This is Intelligence Matters, with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell.

Brought to you by Lockheed Martin.

Your mission is ours.

Looking at both the administration's rhetoric and conversations with the Chinese and its

actions, how would you characterize the approach so far?

They are thinking about how to respond to China's actions across this full spectrum of great

power competition.

I think that includes economic components, security obviously, and what we might call an

ideational component.

They are studying, I think, the Trump era policies on various executive orders and so on,

that the Trump administration put in place.

The administration has said, well, we're reviewing those.

One of the challenges we're facing is that we have what we might call surrogate strategies,

where we're looking to other policy approaches to try to avoid dealing directly with China.

That includes, I think, this notion of domestic strengthening, in other words, if we put

the money into our infrastructure, building semiconductor capacity in the US, making sure

we're leading technologically through some version of industrial policy, that almost

that in and of itself will cause the Chinese to just run away.

They're first and foremost objective if you're the CCP and they're the ones running the

show and Xi Jinping as they want to stay in power.

That's a domestic objective, but for them, their foreign policy works around that.

In some ways, this is an overstatement, but you'll get the point.

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