Identifying China as both a competitor and an adversary, Republican vice presidential nominee Senator J D Vance said on Sunday that his party wants to establish a robust international framework where the US can "check" Beijing.
"I think they're both, right, and I think that what we want to do here is build the kind of international order where we can check China," Mr Vance told CBS in an interview when asked if he views Beijing as a competitor or an adversary.
"We don't want to go to war with China, but certainly they're an adversary...for example, the Chinese know that they're manufacturing tons of fentanyl, they're letting them come into our country. (Vice president and Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris has done nothing about this," Mr Vance said in "Face the Nation" programme.
He said Harris should apply diplomatic and economic leverage on the Chinese to stop manufacturing fentanyl, which is smuggled into the Mexican drug cartels and subsequently shipped into the US.
Responding to a question, Mr Vance said China needs to be warned about it.
"You walk to Beijing, you talk to (President) Xi Jinping, and you say, your entire economy is going to collapse unless you get access to American markets. You need to take this fentanyl seriously or we are going to impose serious tariffs and economic penalties for not following our laws and not helping us stem the flow of this deadly poison," he said.
This is unlikely going to impact the American economy, Mr Vance said.
"I think that we have a powerful economy, with the best workers in the entire world. If we need to fight a trade war with the Chinese, we will fight it and we will win it, but we cannot do what Kamala Harris has done, which is be so terrified of using the economic power that we have that she's not even willing to stop the flow of this deadly poison coming into our country," he claimed.
According to the Ohio Senator, the former president and Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, gets along with world leaders, and there's nothing wrong with him complimenting them as people, if it makes him more effective diplomatically.
"If you actually have a good relationship with people and they trust you to follow your word. We have to remember that Democrats, including Kamala Harris, attacked Donald Trump for having a good relationship with Vladimir Putin. Well, when Donald Trump was president, Vladimir Putin didn't invade another country.
"...So maybe they should take a lesson from Trump's pray - playbook about diplomatic legitimacy, because I think Donald Trump got a lot done because world leaders respected him," Mr Vance said.
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