Setting Forth the Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I want to compliment my good friend and colleague Senator Portman, the great Senator from the State of Ohio, who has done so much in this Chamber on so many issues--COVID-19 relief is just one--to help our great Nation.

Some of you may have heard the news that Senator Portman--I am still very distraught about it--has announced that he is not going to be running for reelection in 2 years, and I think that is going to be a huge loss, not just to the State of Ohio but to our great Nation.

I want to commend Senator Portman for all his phenomenal work. He is proving, again, his leadership and his statesmanship here as we are trying to attack and take on big challenges for our Nation. China

Mr. President, I also want to talk about another big challenge for our Nation, something that I have come down on the floor since I was elected 6 years ago to the Senate to talk about, and that is the challenge that we have with regard to the rise of China. As a matter of fact, this is an area I talk frequently about because there is a lot more bipartisan progress on this incredibly important issue--the most important geostrategic challenge facing our Nation right now, probably the challenge that will be facing us for the next 50 to 100 years--that is with us today.

But there has been progress. I want to talk about this progress, and I want to talk about something, another development that I think is very important.

There has been an awakening. When I started to come down and talk about the rise of China, not a lot of people were talking about it, but there has been huge progress in that now everybody is talking about it--the Biden administration, and the Trump administration had been. I think President Trump and his team, with their national security strategy, their national defense strategy, deserve a lot of credit from reorienting our focus, which was the appropriate focus post-9/11 on violent extremist organizations, like al-Qaida and ISIS, to the new challenge of great power competition with China as the pacing threat that we have with regard to our Nation.

Again, this is something that has been very bipartisan. When you look at Members of this body, particularly those who focus on foreign policy and national security, they all agree that this reorientation on this challenge is something that we need to be doing as a country in a bipartisan way--dealing with the rise of China.

I think, when we talk about this challenge, we are at a place in history that, in many ways, is analogous to the period right after World War II. I want to talk briefly about that in my remarks

In 1946, we had what at the time was a recognition that, post World War II, we had a new challenge--similar to the challenge we are seeing right now, the recognition that we have this challenge with China. In 1946, we started to recognize that we have a challenge with our old World War II ally, the Soviet Union. There was a big focus on this challenge, but not necessarily in organizing foreign policy principles that could help us get through it.

Then, in the 1946-1947 period, an American diplomat named George Kennan wrote an article. It was an anonymous article--he signed it the ``X Article''--in Foreign Affairs, and it was called ``The Sources of Soviet Conduct.'' What Kennan did, really, for the country, for elected officials, for the Senate, for the executive branch, is that he laid out what he saw as the challenge that we are facing with regard to the Soviet Union--the internal weaknesses that the Soviets actually had-- with incredible insights in that regard, and, then, what our long-term strategy should be.

Here is what he said in this article. He said that American policymakers need to enact a policy of ``firm containment'' with regard to the Soviet Union, a country that always was trying to expand. He said, if we, as a nation, with our allies, try to contain this expansion, it would ``increase enormously the strains under which the Soviet [Union and its] policy must operate . . . and in this way promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.''

Think about that. That was the strategy of containment laid out by George Kennan, followed for decades by American administrations, by this body, Republicans and Democrats--the strategy of containment. And we all know what happened.

George Kennan's fundamental insights into this policy--that the Soviet Union would either mellow or completely break down and collapse because we were putting containment pressure on them--ended up happening. The Berlin Wall came down just as Kennan predicted. The Soviet Union broke up peacefully, and this was a remarkable triumph of American democracy and strategy that our Nation should be proud of. That is what happened then.

A lot of us have been saying that we are at a new point with regard to China. There is an awakening. What should that strategy be? I want to talk about a strategy document that just came out.

Kennan's document was called the ``Long Telegram.'' Just this past weekend, the Atlantic Council--which is a think tank here in DC and has been around for decades and is very well respected on the Republican side and the Democrat side--put out a strategy that they called the ``Longer Telegram,'' literally in kind of the analogous situation that George Kennan had done this in 1946 and 1947.

This strategy, also, coincidentally, does not identify the author. So it is similar to that ``X Article'' in 1946 and 1947. The author is anonymous and put out a strategy with insights on how we, as a nation, should deal with the rise of China. The Atlantic Council, as I said, has been around for decades. They published this, and they said this is probably the most impressive strategy document that they have ever published.

Now, is it perfect? Is this the answer? Is this the containment strategy from 1946 and 1947 that was the triumph of American diplomacy over the last 50 years with the Soviet Union?

We shall see. We don't know. But I looked through it, and I do think it is quite a remarkable document, and it is a great important development that we all need to come together on and this new administration--the Biden administration--needs to take a hard look at.

The focus of this strategy document says, which we all believe now, that ``the single most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian China under President General Secretary Xi Jinping.''

I think a lot of us know that. A lot of us have been talking about that. That is the awakening that I believe has happened here in the United States and certainly here in the U.S. Senate.

But like the Kennan article, this one has some very perceptive insights. One is that it focuses on what it sees as one of the biggest weaknesses in China right now, and that is the fracturing of the Communist Party leadership. I am going to talk about that because it emphasizes--``anonymous'' here emphasizes--that should be our focus.

The piece begins by setting the stage of where we are right now.

The strategy article published by the Atlantic Council is titled ``The Longer Telegram: Toward a New American China Strategy'' and can be found at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic- council-strategy-paper-series/the-longer-telegram/.

It talks about the scale of the economy of China and its military and the speed of its technical advancement and its radically different world view than that of the United States. It notes that China now profoundly impacts every major U.S. national interest. This is our challenge, one that is gradually emerged over two decades and has accelerated greatly under the leadership of Xi Jinping.

How has Xi Jinping ruled during this rise? He has eliminated his political opponents. He has stalled market reforms, used ethno- nationalism to unite his country, and his treatment of ethnic minorities has bordered on genocide. In doing so, he has fostered a quasi-Maoist personality cult and a new form of totalitarian, high-tech police state.

Anonymous writes:

In what is a fundamental departure from his risk-averse post-Mao predecessors, Xi [Jinping] has demonstrated that he intends to project China's authoritarian system, coercive foreign policy, and military presence well beyond his country's own borders to the world at large. China, under Xi, unlike under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao-- [three previous Chinese leaders]--is no longer a status quo power. It has become a revisionist power.

That is very troubling for the United States, and this is the situation as laid out by the author of the ``Long Telegram.''

What has the U.S. response been so far? It has been good, but it needs to improve.

The author gives credit to the Trump administration for sounding the alarm in its national security strategy and national defense strategy with regard to the ``strategic competition,'' the ``central challenge'' to our foreign policy, and great power competition that all have resulted from the rise of China.

Anonymous writes that a simple, Kennan-like strategy of containment won't be effective with regard to China because China has studied what happened to the USSR, learned from its mistakes, and understood that the inherent structural weakness with regard to the Soviet model itself was something that caused it to collapse, so China has focused on that.

Yet, as I mentioned, the author emphasizes another central vulnerability of the Chinese system, one which he or she, the author, thinks we need to take advantage of.

Here is what Anonymous writes:

The political reality is that the [Chinese Communist Party] is significantly divided on Xi's leadership and his vast ambitions. Senior party members have been greatly troubled by Xi's policy directions and angered by his endless demands for absolute loyalty. They fear for their own lives and the future livelihoods of their families.

Of particular political toxicity in this mix are the reports unearthed by the international media of the wealth amassed by Xi's family and members of his political inner circle, like so many other authoritarians who amass wealth through corruption, despite the vigor with which Xi has conducted his own anti-corruption campaign, which has destroyed many of his rivals.

So what do we do with this information? As Anonymous writes here--the author of the ``Long Telegram''--we need to focus on Xi Jinping himself.

U.S. strategy must remain laser-focused on Xi, his inner circle, and the Chinese political context in which they rule. Changing their decision-making will require understanding, operating within, and changing their political and strategic paradigm. All U.S. policy aimed at altering China's behavior should revolve around this fact, or it is likely to prove ineffectual.

This, Anonymous writes, has been the missing piece of the puzzle for our China strategy so far.

While U.S. leaders often differentiate between China's Communist Party government and the Chinese people [correctly], Washington [leaders] must achieve the sophistication necessary to go even further. U.S. leaders also must differentiate between the government and the party elite, as well as between the party elite and Xi [Jinping himself].

That is critical.

According to Anonymous, we must work to drive a wedge between these groups and to frustrate Xi's ambitions in order to ``cause China's elite leadership to collectively conclude that it is in the country's best interests to continue operating within the existing U.S.-led liberal international order rather than build a rival [authoritarian] order [throughout the world], and that it is in the party's best interests . . . not to attempt to expand China's borders or to export its political [authoritarian] model beyond China's shores.''

That is the juxtaposition of the significant challenge we have right now with the current strategy in what Anonymous writes in this document that we should be building on.

In building on these insights, the author emphasizes that U.S. strategy should comprise seven integrated components. Many of us have come down to the floor to talk about some of these, but let me touch on a few: rebuilding the economic, military, technological, and human capital underpinnings of long-term U.S. national power, and I think we can all agree on that; agreeing on a set of limited, enforceable policy ``red lines'' that China should be deterred from crossing under any circumstances, such as forcibly invading Taiwan; agreeing on a larger number of ``major national security interests'' which are neither vital nor existential in nature but which require a range of retaliatory actions to inform Chinese strategic behavior; defining those areas where continued strategic cooperation with China remains in U.S. interests; and prosecuting a full-fledged global ideological battle in defense of our political and economic models in contrast with China's authoritarian state capitalist models around the world. Finally, all of this needs to be done in conjunction with and closely coordinating with all of our allies in Europe, in North America, and, of course, in the Asia-Pacific.

This last point is critical. Our allies are critical. We need to remember we are an ally-rich nation. China is an ally-poor nation. That is one of our huge comparative advantages in the geostrategic challenge that we have with China over the next decades

At the end of the day, as Anonymous writes, ideas matter. Ultimately, this is going to be the contest of ideas--China's authoritarian model, which it wants to promote and export, versus the U.S. Western model of open economies, just societies, and competitive, free political systems.

Over the long term, the author writes, the Chinese people may well come to question and challenge the party's century-long proposition that China's great, ancient civilization--thousands of years old--is forever destined to an authoritarian future over which the people have no choice. That decision, however, must come from the Chinese people themselves. We can only provide a model, and we can only show the way. We need to do so with confidence and with our allies.

As Anonymous concludes, there is a subtle, yet corrosive, force that has been at work in the United States for some time, raising doubt about our Nation's future, and some who are encouraging a sense that, as a country, America's best days may now be in the past. Well, I, for one, certainly and fully disagree with this, as does the author of the ``Long Telegram.'' We are a young country. We are a resilient country. Our innovation is beyond compare. We are a free country, and as a result of the long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union, we also know what works: maintaining peace through strength, promoting free markets and free people at home, and having the confidence in George Kennan's insights from 1946 and 1947 that the Chinese Communist Party, like the Soviet Communist Party, likely ``bears within it the seeds of its own decay.''

While democracies are resilient, adaptive, and self-renewing, there are many vulnerabilities embedded in China's perceived strengths. One- man rule creates acute political risks, as Anonymous has described, that we need to take advantage of. Historical grievance can breed violent nationalism. State-directed economic growth can produce massive overcapacity and mountains of debt.

The gradual and, in some ways, abrupt snuffing out of freedom in places like Hong Kong is creating spontaneous protests of tens of thousands of young people that we have been seeing now for months. China's budding military power and historical view of itself as a nation and culture superior to many others is alarming its neighboring states, inspiring them to step up their security cooperation with the United States. Nearly half of wealthy Chinese want to emigrate, and these are the winners from China's four decades of heavy economic growth.

As we have in the past, Americans can prevail in this long-term geopolitical and ideological contest, but doing so will require a new level of strategic initiative, organization, and confidence in who we are and what we stand for. This also means we must redouble our efforts in making the strategic case not just to Americans but to others around the world, particularly our allies.

Let me conclude by saying that the ``Long Telegram,'' while not perfect, sets out what I believe is certainly one of the best strategies I have read to date about how the United States needs to address the significant challenge that we will be facing for decades.

I hope my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, all have the opportunity to read this and analyze it, for, like Kennan's strategy of containment, our China policy, to be successful, also needs to be very bipartisan and ready to be operationalized for decades.

(Mr. HICKENLOOPER assumed the Chair.)

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