Ambassador Robert Blackwill

former distinguished Secretary of Defense, and a wise man, makes the argument that China is the most dangerous rival in American history and is likely to remain so for years ahead.

So it was a combination of wishful thinking, but also not wanting to spend the money on the defense side

which would be consistent with regarding them as this dangerous rival.

And we still haven't spent that money up until this day.

I think that the situation in Asia was not ripe for any interest in a NATO-like arrangement for two reasons.

One is that at that time, they didn't regard the China threat

as so serious that it was required.

But the second was that from 2001 on, of course, the United States was preoccupied with the war on terror.

And almost to the exclusion of other issues, including the rise of China, our good friend Steve Hadley, who's one of the most distinguished practitioners in decades, said in public, we just got China wrong.

And we got Xi Jinping wrong.

And I think the primary reason that we got him wrong is that to this day, we have trouble understanding how Marxist Xi Jinping really is.

It's so foreign to the way we think of the world.

And there's hardly anybody still alive who remembers that very Marxist Soviet Union.

Its last three and a half decades was a gradual slump from that acute Marxism.

And what does Marxism tell us?

Xi Jinping, that China is not safe in the world without leading it because the other forces will try to do China in.

And so that's, I think, his policy.

And we still have not developed

the will to combat it with increases in the defense budget and so forth.

I'll just give you one example, but it is an example of the limp policies of liberal internationalism, the militarization of the artificial islands in the South China Sea.