On Monday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “State of Play,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) said that China has been helping Iran and Russia, “But, nonetheless, if we want to get out of this process of, this country’s unacceptable, whether it’s Iraq or Iran or whatever, and we walk down the road, where, eventually, we’re at war with them, then, somewhere along that process, you have to stop and say, how do we get along? As opposed to how do we ‘win’?”
Smith said, “One, there [are] a lot of very hard China hawks out there who think that we need to be tough, aggressive, China’s coming for us, we need to defend ourselves against them, it’s going to be a deeply adversarial relationship for a long time to come, we’ve got to battle them on every conceivable corner. I’m worried about that approach, personally, just because China’s a big, powerful country, and so are we. I don’t want to walk us down the road to inevitable conflict. We are going to have to coexist with China. And that would be the second thing, I think Trump’s instincts are more towards the coexist model, China’s a big, powerful country, we’re a big, powerful country, as I said, what should our economic relationship look like? And it’s tough, because China is definitely a competitor. And more than that, there’s clear evidence they’ve been supporting Iran. They’ve been helping Russia. But, nonetheless, if we want to get out of this process of, this country’s unacceptable, whether it’s Iraq or Iran or whatever, and we walk down the road, where, eventually, we’re at war with them, then, somewhere along that process, you have to stop and say, how do we get along? As opposed to how do we ‘win’?”
He continued, “And then the third thing, of course, that’s going on is Trump loves him some dictators, okay. He, on more than one occasion, has talked about, oh, he wishes he could run his country the way Xi runs China or the way Kim Jong-un runs Korea or…Putin runs Russia. So, he wants to cozy up to strong men. So those are the three things that I think are most contained in what they’re really talking about here, aside from some bizarre comment about whether or not he’s going to sell arms to China.”
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