Pod Save the World - Trump’s adventures in Asia

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

Tommy and Asia expert and career diplomat Danny Russel discuss President Trump’s five nation, 13 day trip to Asia. They cover North Korea, Trump’s decision to meet with a mass murderer in the Philippines, and China’s political system. 

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for tuning in. My guest this week is a lifelong diplomat and Asia expert named Danny Russell. Danny and I wanted to catch up and talk about a few things. The first is the trip to Asia that President Trump is on right now as we speak. We do sort of a signals check on how it's going, how a trip like this gets put together, what work goes into it and what makes it a success or a failure. We also talk about China, what President Trump is doing there, how they're going, how they're going to, how they're going to. government and system actually works. I actually learned a lot because I didn't know a whole bunch of the stuff, Danny told me. And lastly, we talked about North Korea. It's been a huge subject of discussion in Japan, in South Korea, in China, and everywhere President Trump has been. Danny gives me his sense having just left government about what the threat really is and what we can and should be doing to try to stop North Korea from progressing further

in its nuclear program. Danny is a rare diplomat and a foreign policy expert who has a sense of humor. I think that will come through. So I think you guys will appreciate the interview. And with that, here's Danny Russell. I am thrilled and honored to have my friend Danny Russell in the studio today for POTSafe the World. He is a career diplomat who I served with when he was special assistant to the president and senior director for Asian Affairs at the White House.

He also served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs at the State Department and a billion other positions throughout his time in government. He is currently the diplomat and resident at the Asia Society Policy Institute and in Los Angeles, to my great benefit. Daniel Russell, thank you for being here. Thank you, Tommy. It's great to see you. I have fun memories of our working together on our plan for global domination.

Global domination, one pivot at a time to Asia. Your timing is perfect because Donald Trump is in the middle of a five nation, 13-day trip to Asia. It includes stops in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines. It is the longest trip for U.S. President since George H.W. Bush in 1992. And look what happened then. It was concluded with him vomiting on the Prime Minister of Japan. You and I were on 10-day-long Asia trips with President Obama, and they are brutal. I mean, like, there's at least two days when I just wouldn't sleep at all. I'd walk down into the press file and see some dreary-eyed, you know,

wire corresponded sitting there. But, yeah, I actually think you were quoted in the New York Times calling this trip the baton death march. Something like that. Something like that. So I was sort of hoping to start at the beginning. Like, what goes into planning a trip like this? When you were doing these things for President Obama, what did you want to get out of them?

How long did it take you to put it together and prep the boss before you felt comfortable that it could be successful? I never felt comfortable. Yeah. He could be successful, although having a boss like Barack Obama made it. The flight back. Maybe. Yeah, the flight back was pretty good, except for the one I almost died on where the president's doctor came back because nobody could wake me up.

They were sure it was drugs, but it was pure exhaustion. It was 11 days of not sleeping. Exactly. Exactly. So the only thing that's tougher than being on one of these trips is preparing for one of these trips. And, you know, there are a lot of things that go into it. I mean, in terms of what you're trying to do, you know, the visit by a president of the United States, is an immense forcing function.

So this is the world's biggest crowbar for getting things done and for kind of breaking open, stalemates and problems. But in order for it to work, you have to have really laid the groundwork. And so what you can get out, what you can harvest, so to speak,

and then what sort of seeds you can plant in a visit that can be followed through on and collected later. Those are sort of the, two big questions or objectives in addition to, of course, the perennial objective of not letting your president Barfon another fund leader, if you can avoid it. I mean, specifically in Asia for us, and I think it remains doubly true, the objective is to sustain or replenish the faith that your allies have in you and instill the appropriate amount of unease, if not fear,

in adversaries, wherever they are. So in terms of Asia, the big question is whether Xi Jinping's quote-unquote new era equates to the end of the American era. So I think the mission of this trip in particular is to answer that question. And then there's always the like, don't screw it up. Yeah, they don't screw it up. planning. I mean, you sort of mentioned something that us press goons would call deliverables. I was in many a meeting with Robert Gibbs or Ben Rhodes or we were barking at the policy team for

deliverables because, like you said, these are action-forcing events, these visits. Heads of state like to announce things. They want concrete items that go in press releases. Have you seen any such items or announcements or wins so far on this trip that President Trump has undertaken? Well, I mean, there are two sides to the coin. One is what you really get done. And the other is what I'd call opportunity costs. You know, did you actually utilize the trip and the visit of the president to its fullest extent? Because it's not just about deliverables and tangible immediate results. It's also about, you know, bending the curve, shaping the behavior. and the trajectory of other countries. And if you haven't laid the groundwork and you haven't really prepared for it, then it just becomes a sort of flashbang, stunned grenade, and it's over.

So, you know, in terms of deliverables, I'm pretty scarred. If you did a cat scan on my brain, you'd find all these dark patches from all of my trips. And deliverables still makes me quiver. Yeah. It's definitely a trigger work. Yes. Because not everything is going to be instantly visible. But what's critically important is to have a story to tell.

And that's where Ben Rhodes' magic came in. So being able to tell the story, the strategic messaging, and it's not just a story, it's got to be populated with credible events, actions, and facts. So the deliverables, to me, are always a subset of the policy. and a subset of the strategic messaging. That doesn't just mean managing the press, although I benefited immensely from, you know, your ability and the skill of the team to engage with the press

because things can go very, very, very badly wrong. In fact, they always do in the press. We never had one trip where the press coverage was about what we thought it was going to be about going in. But you're kind to say that. But it's the strategic messaging, I think, has to begin with the realization that the president, what he says, where he goes, what activities he undertakes, is addressing multiple audiences simultaneously. So of course he is communicating

with the host nation. Of course, he's communicating back to the United States of America, but he's also communicating with the entire world and the region. So in terms of the trip, that's underway right now, I think President Trump's getting ready to leave Beijing and head over to Danang, Vietnam. Starting with our allies, with Japan and with Korea, is smart. And I'm not going to say he's just taken a page out of the Obama playbook, but this is certainly what we did and what we would have done. And that's a good place to start. So like reassurance. We're there for you if North Korea acts up, we're there for you, if China tries to run you out of X part of the ocean kind of thing? Well, the goal is reassurance. Just using Japan and Korea as a starting point,

in and of itself, doesn't do the trick, but it sure beats the alternative. So you begin by affirming your partnership with democratic societies and treaty allies with whom you share a common destiny before you go off and say visit China and talk to the Chinese. That's important. In the case of Japan, I don't think there's much you can point to as having been accomplished in terms of outcomes and deliverables. But, okay, this is a very mature relationship. Donald Trump had early on signaled that he was determined to get a bilateral trade deal. You didn't hear anything about that on the visit.

So, you know, there are plenty of quibble. in terms of how successful that was. But the fact that he win is a good thing. South Korea, even more important because he had, I think, the rough translation of the Korean is, scared the shit out of the wrong Korea. Because, you know, the North Koreans

are masters of hyperbole. Right. They've got a whole ministry of propaganda and, you know, the biggest thesaurus the world has ever seen. You used to, just a quick aside, Danny used to forward me and Ben Rhodes, like, the best of, the greatest hits of North Korean propaganda. And it was always some fun reading. Well, a little less fun now, maybe a little more serious.

But then it was great. Well, it certainly expands my vocabulary. Yeah, me too. It introduced the word dotard into American discourse. We all learned something. Exactly. So, I mean, the Korea part is good. But the big sort of enchilada, of course, is China.

Yeah. So it is true that, according to Wilbur Ross, there was somewhere between $9 and $250 billion worth of business conducted. That's, I guess, a rounding error. It's quite a range. Yeah. Of course, the Chinese are masters of these sort of IOUs, and there's a lot of recycling going on and so on.

It's too early, really, to make an assessment of sort of how the China trip. went, let alone how the overall trip went, because the region, I think, is waiting for evidence to see whether Donald Trump was taken by the Chinese. I mean, since the Han dynasty, the Chinese have been practicing the art of wowing the visiting barbarian and through a combination of, you know, invoking culture and glorious, uh, military parades, flattery and all their other means of sort of co-opting and disarming a foreign visitor. And this stuff is remarkably effective. It often works. In the specific case of the last two days, you know, you heard some things from Donald Trump about China. The fact that he, you know, he gave

great credit to China for having basically screwed the United States on trade. Yeah, can we take it on that for a second? Okay, in May of 2016, Trump said, we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world. He was talking about trade, not intellectual property or anything else. This time, he said, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens? I give China great credit. In actuality, I do bullying past administration for allowing this trade deficit to take place and grow. What is that? Well, I make two points, Tommy. One is that it's still very early days. And whatever President Trump says in Beijing, what is going to matter is ultimately what he does.

And there are, you know, multiplicity of views within the administration, as we've all heard and seen. And I think the Chinese organized the visit very deliberately. They took his measure and made an assessment about what kinds of things and how much flattery and so on was going to make a difference to them. They clearly want to deflect the instinct on the part of Donald Trump to tackle them head on over unfair trade practices, just as they want to deflect any inclination. to impose penalties on Chinese banks and companies for doing business with North Korea or not imposing sufficient costs in the American view. But Xi Jinping is a pretty strong leader in a very strong position. And you can be sure that he's got a plan B if, in fact, that doesn't work.

And so the fact that the president of the United States said lavished praise on an authoritarian leader like Xi Jinping, notwithstanding the fact that American companies are being raped, are being forced to divulge their source codes and make compromises in order to gain access to the U.S. market. We did not allow press questions after bilateral meeting with President Obama in 2009. We did take questions in 2014. So we toughened up from 2010. Until after I left, we got a little bit tougher. What did you make of the Trump administration not allowing any press questions? Is this? I mean, I guess there's two takes on it. One is I guess maybe they just don't care and they don't want press questions anyway and I get that or this is just what the Chinese want.

Well, I think it's part of a couple of patterns. One is that the president's taken a very sort of transactional approach to relationships and, you know, seeking to push the principle that if you're going to do business with the president of the United States, then you're going to have to be open about it and that the fourth estate and the media has a right to ask questions. You know, Xi Jinping is eminently capable of handling, you know, Mark Landler or another foreign reporter. He can do it. And so to me it suggests that they didn't really push.

And that's the second problem that I see, which is one of opportunity costs, not utilizing the tremendous leverage. Now, my point, though, Tommy, is that it's not so surprising and it's not a felony for President of the United States to make nice, nice to Xi Jinping in Beijing. We did it too. We said we're going to call China currency manipulator that we didn't do it, right?

So presidents kind of back off some things. Yeah, I think that's... There are two different things. One is the reality of governing versus the rhetoric about how you're going to be tough. what I'm talking about is the inclination in response to the, you know, very well-developed and sophisticated way that Chinese have of handling foreign visitors to make nice, nice because, hey, you too, Tommy can be a friend of China. Right. This multi-thousand-year-old culture.

Well, change everything. You and me. So I couldn't help but notice that when Xi Jinping escorted President Trump through the forbidden city, in the museum area, by sheer chance, they happen to have out on a table, not behind a glass case, a humongous solid gold vase, which they showed him and which he picked up. He put it back, so don't worry about that. But one is, you know, there's a Stockholm syndrome, right? Well, there's also a Beijing syndrome.

And they definitely turned the love light on. Donald J. Trump in a big way. So my point is it you know these little transgressions or not so little transgressions like not pushing for human rights or human rights are one thing but to me the bigger issue is how the region interprets the visit and that's not going to be knowable instantly but if countries in Asia look at the she-Trump interaction and conclude that he's really been had, that Trump has been played by Xi Jinping, that he's bought into the narrative. You know, it looks ludicrous to them. It looks naive to them to be talking

about the warm personal relationship. This is a hard-boiled, cold-blooded, Leninist, authoritarian leader. I mean, he's a nice guy. Don't get me wrong. Sure. But he's not sentimental when it comes to China's interests. Right. Yeah, I mean, he's having his headshot made to look more like Chairman Mao and distributed throughout the country. Xi Jinping is a smart, savvy, savvy leader.

Right. So whether it's on trade or whether it's on DPRK, North Korea or something else, we're not going to get progress in the U.S.-China relationship or on these problem areas because Jinping decided. to do the Donald a solid. Right. That's not how it works. Moreover, for Xi Jinping showing the Chinese people that the superpower, the leader of the free

world came, was bedazzled by China and is treating Xi Jinping as a peer, or frankly, treating him with deference, is a major domestic political win. Right. And showing the countries in the region that, hey, if you thought that this guy and the Americans were going to come riding to your rescue, if you got crosswise with China and tried to invoke some alliance document or invoke some international legal principle, just look because he's clearly choosing China. he's clearly choosing the strong man of Asia. He's clearly choosing the Chinese market. So, you know, there's a risk that if our friends come to doubt our staying power and see the emergence of kind of, you know, G2 superpower deal,

that they will conclude, particularly against the backdrop of diminished American engagement and overall in the institutions of Asia, that, okay, it's China's moment, and we better get on the train. I got asked this question a bunch from people. They wanted to know, I don't know that Trump has tweeted from his trip, but people ask me, like,

could he even bring his phone out with him? And my memory from my time in government was hearing stories from people doing advance on the trip who would wake up and see their phone just sort of magically scrolling through by itself at their, next to them on their bedside table. My sense was the only way Trump's information security would be safe is if he took the battery out and never let the phone leave the plane.

But I'm curious what your take is on whether or not he could bring his phone or tweet while he was in China. Well, since my life is an open book, Tommy, I have nothing to worry about. I'm sure the Chinese have long since crawled all over every piece of electronics I own. But unlike me, Donald Trump has Waka, the White House Communications Agency, looking after him. Without a doubt, he was instructed not to bring his devices to China. And most people, including most business people, keep a burner or phone or a spare iPad or something, go in, clean, come out dirty. The president, though, had occasion to tweet several times while he was in China.

And it's almost mourning now, so there could be more. Here comes a temper tantrum. Well, trust me, nobody's more nervous about it than the Chinese. I'm sure. But the fact is that if you are a foreigner using a 4G phone that's registered overseas, you're going to be able to access more things, I think, including Twitter. But if you're a Chinese individual, if you're resident in China, let alone in Chinese citizen.

Yeah, no, no internet generally. I want to ask you a couple more questions about China in a minute, but I want to ask a couple more things on the trip. President Trump is spending two days in the Philippines. That's because there are major summits there. But he's also holding a bilateral meeting with Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines. Duterte has been accused of mass murder before the International Criminal Court because his version of the War on Drugs is not Nancy Reagan in a commercial. It is indiscriminately slaughtering thousands and thousands of people.

Rather than criticize these extrajudicial killings, Trump told him he was doing, quote, an unbelievable job on the drug problem. Danny, this is a hard problem, right? You have these big, important summits in a country led by a homicidal maniac. What would you have done if President Obama had to go to the Philippines? and there was a request from Duterte to meet. How do you deal with a goon like this in a world where there's a lot of goons running around that have a lot of power? Well, President Obama attended summits in countries with somewhat unpalatable leaders more than once. And there's a pretty high bar for the president of the United States opting to boycott a multilateral media.

I'm kind of getting a feel for your views. on Rodi Duterte. And look, I'm the guy who had to go over to his villa and meet with his cabinet officials in Laos when an hour or so before we were departing to go to this ASEAN summit where he was attending for the very first time. He cursed out President Obama and called him a son of a horror on TV. And so, so, um, wait, what, what was that meeting like? So I didn't meet with Duterte in that meeting. I had already met with him in Manila with, with, with Kerry. We had gone after the inauguration.

And he was, Duterte was more or less on his, on his best, on his good behavior, on his meds at that time. Well, meeting with his cabinet, they tried to explain that I was, first of all, totally misreading, uh, the president because son of a whore was a term of endearment. Number two, that they didn't quite say take him seriously, but don't take him literally. Oh, my God. But it was, you know, along those lines. You know, he deserves the presidential discount. He says this stuff, but you don't have to pay attention. It's for internal consumption, that sort of thing.

But eventually they agreed that he would apologize. And they were desperate to set up a bilateral. meeting during the summit with President Obama, which I strongly suspected would never happen. And in the event, Duterte couldn't find it in himself to apologize. Moreover, in the presence of 17 other world leaders, when it came to his turn to talk, he totally lost it and delivered this stunning denunciation of beginning with Magellan's discovery of the Philippines and the 16th century. century, which apparently Obama is complicit him.

Yeah, he's responsible. And, you know, it was off to the races. But, I mean, to back up, the Philippines now is governed by a problematic president, not the only country in the United States that falls into that category. And the prospect of a meeting between President Trump and President Duterte is a little bit daunting. It's kind of like those B-movies. sort of King Kong meets Godzilla. Sure.

And you don't really know, like, are they going to fight? Are they going to be friends? Who am I rooting for? No. But what shouldn't be lost in the discussion or overlooked is not the personal side, but the fact that the United States and the Philippines are tremendously close, friends, partners, allies have been for so many decades. and I'm sure will be going forward.

And we do a lot of business with them. Speaking of King Kong versus Godzilla, North Korea, our buddy Kim Jong-un, arguably the most important topic during the trip so far was North Korea. It was the focus of President Trump's speech to the South Korean National Assembly. Presumably it came up in all of his private meetings in Japan, Korea, China. So just like starting at the 101, I mean, you worked on this for decades. We spent a lot of time talking about this during the Obama administration. How worried are you about the state of their program today?

I'm extremely worried, and anyone in their right mind should be worried about the progress that North Korea is making, both on the nuclear side and on the ballistic missile side. There's a hell of a lot to worry about in North Korea and from North Korea. Now, I mean, the good news, if you can put it that way, is that nobody, including the North Koreans, actually want war. Right. So war's not going to happen on purpose. But, you know, that's cold comfort. The threat is very real.

Now, you know, when you unpack it, I'm very much of the view that North Korea is not in the war fighting business. It's in the shakedown business. Right. The Kim family and the Gambino family have a basic business plan. Yeah. And that is to scare the hell out of us, to induce us at a moment of panic and high anxiety to make a deal with them on their terms, to collect what they can collect. And then when our pockets are empty, rinse and repeat. So we're up against a tough customer with a clear game plan and the ability to wreak absolute havoc on places, people, and things that we care deeply about.

I mean, in some ways it's almost a classic kind of law enforcement challenge. And the fact that through a combination of deterrence and defense, the United States with our allies have kept the peace for decades, isn't an accident, and that's what we want to ensure continues in the future. What's changing is the quality and the punching power of the North Korean weaponry. Now, that said, and I'm not sanguine about it. I'm very concerned about it, and any president of the United States will be very concerned and find this un intolerable situation. But the fact of the matter is, you know,

there are only two things you can do with a nuclear weapon. Right. You can either detonate it or you can use it to intimidate and to extort. And it's certainly the case that North Korea is not looking to fight a war, as I said. That doesn't mean that things are going to end well. but it certainly does mean that we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of trying to pay ransom, pay off the extortionists. So our plan, our strategy, our priority is stopping the North Korean nuclear and missile program, finding ways to roll it back, if at all possible, and to do so without precipitating thermonuclear war if we can avoid that. The theory of the case is that since North Korea can't be conjoled or persuaded or teased into compromise,

that we have to work collectively with other international partners to systematically remove Kim Jong-un's options and to sort of strip away what he needs in order to maintain regime security in a, inexorable, relentless way, so that he concludes that he is simply not going to prevail, as he had hoped in this particular gambit. He's not going to relinquish his nuclear weapons easily or quickly, if ever, but bring him to the point where he concludes that he can't keep going forward. He has to take some steps back. And however, grudgingly, maybe with both hands crossed behind his back, come to the negotiating table prepared to engage on an agenda that includes denuclearization. Now, to complicate matters further, even though the Chinese

oppose North Korea's nuclear program, and President Trump said repeatedly during his visit that that we and the Chinese agree, we agree. In every meeting with Xi Jinping that I ever attended accompanying the president, the vice president, secretary, et cetera, Xi Jinping always made the following statement. He said, China's position is no war, no chaos, no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. That means no nukes. No nukes comes in third. Yeah, right.

So a big part of the Chinese strategy is stopping the United States from squeezing Kim Jong-un so hard that it either starts a war or that it precipitates a collapse, which has negative strategic consequences for the Chinese side. Can I ask you about the off-ramp? Because we've seen Trump seemingly lurch from sort of relatively conciliatory statements early on saying he would. meet with Kim Jong-un. He had empathy for him to ranting about fire and fury and undercutting Rex Tillerson who was trying to have conversations about North Korea and saying it was a waste of time. Back to what, you know, in South Korea he outlined in his speech seemed like a fairly standard approach to South Korea. I mean, do you think they've provided the space to get that off-ramp that would allow Kim Jong-un to sort of back off? Or are we,

still at Lagerheads in a scary way. Well, I'm not an advocate of the kind of insult brand of diplomacy or diplotainment maybe is what it really is. And I don't think it advances the cause. But I also don't think that it is going to trigger war with North Korea. That's good news. In part because President Trump has a record of being able pretty agile to, sidestep

otherwise apparently categorical statements and commitments that he's made and I don't expect this would be any

different. Certainly it looks like the North Koreans who are themselves in the hyperbole business feel that he's bluffing

and that they've called his bluff. That's not a good place to be either. There's a real risk though. Well, let me put it

this way. The problem is not that you can't get the North Koreans to the table. Right now, they're playing hard to get. But I believe that their strategy is to, in fact, get us to the table. The problem is that they want us to come and exceed to their terms. They want to dictate the outcome of the next round of negotiations, and they want to approach them in a way that,

marginalizes and belittles South Korea that creates real divisions among the allies, et cetera, and that sets the nuclear issue off to some infinitely receding horizon in the future and instead deals with their agenda. And their agenda is America should pay up. America because of its quote unquote hostile policy needs to end. joint military exercises, it needs to withdraw, its U.S. forces, et cetera, et cetera. If we accept negotiations on those terms, we are making a disastrous mistake, one that will not only go nowhere in terms of progress on the threat from their nuclear and missile programs, but will also be tremendously damaging to our alliances.

and I think undercut the NPT and American credibility around the whole world. Now, I'm not saying that we have to lay on elaborate preconditions. And many people are a little bit confused by some of the statements, including in the president's speech to the South Korean National Assembly, that implied that the objective of negotiations, denuclearization, is somehow a predicate or a prerequisite for negotiations. But maybe that's inexperienced and maybe those are just nomenclature issues. The fact is that the strategy that the Trump administration is pursuing, when you set aside the hyperbole and the chest meeting,

is fundamentally the logical extension of the strategy that the Obama administration pursued, which is to impose significant costs to North Korea for its behavior. to maximize pressure and to contain North Korea to make it harder and harder for it not only to proliferate or to obtain the hard currency that it needs for its programs, but really just to keep going for regime stability and to work to sustain unity in the first instance among the allies with Japan and Korea, but more broadly to include China. This is all a good approach. Now, by good, I mean the least worst of a whole raft of terrible options. Yeah. But it is, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, what you have left when you remove everything else that is utterly unacceptable, like war.

So often you hear, the conventional wisdom you hear on North Korea is that China, could fix this. You see it in Trump tweets. You see it in punditry on TV. What do you think the reality is there? And what do you make of sort of a related idea, which is that there's a suggestion that unlocking China's efforts and getting them to do more would involve having a conversation with them on the front end about what the U.S. presence on the Korean Peninsula would look like in the event of either Kim Jong-un falling or reunification of South and North Korea? Well, I'm very much of the view that there's no peaceful solution to the threat from the DPRK that doesn't involve serious U.S.-China authentic collaboration, strategic cooperation. But there is no amount of nagging and no amount of threatening that will get them there. I think it is absolutely essential to work to find a way on the front end to chart out a mutually acceptable picture of the future of the peninsula and northeast Asia. However, that's not as easy as it may sound for a couple of reasons. The starting point has to be what I would call a mapping exercise.

We really need to seriously examine what our respective interests are, what our thresholds are for an acceptable outcome, and to try to see where they overlap and where they diverge. Because although there are important areas of convergence between the U.S. and China, such as we strongly oppose a nuclear North Korea, There are also important areas of divergence. So that exercise has never been conducted. And much of the reason was certainly in the Obama administration,

the Chinese just didn't have an appetite for being that open. And there was a taboo, a kind of totemic fear that if they talked about a future without North Korea, they were somehow secretly wink-wink green lighting. a U.S. military operation or covert action, something like that. So there is a not inconsiderable trust deficit. It will not be easy to find the right people from Beijing and the right people from Washington, but I think that's an eminently worth while project. You can't expect the Chinese simply to take our word for it.

Right. This is a Leninist system that believes strongly that the West is out to get them. And there isn't a kind of verbal reassurance that the U.S. can give, okay, we're not going to move our troops north of the 38th parallel, no matter what kind of stuff. So it will be a long road to Hull. But it's definitely a worthwhile exercise. The other complication, Otami, is that we can't leave our allies in the lurch. And the big powers conspiring to determine the fate of the Korean people behind their back and over their head is the national nightmare of South Korea. It hasn't worked so well in a whole bunch of other places like the Middle East either.

But luckily, we have the man for the job, Jared Kushner. back to this Leninist system you talked about. I want to ask a couple questions about China. So they just completed the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. This meeting took place in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square. I read that 2,287 attendees get together, must be a blast. They elect new leadership for the next five years,

including the Politburo Standing Committee, which effectively rules the country. I will admit, I made it through, four years of the White House without ever having a good understanding of what the hell the party Congress is or how the leadership system works. Can you give us like a little 101 of like what happens at this meeting and who is chosen and how they rule? Well, other than the fact that there's unanimous and vehement agreement the entire party platform, I think the first thing to know is that the government of China doesn't run China. The Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of China,

runs China. The party is supreme, literally and figuratively, and the government is purely subservient to that. The titles by which Xi Jinping governs, Xi Jinping has three titles. By far and away, his most important title is General Secretary of the Communist Party. The second most important title is chairman of the military commission of the Communist Party, guess what? China doesn't have a national army. The Communist Party has an armed wing, the People's Liberation Army and Navy. And thirdly, oh, by the way, that's the Republican Party had an army. That would up the stakes a little bit here. Sorry to interrupt. Tommy, be careful.

Careful what you suggest to our friends. No. Only thirdly is Xi Jinping the president of the People's Republic of China. And that's not the title with which he governs day to day. So the party is incredibly important in China. And in fact, he has made it his mission to do everything he could to strengthen the party and strengthen himself as the core of the party. Once every five years, the party senior members meet in the Great Hall of the People, in the party Congress, at which time they adopt a platform that charts the future goals and the themes, the doctrine that will guide the party going ahead. Some of it is fairly specific.

Some of it is very talmudic and theoretical. Very importantly, at that time, they also announce personnel decisions. So China was ruled by, of course, Mao Teutong, for now. decades and then suffered under a cultural revolution that was traumatic for the nation and the successive generations of leaders. In the aftermath of the cultural revolution under Deng Xiaoping, China's leaders deliberately developed a sort of consensus-based system of collective leadership in order to guard against the extremes of extremes of. one-man rule. And that has continued over time. And so the combination of personnel in senior

party slots has always been an intricate jigsaw puzzle and hugely important. So basically, you have the central committee, which is about 200 plus senior party members. You have the standing, excuse me, the central committee, 200 some odd members, you have the Politburo, which is about 20 plus members, and then you have the standing committee of the Politburo, which is now seven members. And these are the sort of three leadership tiers. Xi Jinping was successful in ensuring that no rival faction within the Communist Party was able to place a powerful member, someone with a future, in the standing committee. and he seems to have been able to populate much of the Politburo and the Central Committee with what you would call loyalists or at least people who will age out and who are not in a

position to oppose him. To challenge him. Right. You know, the two things that experts looked at most closely in the run-up to the 19th Party Congress were personnel and doctrine. And even though it sounds like these sort of medieval Christian debates over, you know, nomenclature and so on, what we saw in the event was the introduction into the formula Xi Jinping's thought. And just take my word that introducing Xi Jinping thought, which is the same,

language that was used for Mao Zetong thought. And a lot of experts would argue a bump above Deng Xiaoping's theory and certainly a lot better than what Zhang Zemin and Hu Jintao had, that this represents more than almost anything you can point to the success of Xi Jinping's effort to really take control of the Communist Party. Because what it means is that if Xi Jinping's thought is enshrined in the party constitution, he speaks for the party. Interesting. And he can't be gainsaid. That's not a five-year scenario.

Right. That's a, you know, until the next strong guy comes a long scenario. He's a tough cookie, right? I mean, he grew up dirt poor, worked his way up. He has taken on sort of a man of the people vibe. he famously went and got some steam buns and bust his own tray and seemed like a normal guy. There's this like George Bush you'd like to have a beer with him vibe. But does that mask a pretty brutal, successful politician or what's he like in your experience?

Well, I first met him when I accompanied Vice President Biden to China and spent, depending on who you ask, either three days or, I think. I think the vice president's memory may be up to about six months now. No, I'm teasing. We spent an extended amount of time with then Vice President Xi, who then came to the United States. We traveled with him, including to Los Angeles. Didn't he go to Iowa too? He went to Iowa.

Biden and the team let him handle that smart. We didn't go there, but we came here. And then, of course, I was present in the subsequent media. both in Beijing and elsewhere, including in Washington, when he was president and met with President Obama and others. I was struck from the very beginning by the sense that whereas the Chinese leaders that I'd been able to observe all came across pretty much as automaton's. There's a very kind of neutral, deadpan robotic quality to them. That Xi Jinping behaved in a way that felt natural to me as a politician.

And I don't mean, you know, stem-wining speeches and that kind of stuff, but he was always asking questions. He had a pretty considerable intellectual curiosity. He wanted to come out of any meeting kind of the winner, not because he'd out-argued the other guy, but because he'd sort of found out what the other guy knew that might be useful and applicable to him. So I think having a sort of... Paul, somebody with a feel for what the public wants with an interest or at least a recognition

of the importance of messaging and of strategic storytelling in a way constitutes a change. That doesn't make him a nice guy. But if you look at the record of what he was able to do in his first five years, you know, it's pretty amazing. As I said, China's leadership had evolved into collective leadership, consensus-based in which the elders, the former presidents, the former leaders wielded immense power from the sidelines. And in Chinese culture for a lot of reasons, there's a very clannish element. And so who your patron is and who you line up with, whether you came from the Communist Youth Party or you came. from Shanghai. All that matters hugely. Are you a Prince Ling? Are you a technocrat? Well,

Xi Jinping essentially caged the elders who, you know, in 2011 and early 2012, the experts anticipated would continue to really run China. They don't anymore. He sidelined, to put it mildly, and in some cases exterminated his rivals. largely through the anti-corruption campaign. He gained unprecedented authority over the military, over the PLA, and began a very significant process of modernization and professionalism. He, in many respects, sort of marginalized the government bureaucracy, which has been an obstacle to reform in the past by creating these

party leading groups, coincidentally, all of which he chairs. Lucky guy. Yeah. And that are staffed by party people who are loyal to him. And that has really transformed in many respects the way that the Chinese government operates. He built up a draconian internal security system and a propaganda system par excellence. He's legalized and institutionalized repression and ironically used the fruit of open society's technology to develop tools to eliminate political space in a big way. He's squeezed foreign companies in China to China's benefit.

He's leveraged market access. He's kept his economy growing. He's pursued a reform in a couple of areas. He's certainly bolstered China's regional and global profile. I mean, C. Davos speech in January, to an extraordinary extent. He's used things like the BRICS, the group of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. He's used and developed the AIIB bank, and now this much talked about belted, Road Initiative.

The Asian Investment Bank. Right. So he's doing literally everything. And he's gained a pretty substantial degree of control and leverage over his neighbors as witness the South China Sea and the Philippines and Brunei and others. He totally beat the rap on the law of the sea tribunal verdict that had gone shockingly against China. Nobody's been able to hold him accountable. So that was all in his first term. Now coming out of the 19th Party Congress, he is significantly strengthened politically,

and he's mapped out the China dream. He's mapped out what he calls the new era. And what the current trip to Asia by Donald Trump will tell the region is whether the future is going to be the China dream, whether the new era is going to look a lot like China in the, you know, Chin dynasty where the imperial center extracted tribute from the peripheral vassal states. in other words, in modern terms, a sphere of influence. Good. Another one of those. My last question for you is about cybersecurity and sort of cyber warfare.

We kind of joked earlier about, you know, not taking your phone into China or off the plane if you're President Trump. But, you know, we've been hearing so much about Russian hacking lately. And I think the Chinese are arguably better at it. They've stolen millions of U.S. government personnel records, including ours. They've stolen sensitive information about our most advanced fighter jets, for example, the F-22 and the F-35. They've hacked Google. They've stolen billions of dollars worth of intellectual property from countless companies. Do you think there's a chance that the Chinese could see Putin's interference in our election and how successful it was and think, let's try that now?

We should shift our focus from more traditional subterranean spy work to over-attack. like the Russians did? That's a great question. And when people say that's a great question, it always means they don't know the answer. I'm saying yes, right? Well, I think that China and Russia are quite different. Now, there are points of convergence and there's overlap.

First of all, there is no common turn in China. I mean, China is not a proselytizing nation in that they are not trying to spread their, political system. They are trying to delegitimize the American-led Western liberal order, but I think that's for their own reasons. They want to insulate themselves against pressure to adhere to inconvenient universal norms and laws and values and so on. Not that they're out to genuinely substitute their way because it's an exceptionalist culture. It's China's Communist Party So they're not like the old Soviet Union.

I also think that unlike Vladimir Putin, the Chinese don't object to their being a thriving United States. They're not seeking to undermine our system, in my opinion. They want, however, to ensure that they are able to have their way with the region, certainly, and with select parts of the world without American interference. So I tend to question whether the Chinese would be tempted to interfere as aggressively or directly in the U.S. political process as the Russians might or may well have. what the Chinese seem to be focusing on in terms of cyber is strategic and economic advantage. So first of all, they're playing a defensive game.

They want to maintain absolute control over what happens in China, including in cyberspace around China. and that means that we have diametrically opposed views of the Internet. Is it the World Wide Web? Or is it a web that looks like that world map you had when you were in high school with different colors for different countries and hard borders? The Chinese, in the first instance, want to ensure that no other party or country can introduce information into... China without their say-so.

They want to have absolute control at home. Secondly, I think that although the Chinese first in copyright and patent matters, and then as China grew and discovered that it had something to lose, not just something to gain, then moved into the cyber world, China has acted in a way that suggests that all is fair in love, war, and business. The United States government under Barack Obama categorically objected to that. We remonstrated with them.

The president was very forceful in every meeting he had with Chinese leaders, including a long, difficult discussion at Sunnylands that I recall, to no avail until in the immediate run-up to Xi Jinping, state visit to the United States, word got out that the United States was preparing to take very significant legal action against state-sponsored, cyber-enabled theft of American corporate

proprietary information. And that would have proven a huge embarrassment to Xi Jinping. He dispatched his security czar, Meng Jinju, to Washington with basically don't come home without a deal instructions. And in the course of 48 plus hours, we were able to hash out some basic rules of the road that have, by and large, stuck that included unacceptance by China in principle that that was unacceptable behavior. So there are a lot of dimensions to our differences in cyberspace. I wouldn't be tempted to apply the Russian tank. template to China, however. Good.

I never forget when I first got the NSC spokesman job. I got a request from the Chinese embassy to meet with my counterpart, I guess, in the embassy. And he showed up with like eight dudes. And they tried to hand me and Caitlin Hayden a whole bunch of thumb drives and CD-ROMs and all these helpful items that we took on board and gave to the Intel Goons back at the White House and never looked at again. Danny Russell, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for helping me understand the Chinese government a little bit better and what the hell is happening on this trip.

And I think my blood pressure went down a click on North Korea. So thanks for that too. Great. Well, it's great talking to you. Great seeing you, Tommy. Thanks, buddy.