White House chief strategist Steve Bannon stunned the political chattering class on Wednesday when he called a liberal magazine writer out of the blue and dished dirt to him about race politics, the fight against North Korea, and internal West Wing skirmishes over an economic war with China.

Bannon told the American Prospect, a far-left publication, that Democrats' fixation on race politics instead of jobs and the economy would be their doom in 2020.

He also denounced the alt-right, by calling them a 'collection of clowns', and said some of his contemporaries in the administration are 'wetting themselves' over his plans to marginalize government agencies and bureaucrats.

'The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day,' he boasted.

'If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.'

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called a liberal magazine writer on Wednesday and dished to him about the North Korean standoff, an economic war in China and race politics

Along the way, he sought to distance himself from the white nationalists and other 'alt-right' denizens who have found an ideological bedfellow in Breitbart News, the website he led until last year.

'Ethno-nationalism – it's losers,' he said. 'It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it.'

'These guys are a collection of clowns,' he added.

Bannon's conversation with writer Robert Kuttner was reminiscent of fired White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci's infamous job-ending phone call to a New Yorker reporter – without The Mooch's four-letter-words.

Bannon and a key aide did not respond to a question on Wednesday evening about whether the Trump-whisperer thought he was speaking off the record.

If not, he purposely contradicted President Donald Trump's stated policy on North Korea, a saber-rattling warning to rain 'fire and fury' down on dictator Kim Jong-Un if he didn't back off an aggressive missile test-launch posture.

'There's no military solution,' Bannon said Wednesday. 'Forget it.'

'Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.'

Bannon also acknowledged a long-running internal feud with National Economic Council chair Gary Cohn over whether to impose trade sanctions on China.

While Cohn and others argue for a softer line in the hope that Beijing will in return help keep North Korea in check, Bannon wants to acknowledge an existing all-out economic war between China and the United States.

Bannon told the American Prospect , a far-left publication, that Democrats' fixation on race politics instead of jobs and the economy would be their doom in 2020

'We're at economic war with China,' he said. 'It's in all their literature. They're not shy about saying what they're doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it's gonna be them if we go down this path.'

'To me the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that,' Bannon added, warning of an 'inflection point' coming in the next decade beyond which the U.S. economy could be permanently sunk.

Cohn and some at the Treasury Department stand in his way.

'Oh, they're wetting themselves,' Bannon said, explaining that he has plans to marginalize the influence of cabinet agencies and bureaucrats who oppose him.

'We're still fighting. There's Treasury and Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying,' he observed.

'We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy.'

During the interview Bannon also denounced the 'alt-right' as a 'collection of clowns'. Pictured is a scene from the violence in Charlottesville on Saturday