Pod Save the World - Chinese Communist Party Coachella

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Tommy and Ben cover the latest from the war in Ukraine, including the bombing of a Russian bridge to Crimea and Russia’s response, the latest on the protests in Iran, why an OPEC decision is leading the US to rethink the US-Saudi partnership, how British PM Liz Truss is making history and waging war on podcasters, why Elon Musk will not shut up and some scandal updates. Then Ben talks with former Australian PM Kevin Rudd about the upcoming Chinese Communist Party leadership conference. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, this is one of those weeks where the world feels a little precarious to me. You know what I mean? There's some big things that could break one way in Russia and Iran where the world could be a better place. It could break a different direction. Things would go a little south. I don't know. I thought you were talking about the Mets. Sorry about that. That was a tough post. I'll be it brief post.

Yeah. Just talking sports. My favorite sport, baseball, my favorite team is the Mets, and they can find new ways. Like, you never think there's a new way they're going to find to lose. Or just torture you guys. Yeah, losing a 10-and-a-half game division lead, getting swept by that team, the Braves, to lose the division where you only had to win one game, and then losing it home to the Padres, it was not. Are you going to get Aaron Judge?

At this point, like, I don't even care. I'm just so, you know, like, you're in the nihilist's phase. By February, this is what. baseball does, it gives you the whole winner to convince yourself that it's worth caring about it again. Yeah, well, the Patriots are starting our third string quarterback, and I'm getting into it. And looking good, by the way, has started. But back to my existential anxiety about the world. No, you're right about the world. The world, that too, it's balanced on a precipice. We're going to start with some of these big balancing issues. So updates from Russia and Ukraine,

including the bombing of a bridge to Crimea and the Russian response to that. We'll cover how these women-led protests, across Iran have grown why a decision by OPEC is leaving the U.S. to rethink the U.S. Saudi relationship. British Prime Minister Liz Trust is setting record. She's making history. We'll explain why. Elon Musk just won't shut up. And then we'll do some quicker updates and some international scandal news. We love an international scandal here. Always. And then Ben, you go deep an interview today with a lifelong friend of the pot at this point. I think we can, you know, Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia, definitely a friend of the pod came by in person and we went deep on China's upcoming election, not a less

suspense about who's going to win that election, the party conference there, which is Jinping, what it means, some of the problems China's having. COVID is not going well. COVID. The worst numbers since like 2020, right? Yeah, and the economy, not going well. Like a lot of headwinds there. And also because we have a particular interest in Australian politics on this podcast, we give

former labor prime minister Kevin Rudd the chance to dunk on the Scott Morrison's and Tony Abbott's of the world. Oh, I love that. I can't wait to hear that. And Rupert Murdoch. Any question to Kevin Rudd about Australian politics ends up being a conversation by Rupert Murdoch, which is good. I mean, I do think that, you know, like in conversations about foreign policy in the last 20 years, you kind of can't go back to the Iraq war enough as being sort of the genesis of all kinds of bad things. You really can't, I think, overstayed the degree to which Rupert Murdoch and his family have just destroyed politics in multiple continents. And the planet.

Yeah. Thanks for that, guys. Also, Crooked is bringing you the election coverage. You love to hate via Crooked Radio. We're taking over every weekend on Sirius XM progress in the Series XM app. You'll hear our host, candidates, experts more, including Pod Save the World on Sirius XM on the weekend. Check it out, Channel 127 or subscribe now and get up to four months free of Sirius XM.

See site for details at Sirius. XM.com slash crooked. Also, real quick, for fans of the podcast, wind of change, they are back for a bonus episode. Patrick heard the Scorpions were coming to town last month. So we went to a show. Check it out. It's super fun. We all love the show. And it's so nice to have them back in my years. I do hope listeners will check out my new show, World Corrupt. It is currently sitting in your Pod Save the World Feed. So you really don't have to do much. You just have to click it at some point. It's about FIFA, the corrupt body that oversees international soccer. and how they awarded this year's World Cup, which happens in November, to Qatar.

They gave the 2018 World Cup to Russia, so banner showing there for them. Raj and I, we wrestle with how we as fans can watch these games and these sports that we love while knowing that they are being distorted by big money, these Gulf autocrats who are buying teams. We talked to a bunch of human rights experts that you'll love. We talk to inspiring players like Megan Rapino, talk about the history of FIFA, the history of sports washing going back to like really World War II or before that. And then we talk about what we all can do as fans to help the people who have been harmed.

And it's a really fun show. It is totally in the world though wheelhouse. Roger is the best. My wife literally said to me after listening to the first episode, you guys finally cracked the code on podcasting, just have Roger talk. I'll listen to him say anything. And I said, I love you too. I mean, how am I supposed to take that, Hannah?

It's a tough shot. I've been talking to you on a podcast for like years now. But I do, it hurts. I have to, you know, I have to acknowledge that Roger is an incredibly charming erudite guy. That accent. And it's a great. It goes a long way. Yeah, everybody should check out.

This podcast is at the intersection of like all the things that we are interested in. He's, uh, yeah. He's from Liverpool. So he kind of has that love, hate relationship with Britain. He's an American citizen now. He lives in New York. Yeah. And like a, he's like into being an American citizen.

He loves being an American. Yeah. Loves America more than almost anyone. I've ever made. Definitely making America better. Yeah, he's making America great again. Okay, let's go to Ukraine, Ben, because big news over the weekend on Saturday, an explosion on the Kerch Strait bridge partially destroyed the only link between the Crimean Peninsula back to Russia. The road and rail lines on that bridge are critical in terms of how Russia resupplies its troops that are fighting in southern Ukraine. We assume the Ukrainian military or their security services

were behind this. We don't know exactly how they did it. There was lots of speculation. Travis Helwig, former comedy writer here at Crooked Media, sending the all kinds of clips late Friday night of like drone boats. That is great. I loved it. The leading theory seems to be a truck bomb of some kind. But this bridge is about more than just supplies for Putin.

When Russia finished constructing it back in 2018, you remember Putin celebrated the opening by personally driving a dump truck across the thing. There's like triumphant pictures of a dump truck. A lot of symbolism here and a lot of symbolism in terms of Russia's claim to Crimea. Hours after the attack, the Russians named a new commander of the war effort, this horrible general who oversaw the brutal air campaign in Syria that killed thousands of people, really, in Aleppo. And then right on cue, the Russian military started firing missiles at Kiev and other cities across Ukraine. They hit infrastructure that's purely civilian, like power stations, and they also hit, like, parks, civilian areas.

I saw they blew up a bike path. I mean, this is very indiscriminate. So, Ben, this is what I mean when I say, like, I feel like the world is precarious. Every week we talk about some new escalatory step. I have no problem, obviously, with, you know, the Ukrainian military targeting a resupply line. But the retaliation from the Russians is an escalation. You're seeing Western countries promise more weapons, you know, and on and on it goes. And I don't know.

It's just kind of, it's got me as feeling nervous like I did in kind of late February, early March. Yeah. I mean, so first of all, the bridge is like hugely symbolic of the entire Putin regime, you know, this 12-mile bridge connecting Crimea to Russia, kind of the symbol of the annexation of Crimea, but also the scale of Putin's ambition. He was able to build this bridge that passed people couldn't. It's also kind of the scale of this corruption. Like famously, one of his cronies got like several billion dollars to build this bridge. It costs four billion. Yeah, it went way over the surprise, surprise. The bid, right? And people have long believed that a lot of that money found

its way back into Putin's pocket. And yeah, it is a critical resupply line. And this gets to the point I was going to make, which is that like, look, the bridge is a military target in the sense that that's one of the principal ways in which the Russians are moving equipment into resupply their troops in Ukraine. And the Russians in response, like what they did was horrific, grotesque, once again, told on themselves as people who were more than willing to commit war crimes. Putin, by the way, said he himself ordered those strikes. So he's basically announcing I am the war criminal. Smart. But they accomplished nothing, militarily, zero. Like, nothing in the war was different in terms of the battlefield the day after those strikes. So the contrast is like the Ukrainians

are continuing to do things that have like a very specific military purpose. Even the attack on the bridge did, but especially what they're doing in their offenses in the south and the north and eastern Ukraine, they're winning the war. And then in response, Putin can't do anything but kind of lash out and lob missiles it in like a glass bridge and a park and Kiev. And the assessment seems to be that he did this to appease like the really right wing hawks. Like I saw Ramzan Khadirov, the Chechen leader, who's a Putin stooch, was cheering it. The head of RT, what's her name, was all for this. Like the really rabid right wingers loved this move, even though it was useless. Yeah, what a bunch of dumbass fascists.

Like, it doesn't, like, you won nothing today. Like, you pissed off everybody around the world. You only further ensured that the Ukrainians want nothing to do with you. And the Germans are now going to send, like, advanced air defense systems who had been sitting on the fence, right? Like, they're helping the Ukrainians now. Yeah, Zelensky's out there today asking for big air defense systems and quite luckily to get them.

The U.S. just announced more high Mars to the Ukrainians. So, like, part of the reason we feel so precarious in a strange way is precisely because the Ukrainians are winning, you know, and Putin, what this strike does signal is that in response to the Ukrainians winning, his answer is to take it out on the Ukrainian people. And then that raises the specter of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, other things that he could do that have a purely potentially civilian cost. And that's what's so scary. Him losing is, we said this way back in February. Like the scariest thing was him winning, but like a close second is the scariest thing is Putin losing because then you don't know what he's going to do. Exactly. A couple other

sort of notable stories and updates that we saw. There have been some interesting reports about how as critical as Western weapons have been to the war effort, you just mentioned the Himars Systems. Ukrainians have actually gotten more sheer volume of stuff by overrunning and capturing these Russian supply depots. And like, you know, again, the long range rockets have allowed the Ukrainians to cut off Russian supply lines. But when you're in this like horrible war of attrition and you just come upon, you know, millions of artillery shells you stole from your opponent, like it's a big deal. Yeah. There was a report in the New York Times that the U.S. believes Ukrainian government was behind a car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a bloodthirsty right-wing

Russian nationalist named Alexander Dugan. The U.S. apparently admonished the Ukrainians for that attack. I suspect the Ukrainians will return the favor for leaking its. to the New York Times. There was another weird leaks to Washington Post that says the U.S. as intelligence that a member of Putin's inner circle has voiced disagreement over Russia's handling of the war and that the intel was briefed the Biden and the PDB. Again, weird kind of leak, but, you know, there has been a lot of like very public criticism, seemingly some fighting between the Minister of Defense and the guy who runs the Wagner group, like two kind of oligarchy types. So I'm not sure what to make of that. Also, Ben, Putin celebrated

a big birthday recently, the big 7-0. observers noted he got well wishes from Stephen Seagal, but not Xi Jinping. I was curious if you sent him anything or had any well wishes, and you maybe put on like TikTok. Yeah, like one of those e-cards, you know, with like a jib jab or something. Yeah, yeah, or the butterflies fly out of the envelope, you know, I mean. It's very nice. I mean, what is it about these autocrats, by the way, that they send each other birthday congratulations? It's so lame. It's very lame. What are you doing? Oh, hey, congratulations president of Tajikistan on your birthday, you know. But it is kind of therefore, because this seems important to autocrats,

it does show that G has Putin in something of a, like on this friend list, he's been downgraded to the second tier of the friend list. Yeah, he's getting left on, like, read receipt on text and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Or he's got the, when Putin texts, G, gets at like, notifications of insolenced response. On the car bomb, I think it's worth us, like, you know, saying or me, because I think I was one you know I went along with the speculation that maybe the

FSB could have done this because it happened so fast and I forgot about that and the Ukrainian woman they framed seemed very unlikely and by the way that Ukrainian woman they framed may still be unlikely so you know eat my words on that I think this was kind of a dumb thing for the Ukrainians to do like there's enough to focus on in Ukraine and it is kind of like once you get into these kinds of targeted killings inside of Russia, what you're accomplishing relative to like how uncomfortable that's going to make some of your allies. In this case, it was the U.S. had leaked it. So someone clearly saw this and didn't like it. Anyway, but put that aside, it feels pretty rogue because there have not been many of these.

It's a non-military target. I mean, even if you hit Alexander Dukin, I mean, he's a propagandist, really. Yeah. And so, you know, this is a, it was a one-off, so it doesn't feel like this is some strategy of assassination by the Ukraine. So there's something kind of weird about the whole thing. I don't quite get it. And I do think it's worth just mentioning. The only thing to watch on this like these reports and leaks about, you know, the Wagner group guy and Progozin and Shorugu, the defense minister, it is the case to me that you felt like as this war has gone off the rails, there's this increasing prominence of Ramzan Khadirov, the Chechen, who, by the way, if you listen to another Russia, probably responsible for the assassination of Boris Nem. Huff. Truly evil guy.

True enemy of the pod. And Progosen, the Wagner group guy, if they do end up kind of taking over, these are like the scariest guys, right? And Pergozun, you're seeing him literally at prisons. Yeah, like recruiting dudes at prison. Rallying dudes trying to get them to join his little group. Yeah. So to me, it does speak to potential divisions.

It also speaks to potential kind of radicalization of who's in charge there, you know. Yeah. The last thing I said, do you see that? Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, said Monday he was going to deploy troops with Russian forces in response to some sort of perceived threat to Belarus. I don't know that he said deploy them to Ukraine yet, but like, I don't know. There's some concern that the Belarusians might get deeper into this. Yeah. I mean, the question is whether that ends up posing a danger to Lukashenko, too, because I can't imagine that a lot of Belarusians want to sign up to go and

be in the meat grinder at Eastern Ukraine there. The other thing I'm watching, we referenced this last week, we actually, as we'll get to later, we had a pretty good run last week. One of the things you talked about was like, maybe it was week forward, central Asian countries kind of distancing themselves a bit from Russia. There was like a big Times article on this, this week. And it's clear in their statements and in some of their actions that the Central Asian countries that used to kind of look to Russia, or they didn't have a choice, kind of under Russia's thumb, are so uncomfortable with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty that they really are drifting away from the Russians. And so he's holding on tighter to Belarus, but he's also losing influence in other former Soviet republics.

And that I think is really notable. Yeah, that is notable. Let's turn to Iran because these protests there seem to be growing still in large part due to another murder of just an innocent young girl. I mean, there was a 16-year-old girl named Nika Shakam Rami. She was seen protesting. She was burning her headscarf in Tehran and later told friends she was chased by the police and then she turned up dead. So a 16-year-old kid was probably murdered by the security forces. This is a horrible story.

That means the protests have been growing. They've been expanding. There's videos going around social media that appear to show police kind of turning sides, switching sides and marching with the protesters. The Associated Press reported that workers at Iranian oil and natural gas facilities joined the protests on Monday. Ben, it was fascinating talking to Yegi Rezion on last week's pod about the kind of generational dynamic at play and how these younger Iranians are just like less afraid of the regime. That's such a great envious.

She's so amazing. If you haven't didn't listen to it, go back. She's an incredible human being. And I heard a ton of feedback about her personally. There was this song released by an Iranian singer named Shervin Hajupur. It has become the unofficial anthem of the protests. They got 40 million views since this 25-year-old guy posted it on Instagram in late September. The lyrics are basically.

The lyrics, not basically, lyrics are strung together tweets sent by demonstrators about why they are protesting. We're going to give a quick listen. It's a beautiful song. It translates to for the sake of. He's reading all these tweets for people about why they're out there. Hadipur was, of course, arrested. I think he's out on bail now. So, Ben, just stepping back, like, again, we were at the White House during the Arab Spring.

And I'm not naive enough to think that there's likely to be a clean ending here where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, the protesters take over. But it does feel like, unlike 2009, unlike previous protests, not since maybe 1979, that there is a real risk to the regime's survival, and if not, like, overt questioning of its credibility. And that, to me, is enormously important. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, a few things on just the song, because it's indicative of some broader trends. Like, the first thing is, like, that song and the reception of God is a sign of the scale to which this movement is about more than just politics, even. It's about, it's about the entire culture and identity of Iran.

You know, like the Green Movement in 2009, and Yegi drew the comparison generationally, but also, you know, that was about, I'm sure it was about more than politics, but it was keyed to a political event, an election. And this feels like a cultural expression that has been building for a long time. The lyrics that song encompassed not just the recent events

encompasses kind of the feeling of psychological oppression of living in the Islamic Republic. So once a movement, comes about like a cultural phenomenon and not just like a political phenomenon, it's usually much more potent and long lasting. I think this song is also indicative of the fact that Iranian women have been completely in the lead on this thing, Iranian girls in the lead on this thing. But, you know, admirably, like men are also stepping up to support them. And this guy deserves credit. He said he's not leaving Iran. He got arrested. He's out. He's still like posting stuff on

Instagram and support of the protests. So it's a sign of the kind of mobilization in the whole society. You mentioned like the oil workers strike. That was actually pretty key in 1979. It was one of the things that helped kind of crack the edifice around the shahs when the workers started going on strike, particularly in the oil industry. So there's a lot to watch here and a lot of danger. And to the fear factor that Yegi spoke about, you know, like I saw there are these pictures of Iranian girls who were like in their, you know, teens, like, given the finger to a picture of the Supreme Leader. Like, this, I mean, this is, yeah, like, that, I didn't see that, you know, that's, we're

in a new territory here. And I think it is really dangerous for the Islamic Republic. I think we, when we caveat this by saying, this could get worse for it gets better, or this might not have clean ending, as you said, like, we're conditioned. It's not because we're not rooting for that. No. It's just conditioned by the Arab Spring, but this does feel like there's this, snowball that just keeps getting bigger. And nothing the regime does is fixing that.

Yeah. And it was good to see the Obama's weighed in in support of the protesters today. I saw Trump actually has been talking about the protests as well in support of the protesters at his rally. So it is a bipartisan issue. I think albeit for far more cynical reasons from Trump. But it was great to see the Obama's like kind of weigh in on this. Yeah. No. And I think it was good. It was important for them. And I think it's important for Democrats and progressives to support the Iranian people like one million percent on this. And look, you know, part of what's weird about it in our politics is that there's this kind of right-wing machine that is pro-regime change in Iran that I disagree with about most things, including the

idea that the U.S. should impose regime change on Iran. Exactly. But that doesn't mean that we should let them own support for the Iranian people. Because I actually, I don't think that they really do support the Iranian people. Some of them, sure. But I think some of them just like this is geopolitics. This is like we want to, we want the U.S. to knock over this regime and kind of install, like, you know, be happy with anybody. They'd be happy with like an MBS type or something running Iran. A strong man that will cut an Abraham Accords type deal with the Israelis and stop threatening their security. Exactly. Exactly. Versus a democracy. What we want is like a bottom up democratization of Iran, and therefore, I hope more progressive voices continue to speak out.

Speaking of long overdue changes in supported democracy and not corrupt autocrats, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. You guys have all heard Ben and I talk about how thrilled we were when President Biden went to Saudi Arabia, fist bumped the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. That trip was seen in large part as an effort to calm tensions in the relationship between U.S. and Saudi and get them to pump more oil in the wake of sanctions cutting off Russian energy exports. That goal failed miserably. And last week, OPEC Plus officially gave the U.S. the middle finger and went all in on helping Russia in the war by agreeing to production cuts. So they're going to reduce their production of oil, which will prop up energy prices, keep money

flowing to Putin, and hike gas prices as the world probably goes into a global recession. So not ideal. A lot of people are pissed. Ukrainians, the French, the White House, several Democrats in Congress, including Bob Menendez, who is usually unhelpful. He's the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he called for a freeze on all cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including arms sales and security cooperation. There's some big carve out, some caveats in there of like without endangering U.S. security, but basically saying OPEC better reverse course or we'll pull back all this cooperation. The U.S. I saw right before we came in, reportedly, canceled a meeting with the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council working group on Iran. So, Ben,

I do think it would be worth just trying to quickly imagine for listeners, like what a right-sized U.S.-S.-Saudi relationship could look like. I will start by just noting that both of us are well aware of the Obama administration. We worked closely with the Saudis. We sold them a shitload of weapons. I don't think either of us are thrilled with that history. I didn't like it at the time. Very few things where I say I didn't like that at the time. Yeah. But also, look, I mean, It's worth also just noting, like, Muhammadman Salman has upended and changed the leadership in the dynamic, right? So there's a distinction.

But again, like, still kind of happy to be critical of that record. But, like, I do think there's some risks here for the U.S. in severing the relationship in like a fit of peak that we should just talk about, which are, you know, I'm still aware of some really important counterterrorism partnerships that we had against al-Qaeda in recent years with the Saudis. They're the biggest player in the Gulf and our ability to, you know, have a. influence in the region can go through them sometimes. The U.S. is about 5,000 troops in Saudi and the UAE.

Curie's been what you think. So there's a thing sort of like at stake, right? Any of these proposals that you've seen floated in Congress, like Tom Malinowski had one, just talked about the Bob Menendez one, anything floated makes sense to you, any anxiety about kind of making this decision, you know, in the context of them not pumping oil versus, I don't know, human rights, butchering a journalist, et cetera. I'm going to start where you ended. which is it's all well and good that all these people have decided that they're now outraged about the U.S. society relationship.

But it does kind of tell on ourselves that, oh, when they were just chopping up journalists and throwing women activists in prison, that was one thing. But when OPEC came out and like heard our bottom line game on, right? I mean, like I wish that the thing that triggered people was the chopping up of a journalist for the Washington Post. put that aside because everybody knows how we feel about that. How would you right size it? There were a lot of proposals that, frankly, a lot of people around Biden were four in the Trump years suspending all arms sales to Saudi Arabia. And, you know, you can say you're suspending because you can say you'll resume them if things change. Right. Mead these criteria, yeah. But like, you know, they need those arms. They want those arms.

that only hurts us in that the defense contractors don't get the money for those arms. That's something that matters to people in the U.S., but I think that's a risk worth taking because I don't think we should be arming people like this. Stopping any support for their war in Yemen, which has been stop and start around ceasefires, but is still ongoing, would be certainly a part of the consequences you could impose. And just, you know, this kind of lack of deference to, their concerns on this range of issues. Now, the risks, I don't, terrorism, like, they have their own interest in fighting terrorism. So I always kind of, when people would say, well, what about

the cooperation on ISIS or Al Qaeda? Like, yeah, like, they're not going to switch sides because, like, those guys would kill MBS if they could, you know, like the ISIS guys and what's left of Al Qaeda, although there's not really much left. The risk, what the other risk used to hear is that they're going to kind of go all in with the Russians. Well, first of all, they just bailed out the Russians with a significant amount of revenue on these oil prices. And fucking Muhammad bin Zayed. I was just going to say that. The president of the UAE.

Yeah. In Moscow. The most powerful man in the Emirates is in Moscow today where he said Russia has the right to defend its national security, right? By invading other countries? Like, this is the man, and I'm D.C. listeners, like, I'm looking at you, people who've been at. Gulf funded think tank. People who've been at Cafe Milano with the Emirates or, you know, Wolfgang Puck, like, cooked at the Emirati ambassador's residence for some party you went to. Like, that guy is in fucking Moscow today.

The day after, like, a bunch of missiles were lobbed at civilians, okay? Now, I think the most benign description of this meeting is maybe he's trying to play a diplomatic role and the Saudis played a role in that prisoner exchange. If I'm wrong and it is announced in Mohambin Zaid is. broken end to the war in Ukraine, like, I will eat all the crow in the world. All I see is a supposedly highly respected figure in Washington who's celebrated for his strategic acumen, Mahm bin Zayed, sitting next to Vladimir Putin, okay? And on the Russian relationship, what, they're going to buy all their arms from the Russians? Those are some good arms the Russians got. They can try, right, but they're not a lot left. And switching systems at this point is going to take a

decade. Well, that's what I always heard from our military is that would take them, a decade to get on Russian systems that American systems, and the Russian systems, like, don't seem to be working too well. Yeah. We have leverage. Like, we always act like the Saudis have all this leverage on us, and we're just, he's like, we're this small country that has to do whatever they say. No, they're rich. That's their leverage. They have a lot of money. Listen to the podcast, the Gita with Roger to get a sense of that. World corrupt. I mean, like, this is, these are the most corrupt guys in the world. One way to make this a lot easier, by the way, would be to diversify our sources of oil. Well, yes, yes. And so we talked last week about a prisoner exchange between the

U.S. and Venezuela and wondered if that could be part of a broader diplomatic thaw. Shortly after that speculation, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is preparing to reduce sanctions on Venezuela, allow Chevron to resume pumping oil and gas, and get them back online. That will take a while. But if that happens, if we had a better relationship with Iran and Iranian oil was on the oil market, that could fill a chunk of the energy gap. And of course, like the long-term the goal is to get the fuck off fossil fuels, right? But that's going to take a while. That will probably not happen before the Russia-Ukraine war is over.

But, you know, it did seem like the administration maybe leaked the Venezuela piece of this in response to OPEC plus. And if so, good for you. Yeah. And it's probably like a signal to markets to do that leak. Yes. But like the, yeah, but it bears saying that the long-term goal here should be to get off of fossil fuels. You know, I think we should be doing that for the planet.

But, like, it also stands to reason. that all these guys, whether you're taking by Putin or MBS or MDRO for that reason, for that matter, the reason they're able to be autocrats is because they have oil and, you know, everybody needs oil. But I do think in the short run, look, the idea

of having these kind of blanket sanctions and trying to choke and starve off the Venezuelan oil industry hasn't done anything to dislodge Maduro. It's kind of funny that we like, we had this other dictator in Saudi Arabia that we go to

to do our bidding on oil. And then with these other dictator, we sanctioned. But I think that it would be logical for our own interests, but also ultimately to try to have more an entry point to make progress in Venezuela to do that step and to facilitate the return of Venezuela and oil to the market beyond where it's been. Let's turn to the UK, Ben, because the new British Prime Minister List Trust is making history. We talked a few weeks back about how her tax plan nearly tanked the global economy, the Tory tax plan.

And they walked part of that back. But then last week, a British outlet called the Observer commissioned, a poll that found Liz Trust has a negative 47 point approval rating, the worst ever recorded for a prime minister by their polling firm. Do we think David Lamie is about to be foreign minister? Because this is feeling good. I mean, let's just get the election called here. I mean, this is some, I think what's clear from these numbers is like she's not going to recover.

Like there's no chance that she can, you know, become elected prime minister, I think. And so it just begs the question of will there be an early election just because of the complete chaos in British politics? If not, when will the Tories dump her overboard? We can vote of confidence, I guess, could happen. Yeah, yeah. Well, but like this is this is a really dysfunctional situation right now where you have this prime minister has no legitimacy. She didn't win an election. Nobody seems to want her to be Prime Minister, except for a hard-line number of Tories.

She, you know, was playing footsie with tanking the whole global economy. And now, yeah, we're just in this waiting game until Kira Starmor can get in. Even worse, Ben, she attacked us personally in a speech. She said, quote, labor, the lib Dems, and the SNP, dot, dot, prefer protesting to doing. They prefer talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions. They taxi from North London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo. From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers. End of quote.

So I am announcing the formation of a 2004-Iraq war-style coalition of the willing podcasters to fight back against these smears. We're going to get Rogan, Ben Shapiro, call her daddy, all the true crime, and we're going to fight back. Are you with me? Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, first they came for the markets, and I said nothing, but then they came for the podcasters. and I took that personally. Yeah.

I mean, so I took that little personally. Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, maybe don't worry about the podcasters list for us. Your prime minister of like a big, well, used to be really important country. Well, that's still important country. Sorry, guys. I mean, like, get focused on other things here. The North London reference was a little weird too.

It's kind of where the, a lot of the heart of the Jewish community is. Oh, interesting. But like the, it was just, it made me just because Kier Starmer said to do all this work to purge, you know, any Semitism from. the ranks of the Labor Party. But anyway, yeah, podcast hit a little close down. Back off, trust. The other thing that's been bugging me, Ben, is Elon Musk will not stop tweeting about foreign policy. He tweeted a Twitter poll asking people to vote on a Russia-Ukraine, quote-unquote peace plan, arguing that they should redo the elections and annexed regions

under UN supervision, make Crimea formally a part of Russia and require Ukraine to remain neutral, I assume that means no EU membership, no NATO. Not the best deal for Ukraine or much concerned shown for the Ukrainian people, especially reports of torture of civilians in Russian occupied areas. Elon also told the Financial Times that Taiwan should become part a special administrative zone controlled by China. What a surprise that the Chinese government loved that idea. I think he sells a lot of Tesla's there. I generally dislike and avoid the kind of Elon Musk news cycle because he's just like a thirsty troll. But it annoyed me because there does seem to be some question. about whether Elon is reducing Ukraine's access to his Starlink's internet satellites,

which have been critical for the Ukrainian military. And more generally, like, there is obviously a place, I think, for what's usually called track two diplomacy or like conversations by people outside of government to try to find space for some sort of peace deal. But this just reeks of a guy looking out for his own business interests, having a massive ego and being willing to just spout off on anything. And like a Twitter poll about peace in Ukraine is like such a self-evidently stupid way to have this conversation that I worry that his efforts are making real diplomacy or real diplomatic efforts look like a farce. And we don't want that.

Yeah, I mean, you know, in some ways Elon Musk is the perfect avatar for Twitter itself, which explains, I guess, is interested in it. Because like, you know, a pandemic happens and suddenly everybody on Twitter's an infectious disease. expert, you know, or, well, the hurricane's coming and suddenly he's like a weather expert. Like Elon Musk, because he, like, is following the war on Twitter is now, like, thinks he's somehow qualified to, like, broker peace. He got a little bit of pushback, and he's tweeting, like, maps of what he thought was, like, a polling result from 2012. It's like, hey, man, anything happened between then and now?

Well, that might change people's opinions? Yeah, because, I mean, I was to say, like, usually guys who do track two or women who do track two, are experts in like the field they're doing track two. And the thing about that map, so he tweeted this map from 2012 that showed the kind of more pro-Russian political parties had done well in eastern Ukraine, totally different context. Pre-2014, by the way, ignores that the same regions voted for independence overwhelmingly from Russia. But also like, who gave him that map? You know? I doubt that Elon Musk has like a set of graphics on his computer of the maps of of Ukrainian election results.

It is very weird. Someone is feeding in this stuff. And look, he's the richest guy in the world or one of them. Like, he has a platform. It's reaching a lot of people. It's a pain in the ass to think about, but it makes your head hurt. But yeah, meanwhile, like the Taiwan plan, which basically Taiwan won't exist anymore. I mean, let's just move on, Elon.

Maybe protecting his own semiconductor access. A couple things we don't have time to discuss this week, but just want to note. Trump in his infinite helpfulness through his weight behind a far-right party in Spain called the Vox Party. We've talked about them before. They're terrible. We'll talk about them in the future. The U.S. Senate delegation to Afghanistan for meetings with the Taliban that included David Cohen, who's been on this show. We know him well.

He's the deputy CIA director. I'm sure that was a blast. Hopefully they all get to a place where there's some sort of deal on humanitarian relief for the Afghan people. And everyone seems to think Kim Jong-un is about the test of nuclear weapon. there's lots of reporting about his new outfits. He was wearing a weird white shirt. Don't know what to make a bat. And kind of an eat, pray, love hat, you know.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, you're right. And then a video of Brazilian, speaking of eat, pray, love. A video of Brazilian president, Jaya Bolsonaro, saying he would eat human flesh has gone viral in their presidential campaign. Yeah, good to see that campaign closing on that note. We'll definitely be coming back to the Brazilian election. It was good to see friend of the pod, Tabitha Amarol, out there. Lulu was like promoting her as a surrogate. But then my favorite David Cohen story,

like I hope I didn't tell it before that involves you, is like when he was the sanctions guy at Treasury, we were putting like the 900th round of sanctions on Iran and we put David Cohen on television, right? He did some cable hits or something. And Dag Vega, maybe first who ran booking and sort of for the White House, yeah. He booked the, he was concerned. He was concerned he came up to you and I after and he's like we're like David did great and he's like I don't think so he looked really angry the entire hit and you just look at him without he's like he's fucking angry at Iran Dag he's angry at Iran you know my god I just remember the dad didn't know what to do you didn't know if you're joking or not uh yeah we were like it was a pressure

cooker a little good news ben uh remember that NASA mission we talked about a couple weeks back yeah yeah yeah yeah spaceship into an asteroid yeah exactly They were testing whether we could deflect planet killing asteroids in the future. Sounds like it went well. You did. Points for NASA. So we just need to not kill ourselves first. And again, like I said, like they shot this little thing at this asteroid thing and worked.

Every movie in which we needed to send a nuclear, like a massive nuclear weapon hit the asteroid is now we didn't need to do that. So then AFUK, like Bruce Willis, you could have survived. Sorry, guys. Another argument against nukes. Two quick things before we close. when we get to your interview with former Prime Minister Rudd. You guys know we love a good scandal here. So just to follow up on the story that had the chess world buzzing,

an investigation found that a teenage chess champion named Hans Neiman likely cheated more than 100 times. He was recently accused of using signals delivered via electronic anal bead to cheat in a match in St. Louis. There's a very funny video of him that went viral because he was getting a little more thorough pat-down than the others at the event. So care to comment?

Well, I'm just glad we could get to the bottom of something. There's a lot of loose ends on this show. You know, we, I mean, there's... I like what you did there. Yeah, yeah. You got it at the top. You had it at the top. Also, the world's oldest and largest

competitive Irish dancing organization is looking at the charges that teachers at prominent dance schools have been rigging the competitions. Some parents, in some of these articles, compared it to the mafia, Because once you get a favor from some, like, crooked dance judge, you're indebted to them for life. No reports of anal beads being involved.

But it does seem like the moral of the story here is that people will cheat at literally any competition you throw. No, the anal beads thing has prompted my antenna around cheating scandals to go up. So in addition to this one, we've like, you know, had the poker scandal, right? What was that? I couldn't understand it. I'm not smart enough. It was basically like this live stream poker. showdown between this very established poker player and this kind of up-and-coming woman,

she, like, kind of called him for the entire pot at a circumstance when you wouldn't normally do that, like the odds were, like didn't suggest you should do that, and she won, and then he accused her of cheating, and then she gave all the money back to him, but then she said she didn't cheat, and now there's like a huge, like poker Twitter's gone nuts on this. And then there was a one of the fish, these guys who were in these fishing competitions who were like, that was the best. Putting extra weight in their catches that got caught. That was incredible.

So people are cheating at them. The fishing one just to like go back to that. So these fishing competitions, you can win a ton of money, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who knew? I'm in the wrong field. So these dudes are weighing their fish. And you're supposedly the fish are supposed to be alive when you weigh them because they catch and release. Yeah. Their fish were dead. People were like, it smelled

kind of fishy. So they started cutting them open. These guys had shoved like other fish fillets. And they were and lead weights into the bodies of these fish. And there was almost like mob justice delivered on these guys in real time. It got real ugly. They were, I mean, they were caught hook, line, and sinker. I mean, there was like no question about it. Brutal.

Okay. Enough from us. When we come back, you'll hear from someone very smart and very erudite. Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, about all things China. So stick around. We are very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World, Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister and Farm Minister, and then Prime Minister again of Australia,

the president of the Asia Society, and also the author of a book, a relatively new book, The Avoidable War, Reflections on U.S.-China Relations and the end of strategic engagement. It's a long title, but everybody should buy it. This is the best primer you're going to get on the rising tensions between the U.S. and China,

the risk of conflict over Taiwan or something else. But welcome back to POTS of the World. Thanks very much, Ben. Good to be back in LA. Good to be back on Pod Save the World. Have you saved it yet? We're working on it. The thing about having this podcast is if we save the world, we put ourselves out of business.

So actually the state of the world is actually, you know, relevant to our model. A bit like the avoidable war. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we should collaborate on this. Pod Save the World and the Voidable War. I think it's a similar mission state. It is. There's a lot of overlap.

Well, I want to start, you know, you are really one of the foremost experts we have on China in the world. It's the subject of your book. We are also approaching a very important event in China. The party Congress is upcoming. Just for our listeners, describe, like, why this is important, and what do you think the kind of headline to watch for out of this event will be, obviously, Xi Jinping seeking a third term, not really contested in that regard.

But how do you set up the party conference in its importance? Yeah, well, in the history of the Communist Party, they have these every five. years. So the party's just literally had its 100th birthday and this is Congress number 20. So you take your shoes and socks off and then you work out with, if you count your fingers as well, that's the entire history of the party since 1921. What do they do? Every five years they elect the Supreme decision-making bodies of the party. What's called the Central Committee, 220 members thereabouts, 25 members of the Politburo and seven members of the Standing Committee of the the Politburo. And really the standard committee, the Politburo, acts as the cabinet of the

country. And it meets weekly with a fixed agenda, fixed secretariat. So that's kind of where it all happens in and around Xi Jinping's office itself. So what we're all looking for in terms of the 20th Party Congress is the personnel changes. Who are the folks who are retiring? Probably 11 out of the 25 are retiring for age reasons. And then it will be a question of who gets promoted. because the folks who get promoted also then become candidates for taking on significant positions in the administration of the country, from premier, vice premiers for the economy, as well as those responsible for foreign policy and security policy and those sort of things. The other thing we're looking for for the Congress is it's the five-yearly work report by the General Secretary of the party, which lays out the ideological line for the party.

the country for the long term. And the reason we emphasize that is, under Xi Jinping ideologies come roaring back. It's not just the Deng Xiaoping period where it was a bit of camouflage over the top of a party which had basically become economically pragmatic and foreign policy pragmatic. That's no longer the case. She Jinping's brought ideology back. It's more Marxist Leninist, it's more nationalist. And as a result, therefore, when we look at this document, we'll be looking at, is he going further left on the economy? Is he going further right on nationalism? And that'll be answered for us by the sorts of phrases and language which are used,

which are different from those in the past. So I think we all anticipate Xi Jinping kind of breaking the recent taboo of Chinese leaders who've only served two terms. And, you know, I haven't seen the polling, but I imagine we expect a decisive valid. of Xi Jinping. One thing that you've written a lot about that people miss sometimes because I think the narrative around China and the U.S. is this kind of, you know, rapid growth, poised to take over as a world's largest economy, an ascendant political model that is challenging democracy.

But there's some real vulnerabilities in China, a slowing economy, the zero COVID policy that it seems to have engendered some building unease in China, you know, bubble in the real estate market. What are the risks coming out of this party Congress for Xi Jinping? And how should we think about the vulnerabilities that China's facing going forward? Well, Ben, you're right. When I travel around America, because I live in New York, I run an American think tank. And I speak to Americans, and sometimes there's an assumption that China is 10 foot tall. And then America is still 6 foot 2.

Yeah. I suppose my news for the United States through Pod Save the World today is think of China as 5 foot 9 and a half. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like they've grown a lot and they may grow further. In fact, they probably will. But let's understand that there are still constraints on China's growth.

And there are two or three big ones. The overhang of demography. As of next year, India will be a bigger. country population terms than China. But more importantly, there's a shrinking workforce, and that means less competitive labor rates. It also means more money being spent on old people through the aging of the population and the budget. So all those factors are a headwind against growth. The other big challenge, I think, facing the country at large is rising structural unemployment. We've got a project of the Age Society at the moment on what we call the 19%.

That's the youth unemployment rate, and it's been stuck for quite a while. And so you're a young person who's college educated and you can't find yourself a job. Life's not looking as bright as it used to when there was this automatic absorption of bright young things into the new technology industries of China's future. So there are social problems hanging around that as well. And for the world at large, as China has become more pushy and its foreign security policy, well, it's generated a reaction around the world as well. Not everyone's in love with the People's Republic of China.

If you're in Europe, people are now scratching their heads about why they would never condemn Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Many people disturbed fundamentally about human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as recently concluded in the Human Rights Council report on the same. And if you go even to the developing world and you see the overhang of Chinese debt through the Belt and Road Initiative, there are now possibly eight to 12 countries in the world looking towards one level of sovereign debt crisis or the other where China is the principal owner of the debt. So the reactions, therefore, in those parts of the world where China has been slow to rescheduled debt and in some places where assets have been confiscated to offset debt like in Sri Lanka, it creates reactions as well. So it's not all going China's way.

It's still a country of formidable strengths, which therefore represents a major competitor, structural competitor to the future of United States power. But as I said, five foot nine and a half is different to 10 foot tall, and we should see it in those terms. So you have a good perspective for the next couple questions I'm going to ask, one about the U.S. and then the next one about Taiwan, in that you were a politician, so you had to kind of be attuned to public moods. You were a diplomat,

so you had to try to solve problems sometimes that politicians made. In other words, not attuned to public food. Exactly, right, exactly. And then, you know, you've been an academic of sorts and kind of assessing all this. It seems like you talk about the avoidable war. China and the U.S. both have problems.

You just talked about the Chinese problems a bit. the U.S., I think we all know what our political dysfunction has been. It feels like both countries amidst those problems have, you know, anti-American or anti-Chinese sentiment is building inside their body politic, right? So China's become increasing nationalistic and somewhat anti-American and some of its rhetoric and media. But the same is true in America. You see, you know, increasing anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S.

Congress in American politics. The premise of your book is essentially you have to manage this competition between the U.S. and China to avoid a war. How do you do that when all these forces that are being regularly unleashed in the politics of both countries is driving in the other direction? By the way, in your intro to the question, I loved your reference to me being an academic of sorts. I think that's one of the most generous things that's been said about my claim to the academy. I should tell you, literally three weeks. weeks ago, I finally graduated from Oxford. Yeah, gown and everything, right?

I did a gown, got a genuine defil after four years of hard labor. So are you a doctor? Can we call you Dr. Redden? You can, but basically I specialize in podiatry. But it's also on Chinese Marxist Lennoxianist ideology. We fix your feet and we do your ideology

at the same time. One of the craziest things I've done in my life, by the way. Yeah, I know. Congratulations. So that's but on your core proposition, which is the world which politicians live and work and have their being in, and that which diplomatists occupy, and where do the intersecting sets lie? And how do you craft a strategy for dealing with China in the future, which is policy literate and politically literate? That's the essential major challenge.

The policy literate argument is what I describe as managed strategic competition, Essentially, constructing a framework which has strategic guardrails in it around the five big strategic red lines in the U.S.-China relationship. You know, Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea, Korean Peninsula, plus cyber and space, any one of which any day that we could erupt into something really bad. Yeah. Okay. So most rational folks sit down, even if we're sitting in Beijing at the moment, we'd probably agree on this part of the conversation. Yeah. Then enters the real world of politics where China, in this country, the United States,

and amongst most democratic countries in the world, not Western countries only, but democratic countries, is seen its approval levels collapse. More in the West than in Asia, but also in other parts, the democratic world in Asia and Africa as well. So the intersecting set, I think, is this. If you ask Americans and Chinese at the corporate level and at the public level, do they really think going to war is a smart thing? And then you spend the next 30 seconds describing the fact that there is no such thing as a limited war between China and the United States,

that if it broke out over the Taiwan Straits, there is one path that's called escalation. because automatically you're going to be involving Guam, United States Territory. You're going to be involving Okinawa, sovereign territory of Japan. You're going to be involving the coast of Fujian, where China's intermediate rocket forces lie, which directly threaten Taiwan and US forces in the region. You are in a general war very rapidly. So the idea which I think exists in the back of people's mind,

this would be like a 21st century version of the Falklands War with pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. pop battleships in a distant sea somewhere is just so fundamentally wrong that the job of policymakers is to paint for the publics of the world, including in China. This will be bloody, cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives, including Taiwanese civilians. And therefore, of itself, if we're mindful of the history, say the First World War, is a war well worth avoiding. That's part of the painting of the picture, which the,

policy class need to do for the political class. Yeah. So then turning to Taiwan, which is, you know, of your five scenario is probably the most unfortunately likely to be the tripwire into potential conflict. You know, you have an essential situation. We've talked about this a bit recently in the podcast. But you have a situation which the Chinese kind of insistence that any discussion between the government of Beijing and the government of Taiwan, takes place under the premise that there's one China, and that China is governed by the People's Republic of China. That is the China governed by the Chinese Communist Party. That's kind of their precondition for discussion, and their offer is one country, two systems.

You can be a part of China, but we'll let you keep an autonomous political system of sorts. That obviously looks a lot less attractive after Hong Kong, right? A lot of spontaneous applause. Exactly, not in Taiwan. A slow clap in Taiwan on that one. And then in Taiwan, you have a government that increasingly sees itself not as like some government in exile of China, which is how it was for years under Chengkosh. But as the government of Taiwan, they just want to be left alone. How do you – what is there for Taiwan and China to talk about if they just disagree about this fundamental question of whether Taiwan is part of China?

How do you structure a dialogue of sorts that can, you know, as I've heard of. you say talk, talk, talk, instead of war, war, war, jaw, jaw. How do you do that in that context, where, as we were just saying, the public mood is probably not to have those conversations? Well, you're right,

because China took out a huge long barrel shotgun and blew a hole in its foot over Hong Kong, and therefore by extension over the future of one country, two systems as a basis for managing the future negotiations. with Taiwan. If you look back at what happened, and it's very recent the crackdown in Hong Kong, last several years really. And leading into the last Taiwanese presidential election, President Tsai Ying Wen was in some difficulty going to that election.

Suddenly the Chinese did what they did in Hong Kong and suddenly the traditional governing party in Taiwan which would been working on one country two systems. Yeah. With the PRC, the KMT, the Guam-T, the Guamese, the Guamendang looked like a bunch of political sellouts. And they got smashed in those elections, as we know. And frankly, if the KMT returned to that position, they get smashed again. Yeah. You're now the one podcaster in the United States who's a Taiwan expert.

You've just been there for an extended period of time. So your question, therefore, is a valid one, which is, apart from the artificiality of constructing a dialogue, what could it be about? Two core points. The PRC's benchmark for re-entering dialogue is accepting this mythical hallowed status of something called the 1992 consensus,

which is a piece of high theology which even I can't remember. Because it's complex and like most things associated with the Delphic Oracle capable of accommodating multiple interpretations. Yes. But anyway, let's just put that to one side because it's kind of about there is one China.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't think it, frankly, it should be an impediment for the DPP or the KMT to get across that hurdle. And they should. Yeah. The second and real part is the substance of it. One country, two systems, is dead and buried. It's called Hong Kong. Yeah.

Okay. Therefore, if the Chinese are serious about this, about a negotiated as opposed to a military outcome, we're up for one country. three systems. And the third system would have to be radically different from the second one. There was a day when those of us who used to play think tank land around Taiwan, I used to be a policy planner when I had a real job prior to politics, and that was in the Australian equivalent of the State Department. And we used to think about what a grand Chinese confederation might look like, and that is Taiwan effectively retaining everything that it is now, including its armed forces, including its sovereign capabilities to be represented abroad, but still falling

part into what might be called a broader national confederation. In other words, it was ultimately a political nationalist and almost ethno-nationalist concept. But beyond that, did not have a whole lot of domestic, political, and administrative coherence. One country, three systems, if it was to ever get anywhere, would have to be a lot of those lines. When I've discussed grand Chinese confederations with the PRC in the past, they look at me as if I've just like Martin Luther nailed a whole bunch of heresies

to the door of the church in 1517 and then begin to say heresy, heresy, heresy and then start constructing funereal pires. But if they're serious about a dialogue, it's got to be about a different model. Yeah. And at least probably just some mechanism to avoid unnecessary escalation, right? Well, in the vein of dialogue, I think there's a lot of anticipation that Joe Biden may actually see Xi Jinping for the first time later this year at

the G20 summit in Indonesia. Pretty remarkable that we're, and this is more of a COVID thing than any else, but they were almost two years into the, you know, Biden administration, they haven't seen each other. You know, Xi will be enshrined in his third term. We'll be after our midterm elections, what would you say should be the focus, particularly for the Biden administration going into that meeting? And what does a good, successful meeting look like from your advantage point? Well, politics and diplomacy, as you know, is the art of the possible. So going into such a meeting, it would be useful for the administration to have a clear idea.

I think of where Xi Jinping's mindset is at the moment. And he is not domestically vulnerable in a political sense, but there are another range of mounting vulnerabilities, which we've discussed earlier in this podcast. A slowing economy induced by a whole range of demographic and ideological and COVID-related reasons. plus Xi Jinping's bestie Vladimir Putin having done what he's done in Ukraine, which Xi Jinping effectively backed in back in February, and now this guy is in all sorts of trouble. So therefore suddenly China's geopolitical situation looks less robust from Beijing's lens because of Russia

and economically because of the factors I've discussed before. I think going into Bali, therefore, the United States should see Xi Jinping, despite his triumph of the 20th Party Congress within the Communist Party, as being somewhat externally and economically vulnerable and therefore probably in a mood to find a stabilisation mechanism for this relationship.

Yeah. So what would that mean like putting on the table? It would mean putting a framework on the table, on the table, which I describe as managed strategic competition, the administration will have its own language around this, but which sets up guard rails of one form or another, or a process to get there, around these five strategic red lines, agree that you're going to have non-lethal competition in other domains and still carve out space for John Kerry to do his work on climate and for the other global common goods to be advanced, including global financial stability where we're not out of the woods yet.

For example, debt stabilization. Interestingly, prior to the Pelosi implosion is what I describe it, which is a Nancy doing what she did, which I don't think was wise, and the Chinese reacting in the way in which they did, which I don't think was wise, but that's what happened. Yeah. Chinese think tanks had begun to work through concepts of a change of conceptual framework for the relationship around a type of managed strategic competition. If you ask now, what's the Chinese classical formulation of the U.S. China relationship? It is no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect for each other's political systems and win-win cooperation.

Yeah. To which I said recently to senior visiting Chinese officials. So untrue, untrue, untrue, untrue, untrue. Yeah. A little odd date. So I'm not going to get very far without comrades, I said to them. But there are formulations which start to edge towards where I think the United States under Secretary Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and the president are moving, which is if you could begin talking about the need for a positive cooperating. construction, competition,

but the Chinese were not necessarily dismissive of this idea, strategic guardrails within a necessary strategic framework to stabilize the relationship. Then I think we start

to move in a more shall we see stabilizing direction. My last point is this been the reason language matters in the Chinese system and what is officially authorized by the leader from the top because it's an utterly

hierarchical system. If the leader pronounces a new orthodoxy in language for the U.S.-China relationship, then the rest of the ecosystem starts to work in a different direction, the military, the diplomatic establishment as well as the economic system. Yeah. Whereas at present, it's not. Yeah. And those guardrails, you know, could also avoid escalation, have lines of communication to talk things out before misinterpreting each other. On the positive side, the last question on China here is you mentioned climate. We're also coming up to another COP conference, the annual UN sponsor conference on climate change. The U.S. just put a bunch of money into clean energy over the next decade. Is there any potential horizon for the U.S. and China getting back together

on climate? That's how we got to the Paris Agreement in the Obama years. It doesn't feel like that dialogue has really made a lot of headway recently, but do you see potential for collaboration on climate? Well, President Biden, the administration, should be congratulated for the state craft and the political craft of getting the so-called Inflation Reduction Act through and all the little Christmas trees which exist under that strange title. Yeah, it's more the Climate Change Reduction Act, but yeah. Thank you.

You could say that I couldn't possibly comment. But you now have the instruments in place to deliver lower American greenhouse grass emissions of an order of magnitude. And that's what's good about it. And I congratulate the administration by doing it. given it's fashionable in this country to criticize the administration for everything. So on the China front, a couple of quick points. China is acting domestically on climate change, not because they love America,

not because they like me, not because they respect Ben Rhodes' podcast, it's because they've done the science domestically. They accept it unless they do act and the rest of the world acts, it's terrible for China. Yeah. and that is the environmental and economic consequences for the country, food security, natural disasters, the rest, all the things we talk about worldwide, are just, if not more applicable internally for them.

And the report after scientific report in their country dictates the same. That's why, despite the collapse of the U.S.-China relationship struck for the over the last five years, there you have climate change action entrenched into the 14th five-year plan as its central organizing principle, which means decarbonization, the mass expansion, renewable energy production, energy efficiency programs, and huge technology investments along the same. It's not enough, but given where they were when I first encountered the Chinese back when you were working for President Obama at the Copenhagen conference in 2009, they have moved a million miles.

So I think China continues to act. I think also below the radar, the Americans and the Chinese already know through the year and a half of constructive work between Secretary Kerry on the one hand and Siar Genoa and the other, his Chinese counterpart, they know what they need to do, and I think their teams are separately working on that anyway in terms of their bilateral collaboration to take the next conference of the parties to the necessary next stage. It's not ideal where we are at the moment, but I am not in the hand-rigging corner. which says, oh, woe is me.

Yeah. That's the end of climate change actions, more complex than that. Yeah. Well, John Kerry's irrepressible optimism I think is very beneficial in this circumstance to just find spaces of overlap and climate. And energy. How does John Kerry keep doing it? Yeah.

Last time I saw him was in Glasgow and, you know, I'm not boasting to say I'm like, I don't know, 30 years younger than John Kerry and he has about 30 times more energy than I do. I don't understand whatever his diet is. they need it. Yeah, he stuns me. I mean, I'm reasonably active. I'm not as old as him. Oh, no. Like I'm in my early 60s, but look at this guy and I think, my God, how does he do it? But you're right, it's irrepressible enthusiasm and irrepressible energy to get stuff done. But I've got to say, Siajun Hiri's counterpart, who should have retired a long time ago, Lausier, as I call him, also has energy for this, because he gets the science and he knows it's real.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what I think is good about these two individuals. Yeah, well, let's hope we can root for that cooperation. One last question we're going to ask you just because we've had a lot of fun over the years at the expense of people like Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. The Australian Liberal Party seemed to put up the kind of politicians that were very easy to make fun off here on Ponce of the World. And also made for appropriate foils because they were, you know, for instance,

thwarting out. on climate, among other things. But we have a new government in Prime Minister Albanyse and a new climate plan. What is your early assessment of this new Australian government? What's the most important thing for people who listen to this who probably are supportive of those politics as we're looking at what's happening in Canberra? You know, Australia and the United States are not dissimilar in all this. The Europeans look at Americans and Australians, say, what is it about your countries because you're so divided on climate. Rupert Murdoch.

And I was about to say it's a couple of answers. One starts with R and ends with M. And Fox News in this country, and the fact that you own 70% of the print media in my country means that it's day-to-day hand-to-hand combat, trench warfare, with mortars and shells flying on this question. So it's just bloody campaigning. But my party, the Australian Labor Party, won the last. election on a robust commitment to bring down a greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030.

And they have legislated now the machinery and the funding necessary to do that. They got it through the Senate. When I tried to do this more than a decade ago, we lost it in the Senate by one vote. So we're a decade late in terms of what we should be doing. So full marks to them on that. It's a big renewable energy transformation. And they're doing so remarkably because the climate minister, Chris Bowen, who is also the energy minister, has forged a coalition between business, organized labor and the environmental movement. So for the last time, Rupert Murdoch to one side, there's a coalition across all the affected groups to just get this done.

So it's good to have the Australians back in the game. It's been a long time absent, as we've had Conan the Barbarian as the last. Australian Prime Minister responsible for climate change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And prior to that, Conan the Barbarian Mark I. Yeah. And so it's good that they're there to be able to work with United States on this. And you've got John Podesta back in harness as well.

Yeah, which, you know, he knows he'll know how to make sure that the resources and the regulatory framework are brought to bear. Implementation is one of his many skills. Well, look, this is a great conversation. everybody should check out the avoidable war if you want to avoid a war you should read that book it does overlap with the agenda

of pod saving the world and we look forward Who is pod by the way? I don't know Is this a person? It's the listeners is how I think about it It's not going to be me It's not going to be Tommy

I think it has its origins and Asimov somewhere It's kind of early science fiction Yeah that's a good way of thinking about it You could all get into a pod and save the world But look, thanks for being here And we'll keep in touch

And keep following your stuff Thanks, Ben And all the best with Pod Save the World Thanks again to Prime Minister Rudd One of our Just a fantastic guest every time Great guest Thanks to the Irish Dancing

Club Yeah, we're just weird Just weird All the all the chess fans out there Anyway, we got to beat Bolsonaro If you're Brazilian And you're listening to this Please go to show

Yeah, knock on doors Go to the Vote Save Brazil Yeah, something like that Yeah, I'm like Just do whatever you can do. Whatever it takes. Please, we really don't need to deal with Bolsonaro. No, no more.

All right. Talk to you next week. See it. Potsay the World is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. Saul Rubin is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montuth. You upload our episodes and videos at YouTube.com slash crooked media.