On presidential trail and on China, Hurd should be heard
Quin Hillyer
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Sometimes, long-shot presidential candidates deserve to have their policy prescriptions heard, regardless of whether they make headway in the polls. Witness, for example, the thoughtful focus on China by former Texas Rep. Will Hurd.
“The Chinese government is trying to surpass the United States as the sole global superpower,” Hurd told me in a half-hour phone interview this week. “This is what the Chinese government has said about itself, in English, since at least 2015.”
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Hurd is a nine-year veteran of the CIA who handled terrorism matters while stationed in Pakistan and Afghanistan but said, for some years, his intelligence job “was to stop Chinese spies from stealing our secrets.” When he left the CIA, he helped build a cybersecurity company and “was able to see how Chinese cybercriminals attack and steak our intellectual property,” and he worked against Chinese perfidy on the House Intelligence Committee and in investment banking since leaving Congress 18 months ago.
Hurd said a major reason he is running for president is that he is the only one so focused on and experienced in dealing with the Chinese threat.
In a 2021 blog post, Hurd described the Chinese government, not its people, as “authoritarian … run by the Chinese Communist Party that strips the freedoms from the people of Hong Kong, threatens its neighbors in the South China Sea, imprisons its own people for dissenting … and violates international law by forcing their own ethnic minority populations into concentration camps.”
In our interview, Hurd first explained why the public will suffer if China becomes a greater superpower, and then he outlined steps to stop it from happening.
Economically, “if the Chinese surpass us and have their percentage of the global economy surpass us, the dollar will not go as far as in effect it has since the end of World War II,” Hurd said. “Our retirement accounts are not going to last as long as expected. Our kids and grandkids are not going to be able to get jobs on the cutting edge. We could become the United Kingdom of the 21st century.”
By that, Hurd was referencing the U.K.’s precipitous drop from nearly 50% of the world’s economy at the end of World War I down to 3% today. “That’s the kind of impact,” he said, “that losing a new Cold War would have on our country, our economy, our way of life.”
And, of course, it isn’t just economic: “We know how Chinese are using tools like facial recognition. They are using it to subjugate their population. So if the Chinese brands of these kinds of important technologies become the global, de facto standard, that impacts our security, that impacts our freedoms. … I don’t trust a world where Communists are in charge.”
Hurd said that to combat this, he would pursue “five broad objectives.” He would “integrate economic security into the broader official National Security Strategy” to contend with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He would impose the “principle of reciprocity” in business regulations so that “if an American company isn’t allowed to do something in China, then a Chinese company should be restricted from the same activity in America.” He would “reinvigorate our diplomatic efforts” (in numerous ways his blogs and websites describe), use his expertise and experience to “focus the intelligence community on understanding the battlefield of the future, which is technology,” and “modernize our military.”
I pressed him on the latter point, and Hurd wished he had time to get into the details of “cyberwarfare,” “conflict in space,” protecting against “weaponized biologicals,” being “ready to operate in a ‘communications-denied’ environment,” and other wonky-sounding concepts that it would be nice to think a president (unlike, say, President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump) actually could understand.
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Hurd is also eloquent about the need to support Taiwan against Chinese invasion by making China less emboldened to invade in the first place. Hurd said that unlike what the U.S. has done for nearly 10 years in Ukraine (going back even before Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014), we should provide (for a price) all the arms Taiwan needs now rather than slow-walking the arms to be always a step behind.
There was, of course, a lot more Hurd had to say, to which a single column can’t do justice. What impresses is how comprehensively he lays it all out and how well internally integrated it is. Presidential campaign or no presidential campaign, policymakers should heed Hurd’s advice. In their nefarious ambitions, the Chinese should be checked.