KT McFarland: Trump first leader to finally fight back against China
"It's a war, were' just finally waking up to it,' says KT McFarland breaking down the U.S. Cold War with China
President Trump was the first “leader who understood that the Chinese have been at Cold War with us for decades and now we’re finally taking the steps to fight back,” former deputy national security adviser KT McFarland told “Outnumbered Overtime” on Wednesday.
McFarland made the comment the same day China condemned what it called an “unprecedented escalation" by the United States and threatened to retaliate after it was ordered to close the Chinese consulate in Houston.
In a statement sent to Fox News, State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus confirmed the directive and said it was issued "to protect American intellectual property and Americans' private information.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted his support Wednesday for the shuttering of a Chinese consulate in Houston, claiming that spying activity was carried out through the facility.
McFarland said that Rubio is “right.”
“The Chinese are using their presence in the United States, whether it’s at universities, whether it’s at corporations, whether in their consulates and diplomatic facilities, they use it to spy,” she said. “They use it to steal our intellectual property rights, they use it in a whole lot of ways that we never use our businesses or our students overseas or our diplomatic installations.”
On Monday, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on 11 Chinese firms over their use of forced labor and other forms of repression against the Uighur Muslims, an ethnic minority in China, including some with documented relationships with American companies.
The sanctions represent another step by the administration in its heightened pressure on the Chinese government in recent months.
When asked what Chinese retaliation might look like, McFarland said, “they will do a tit-for-tat.”
“They will do something to shut down maybe a consulate that we have somewhere in China,” she continued.
McFarland also noted that “the Chinese have been in Cold War with us for decades.”
She then pointed to some “signs” of a Cold War, including the fact that, “they’ve exploited a lot of our trade agreements with the Chinese” and “our intellectual property rights.”
“They have stolen trillions of dollars in American research and development,” she went on to say, adding that “when the pandemic hit, the Chinese knew they had a pandemic and they let it loose on the world very intentionally.”
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“To me, those are all signs of a Cold War, not being fought with military equipment, but cyber-attacks, bioweapons attacks, other spying and other intellectual property theft,” McFarland said. “It's a war. We’re just finely waking up to it here.”
Fox News’ Brie Stimson, Ronn Blitzer and Tyler Olson contributed to this report.
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