Excerpts from The Straits Times' interview with Steve Bannon, previous strategic adviser to US President Donald Trump.
On the end game for the US in its competition with China
"I think the end game for the US is the end game for all of our partners and for freedom loving people like in Singapore. I mean, you can't have this… totalitarian, mercantilist, dictatorship.It's got to be confronted.
"I think the mask has been stripped off the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) by the demonstrators in Hong Kong and the pandemic.
"If the CCP is not taken down… this information and economic hot war that they're engaging with the West is going to metastasize into a kinetic war and it's going to happen right at the front door of Singapore. It's going to happen in the South China Sea and on the border of China, Pakistan, and India."
On President Trump's approach to China
"States, we've two choices, very simple. We either can become the leader of the fourth industrial revolution, or we're going to just devolve into continual class and racial strife as we fight over an ever shrinking pie based on a service economy.
"We're in a full scale economic war with the CCP right now. And… if we don't stand our ground now, united, we're going to pay with a kinetic war in a couple of years.
"Donald Trump's the hammer and American capital and technologies the anvil. The only problem I've with President Trump and the administration… (is) about the timing.
"The reason that I'm called the leader of the ultra hawks, the super hawks, is that I say no. You must immediately cut them off of any access to capital. You must immediately cut them off with any access to technology. We've to force their hand now and put an extreme economic pain regarding Hong Kong. Otherwise they will move on Taiwan in a couple of years and then into the South China Sea."
On America today
"People will talk about the times we're in right now, hundreds of years from now. The world's at an inflection point. We're being drawn in, inexorably, into a potentially massive global conflict.
"That can be avoided if we remember the moral imperative of what we've been bequeathed. Of what everybody that came before us, of what everybody in Singapore, everybody in South-east Asia, everybody in the Pacific, that died and gave their lives in World War II. For what? For freedom.
"We've a moral responsibility to those that came before us to make sure that we've bequeathed a world that's more free and more prosperous. And that's the challenge of our times.
"History is going to weigh and measure us, whether we were able to step up to challenges of this time."
On India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and confronting China
"I'm chairman of the Hindu Republican Coalition. And I couldn't be prouder. I've actually started to work with several Democrats who are Hindu Americans.
"I think just like China can't have Hong Kong be successful as a democracy, or Taiwan, they can't have India. Because that puts a direct lie to their totalitarian dictatorship in China. India is a very messy democracy, however, it works.
"We're nationalists. Modi was Trump before Trump.
"The Chinese Communist Party looks at Modi as, I think, as big an enemy as the United States, because he makes this democracy work. I think it's something to be very proud of. I think the Indians are fantastic. I've been a huge advocate that we should become a bigger and bigger partner on India.
"India is absolutely the key that picks the lock. There's no doubt about that."