‘The Ingraham Angle’ on Russia-Ukraine conflict
INGRAHAM: Joining me now is Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under President Trump. He’s also the author of “The Strategy of Denial.” Elbridge, this doesn’t seem like the right time to be taking economic pressure off China now that we just learned we had a $1 trillion overall trade deficit last year. Your thoughts?
ELBRIDGE COLBY, THE MARATHON INITIATIVE CO-FOUNDER: Great to be with you, Laura. I think in general you’re absolutely right, we should not be removing any leverage. I think what President Trump and the administration that he led really shifted correctly on was understanding that this is not purely a commercial situation with China, that it is intimately connected to our national security and it’s been associated with the deindustrialization and tremendous number of problems that our country faces. So look, there are companies out there, we are going to trade with China, but we should not be giving up leverage where we can avoid it. I haven’t looked deeply into the tariff letter, but I think the attitude of saying look, this is not a fair dealing counterparty, this is somebody that we are going to have to build and sustain leverage in the economic space is the way to go about it.
The Ingraham Angle