Bill on Securing America 8/8/23 – Part 1

Frank Gaffney (00:00):

We are back and we’re pleased, as always, at this point in the week generally with the opportunity to speak to Bill Walton, a recovering master of the universe on Wall Street. A man who has, among other things become a prominent figure in the conservative movement in our nation, as well as a very engaged philanthropist, as well as dedicated public citizen I think it’s fair to say. And he’s a man of many, many parts and we’re always happy to have a chance to tap his insights, as well as those that he generates in the course of a terrific television podcast that he does, the Bill Walton Show.

(00:52):

And Bill, it’s good to have you back to do all of that and more. Welcome.

Bill Walton (00:57):

Frank, great talking with you. Thanks for the praise.

Frank Gaffney (01:02):

It’s well deserved, honestly.

(01:04):

Bill a lot to talk about and not a whole lot of time. Let me start by asking you about something that the committee chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party of the House of Representatives, Representative Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin has addressed with the Biden administration recently, which is this sweeping umbrella agreement called the Science and Technology Agreement between the United States and China. I think we touched on it a little bit earlier with our friend Gordon Chang. But I’d be very interested in your views on the advisability… Mike Gallagher is taking a dim view of it, but your thoughts on whether it’s wise for the United States to be continuing to use this as a mechanism for it seems the wholesale transfer of both scientific information and know-how as well as technology to the Chinese Communist Party.

Bill Walton (02:04):

Well, Mike Gallagher is exactly right. This agreement, it’s called the US China Science and Technology Agreement, STA as we fondly call it, was inked back in the dark ages of a relationship with China when we really had no idea what they would get up to over the course of-

Frank Gaffney (02:24):

We were in the dark, that’s for sure.

Bill Walton (02:26):

We were in the dark. They probably were making plans, as they always do. Anyway, 1979 when it was first agreed to. And the idea back then, as we all know, was that the United States is going to help China with technology and markets and investment, and we’re going to make China come up to speed with technology and its market economy and make them safe for democracy. Well, just the opposite has happened, of course. The Chinese Communist Party took this agreement and used it every which way to Sunday to exploit our technology knowhow. And the agreement is at the State Department level, but each agency in the United States government that has anything to do with research also has sub agreements with these. And they’re giving permission to lab to lab, university to university, scientist to scientist cooperation. And this has been ongoing for almost 35 years, and it has got to stop, particularly now that we have a very gimlet eye view about China’s true purposes. China, of course, is-

Frank Gaffney (03:35):

And rightly so.

Bill Walton (03:36):

Well, yeah.

Frank Gaffney (03:38):

It hasn’t exactly worked out as we were thinking it would in the dark ages.

Bill Walton (03:42):

Well, it’s worked out for the Chinese. I mean, the thing that wasn’t contemplated then is now the Chinese are… It’s hard to measure ascendants, but they’re people saying that in artificial intelligence, quantum sciences, biomedicine space, space warfare, which wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen in ’79, now is, and we’ve given them an awful lot of technology and we’ve created a formidable competitor. And nothing in this agreement was envisioned to deal with that sort of thing. The Chinese, of course, would very much like to keep this agreement. The Chinese ambassador to the US was at, of all places of course, the Aspen Security Summit, which I think is Davos West, saying that they’d very much like to renew it on the basis of equality and mutual benefit. Well, that’s not a trade that we can make and it’s time to shut it down.

Frank Gaffney (04:38):

I think it’s fair to say, Bill, that if we do in fact see the Chinese now enjoying advantages in a host of these technology areas, they’re unlikely to be transferring that information back to us. Don’t you think?

Bill Walton (04:51):

It’s a one-way street, Frank. Absolutely a one-way street. And this really brings into high relief or high focus just the divides in Biden administration and maybe the rest of us, Janet Yellen is still saying this is a terrific agreement and that we’re overstating the effect on the technology transfer. And she’s a complete dove when it comes to China. My fear is that Antony Blinken, who of course was getting paid roughly a million dollars a year by the Chinese to run Joe Biden’s Foundation before he became Secretary of State, is conflicted on China. And so our China, our interest to protecting ourselves from China in this administration are severely compromised.

Frank Gaffney (05:40):

No, they are. I was going through Michael Pillsbury’s book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, recently, Bill, and it’s an interesting book in a number of different respects. Notably, the chronicling of the extent to which we have been massively transferring information technology, scientific data and technology and technical expertise and so on to the Chinese over a very long period of time. And in fact, he’s talked about in public the large number of representatives of these various government agencies based in the embassy in Beijing, whose job it is even now to be promoting this kind of transfer of information and technology and so on. It just boggles the mind that we’re this out of touch with the military and strategic realities.

Bill Walton (06:40):

Yeah. Part of the problem, Frank, is that the scientific community does not see the national security problem. I mean, they’re all into discover new things, invent new formulas, all that sort of thing. And so the scientific community’s up in arms and they can’t believe that we would end this form of cooperation. It’s time for us to think about something else besides their curiosity and their new inventions, which if we give them to the Chinese, they would use to kill us.

Frank Gaffney (07:10):

You bet they will. Indeed. Bill, we got to take a very short break here for a moment, but when we come back I want to ask you about some developments on the Chinese economic front that suggests that Xi Jinping’s sort of industrial and economic infrastructure is coming apart at the seams and what the implications of that might be. We’ll be right back with that and more with Bill Walton right after this.