Pod Save the World - Why China loves Jared

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

Tommy talks with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos about China’s frantic post-election efforts to build a relationship with Jared Kushner, and why the “Kushner channel" makes American counterintelligence officials so nervous. They also discuss the shockingly-wide distribution of sensitive intelligence in the Trump White House, and how Evan feels about the threat from North Korea roughly six months after his visit to Pyongyang.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. My guest today is a fantastic journalist named Evan Osnose. He's written about China, about North Korea. His latest piece is about Jared Kushner becoming China's Trump card in the White House. I'm not going to do the thing I always do, which is give you a redundant intro at the top and then do it at the bottom. You just have to listen, okay? He's a smart guy. It's a brilliant piece. Lots of cool intrigue with counterintelligence and the PDB and all kinds of weird shit going on in that place. You're going to want to hear it. So here's the interview. My guest today is Evan Osnosed. Evan is a New Yorker staff writer who covers politics and foreign affairs. His book is Age of Ambition, chasing fortunate truth and faith in New China. It was based on eight years of living in Beijing. So he is certainly an expert on all things China. His most recent piece for the New Yorker is titled Jared Kushner is China's Trump card. Evan, thank you for doing the show. Thanks, Tommy. Happy to be here. So let's start with your piece on Kushner and China because it was a riveting piece like most of your work. So rewind a bit. Like most pundits in the U.S., including crooked media, the Chinese thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. They were wrong, as we now know. So on election night, these guys were scrambling with the rest of us.

Who is Donald Trump? What's he going to do? How do we build relationships with his team? And as you note in the piece, like, if you're the ambassador, you're the Chinese ambassador of the U.S. failing to do so with literally end your career. And, you know, it's high-stakes stuff. Like, they're right to be nervous. Trump immediately starts changing policy.

He took a call from the president. of Taiwan. He cast doubt on the one China policy. So they lash on to Jared. Jared becomes their guy. You fast forward a few months, despite having no experience on China policy, you quote a transition official referring to him as Mr. China, another former NSA official called him China's lucky charm. What happened? How did he become their guy? Well, you hit on the key moment, which was, frankly, they woke up on the morning after the election. And like everybody else, they had gameed it wrong. But from their perspective, this was now a national security crisis, because after all, you know, they had a president-elect who had come to office in part by saying that China was,

you know, quote, raping the United States and so on. And then on top of it, they didn't know any of these guys. You know, the Trump campaign had been largely shunned by the sort of establishment national security Republicans. So they were really in, they were really in despair. And actually, the ambassador said as much to people around town. He was just, he really didn't know what to do. And then into this moment walked this opportunity, which is to say that Jared Kushner was, by his own description, determined to do things differently than the way that seasoned diplomats did him. He believed that the diplomats and that the bureaucracy or what he calls the machinery of government was part of the problem in his view. And so he wanted to be a lot of the problem. And so he wanted to

to do things like a businessman. And, you know, this is very much like what his father-in-law thinks, which is that if you get two people into a room and you're both business-oriented guys who are interested in getting away from the prying eyes of the press and having a classified or sort of, you know, at least a confidential relationship as Jared would prefer and that you can cut through some of the diplomatic baggage and maybe you can make a breakthrough. And that's what he set out to do. But from the Chinese perspective, this was actually incredibly good fortune for them. Because their representative was no rookie. Tui Tienkai, the Chinese ambassador, was former ambassador to Japan. He'd been a vice foreign minister. He'd been at the UN. He has a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He's been doing this

and only this for decades. And he now found himself sitting across from an American who had been a diplomat for about a week and didn't really want to take advantage of other. senior American experts, experts on China, experts on Asia. He actually excluded them from the meetings. And that was the, so that's the setting in which these two encountered each other. You know, I'm reading this and I'm thinking, oh, man, the Chinese must have just been licking their chops. Like they found a mark. They found this young naive guy. But then I also thought maybe a more charitable explanation is the relatives of prominent Communist Party officials in China are called princelings. They, you know, they have money, they hold positions of influence solely

because of nepotism. So maybe a more charitable explanation for why China sought out Jared is that it kind of made sense to them to deal with the unqualified children of powerful people. Am I being too nice to Jared? No, I think you're right about that. In a sense, they sort of recognize this model. In fact, they understand what it means to have a powerful son-in-law who straddles the line between family, advisor, and business representative. Because that's how a lot of family clans are organized in China. So that was actually a comfortable arrangement. There was an interesting moment a couple of months into the administration when a Chinese think tank called the Pangol Institution did an analysis of the White House. And what they concluded was that there were

these competing groups or factions to put it in sort of Chinese political language. But the most powerful faction was what they called the Trump family group, and that consisted of Jared and Ivanka Trump. And as they put it in their analysis, they said that Jared Kushner and Ivanka had a hand in final decision making on diplomacy and business. And they used a term that really is unusual. You don't hear much in Chinese anymore. It's an ancient term from Chinese. And what they said was that they practiced Jia Tianxia, which means to merge the state with your family in your business, to treat the state as your family possession. And that that was became sort of the thesis, the organizing framework by which they then built this relationship with Jared. Yeah,

that sounds familiar. So this story gets even more interesting. You reported that Kushner's meeting with these Chinese officials made counterintelligence officials in Washington uncomfortable. Why was that? It made them uncomfortable for two reasons. One was about the nature of the meetings, just quite literally how they were meeting and how it was organized. So Jared Kushner believed that he needed to, as I mentioned, get around some of the bureaucracy. So he didn't invite the usual players into the room, the senior national security council staff, members of other agencies who would be area specialists, note takers. He wanted to have, on at least one occasion, he met literally one-on-one with the Chinese ambassador. And then they met so many times that Jared can't recall the total. And this,

was worrisome to national security officials, I should say more specifically, to counterintelligence officials, particularly after they gained a piece of intelligence in the spring that indicated that Chinese officials were saying amongst themselves that in one of the meetings between Jared Kushner and Tui Tienkai, the Chinese ambassador, that they had discussed his business interests in addition to policy matters. And, you know, I'll point out what you know, but, you know, maybe useful for listeners to know is, you know, anytime you're dealing with a piece of intelligence like that, it should be treated somewhat warily in the sense that you don't know if it's not always easy to know what the context was. It may be that the Chinese side is mischaracterizing what happened

there. But it was a red flag. And it was assigned to counterintelligence officials that the Chinese may be essentially running a play here. They may be trying to influence Jared Kushner by using business inducements in order to try to affect his decision making on policy matters. And I will add here because it's important that I, you know, Jared Kushner denied ever raising his businesses. And he says and his lawyers say that he's been scrupulous in maintaining a distinction between business and policy matters. So I should just add that here. Yeah. I mean it just speaks to the naivety of a like, first of all, if you're going to meet with the Chinese ambassador of the U.S., talk to the people who have subject matter expertise because this stuff is complicated.

There's all these terms of art and precedent and whatnot. But also cover your own ass, man. Have someone in the room that can back you up on this stuff. In some ways, you know, that's one of the things that I think comes through most clearly on this is that there are best practices for a reason. And they're not because of, you know, bureaucratic tradition or because people are stuck in old ways to doing things. It's because they're self-protective and they avoid unnecessary risk. And by sort of ignoring all that, a novice put himself at greater exposure than he needed. Yeah. And, you know, so you mentioned that Jared denied that he talked about business interests when he met with the ambassador. But it does look like this could be a pattern. I mean, he's been accused of mixing official business and Kushner family business when he met with the head of a Russian state bank. His real estate company received a $30 million investment from one of the biggest financial institutions in Israel right before Trump's visit. So the list goes on of incidents that at least have an appearance of impropriety.

Do we think Jared's a mark because he's naive? Is it because this complicated business empire just kind of. of makes it easy to try to find avenues to get at him? Are they related? Like, what's your assessment of it? Yeah, I think he faces a fundamental structural problem, which is that he tried to set up a very unusual arrangement where he said, okay, I'm no longer CEO as of, you know, January 9th, 11 Days ATER. I'm now a member of this administration, and I will retain a considerable share of my assets. I've gotten rid of some of them. But, you know, fundamentally, his personal and financial life are inextricably intertwined with the family businesses. And the family businesses

are global in nature. And so it's a bit of a case where no matter what he does, no matter how many times he says that he's going to try to build a, you know, to use the appropriate metaphor, a Chinese wall between these two parts of his life, that they are almost inextricable. It's almost impossible to entangle them, partly because his foreign counterparts are going to know that that's a seam that they can mine. And so they will continue to do it, putting him into the position of playing constant defense. And this is, of course, I'm taking the most generous interpretation here, even setting aside trying to understand what his motives are or what his own vulnerabilities are, just that the arrangement they've come up with leaves him acutely,

almost unprecedentedly vulnerable for somebody at his altitude in the White House. Yeah. And it doesn't help when your sister's out there trying to hawk $500,000 investor visas in Beijing. I think that adds to the skepticism. trouble. And, you know, people may have followed this, may not have, but his sister is now, as a result of mentioning Jared Kushner's status in the White House and the course of these investor meetings in China, the Eastern District of New York is now, has subpoena documents from the Kushner companies. It's said to be investigating their visa investor program. So that's now a sort of ongoing concern for them, too. Not good. So, I mean, it's not at all surprising that Jared is the target of foreign intelligence services. That's not his fault in any way. He's an obvious target because of his relationship to Trump, his influence in the White House generally. But like all things, Trump, the story just gets weirder.

I mean, you and the Wall Street Journal reported that counterintelligence officials warned Jared that Wendy Dang Murdoch, a prominent Chinese American businesswoman and an ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch could be using her relationship with Jared and Ivanka to push Chinese government interests. That is weird. That one surprised me. Jared also seems to basically kind of ignored that warning, right? Like, what is going on here? Well, when he was warned about it in a briefing from the chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, Bill Prestap in March, his response was that he was unalarmed. As he put it, look, I've never seen anything in my relationship with Wendy Dung that makes me think that she's trying to manipulate me or to draw me in anything. So he basically said, look, I take the warning, but it's not going to affect my behavior. behavior. And then he went when he was in Beijing for the summit this fall with the president, he had a lunch with Wendy Dung that was, did not appear on the public schedules, was not briefed. You know, I came upon it in the course of reporting and then brought it up with them at the White House.

And he said, yes, you know, I did have lunch with her because I concluded that I was capable of figuring out what information I'm going to give to somebody and what I'm not. Right. As he said, he thinks he's capable of making these decisions. Look, it's a weird sort of sub-element, subplot of this whole thing. And I was initially quite skeptical that there's looming over this a kind of strange domestic drama, which is, after all, that the story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, owned by the ex-husband of the subject, Wendy Dung. But I will say that when my reporting partner, Adam Entis and I talked about this with area specials, people who we know are knowledge. about what the intelligence on China has said over the years. What they said was, look, Wendy Dung's name has come up in the past as people are curious about the relationship she has to the Chinese

government. And it's just odd. But it's never been conclusive. They've never gotten anything firm on it. So from Jared's perspective, there was two ways to handle that. One was to say, I am going to treat this now with a little bit more caution. I'm going to be more conscientious about how I go about these meetings. I'm going to make sure that everybody at the White House and it's on the public record that I'm meeting with Wendy so there's no confusion. Or you go about it in a slightly different way, which is what he chose to do, which is more or less status quo. Yeah, yeah. By the way, congrats on recruiting Adamentis. He made my life a living hell when I was the MSC spokesman. And he's a hell of a good reporter. He's very good at it.

Yes, he is. Another interesting sort of nugget in the stories, sort of mood music behind this whole weirdness is that Jared has had a very hard time getting a security clearance. It's normal that officials get an interim clearance while the process is ongoing. It's an owner. process. You have to put all your, you know, meetings with foreign officials, your financial records. They, like, literally interview your friends from college. It was, it's not fun. Do it take some time? But usually senior officials can get it expedited. His clearance process doesn't seem normal. He's at an interim clearance for a long time, and it seems to have alarmed some intelligence officials. Can you explain a little bit about what we know? Yeah, this has been, it's a source of some sort of

growing fascination among national security specialists here because it is odd. Jared got his interim clearance like most new arrivals. And because he was so senior in the White House, people assumed that it would be, as one person put it to us, a former senior intelligence official, that this would be an expedited process would be pro forma. It would really not be the usual. It could be months, but it really didn't seem like it would be. And then the process dragged on. And initially, when he filed his questionnaire, which is the start of the formal start of the process, it was sort of troubled from the beginning. And he acknowledged as much. He made an error in his initial filing. He said that there was a miscommunication in the office, and he said that his aide had filed it prematurely,

a draft, as he put it, filed prematurely. And that that left off all foreign contacts. And so the next day, he said, I will produce an exhaustive list of foreign contacts in May. So about four or five months after that initial declaration. He did provide the list of more than 100 foreign contacts, but it left off some crucial meetings, including his meeting in July of 2016 with Don Jr. And a Russian lawyer who was said to have incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. And that meeting was then later added in a further supplement. So he's had this kind of iterative series of supplements to the file. And that's one conceivable explanation, why the process has dragged on so long.

But as you know better than most, you know, this process is one that's opaque to the outside world and even opaque to the participants. So his lawyers, his aides and Jared himself, they don't really know. They're asserting that they think he's in a queue that is just backed up. But, you know, people who do this say that doesn't really conform to what we know about the process. There's some speculation that it may be because, as we know, he's testified about his Russia meetings to the congressional committees. It may be of interest to Robert Mueller in the special counsel's office. But there also is this child. element. And that was one of the things that we wanted to surface in this piece was that there's an element of Jared's security profile that had not yet received public attention and may in fact turn out to be part of the reason why he's had trouble getting full adjudicated access to intelligence. Yeah, it's very weird. It's a very weird anecdote. Another anecdote from the piece that like literally made my jaw drop was it involved the president's daily intelligence briefing or PDB. So the context is each morning the president gets an iPad with a all the latest most relevant and sensitive intelligence.

Often there's a meeting with the senior intelligence officials, national security advisor, whomever, to discuss that and probably orally brief some things that you just don't even want to put on the PDB. By the end of the Obama administration, seven White House officials were authorized to get the president's version of the PDB. The Trump administration has expanded that number to as many as 14 people, that includes Jared. You quote a former senior official saying, quote, it got out of control. Everybody thought it was cool.

they wanted to be cool, end quote. Intelligence was cool. It was fascinating. I got a lot of intelligence. I was never allowed to read the PDB, and I shouldn't have been. I thought, I read this and I thought, you know, I was texting with former, you know, officials I worked with. It's crazy. And it seems to show a cavalier, worrisome approach to intelligence consumption and kind of ironic since the whole argument about Hillary's emails that she was reckless with classified information.

Like, what is your sense of how this happened? Who is greenlighting all this access to the PDB when it's supposed to be close hold? Well, ultimately, the decision rests with the president. So the president can overrule whoever wants to try to narrow the circle or try to prevent the expansion of that group. And there were concerns within the office of the Director of National Intelligence when it was suggested that this circle be expanded to include Jared Kushner and others to this really kind of expansive list. But in the end, and this gets into some of the interesting sort of problematic dynamics, personnel dynamics, when you've got a family essentially occupying powerful positions in the White House, that people in the DNI's office, the Director of National Intelligence Office,

they didn't want to irritate the president, the ultimate customer of intelligence, by telling him that they didn't want to do this. And so they didn't make a fight about it. And so that's part of the reason why the circle expanded and expanded to the point where it is now. And it has caused some consternation because, you know, David Priest, who's written a book on the history of the presidential daily brief has told us, this is really an unprecedented arrangement where somebody without a permanent security clearance is now receiving the PDB for over a year. Yeah. There really isn't a precedent for that. It's nuts.

And I do think it gets to the heart of the puzzle for this White House, which is that they've got this entanglement of familial business and political and popular. policy interlocking ties. And I know it's almost second nature. We all think about and talk about it all the time now. But it is the, it's the core of the problem. And from that flows all of these other issues. Yeah. It's so crazy. 14 people get the PDB in the White House and the president of the United States would rather get his information and share it from Fox and Friends or whatever, you know, crazy Twitter meme he found that day. It just makes me sick to my stomach. Back to China for a minute. During the campaign, the banan approach to China was. fully in control. I mean, you mentioned earlier. He was accusing China of raping the United States. I talked about how they were stealing from us when it came to trade, promised to label China a currency manipulator, which in fairness is a promise a lot of presidents have failed to keep. That was the campaign, though. In the White House, even when Bannon was there, the tone was very different. Trump met with Xi Jinping a few times, notably once in Mar-a-Lago, once in Beijing. Both were all smiles, warm words. In Beijing, they wowed him with pomp and circumstance and parades

and opera. But let's talk results for a minute because you reported the Chinese officials felt Trump didn't even really know enough to push back on some of the most sensitive issues. Danny Russell, who is a former colleague of mine who's been on the show, said the Chinese felt like they had Trump's number. Fundamentally, what they said was he's a paper tiger because he hasn't delivered on any of his threats. There's no wall on Mexico. There's no repeal of health care. He can't get Congress to back him up. He's under investigation. That's a pretty brutal assessment from Danny. What do you think China makes of Trump? What have they learned about him since those first hours after the election when they were scrambling to make contacts?

Yeah, there's been this fascinating evolution in their thinking. You know, they at the very beginning thought that Trump was, in the words of a former U.S. official, their mortal enemy. I mean, they really believed that he might be somebody who wanted to blow up their relationship. And then that's where what's known as the Kushner Channel. people talk about it, China Specialists these days, that's when the Kushner Channel became the defining fact of the U.S.-China relationship and really shifted the whole direction of it from being this sort of headed in the direction of an adversarial dynamic to something that was this collegial, almost sort of partner-like, almost deferential relationship where the

president would talk constantly about how President Xi is his, how he respects him and likes him, and he thinks that President Xi likes him too. And that was really the result of a basic political and ideological debate. And it was sometimes unfolding right there in the Oval. I mean, there were these, there are, I've heard it from a number of people. There were these sort of knockdown dragouts between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and assorted other figures on both sides. But on this basic question, which was that Bannon believed that the United States needs to challenge, China, needs to shift the direction of the relationship.

And Jared Kushner believed, no, you need to treat it like a business relationship. Treat it like two, you know, powerful investors who get together and figure out a win-win arrangement that helps both of them. And so what they did is they came up with this idea of a summit that would be almost without substance. It had almost no content whatsoever. They never talked or never pushed hard on any of the things that the Democrats and Republicans agree need to be addressed in the relationship. Things like market access for American companies, making sure that American scholars and journalists can still get into China. None of that was talked about. What they wanted and what the Chinese wanted above all was a set of impressive photographs that would demonstrate that she was being treated with respect around the world as a great leader.

It would help him at home and would also set this relationship on a new footing. And that's exactly what the Chinese got. And that's what Jared was pushing for internally and succeeded in essentially winning those debates, winning those debates over career diplomats and national. security professionals and also winning them over Steve Bannon and some of the other political strategists. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm happy that the Bannon or the Trump Channel has sort of moved us away from the Bannon view of sort of, you know, almost apocalyptic inevitable confrontation with China. But it is remarkable to imagine a bilateral meeting between the U.S. and China where none of the major irritants are raised like access in the South China Sea, you know, human rights,

Tibet, right? None of this stuff even comes up. I mean, that's like, that is the Chinese dream. Right. Well, this is what gets to, there's a really interesting thing here, which is that by the end of the Obama administration, and this is a bit of a knock on where the administration ended up on China, there really was a feeling, even among progressives, among Democrats in the China specialist community, that things were, had drifted, that the sort of, you know, that the all powerful consuming energy of the Middle East had just taken the focus away from trying to prevent China from steadily. pursuing a kind of what's known as the salami slicing strategy where they just bit by bit, you know, they acquire a little bit more control in the South China Sea. They continue building up islands. You know, they gradually erode further the already pretty grim state of human rights in China and that the administration just hadn't done enough to push back on that. And so it's weird because you don't hear a lot of Democrats who agree with Steve Bannon on anything. But one thing that is a bit of common ground is that there was this feeling that, no, you know,

people don't want to go quite as far as Bannon does, which is to blow up the whole, blow up everything. But they did feel that there needed to be a more hard-headed approach on China. And Kushner took it in the opposite direction. Speaking of blowing up everything, a big issue at every meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping is North Korea. You actually went to North Korea last year and wrote a fascinating but terrifying piece, in part, because you're one of the few people, I think, in journalism. and in Washington who talks about how devastating a war with North Korea would be. How are you feeling about the current state of things with North Korea? And could you tell us a little bit about what that trip was like, just sort of on a personal level being in Pyongyang? Yeah, I mean, it was,

as my wife tells me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Yeah, got it. I think, look, I had been working on trying to go there for a number of months, and then, meaning that I was basically dealing with North Korean diplomats at the UN because we don't have an embassy. Obviously, the North Koreans don't have an embassy in Washington and we have no representation in Pyongyang. So they have this office at the UN that you can deal with if you're trying to get into North Korea. And they're very slow and they don't really let in a lot. But occasionally they do for their own reasons. And what it happened to be that at the moment that I was asking to go to North Korea, they started to realize the North Koreans did that they sort of needed to get their story out, I mean the most basic sense,

It's meaning that nobody had any idea what the hell North Korea was thinking about when it comes to a nuclear war or a Trump administration. Just no journalists had really been in there in a while in any sort of sustained way for a print outlet. So they said, okay, we're going to let a few people in, and they let in Nick Christoph from the New York Times. And I think the Wall Street Journal went afterwards and so on. But it happened to be that when I went, things had taken a bit of a turn for the worst shortly before I got there. That was the week that the president was threatening fire and fury. to rain down on Pyongyang. So I did have some second thoughts.

Yeah, I bet. We kind of concluded that this really was a story that had to be done. It had to happen. And I was going in the front door. There was nothing sneaky about it. I wasn't pretending to be a tourist or anything. I was going in exactly as they knew what I was. They knew who I wanted to talk to, which is to say I wanted to talk to government officials

who are working on the U.S. relationship. What do you care about? What do you think about? And I talked to some of your successors, people in government who could give me a steer on whether that was a bad week to go into North Korea. But I did get a feel that it was, they thought I could do it safely as long as I was careful. So I went. Yeah. It's funny that they wouldn't give you more meetings because the reality is they could learn a hell of a lot more from you about the U.S. system than you would probably learn from them given how clammed up they are.

Yeah, they, you know, I think they are so overt, so uncomfortable. to the idea of dealing with the outside world, and particularly with the United States, that everything we do is fraught. Everywhere I went, you know, there were layer upon layer of people watching me and then people watching the watchers. It was, you know, it really was. There was a, we had a two-car caravan everywhere I went. And I know that's a cliche about North Korea that you always feel like you're kind of in the Truman

show. But it was also an indication to me of how fraught it is in their own system. I mean, that it wasn't like the whole North Korean government thought this is a brilliant idea to let in a journalist. In fact, there were bitter divides between parts of the North Korean government, parts of the foreign ministry, for instance, which are more inclined to want to open up the conversation. I don't mean open up the country, but at least have some sort of dialogue with the outside world. And then the security elements that are, you know, not at all interested. And so that's part of the tension there. But, you know, they have a lot to learn about the United States.

and they sort of use the opportunity of having a foreigner there to ask me a bunch of questions about, you know, is this guy Trump exactly what he says he is? We don't know. We don't know either. I did think to him. I said, you know, you guys are really not all that worse off than we are in terms of understanding what he really intends. Yeah, no kidding. Do you feel like this Olympic thaw is real? Is there any hope to be drawn from it? I think it is exactly what it appears to be, which is a short, largely theatrical opportunity to show North Korea. Korea being, they want to show themselves as being a more normal country than they are. And they want to, they want to play. They want to participate. But it should not in any way be perceived as a substantive move away from the fundamental, very dangerous questions at the heart of it, which is a North Korea still regards the United States as an existential risk to its future. And the United States still has not decided, particularly I should say the Trump administration, has not decided whether it's willing to live and coexist with a nuclear North Korea. full stop. As long as those two exist, you can have an Olympics, but it doesn't solve the problem. Yeah, Olympics don't prevent you from proliferating weapons of mass destruction.

My final question for you. So in 2015, before President Xi's visits the United States and before Trump was elected, you wrote that the U.S. and China were entering into a more dangerous era. Do you still feel that way? And, you know, it's just funny because I think back of like all the things Obama used to rail against when it came to China, like currency manipulation, the risks of China. holding all our debt. Like you don't hear about those problems anymore because they don't seem to be problems anymore. So how did Obama do, do you think, and things gotten better or worse since 2015? I think Obama did well on several things when it comes to the China relationship. You know, he did put it in the foreground. There was some people forget about it, but there, you know, there was the pivot to Asia, which was designed to be what was needed, which was a return to talking about the whole world, not just the Middle East and sort of a recognition that so much of the 21st century

is going to be conducted in East Asia. And we have to have a coherent set of relationships there. We have to invest in those relationships and those alliances. So he started down that road. But as has happened so many times in our history, he got sort of drawn away from it, sucked away from it by the grueling, grinding obligations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And I, I think, and Syria, of course, which became the looming issue in his windshield. I think that the hard part for him, and this was not, it may have happened to any president, but especially, I think, to Barack Obama, was that China emerged after all of the years of everybody saying China is going to become the next big power in the world. It's going to be trailing the United States pretty soon.

It's going to make a play for rivalry of some kind. That that happened. And it happened almost so slowly and gradually that it was easy to overlook some of the steps. And so as they began to build up islands in the South China Sea, as they began to make these claims and pursue them, it became hard for us to decide as a country, how much are we willing to accept of China's growing assertion of power and how much do we want to push back on it. And we never came up with a theory of the case. We never had a fully realized idea of, okay, this is okay, but this is not okay. And so as a result, our policy was sort of at cross purposes. And I'll give you one example, when they created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,

which was essentially China's version of the World Bank. Initially, the U.S. said, we don't want to be a part of it. And we told our European allies and partners, we said, you shouldn't join it. And instead, the Europeans all joined it. And that was embarrassing for us because it showed that we didn't have the clout that we used to have with them. But also it was an indicator of how China's clout, how China's leverage had really increased. And we weren't yet ready to deal with that. Right. So, you know, I think that was the puzzle that he faced, and it's not one that he was ultimately able to solve by the time he left off.

So could I put you in the camp who thinks that China's abandoned the old Deng Xiaoping, Maxim, hide your strength, bide your time. Are we flexing? Okay. That's over. It is really over. It's quite striking how much they're now willing to just to trash that. And the one thing that I'll mention just easy to forget is Xi Jinping is such a big player. The Chinese president really has just sort of taken up so much room in Chinese politics. And he's a very ambitious, assertive guy on the world stage. He's the one who is driving this idea of China becoming an alternative, as he puts it, to Western liberal democracy, that we sometimes assume that means that that that's the only voice in China. And that's not true. And when I was there just a few weeks ago in Beijing, people are very judicious about what they'll say.

but they really do say that there is concern that he's moving so fast so far that it may get him into trouble. They're just a little worried that he's going to provoke a confrontation with the United States that they don't want. So there is still a policymaking process in China even if it's largely invisible to us most of the time. Interesting. Yeah, well, let's hope their bureaucracy slows confrontation down and ours does too. Evan, thank you so much for doing the show. This was fascinating, as always. Everyone who wants to learn more about China should buy your book and obviously check out all your great work in the New Yorker because it is you deliver week after week. So thank you again. Thanks, Tommy. I enjoyed it. All right, have a good one. All right, that's it for Potta of the World this week. Thank you guys for listening. Please rate us and review us in the iTunes store if you like the show. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to Luca. She's had a tough week to a little tummy bug. She's feeling better. Thanks, guys.