US Representative Mike Waltz, who was nominated by US president-elect Donald Trump as national security adviser, recently emphasized the importance of Taiwan in advanced chip production and global trade.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has been “openly talking about the decline of America” and “replacing America as a global leader, the decline of Western values,” Waltz said during a Reagan Foundation event in California last month to promote his book, Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret.
Waltz said Xi aims to replace Western values with “essentially a techno surveillance state dictatorship” and described Taiwan as Xi’s “next step” after taking control over Tibet and Hong Kong.
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The lawmaker also warned of the “implications” of China taking over Taiwan.
“Not only would they control 80 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips, if you look at the geography, they would [also] control the shipping lanes into Japan, South Korea [and] Southeast Asia, [which is] about 50 percent of global GDP,” Waltz said. “The stakes are enormous.”
Waltz, a retired colonel, was the first US Green Beret elected to congress in 2018, after serving multiple tours in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa. He is a well-known China hawk who serves in the US House of Representatives’ China Task Force that seeks to address the Chinese Communist Party’s influence.
China has been building its military, and their navy and aerospace forces are now larger than the US’, Waltz said, adding that the Chinese government was “tripling — not just doubling — the size of their nuclear arsenal.”
Future US presidents should not just think in traditional terms of “tank to tank, ship to ship,” but also in terms of cyberattacks — such as those conducted by Volt Typhoon, a state-sponsored hacking group, he said.
Waltz said Volt Typhoon is not just spying, but also putting “cyber time bombs into our system.”
“The first shot in every war game now is fired in space and in cyber,” he added.
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