Russian and Chinese Economic Warfare Against the U.S.

Kevin Freeman is a certified financial analyst and best-selling author of Game Plan: How to Protect Yourself from the Coming Cyber Economic Attack and Secret Weapon: How Economic Terrorism Brought Down the U.S. Stock Market and Why It Can Happen Again. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, and the host of the upcoming weekly show on The Blaze TV Economic War Room with Kevin Freeman. 

FRANK GAFFNEY: Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the War for the Free World.  There is a part of the battle space of the War for the Free World that requires extraordinary intelligence and a lot of clarity—a vision. And the man I think of bringing most of all of those qualities to the economic warfare battle space is our first guest. He is Kevin Freeman, a certified financial analyst who is a best-selling author. He is an active contributor to the public policy debate at the Center for Security Policy—where he serves as a Senior Fellow—and he is about to become the host of a new weekly television program on the Blaze Network called ‘Economic War Room with Kevin Freeman.’ Kevin Freeman, it’s so good to have you with us. So much to talk about in that war room and battle space—glad to have you with us.

KEVIN FREEMAN: Great, good to be here Frank.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Well, I want to do a kind of lightning round because there’s a lot to talk about here, Kevin. The Rand Corporation has just turned in for the consumption of something called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission a very worrying study about Chinese penetration of the U.S. aviation sector. Would you talk a little bit about its findings and what we should be thinking about them?

KEVIN FREEMAN:  Sure, and Rand actually did a nice overview but it’s a fairly light touch in this one respect: we need to always remember that China is a communist nation; they’re controlled by the Chinese communist party—the People’s Republic Army—and they do not necessarily have purely economic interests. And I think that the flaw of the Rand report—and so many of these reports—is that they assume China has a primarily economic interest. But even if they do have a primarily economic interest, the Rand report raises some troubling issues. It talks about specific efforts to overtake and develop the Chinese aviation industry at the expense of the U.S. aviation industry. They recognize that we’re in a global economic war and we don’t, so it is very troubling.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Well, you talk about Chinese interests being more economic; they’re also not consistent with ours the last time I checked, in very many respects. Talk in regard, Kevin Freeman, about their play for a piece of Hollywood as well as the seeming vacuum cleaning they’re doing of our tech sector more generally. Are these also areas we should be concerned about?

KEVIN FREEMAN:  Well, absolutely. China has two policy approaches: one is that they have stolen an enormous amount of our technology—potentially as much as five trillion dollars through the years through intellectual property theft—and the second is they use what they’re not stealing to purchase and buy up Hollywood—either major studios or distribution outlets and so forth—so that they can culturally impact America. They have a master plan; they think in terms of five year plans, “we’re going to accomplish this.” Something that we Americans don’t do collectively, they do and their intention is to change the American thought towards China, to purchase any technology that they can’t acquire through theft. And so through mergers and acquisitions they’re building up their industry at our expense.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Just a quick point on the Hollywood play: it would seem as though with the enormous market that China represents—even if they didn’t own the industry outright, or at least big chunks of it—that they would be exercising control over what’s broadcast or put in the movie theaters, online, what-have-you, that they found objectionable. Is that a piece of what you’re getting at there in terms of China’s influence on our culture and propagandizing us?

KEVIN FREEMAN:  They use both the carrot and the stick and then they steal what they can’t otherwise control with the carrot and the stick. So yes, they put before Hollywood if you want to offer and show films here, they’ve got to be pro-China films. And so they’re creating control over the way that Hollywood is promoting messages and, unfortunately, the way Americans think is often in line with the way Hollywood promotes messages.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Yea, to the considerable detriment of our polity and our culture, I think. Kevin Freeman is the author of Game Plan: How to Protect Yourself from the Coming Cyber Economic Attack. Kevin, one of the things that you have documented—both in Game Plan and also Secret Weapon: How Economic Terrorism Brought Down the U.S. Stock Market and Why it Can Happen Again—is that bad actors, notably in Russia in Vladimir Putin’s regime, have been targeting our economy for economic warfare as well. Our colleague Diana West has recently written a very, very troubling piece about a sort of variation on the Russian and Hillary Clinton pay-for-play scheme that seems to have resulted in an immense amount of American technology—including hypersonic missile-related technology—to a so-called Silicon Valley in Russia called Skolkovo. Tell us a little about that Kevin, and as an expert on economic warfare how you see this fitting in.

KEVIN FREEMAN:  Well, the Clinton Foundation has long been subject to major donations in form of, ‘we’ll pay you to come speak here,’ or ‘we’ll just pay you for influence in other ways.’ It appears Skolkovo is just one more of those examples. We’ve seen technology transfers to China under the Clinton administration that happened in the 1990’s. This seems to be part of the more modern version which raises the question, if the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation were so eager to work in Russia, why it would be that Putin would so desperately want President Trump in the White House—which, that’s the narrative; I’m not sure if there’s any truth to that whatsoever other than he kind of assumed that Clinton would win and so forth and was meddling…I don’t know. But there are no doubts that there are incredible Russia ties between the Clintons and these concerns like Skolkovo and others that are not being investigated, they’re not being covered in the media, and thanks to Diana West for bringing that out.

FRANK GAFFNEY:  Amen. Kevin, one other thing—and we’ll be talking momentarily about it with Paul Coyer—is Venezuela seems to be in the process of turning over to the Russians holdings that their state-owned oil and gas industry PDVSA has had in CITGO, which includes three refineries and pipelines in this country. The Saudi’s are similarly making a play, I’m told, for one of our oil refineries. You’ve documented in your reporting and analysis on economic warfare at GlobalEconomicWarfare.com the express intentions of the Russians and the Saudi’s to destroy our energy sector—what are the implications of turning over parts of it to them?

KEVIN FREEMAN:  Well, you know CITGO goes back through Armand Hammer and Cities Service who had very close ties with the Russians in the 1970’s and 1980’s and Venezuela, of course under Chavez, had very close ties with the Russians, the Soviets. But this has been a long play to have a foothold in our hemisphere of a very large oil reserve country—which is Venezuela—and now that foothold, because of the nature of the energy business, has translated into just an open highway for Russia to meddle in our energy. They need to do that because that’s the only real strong industry that Russia has. And if the energy industry goes the way of shale production and American renaissance there, Russia’s geostrategic interests are sharply curtailed; so they need to have influence they need to kill our fracking industry, and Putin has funded a lot of environmental efforts around the world to try and stop this. Now they’re using a back door to get into it.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Kevin I know you’re going to be covering these kinds of issues intently in your new program “Economic War Room with Kevin Freeman” on the Blaze Network coming up this summer. Just 30 seconds on the program, if you would, on the program and how people can find out more about it.

KEVIN FREEMAN:  Well the world views on all these economic issues as a battle space, we tend to view them as a market place. We’re going to bring the information on how the world thinks down to the pocketbook issues of individuals so that they can see that Russia, China, and others are targeting their economic well-being. That should awaken people to national security concerns and we’re going to give them good, hopeful answers on how they can respond.

FRANK GAFFNEY:  It’s exciting. We’re delighted to be supporting and hopefully in other ways helping with it. Kevin Freeman, we look forward to talking with you again very soon. Next up, Paul Coyer on the coup in Venezuela and what it might mean for you—straight ahead.