Matthew Pottinger has emerged as a key player in the administration’s adversarial approach to China.
Before Matthew Pottinger served the president as deputy national-security adviser, and before he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marines, he was a China-based journalist, often reporting on politically sensitive topics that brought him to small villages.
“I always had a rule that when I arrived in a sensitive spot like that in China, I would always leave before sundown,” he said during a lecture hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center in 2011. If he stayed too long, local police would find and hassle him. In one case, he broke this rule; he was on a roll, interviewing farmers about a local corruption scandal. But soon enough, a black sedan picked him up, and he was subjected to a five-hour interrogation before he was released.
“They said: ‘If you write a word about this scandal, we will come find you’ — so I called their bluff,” he recalled. “I wrote a front-page story for the Wall Street Journal.”
Such as it is for Pottinger in his current role, where he’s had the opportunity to put to use his insights on the Chinese Communist Party — and continue calling their bluff. His influence in the Trump administration has grown as its China hawks have won out over other factions during the coronavirus era. It’s in this light that Pottinger has emerged as key part of what might be the most consequential aspect of President Trump’s foreign-policy legacy.
Along the way, he has coordinated the administration’s turn against China from the early days, when the president seemed bullish on cooperation with Beijing, to the coronavirus era, which has seen a more robust repudiation of the regime. With this shift, Pottinger has taken center stage, appearing in public to explain the Trump administration’s approach.
It’s all about reciprocity and candor, he argued on Friday during an address to Policy Exchange, a London-based think tank: “So it is in a spirit of friendship, reflection, and, yes, candor, that I ask friends in China to research the truth about your government’s policies toward the Uyghur people and other religious minorities.” He went on: “There is no credible justification I can find in Chinese philosophy, religion, or moral law for the concentration camps inside your borders.”
At first blush, Pottinger seems an awkward fit for this administration. For one, he raised eyebrows and inspired mockery, including from the president, for his choice to wear a mask early on during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Daily Beast. Further, the president has sometimes placed other priorities over human-rights promotion, while still focusing on this in prepared remarks. Other officials, such as Pottinger and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have placed values-based diplomacy at the center of their work.
But they and other China hawks recently have been given free rein to go after the CCP in a range of areas, and as Beijing’s misconduct has grown more egregious, they’ve become the public face of a policy putting a greater focus on human rights and the CCP’s quasi-totalitarian ideology.
That’s how you ended up with Pottinger on Friday making the case that “if you look at the actions that President Trump has taken, and the policies that he’s put into effect, the moral component is unmistakable.”
His rising influence seems to derive from his usefulness to the president and willingness to follow orders, not promote his own agenda — Pottinger has been ready to assist with the implementation of each phase of Trump’s thinking on China. This started with an assessment of the possibility of closer cooperation early on in the administration. Now that his longstanding skepticism of the Chinese regime has converged with Trump’s priorities, and a political scene broadly more aware of the CCP’s global challenge to liberal democracy, he’s hit his stride.
All of this has made him the architect of the U.S. government’s emerging efforts in the ideological competition with Beijing.
Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), who first met the deputy national-security adviser when they were both counterintelligence officers in Iraq, calls him one of the two people in the world most responsible for the current reappraisal of the CCP. (The other is an Australian, John Garnaut, the journalist and government adviser whose work has contributed significantly to the turn against Chinese political influence in the country.)
“When the history of our New Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party is written, I really believe that Matt will be up there with another hero of mine, Wisconsin’s George Kennan, in terms of his impact in shaping the competition,” he told National Review in an emailed statement, comparing Pottinger to the legendary diplomat and Cold War strategist.
During a speech in May, Pottinger detailed the long history of Chinese democracy movements, calling the idea that Chinese people can’t be trusted with democracy “the most unpatriotic idea of all.” He elaborated: “Taiwan today is a living repudiation of that threadbare mistruth.”
In that instance, he spoke directly to the people of China. He did the same on Friday, noting that that previous speech, about the May Fourth Movement, was viewed over a million times (he gave both speeches in Mandarin).
Pottinger is adept at explaining the depravities of the CCP in terms that make sense in a Chinese cultural context, while simultaneously warning of the Party’s global activities. Further, he exhibits an unparalleled grasp of the stakes of this contest.
The goal of CCP political interference activities overseas, he said Friday, is to convince targeted democracies that Beijing is no threat, until it’s too late to do anything about it. This is something that the Party has done successfully for years. Pottinger proffered a response:
As my friend Tony Dolan told me: “The great paradox of institutionalized evil is that it can be enormously powerful but also enormously fragile. Thus, it is compulsively aggressive and ultimately self-destructive. It senses its own moral absurdity. It knows it is a raft on a sea of ontological good.”
“What evil fears most is the publicly spoken truth.”
So speak up, everyone.
Politico reported last week that Pottinger will leave the administration at the end of the president’s current term, whether or not he wins in November — he’s already served in this administration for four years and has a family.
But it seems he’s not yet done calling Beijing’s bluff.