– The Washington Times
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he no longer views Communist China as a major threat and is calling for the U.S. to share power with Beijing in a new world order with a weakened America.
The influential podcaster, who boasts 21 million followers on X and YouTube, also said the U.S. military is unable to defend Taiwan against a Chinese cross-strait assault.
The comments in recent online interviews set off criticism of Mr. Carlson, who while at Fox hosted an on-air segment called “The China Threat,” for sharply altering his views. He now favors and promotes the neoisolationism and anti-Israel views of some radical Make America Great Again advocates.
During a video interview with Britain’s Economist magazine, Mr. Carlson said the U.S. has reached the limits of its power and is unable to defend the self-ruled island of Taiwan.
“The U.S. is not going to defend. It cannot defend Taiwan,” Mr. Carlson said.
“I think we’ve reached the limits of our power, and power has limits. … Power is not infinite. You can squander it, and we’re in the process of doing that,” he said amid his harsh criticism of the Trump administration’s military action with Israel against Iran.
The comments by the podcaster clash with those of Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who has stated in congressional testimony that his military forces would prevail in a conflict with China over Taiwan, but at a high cost.
“I will tell you with complete sincerity of heart, mind and soul, that we, the United States, would prevail in a conflict [with China] as it stands now with the force that we have right now,” Adm. Paparo said in remarks in Arizona in May 2025.
In other comments as commander, Adm. Paparo said such a conflict would be costly in terms of casualties and loss of forces.
Key military advantages in such a war are U.S. submarine capabilities, greater space and counterspace forces, and the ability to conduct combined arms warfare, he said.
China’s rapid development of new weapons, including warships, are a “bad trajectory” for winning in any future conflict, Adm. Paparo said.
Mr. Carlson said it is hard for him to comment on the impact of a future Chinese takeover of Taiwan on key U.S. allies Japan and South Korea.
But he suggested a Chinese takeover would be justified because “big powers want to get control of their regions,” just as the Trump administration is doing in the Western Hemisphere under a revived Monroe Doctrine.
On dealing with China, Mr. Carlson said, “We can no longer be the sole author of terms, of commerce, of anything, we have to share power [with China] … because of their scale.”
“So there’s got to be a nondestructive way to do this,” he said.
Mr. Carlson did not respond to email requests for comment.
Taiwan remains a major diplomatic flash point, as Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared annexing the island is a core interest of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
President Trump has said Mr. Xi has assured him that China will not invade Taiwan during his second administration.
Taiwan is expected to be a topic of discussion when Mr. Trump travels to China for meetings with Mr. Xi in the coming weeks.
In separate comments on “The Tucker Carlson Show” podcast, Mr. Carlson interviewed a Beijing-based schoolteacher, Jiang Xueqin, who was asked how he would address the Iran conflict if he were the U.S. president.
Mr. Jiang said the “American empire” is “overstretched” and probably was provoked by Israel into a “never-ending” Middle East war.
“So what I would do is basically sit down everyone, including Russia, China, Iran, and say it’s time for a new world order where we are partners in this relationship,” Mr. Jiang said.
Mr. Jiang also said as U.S. leader, he would host talks “where everyone is respected, where America is no longer the bully, but a willing partner in creating a new economic order that benefits everyone, and not just a few.”
The comments reflect Chinese Communist Party propaganda narratives that the U.S. is a declining power and should acquiesce to China.
Mr. Carlson said he agreed and blamed Israel as the cause of U.S. involvement in the conflict.
“I think that’s the wisest possible advice, and probably the only path that preserves civilization,” Mr. Carlson said. “But the one country standing in the way of that is Israel, which is the only beneficiary of this war, as you just said.”
Earlier in the podcast, Mr. Jiang promoted what he said were rumors about Israel seeking to rule the entire Middle East and a conspiracy theory that Israel is planning to set off a war between Arabs and Iranians by covertly bombing the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and blaming Muslim terrorists.
Mr. Carlson ended the interview with Mr. Jiang, who said he is a Canadian citizen, by saying, “If we talk longer, I’m going to start to cry on camera.”
Retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell rejected Mr. Carlson’s call for sharing power with Beijing.
“The notion that power could be shared between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China is absurd,” Capt. Fanell said.
“Such a suggestion demonstrates either a complete naivete about the Chinese Communist Party or adherence to a pathology [that is] totally anathema to America’s constitutional foundation.”
Capt. Fanell said the dictum of the CCP is “I win, you lose.”
“The CCP stands for the state’s control over collective groups based on identity politics, while America stands for individual liberty and responsibility,” he said.
“The new world order concept promoted on Mr. Carlson’s podcast aligns with CCP dictator Xi Jinping’s ‘Global Governance Initiative,’ and I predict the American people will reject it,” Capt. Fanell said.
Melissa Chen, vice president of the research firm Strategy Risks, said the podcaster’s comments about power sharing with China were a “mask-slip moment.”
“What he’s touting here is multi-polarity, which is nothing more than a politically correct way to say American decline,” she said on X. “Tucker has shown he’s not America First.”
The CCP for years promoted the same concept through propaganda narratives announcing China’s “peaceful rise” and urging a multipolar world order where power is shared by the U.S.
“They couch it in such docile language knowing full well what it means — the slow erosion of American primacy while they build up their military capacity, steal tech and dominate global supply chains,” she stated.
Beijing explicitly sees the current U.S.-led order as an unfair constraint on China’s rise and seeks to replace that order with its own.
China continues to violate the terms of the post-World War II U.S.-led order and, until Mr. Trump, the U.S. did virtually nothing in response to China’s trade violations, illegal territorial claims in the South China Sea, and technology theft.
“Multipolarity or ‘sharing power’ is not a peaceful compromise — it’s the transition phase between one Pax and the next,” Ms. Chen stated. “The CCP has never hidden that it wants a China-led order. The United States, until recently, never hid that it intends to preserve the one it built.”
Manish Adhikary, an executive editor with India Today magazine, said Mr. Jiang claims to be an expert in “predictive history” and has been called “China’s Nostradamus” and a conspiracy theorist.
“In over 68 minutes with Tucker Carlson, Jiang never once mentions China’s declining population, its local government debt crisis, its dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, its treatment of Uyghurs or its assertive behavior in the South China Sea,” Mr. Adhikary said.
“He tells Tucker that China ‘doesn’t really have a geopolitical framework, a grand strategy’ — a claim difficult to reconcile with the Belt and Road Initiative, explicit military modernization targets, and what scholars have documented as Beijing’s long-term strategy of displacing U.S.-led order,” he said.
No public evidence links Mr. Jiang to a formal affiliation with the Chinese party state, but Mr. Adhikary said he is viewed as providing a “steady, sophisticated drip of civilizational pessimism aimed squarely at Western audiences.”
“The asymmetry in his output — every major power examined and found wanting, except the one he lives in — is a pattern serious readers are entitled to notice,” he stated in a commentary.
• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.
