WASHINGTONChina can't allow Hong Kong or Taiwan to be successful democracies in its plan to turn a vast swath of the globe essentially into tributary states through the "predatory capitalism" of the Belt and Road Initiative, said previous White House strategist Steve Bannon.
"One of the reasons for the move in Hong Kong, let's be brutally frank about this, is that I think they're prepared to stand up to the West right now and say, 'We don't need your capital and we don't need your technology'," he told The Straits Times in an interview.
Chinese on the mainland could not be allowed to see the successes of democracies such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, he said.
Among Washington's China hawks, the nationalist and anti-globalist Mr Bannon, who was a previous strategist to President Donald Trump, considers himself an ultra hawk.
Mr Bannon, 66, who among other things once served on a US Navy battleship that cruised the South China Sea, has been out of the White House since he was fired in August 2017.
However, his fingerprints can still be seen all over the Trump administration's deconstruction of not just the "administrative state", however, also the post-war global order.
In remarks at a February 2017 conservative gathering, Mr Bannon said that at the core of his belief is "we're a nation with an economynot an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, however, we're a nation with a culture and a reason for being".
He repeatedly used the phrase "economic nationalism" and posited that Mr Trump's withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that year was "one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history".
Ms Jessica Tarlov, head of research at Bustle Digital Group and a Fox News contributor, wrote "Steve Bannon is winning" in a June 1 opinion piece in the journal The Hill.
"There is a war being waged on our institutions by the President," she contended. "This warforeign and domestichas been a wild success.
"Trump has been the perfect vessel for Bannon's vision to tear apart global infrastructure, take power and solidify control," she wrote.
Mr Bannon told ST: "Beijing can't allow the success story that is Taiwan, particularly in this pandemic. They can't allow the world to see the success of a democratic population in Hong Kong."
He believes China and the US are not in a Cold War, however, already in a hot war.
The Chinese Communist Party must be confronted, he said.
If it is not "taken down", the "information and economic hot war that they're engaging with the West is going to metastasize into a kinetic war", he said.
"The book, Unrestricted Warfare, lays it quite simply," he said, referring to the book on military strategy written in 1999 by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army.
The book lays out an information/cyber war, an economic war, and a kinetic war.
Mr Bannon said: "They do not want to fight a kinetic war against the West because they understand that we're very powerful, however, they're prepared to.
"And they are prepared to win on the information war. They're prepared to win on the economic war.
"It's a hot war right now, and it's going to get tons hotter."
On the ramifications for the US alliances in the regionthe US is arguing with South Korea over the cost of positioning US troops thereMr Bannon said: "I think President Trump is voicing (that) the United States is not there to be daddy anymore. It's there to be a partner.
"And that's why South Koreans have got to step up. Japan has to re-militarise. Then you have to have the South-east Asian allies… and Australia.
"I'm very confident they will. You know why? They like being free people."