambassador to China someday.
As President Trump increasingly blurs economic security and national security — viewing China’s economic rise as a national security threat to America — Pillsbury’s knowledge of China has become even more in demand.
President Trump’s economic team is deeply divided on how to approach China, with nationalists like Mr. Navarro and Mr. Robert E. Lighthizer, President Trump’s top trade negotiator, often clashing with Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, who have offered pro-China approaches.
Pillsbury, whose realist view of China has found resonance, tries to explain to White House officials that China’s leadership has its own internal divisions and advises President Trump on how to leverage those splits to gain an advantage, he said.
When Mr. Navarro, with whom he plays tennis and who featured him in his movie “Crouching Tiger,” asked him how to rankle the Chinese earlier this year, Pillsbury begrudgingly told him that using the term “economic aggression” would grab their attention because the word “aggression” has a more sinister meaning in Mandarin.
In June the phrase was emblazoned in the title of a White House report on China’s intellectual property practices.
In practice, Pillsbury offers more nuanced prescriptions for responding to China’s march to global dominance. 

Others in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, have openly clashed with the Chinese.
“To try to get them to sign a piece of paper saying they’ve done all these bad things is futile,” Mr. Pillsbury said. 

“It gets back to the goal of the president. If the goal is to humiliate the Chinese and tell the base we’re stopping this raping of our country, this approach won’t work.”

Pillsbury’s more doveish tone is part of an effort to stay in the good graces of the Chinese. 

He has traveled to China four times in the last 18 months and is planning to go again in December, when he will share insights about the United States with Chinese think tanks.
Consulting and writing have made for a lucrative career for Pillsbury, who is working on another book and has mused about a movie of his own. 

He lives in a $7.5 million Georgetown mansion with his wife, a British-born ballerina who was a member of the Royal Ballet Corps, and they own a well-curated collection of Asian art. 

For recreation, he flies a small Cessna, which he crashed last year during a landing in Maryland. 

He was unhurt.
These days, Pillsbury likes to boast — with a smile — that he has become a “humble, modest fellow.”

US law enforcers should stop China’s influence campaign

Michael Pillsbury, hailed by President Trump as the leading authority on China, says it is time to act against wicked Beijing
By Jun Mai

Michael Pillsbury, author the The Hundred-Year Marathon, has emerged as one of the most influential voices on China policy in the US. 

US law enforcement should step in to stop a Chinese government influence campaign in the United States, according to Michael Pillsbury, an influential American strategist hailed as “the leading authority on China” by US President Donald Trump.
Mr Pillsbury claimed the Chinese influence campaign dated back more than seven decades.
“A lot of people said words along this line: it should not be law enforcement, it should not be national security,” Mr Pillsbury said at forum on Wednesday at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based conservative think tank that has grown influential under the Trump presidency.
“I’m very scared when people think it should be a moral principle that US national security law enforcement or congress can’t get involved in these issues.

“We can protect the Chinese diaspora’s human rights and civil liberties, although we are going to have action by the US government.”
Mr Pillsbury was commenting on a massive influence campaign by Chinese embassies and consulates in the United States.
The campaign has included shaping discussions through Confucius Institutes, mobilising overseas Chinese students to improve the image of the Chinese Communist Party and silencing political dissent among overseas Chinese.
Mr Pillsbury, director of the Centre on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, is a former intelligence official and diplomat.
During the Reagan administration, he was an assistant undersecretary of defence for policy planning. He is the author of The Hundred-Year Marathon, a book much discussed both in China and the United States, amid tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.
Mr Pillsbury’s influence in the White House was underlined by President Trump’s comment that Pillsbury is “the leading authority on China” during an interview last month.
US Vice-President Mike Pence name-checked strategist Michael Pillsbury twice during a speech at the Hudson Institute in Washington on October 4. 

His name was mentioned twice in a speech by Vice-President Mike Pence on China, dubbed by some the “new cold war speech”, which included a long list of criticism of Beijing’s policies, ranging from trade practices to human rights.
Vice-President Pence’s speech, delivered three weeks ago, was also made at the Hudson Institute.
During Wednesday’s event, Mr Pillsbury argued that influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party had started as early as the end of the second world war, when Washington sent five-star general George Marshall to stop China’s civil war.
“This debate about how to handle the influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party – what if what Dr Pillsbury says is true, that it first began in 1944?” Mr Pillsbury said.
Summarising Marshall’s unsuccessful mission to broker peace between China’s Kuomintang and the communists, Mr Pillsbury said the Communist Party had “successfully manipulated the US embassy and people back in DC”.
Marshall’s mission was to force the warring parties into a coalition government and to absorb Mao Zedong’s army into Chiang Kai-shek’s, with the dangling carrot of billions of dollars of US military and financial aid to smooth the way. 

After Marshall’s failed mission, the Communist Party took over China in 1949.
“Yes, I welcome all the new enthusiasm of all the young people who are discovering this just after Xi Jinping took over, just the last couple of years, but I think it goes way back,” he said.

Sina Delenda Est

Donald Trump’s New Asia Strategy
By Harry J. Kazianis

To be honest, it was quite amusing to watch the American and in many respects, international media, go into total meltdown when US President Donald Trump took a simple phone call from the President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen.
Vice President Mike Pence, using the word’s “President of Taiwan,” stating obvious reality, and creating another uproar in the process, gets to the heart of a foolish game of make-believe that the new administration could be itching to end.
Indeed, for many of us foreign policy professionals here in Washington who have bitterly commented on the Obama administration’s poorly resourced so-called “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific, this seemingly simple act was a clear sign of things to come — and was no surprise at all.
What President Trump must do now is offer up a much more expansive vision for America in the larger Indo-Pacific region while making the case to the American people why they must support such a vision.
When he does, another so-called “shocker” will reverberate the world over but will be something many China watchers have been begging for: a tougher line against Chinese aggression.

Long Overdue Shift:
A shift in policy toward Taiwan, and indeed the whole Asia-Pacific and larger Indo-Pacific region, has been something discussed in US foreign policy circles for almost a decade — even longer depending on what you base as your starting point.
The reason for such a shift is obvious.
To start, Beijing flipped from foe to friend thanks to Richard Nixon — a welcomed ally against the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, since the late 1970s, a largely bipartisan group of foreign policy intellectuals has pushed the idea of welcoming a "peacefully" rising China into the international community under the guise of what Robert Zellick famously termed becoming a “responsible stakeholder.”
The idea was to ensure China did not turn into an adversary by giving it an important place in the current international order, to prosper from it, and in many respects, help defend that prosperity for generations to come.
Beijing, it was thought at the time, if given a prominent place in the status-quo, would have little reason to fight against it.
And such a policy worked, for a time.
One can make a credible argument that Beijing did not challenge the international system, a system created largely by the United States and Western powers, for decades.
China’s economy integrated into the world financial system and Beijing became rich in the process. China now sports the second largest economy by measure of GDP (Number one if PPP is used), it has lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty and its borders, for the most part, across all domains, are largely secure.
However, since the fall of the Soviet Union and accelerating over the last decade or so, the People’s Republic has grown weary of an international system it was not strong enough to shape at the end of World War II.
Chinese leaders, quick to cite a century of humiliation at the hands of western powers, now want to amend that system to have a greater say in Asia’s affairs, and indeed, become the dominant power, its traditional place in the Asia pecking order for centuries, before its humiliation.
As one famous Chinese academic, based in Beijing, told me recently: “You Americans actually thought we would continue to support an international system that we never had any input in creating? Especially in a time when you are in decline?”
And events in recent years only go to show the great lengths China will push to change Asia’s order to its liking. 
For example, Beijing’s actions over the last several years in the South China Sea — through which 80% of the natural resources it needs to power its economy passes — have sparked heated debate in America that China not only may have dangerous ambitions, but seeks to push America out of the Asia-Pacific entirely.
Such actions include: declaring a ‘nine-dash-line’ which acts like sovereign borders over the richest ocean-based trade route on the planet, building fake islands that are now being transformed into military bases and creatively using nonmilitary maritime assets to push outlandish territorial claims all the way to far away Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

What Will Such a Shift Look Like?
So what will a Donald Trump policy for Asia look like?
If Trump takes the advice of his most experienced Asia hands, people like Peter Navarro, Michael Pillsbury, Randy Forbes and Forbes’ former deputy Alex Gray, Beijing will be in for a rough ride indeed.
As Executive Editor of The National Interest as well as Editor of The Diplomat, I have had what can be considered a front-row seat to what such thinkers have been saying for years.
First, the most obvious component to such a Trump strategy, as gleaned from the various writings of this distinguished group of Asia experts, is a greater emphasis on hard power and using such power to deter aggressive Chinese actions in the future.
Specifically, higher numbers and more sophisticated pieces of US military hardware would be transferred to the region.
Allowing this to happen would be an increase in US defense spending, with the end of sequestration.
Special focus would be on deploying assets that negate China’s fearsome anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy along with the much delayed public release of the Pentagon’s formal plans to push back against A2/AD, what was known in the past as Air-Sea Battle, now called JAM-GC.
Diplomacy would also be a big part of what has to be seen as a much more robust “pivot” under Trump.
Taiwan would be a big part of such a strategy, with relations being upgraded just under the level of full diplomatic recognition, an important sign of growing ties, but not enough to anger Beijing where kinetic conflict could be possible.
Vietnam should also see ties strengthened under the Trump administration, with possible US naval deployments to Cam Ranh Bay.
Economics, especially if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead and buried, must play a big part in a newly crafted Trump Asia policy.
Bilateral trade deals must be cemented with all members of the TPP, with special emphasis on Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan and Australia.
A Congressional source, who agreed to speak on background, said he already saw hints that the new administration was working up plans for bilateral trade deals throughout Asia.
He explained: “The new administration realizes there is a certain cost to be paid in the Asia-Pacific now that TPP won’t happen. The goal now is to work with partners and allies in Asia to ensure trade links are expanded. There is already talk on Capitol Hill on how to move forward — and quickly after Trump takes the oath.”

The Biggest Challenge:
But such a strategy, a plan I would fully support, will always suffer from one big challenge that must be considered if such an action were to be implemented and be successful: will the American people support it?
If President Trump wants to push back on China, he must explain and sell his strategy, using important political capital along the way. 
He would need to demonstrate why this is a top national priority, any why ultimately Americans might be called to sacrifice their lives for it.
As one retired Chinese naval officer said to me quite recently: “Are you willing to die for your place in Asia? Are your sons and daughters willing to give their lives for Taiwan? Or rocks in the South China Sea? We are.”
There is also the issue of possibly going too far in pushing back against China — appearing too hawkish and creating tensions that could lead to conflict.
If such a strategy is not managed properly, or were to become too belligerent against Beijing, and considering the fact that both nations have large arsenals of nuclear weapons, the consequences could be profound.
Ultimately, the issues raised by China’s challenging the status-quo in Asia are a timeless problem: when a rising power seeks to undo the international system and perks of an established power and its allies and partners.
However, there is much more at stake than the simple primacy of the US in Asia.
If Beijing is simply allowed to tear asunder important norms like the concept of the global commons truly being borderless as well as continue to bully allies and partners throughout the region a dangerous precedent will be set that other nations will surely follow. 
And that is something no nation can allow to occur.

Sina Delenda Est

Trump presidency would pursue a policy of “peace through strength” in Asia
By John Pomfret

President Trump has also vowed to add more than 70 ships to the U.S. naval fleet, turning it into a force of 350 surface ships and submarines. To ride herd over this massive buildup, Trump has reportedly tapped Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) to be the next secretary of the Navy. Forbes has long supported a bigger Navy and stronger pushback against China in the South China Sea.

I participated on Wednesday in a Chinese talk show on Chinese-owned Phoenix TV on the election of Donald Trump. 

There the glee was palpable about the victory of a man that Chinese state-run media has dubbed a “clown” and held up as an example of why the Chinese are better off living in a one-party state.
Underlying the glee was a belief of the guests, most of them leading Chinese analysts or former diplomats, that a Trump administration would cede the Western Pacific to China, downgrade its alliances with Japan and South Korea and not carry through on the candidate’s threats to slap tariffs on Chinese goods. 

Perhaps, I thought, my fellow panelists should be careful what they wished for.
To be sure, many in the Chinese government did not like Hillary Clinton. 

She made headlines in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, criticizing China’s family-planning policies. 

As secretary of state, she, more than President Obama, was the originator of “the pivot,” the United States’ move to refocus its power on Asia.
On the campaign trail, Trump criticized Clinton’s Asia policy and mused about pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea and Japan if they didn’t pay more for American defense. 

He floated the idea that perhaps the two longtime U.S. allies could even become nuclear powers. Chinese analysts were giddy at the prospect of a U.S. retreat from Asia.
But, increasingly, Trump’s musings on Asia appear to be more of a ploy to wrest more dollars from U.S. allies than a genuine threat to exit the region. 

On Wednesday, Trump assured South Korean President Park Geun-hye that the United States would defend South Korea from any North Korean aggression. 

Trump also agreed to meet with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in New York next week.
Trump has also vowed to add more than 70 ships to the U.S. naval fleet, turning it into a force of 350 surface ships and submarines. 

To ride herd over this massive buildup, Trump has reportedly tapped Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) to be the next secretary of the Navy. 

Forbes has long supported a bigger Navy and stronger pushback against China in the South China Sea.
Other signs point to a more assertive U.S. policy in Asia. 

Professor Peter Navarro described the Obama administration’s “pivot” as “talking loudly but carrying a small stick” and vowed a more forceful response to China’s maneuvers in the East and South China seas.

This week, two of Trump’s campaign advisers — professor Peter Navarro, known for his strong criticism of China, and Alexander Gray, who served as an adviser to Forbes — published an essay in Foreign Policy magazine arguing that the Obama administration had not been tough enough on China and that a Trump presidency would pursue a policy of “peace through strength” in Asia. 

Navarro and Gray described the Obama administration’s “pivot” as “talking loudly but carrying a small stick” and vowed a more forceful response to China’s maneuvers in the East and South China seas. 

Another Trump adviser is Michael Pillsbury, a former Defense Department official, who recently authored a book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” in which he accuses generations of U.S. leaders of being bamboozled by Beijing and outlines a Chinese plot to dominate the world.
On trade, while the guests on the show Wednesday night seemed blithe to Trump’s scheme to hit Chinese exports to the United States with tariffs or label China a currency manipulator, there is nothing to suggest that Trump won’t make good on these promises to pursue a far more protectionist path.
Already, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal in the Asia Pacific, is dead.
Again this is bad news for Beijing.
China’s exports to the United States have bankrolled the modernization of China’s military, science, technology and infrastructure and helped to improve the lives of countless millions.
While exports to the United States are no longer as central as they once were to China’s prosperity, with a shaky economy, Beijing needs all the business it can get.
Near the end of the show, a young man from the audience asked whether the prospect of better relations between the United States and Russia would end up hurting China.
None of the assembled seemed concerned.
But it very well could.
China shares a long border with Russia and a long, difficult history with the empire to its north. Despite a common interest in opposing U.S. power, tensions exist under the surface between Moscow and Beijing.
Listening to the talk from the panelists about Russia, I remembered reading the transcript of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger just a week before Nixon made his historic trip to China in February 1972.
“I think in 20 years your successor, if he’s as wise as you,” Kissinger said, “will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.” 
The president agreed.