WASHINGTON—Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said on Oct. 27 that China is a “key player” in the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.
At an event hosted by Washington-based conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in conjunction with The Epoch Times, Mr. DeSantis struck a hawkish tone toward Beijing regarding its involvement in the conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.
“The CCP is keeping both Iran and Russia afloat financially,” Mr. DeSantis said in his speech, using the acronym for the Chinese Communist Party. “China’s purchasing massive amounts of Iranian oil on the black market, thereby enriching the mullahs and Russia is selling China gas and much, much more. And that is bolstering Russia’s war machine.”
Mr. DeSantis went on to say that the protracted conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which began in February 2022, “will ultimately benefit China because it will distract America and it will deplete our already dwindling Western weapons and ammunition stockpiles.”
And although the United States will support Israel in defending itself, he said he believes that China “like[s] the Hamas–Israel conflict.”
“Clearly the way the world has gone the last two years has benefits to China,” he said. “There’s no question.
“The threat posed by the CCP requires our primary focus and attention right now. They are the first truly peer competitor that we have dealt with in our lifetimes.”
The Biden administration has relaxed or failed to enforce sanctions on Iran, which exports oil to China and has given drones to Russia. Mr. DeSantis said that Russia has been selling China gas and “much, much more.”
He blamed “bad decisions made by America’s ruling class” for the economic leverage China now has over the U.S. economy, noting that the United States had given China most-favored-nation trading status and allowed Beijing to be part of the World Trade Organization.
“And China has grand ambitions. They seek to be the dominant power in the entire world, and they are marshaling all their society to be able to achieve that objective,” he said. “So this is a formidable threat and it requires a whole-of-society approach.”
He warned that “a world that’s dominated by CCP will see them export their authoritarian vision all across the world.”
“This will be a world marked by internet policing, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and social credit scores. It will end up creating a global dystopia, and this is a regime that you do not want to have control or influence over our society,” he said. He also compared the China threat to the Soviet Union’s effort to spread communism worldwide.
The death toll that the Chinese regime is responsible for over its approximately 70 years of ruling “may very well be the highest of any government in history and numbers in the tens of millions,” and the regime’s coverup of the COVID-19 pandemic, he added, has “put the rest of the world in great peril.”
Mr. DeSantis pledged that if he is elected, he will reorient U.S. foreign policy to prioritize the Indo-Pacific region to defend U.S. national security. Deterring CCP aggression, he said, requires the United States to project strength, which he detailed as bolstering the U.S. military to deny Chinese ambitions toward Taiwan, unleashing “America’s full economic potential,” ensuring U.S. technological dominance, and closing border loopholes.
During a Q&A with Mr. DeSantis, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek asked the governor whether the issue of human rights should be tied to U.S. policy on trade with China.
“Traditionally, human rights have been linked to trade or trade has been linked to human rights,” Mr. Jekielek, also the host of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” said.
“I think human rights is something that’s good to stand for. What is the concrete interest? I do think it informs a concrete interest because this is one of the great weaknesses of the CCP,” Mr. DeSantis said. “What they’re trying to export around the world ultimately, is something that is going to suffocate human freedom. Their vision is a dystopian vision.”
Along with warning about China, other topics Mr. DeSantis highlighted in his major foreign policy speech include the latest Israel–Hamas conflict, which began on Oct. 7 and consisted of the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and border security amid the crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border.
During his Q&A, Mr. DeSantis noted the trend of leftist governments in Latin America.
Mr. DeSantis emphasized that the United States is now at “the decisive decade” to “arrest our country’s decline” and tackle the challenge from China.
“At the end of the day, China has a lot of liabilities. They have a lot of weaknesses,” he said. “They want to maintain ironclad control over their population indefinitely,” but there are already cracks showing, and increasing, “because they are not doing what needs to be done for individuals to ultimately flourish.”
