Former Trump Administration National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien said Wednesday that it was naive of the Biden administration to think that China would help them prevent Russia from invading Ukraine.
The New York Times recently reported that over a period of three months, senior Biden Administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials where the Americans presented intelligence of Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and tried to convince the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade.
The Chinese not only rebuffed the Americans, but also shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the U.S. was trying to sow discord and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the Times reported.
“There’s nothing wrong with talking to our adversaries, but I think it’s a little naive to think that somehow we’re going to convince the Chinese to go to their allies — the Russians — and say, ‘The Americans know where your troops are, so you shouldn’t invade,'” O’Brien told a small group of reporters on Capitol Hill before meeting with lawmakers on the Republican Study Committee.
“I think it maybe wasa little naive to expect that we were going to get aid from the Chinese on this issue. I mean — especially when China, at the same time that this is happening, China’s sending fighter jets into the air defense identification zone of Taiwan,” he added. “So, it was a little surprising.”
The Times also reported that White House officials told the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. that they would impose tough sanctions on Russian companies, officials, and businesspeople in the event of an invasion that would go far beyond those imposed by the Obama Administration after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The appeals to China fell on deaf ears, all the way up to Russian forces firing missiles into Ukraine.
Some U.S. officials believed they could convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to tell Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. But the two leaders released a 5,000-word joint statement on February 4 after they met at the opening ceremony at the Winter Olympic Games that declared their “no limits” partnership.
O’Brien told Breitbart News that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he did not have the support of Xi.
“They — he and Xi — got together at the Olympics. There’s no doubt they talked about this. China is building pipelines and buying oil from Russia. And they’re basically telling the Russians, ‘If you’re cut off from the West, don’t worry, you got access to the Chinese market.'”
“So they’re certainly supporting Russia. And they’d also like to see the precedent of Russia taking Ukraine to give them a precedent for taking Taiwan. So we’ve gotta be very tough on China,” he said.
“There’s this idea that we don’t want to provoke China in this crisis. This crisis is in large part because of China and because of the alliance between China and Russia. And so it’s, it’s time to be tough on China,” he added.
RSC Chairman Jim Banks (R-IN) blasted President Joe Biden for not addressing the threat from China in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening:
For conservatives, it wasn’t as much about what Joe Biden said last night as it was what he didn’t talk about last night, first and foremost being the greatest threat that America faces in China, and not a single word from the president of the United States about what America needs to be doing to compete economically and militarily with our greatest adversary.
RSC member Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) told Breitbart News, “Clearly he didn’t address the big elephant in the room, which is China. I think he’s extremely out of touch with the American people. And I think it’s our job as politicians, and especially his job as a leader to talk about the issues — not just the issues he wants to talk about, but all of the issues.”
O’Brien said the U.S. needed to go back to a “peace through strength” posture, adding:
We need to build the 355-ship Navy that I know all of the congressmen and congresswomen here in favor of. We’ve got to get it right. We’ve got to fund the defense budget so we can get hypersonics to deter the Chinese.
We need to work with our allies in Taiwan to make sure that they have the equipment and the tools necessary. If there’s been any message from Ukraine, [it’s] ‘Don’t hold back on supplying Taiwan with the weapons that they need because the Taiwanese are like Ukrainians — they’ll fight, but we need to give them the tools now, before it’s too late, so they can do so they can actually deter Chinese invasion.
O’Brien said the Biden administration’s approach to Russia was very different from that of the Trump administration’s:
Look, here’s the thing — diplomacy is good. Talking to our adversaries is good. I’ve always said that — I met with the Russians when I was in office, [but] we may have had a little different message that we gave them then than what they’re hearing now, and we weren’t trying to reset relations.
We were trying to be pretty clear-headed and clear-eyed with respect to what Putin wanted. And we pushed back hard and whether it was getting out of the Open Skies Treaty, because the Russians were violating it or getting out of the INF treaty, which the Russians were violating, or not renewing the New START [Treaty], unless they agreed to stop building their non-New START-compliant nuclear weapons.
“We had tough messages for them,” he said.
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