Steve Bannon has been thinking big thoughts.

Though he's stayed largely out of sight since the publication of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, Bannon has been in high demand in recent weeks. He appeared, behind closed doors, in front of the House Intelligence Committee and is said to have given Robert Mueller some 20 hours of his time as well. What he told them, of course, remains unknown. As does the path ahead for Donald Trump's erstwhile strategist.

These days, he no longer runs Breitbart News, but Bannon remains holed up at the townhouse that once served as its Capitol Hill headquarters, plotting the next stage of his right-wing populist revolution and brooding over the course of human events.

That's where, on a recent Saturday afternoon, I found him—wearing a beige-khaki shirt over an orange polo, the collar down on one side and popped on the other. Amid the clutter sprawled in front of him on the dining room table at Breitbart's townhouse lay two totems of his current thinking. One was a copy of The New York Times, showing coverage of the Women's March protests that greeted the one-year anniversary of Trump's inauguration. He's been studying the movement closely, he explained. The other was a sheet of paper on which he'd sketched a triangle, labeling its vertices China, Persia, and Turkey. Invoking the 1930s and '40s, Bannon told me that he believes the triumvirate is forming a "new Axis," one that he thinks the U.S. and its allies must confront and defeat.

In the wide-ranging conversation we shared, Bannon declined to address the status of his relationship with Trump or with his onetime patrons, Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who have severed ties with him. In fact, when the conversation turned to the Mercers, he cut it off, but not before he had offered a stern defense of his worldview, a reflective perspective on his time in the White House, and a cryptic glimpse of what he's planning to do next.

GQ: You've made it clear that you're concerned about China's rise, and that you want the U.S. to embark on a national project to counter its global influence—something like a new Cold War. Do you have some sort of grudge against China?

Steve Bannon: China has been at economic war with us for a long time, and we're now starting to confront that. President Trump's policies, if fully executed—it already has their attention in a massive way—will start to right the balance.

I'm a Sinophile. I have a great love for China. One of the reasons I joined the United States Navy Pacific Fleet was from a very, very young age in my life, I had a great attraction to Asia.

Really?

Oh yeah, one of the most important things in my life was—for the first time as a Naval officer—pulling into Hong Kong in 1977, ’78. It was a very powerful experience for me. I spent time in China, actually owned companies in China. I've lived for a while in the French Concession in Shanghai. I've studied Chinese history and I love it. I have a very big difference with the regime that runs China. But I have great, great love for the Chinese people.

It's been reported that you've compared the regime to the early stages of Nazi Germany. Is that accurate? Does that reflect your thinking?

John Kennedy wrote Why England Slept about how people were caught by surprise with what the Germans did. Why did America sleep?

If you look at President Xi's nineteenth party speech, and if you actually read it—I keep saying the elites in this country are not serious people; I don't think enough people read it—it's a three-and-a-half-hour speech, and there's no happy talk in the entire speech. If they accomplish in the next five to 10 years [what he described], I think it'll be virtually impossible for us to continue to be a hegemonic power vis-à-vis them. We've been asleep and allowing this to happen.

“The Russians are bad guys. They’re not pilgrims. But I’ve argued from day one that we ought to try to reset the relationship with Russia.”

I know that one of your favorite books is The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. When you think about rising and declining powers, are you at all worried about provoking a conflict with China that the U.S. would lose—the so-called Thucydides Trap?

I don't think it has to happen. First off, the whole concept of the rising power and the declining power presupposes that the larger power that's declining continues to decline.