Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), a candidate in the 2020 Democrat presidential primary, spoke with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily about U.S. policy toward China, which she felt is needlessly and dangerously antagonizing a nuclear-armed adversary.

She also criticized Americans for hypocritically speaking out against Chinese authoritarianism while “not addressing the very real problems that we should be addressing here at home.”

Gabbard agreed with Marlow’s observation that the U.S. economy is “deeply intertwined” with that of China, making policy decisions more complicated.

“There are a lot of very real concerns that we have about their policies, some of the issues related to IP [intellectual property] theft and others,” she said.

“We’ve got to be able to look at this within the context of what’s in the best interest of our country and national security,” Gabbard said. “I believe that being able to work out our differences with China, whether it’s in regard to trade policy or other things, is absolutely necessary while still maintaining the opportunity, the ability, for us to be able to work together in those areas where our interests are the same.”

“I think it’s a mistake, for a long time people have looked at China with a zero-sum mentality — that for us as the American people to be successful, or to quote-unquote ‘win,’ that China must lose,” she said.

“I think that’s a mistaken proposition, not only as we look at our foreign policy with China, but really around the world,” she contended. “It’s important to look at those areas of common interest, see how we can maximize those, while also, again, making sure that we can actually work out those differences and resolve the issues and problems that we have.”

Gabbad said she believes “the greatest existential threat we face in this country is increasing tensions between the United States and nuclear-armed countries like Russia and China, pushing us closer and closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.”

“That’s the danger here of continuing to just pour fuel on the fire of, really, an economic war that’s being waged with China” she continued. “Because an economic war can very easily turn into a hot war, and you’re talking about a hot war between the United States and a nuclear-armed country. I don’t think we should take that lightly, by any means.”

Marlow asked Gabbard about the uncritical position taken by outspoken “very woke” critics of President Donald Trump, notably including certain professional basketball stars with heavy financial interests in China, towards Beijing’s authoritarianism and massive human rights violations.

“I think that there’s a lot of work that we can and should be doing right here at home to continue our path to strive always for that more perfect union, to stand up for and protect our own freedoms and civil liberties that we can never take for granted,” Gabbard responded.

Gabbard said it was “hypocrisy” for Americans to look at other countries and “try to dictate to them what they should do and what kind of governance we feel that they should have — but meanwhile, we’re not addressing the very real problems that we should be addressing here at home.”

The NBA basketball scandal Marlow referred to involved star players professing ignorance of Chinese human rights violations after Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey expressed support for the Hong Kong democracy movement in a tweet he was later forced to delete.

Marlow also mentioned the latest Internet freedom report by Freedom House, which found China to be the most repressive regime in the online world for the fourth year in a row.

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