The Breakdown - Everything You Need To Know About The US & China: The Biggest Realignment Since Nixon, Feat. Graham Webster

Episode Date: June 6, 2020

The U.S.-China relationship has an outsized impact on global economics and politics. As that relationship comes even more into focus in the wake of COVID-19 and a return of trade tensions, this episode provides a historical primer.  Graham Webster is editor-in-chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center. He’s also a China digital economy fellow at the New America think tank. In this episode, Webster explains: Why the relationship with the U.S. has been at the forefront of Chinese policy since the People’s Republic of China was formed, but has flitted in and out of America’s focus. Why the first most significant period in the U.S.-China relationship came between the late 1960s and 1970s, as the U.S.-China relationship normalized. How Tiananmen Square undermined but didn’t destroy the relationship. Why George W. Bush came into office with an intention to focus on China but got distracted in the wake of 9/11. Why China has spent the last decade becoming increasingly illiberal. How the rise of social media contributed to the shift. Why China and U.S. policy is as much a reflection of domestic self-identity in both countries as it is a bilateral political question.  Why China’s human rights abuses present such a challenge. How COVID-19 changes the relationship. Find our guest online: Twitter: gwbstr Website: DigiChina

Welcome back to the breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. This episode is sponsored by BitStamp and CipherTrays. The breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. And now, here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to the breakdown. It is Friday, June 5th, and today we are talking about the U.S.-China relations. It is undeniable that the relationship between these two powers is one of the most significant drivers of global geopolitics as well as global economies.

We have experienced acutely the connection and interdependence and reliance in ways that we may not have even thought about in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of the health implications of a globalized society where virus once released will find its way everywhere, but also in terms of how we were or weren't able to respond because of our reliance on supply chains that weren't available or easily accessible around things like protective equipment for medical professionals. This is creating, or perhaps I should better say, accelerating a set of discussions around what the proper relationship between the U.S. and China is. And you have, on the one side, folks who believe strongly in the 1990s vision of a globalized world economy, who

still rely or want to rely on the benefits of just-in-time supply chains, who are basically saying globalization needs an update, but it's still the right model. On the other hand, you have a completely different type of actor who believes that China is the biggest threat to the U.S. and the world in the 21st century, who is calling for and already saying that we are in a second Cold War in some ways. In the middle, you have a ton of people who are trying to make sense of what the right relationship is. How to balance the value of interdependence from an economic standpoint as it relates to the cost of goods and export markets in terms of things like technology, while also acknowledging that there are huge issues to be dealt with, be they

human rights violations, be they questions about the reliance on a different economy for certain aspects of the global or the U.S. supply chain. There are these major, major questions. And I realized that as many of these questions as there are, it's so hard if you're not an expert to actually figure out where to dive into this conversation. And as it gets increasingly partisan, and as the rhetoric becomes more of a political football, I thought it would be valuable to have someone to join the show to actually try to give a primer, right, a 101 level conversation on the history of the U.S.-China relationship, to understand where it came from, how it has evolved over time. So with that in mind, I'm thrilled to welcome my guest today, Graham Webster.

Graham is the editor-in-chief of the Stanford New America Digi-China Project at the Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center. He is a China Digital Economy Fellow at New America. He spent years at Yale Law School as a senior fellow and lecturer talking about the dialogue between the U.S. and China. He has been an adjunct instructor teaching East Asian politics at New York University. He's written for a million publications. And on top of all that, he is one of my oldest and closest friends. We met our freshman year at Northwestern when he showed up in the dorm across the hall, and we ended up starting a magazine together exploring what it meant to be a millennial, a term that really didn't have a lot of context, it didn't have a lot of meaning, and it certainly

didn't have the baggage that it has now back then. So it's interesting, and we'll talk about this a little bit in the interview, but these questions of where we fit in the world, and how the world is changing have been a part of our conversation for going on 20 years now. So I'm thrilled to invite you guys into that. Graham is an incredibly brilliant guy. He's extremely well spoken. And I think that you guys will learn a lot from this show. I know I did.

So without any further ado, let's dive into this interview. And as always, when we do interviews that are, I think this one tops out at a whopping 80 minutes or something, it's only going to be very lightly edited. So enjoy it. And I'll be back with the wrap up. All right. I am here with Graham Webster. Graham, how's it going? It's going all right as it can be. Nathaniel, how are you?

Good. So as I mentioned in the introduction, this is going to be a fun one for me because Graham and I have known each other for 18 years now, I guess, fall of 2002 when we met as a freshman at Northwestern. Yeah, it's been a little while since we moved into that dorm across the hall from each other. And so it's nice to be in your little corner of the internet and to, you know, to get to know some of your community there after what was a hell of a journey. Yeah. So basically, just a tiny, I will indulge a tiny little bit of background context. But one thing that Graham and I shared really early was this sort of question of our generation's place in history.

And at that time, I mean, this was 2002. So it was, you know, September 11th, Iraq War Days. And the term millennial was barely being used. It wasn't something you saw in pop culture already. And so we started a magazine, because that's a really rational thing to do in the internet era, called The Passenger. And its tagline was a journal of a generation that doesn't know whether it's a generation at all. And I think it's interesting now, you know, almost two decades later, to see how many of the sort of explorations that that kicked off have stayed with us. I mean, I know for me, the sort of questions that I was always interested in

had to do with big shifts in power systems, both economically and politically. And that had a bunch of different dimensions then, but obviously now, you know, being in this space, in the Bitcoin space, thinking about macroeconomics, bringing geopolitics into it, it's kind of these ongoing questions. And, you know, how did your journey get you to where you are now? I guess, and for those who don't know and who've only heard what I had to say in the introduction. Can you explain just a little bit about what you spend your time on every day? Yeah. So right now, in 2020, I'm editor of a project that spreads across a bunch of institutions, but we're headquartered at Stanford, and we do translation and analysis of Chinese technology policy,

mostly in the digital realm and the digital economy. It started out organically in the way that some of the better projects do these days, where a group of people who were tracking the stuff got together online and we started translating things that we thought needed to be available in English. And then we just put them on each other's blogs and they got kind of minimal but sometimes decent attention. And then we got adopted by the Think Tank New America and kind of grew there. And now we've moved our headquarters to Stanford and I live in Oakland, California. Beautiful downtown Oakland, California, as it said, on the podcast world. But, you know, that's my main event right now. But over the years, I ended up really by happenstance in the beginning,

specializing in East Asian politics, first looking at Japan and then heavily on China and working on U.S.-China relations. And I've lived in Beijing a number of times and spent quite a few years working at the Yale Law School China Center where we were organizing basically U.S.-China dialogues between former officials and scholars in an idea called Track 2 dialogue, which takes the government as being Track 1, and we say, well, we're going to try to do some back channel and be a little more flexible than the government people can be. And that was mostly during the Obama period, and it became a lot harder to do in recent months, recent years, just because I think the U.S. side became.

a lot less coherent and a lot less predictable. And it was harder to kind of get out there and really make a difference and help out bilateral relations in a way that is in accordance with our values. So it's really interesting. I mean, there's a couple of contexts that I wanted to share for why I wanted to have this conversation right now. The first has to do with the specifics of the Bitcoin and larger blockchain space. I think one of the fascinating things about this industry to me is that it's the first technology industry that I've seen that unarguably, in my estimation, has not grown up domestically in the U.S. first and then been exported elsewhere.

It is something that has grown up simultaneously in slightly different fashion, but in concert everywhere in the world. And I think there's a lot of people who would argue that East Asia in general and China in specific is as if not more important in some ways to the development of the industry as the U.S., which makes it kind of interesting. It's also interesting in the context of China moving aggressively into digital currencies with its DSEP project and just all of its sort of blockchain initiatives, which I think are part of a much larger shift in its technology strategy.

So that's part one, is there's this relevance for this community specifically. Then more broadly, I think that the audience, that I have tends to be interested in Bitcoin as a proxy for or part of a larger set of conversations about economic shifts and power shifts around the world or the world over. And it's hard to find something with as much potential resonance and relevance than the U.S.-China relationship. And there is obviously a huge amount of conversation about this. There's bluster about this.

I mean, it's becoming an increasingly important political football in the U.S. U.S. And my goal with this conversation is to provide sort of a primer for those of us who don't spend and haven't spent, you know, a lot of time over the last couple decades trying to understand this interdependent relationship. So without putting you on the spot, I'm trying to give everyone kind of the key 101 course with this with this show. Well, all right. I'll do my best. And I hope you all will run up against my general rule, which is if I get asked something that I don't know, I will say that and then we'll have to move on. But I might be able to direct people to the right place if we swerve out of my competency.

Awesome. All right. So we talked about this a little bit of how to let this flow. I do want to go back into history first or quickly. But first, you kind of had an interesting background argument where you basically said to me that you think that Americans getting worked up about China right now is as much about the U.S. as it is about China. And I'd love you to expand upon that just so we have kind of a frame of reference before we get into some of the history about how the U.S.-China relationship evolved over the last few decades. Yeah, well, so this is a kind of a way that I've been looking at the U.S.-China relationship for the last, you know, year and a half, two years. And I kind of realized that in the Trump period, there has been a huge rise, not only in kind of substantive policy,

differences between the U.S. and China, but also in kind of frantic discussions about, you know, what's going to happen between the U.S. and China or as the American position in the world being overtaken. And I kind of, in order to explain what I think is going on, I came up with the idea that there's essentially, you know, three things, and I think you could come up with more, that Americans and American elites especially are worried about that, actually are more about the U.S. than they are about China. But if you think of them just domestically, it won't make any sense. It's also about China.

And if you think of it as just a China problem, then it won't make any sense either. So the three that I think about, the first one is kind of the biggest, most comprehensive one. And that's just a change in comparative power between the U.S. and China on earth, whether it's economic or military. And this has been a topic of discussion for, you know, 20 years. At the beginning of the 21st century, you know, the Bush administration was going to look at competition with China. And they got distracted. There was 9-11. There was the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.

And it was, you know, just a diversion of kind of elite national security strategist attention. Well, that stuff crept back. and China's economy and its military modernization advanced. And the difference in power is still pretty pronounced, certainly, if there was a, you know, a shooting war or an attempt to go take over other parts of the world. The U.S. is still a far more capable coercive force. In the economic side, it's a little bit of a different picture. But there's two things going on here. One is the real thing of competition around the world.

with China or the Chinese government and nation as an aggregate having more power compared to where they used to be, and perhaps the U.S. losing some of that power and influence. And that's the obvious China part. But the part that's really about Americans is that it's a realization that a type of power that many Americans thought was pretty absolute never really was. And so here I go back a little bit and say, you know, in Washington there are debates about how to maintain dominance or preeminence or primacy in the Asia Pacific, how to essentially keep China number two or under control or contained.

And I think that this is inspired by a worldview that tends to forget that the U.S. didn't get what it wanted when the Communist Party took over the mainland in China. They didn't get what they wanted in the Korean War. They didn't get what they wanted in Vietnam, even some of the ways that nominal U.S. allies have behaved over the last years in the Asia Pacific aren't really in accordance with U.S. preferences. So this sort of notion of U.S. leadership or dominance or control has always been a bit of a phantom. And I think we've been seeing that kind of regression to the mean of, you know, how extensive really is U.S. power for this entire century so far

because it began with Afghanistan and then Iraq, both of which turned out as exactly. examples of the limits of U.S. coercion. So, you know, when you're having this concern about your empire's future and how much power you're going to have, especially if you're a military planner or kind of a Washington, D.C. type, that makes people worried. And China is the main kind of, you know, China is the main example of what might be a challenger there. So that's the first kind of element is a regression to the mean in how much power America has

and that sense of anxiety being all about China as well. The next one, and I'll go through a little more quickly because I think we're going to stick with these ones for some time. The next one is just new technology is really freaking everyone out. This is fairly easy to describe all the discussions that we've had over the last few years around the world about AI and algorithmic accountability. and all of the kind of elements of blockchain architecture that people find appealing or certain power centers find challenging. These are social systems and people's ideologies trying to reckon with a highly automated social infrastructure. And of course, here, China is a major issue. What does it mean if all these technologies are being used by a regime and a culture and a country,

that has different interests or preferences from one's own or one's own countries. Then there's the issue of, is China going to be the new AI superpower? And I think we're kind of over that particular meme now. But that really worried people for a little while. And the last one kind of combines these a little bit, I think. There's an economic reordering happening in the world. It's both macro among different countries in terms of the centers of gravity of various types of industries. and it's also heavily affected by automation.

And this affects both the U.S. and China, but certainly in the U.S. In the 2016 election, I think we wouldn't have ended up with a President Trump if there weren't so much discontent with the way that automation and concentration of power has displaced people from their jobs and their prosperity. And I don't think that Bernie Sanders would have had the prominence that he had in two elections without that. But this is also something in which China gets part of the blame in the American discourse, and it's partly true. China is an avatar for outsourcing and globalization and for global supply chains for economic actors who are chasing efficiency, meaning lower costs.

China gets mashed into that conversation, which is really about economic justice in one's own local context and not so much about, well, are the people of Fujian or, you know, Shenzhen or something going to eat your lunch? It's more about why are these companies and these governments letting other places, you know, capture the value that we think we should have. You know, there's all sorts of justice arguments, one way or the other on that. But those three anxieties, the overall U.S. status and then a panic about. out new technologies, and then this sort of insecurity of the great mass of people as automation and economic transformation happens, all are really about us, whether you're American or from

other places, but they're wrapped up inextricably with China. Well, and it's interesting because there's an inverse to that as well, I imagine, in terms of how China views itself and what it means to be a, a, uh, a, uh, and what it means to, you know, be a strong China in the world vis-a-vis other countries, right? So a conversation that is nominally about the U.S.-China relationship actually becomes four separate conversations, you know, one, the U.S.-China relationship from each of the different sides, but then within those countries, the relationship about what it means to be Chinese, you know, relative to America or the rest of the world, or what it means to be American relative to China or the rest of the

world. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to some extent, if you look at the history, of U.S.-China relations, at least since the People's Republic was founded in 1949, the U.S. has been at the front of Chinese leaders and strategist minds the whole time. And China has sort of weaved in and out of the consciousness of mainstream American strategic thought. Really, it just wasn't that big a deal when there were wars to be had in other parts of the world. But when the war was in Korea and China was on the other side, you know, it was quite front of mind. You know, the way that Chinese thinkers and leaders have managed these transitions, the transition of comparative power, has been very interactive with the way the thinking goes around the world and in the United States. So, you know, I kind of look at, you know, maybe the best way to do it is to rewind before the 2016 election because that appears to us to be a huge shock.

But I would argue that it's not, you know, Trump's election wasn't as radical a shift in U.S.-China relations as was just already going to happen in U.S. China relations. Okay, great. Well, you've now segued us to get a little bit historical. So what is, I mean, I know it's an impossible question. You almost just located one part of it at the beginning of the People's Republic of China. But what are key historical inflection points that are relevant for understanding this, at least on a base level? Well, looking from U.S.-China relations as the frame, right, which really narrows things in a worldwide. interactive system. Certainly the founding of the People's Republic and then the Korean War, which came shortly thereafter, were key moments. It put the United States and China at odds, and the U.S. maintained its official relations with the Republic of China, which was on Taiwan.

And that really set the tone for quite a while because it was the Cold War. in general, China was seen as part of the communist bloc, and of course the U.S. was the, at least self-styled shining light of the free world, right? And what happened later, the next time that things really shifted after a period of quite cool relations was in the late 60s and early 70s. And so, you know, you and I have been interested in the period around 1968 for a very long time, in part because of this fixation that we had in the early 2000s on the meaning of our generation. You know, the late 60s was a time when a particular generation had a particular role. Well, in the late 60s, when Richard Nixon was elected, he was elected after having written a foreign affairs essay that kind of clearly indicated that his thinking included bringing the People's Republic into the global community and sort of ending this fiction that China was the Republic of China on Taiwan, and that sort of that regime eventually, rightfully would rule all. of China. That by then was clearly not going to happen. Sinosoviet tensions had increased. And Nixon and Kissinger and others identified a kind of geopolitical wiggle point, which was that if the U.S.

and China could come to some sort of understanding, at least on a limited basis, boy, the Soviet Union would have a lot more trouble. And that was still one of the major goals was to essentially balance against any Soviet influence in power. So Nixon, supposedly, the story goes a few different ways, but I think the best telling has Nixon telling Kissinger to try to make it happen, and they start this dramatic diplomatic outreach that culminates in President Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong meeting in Beijing and their trip to the Great Wall together. And that finally culminates in the late.

70s in normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China. So that decade from the late 60s to the late 70s was the last major reorganization of U.S.-China relations. There have been a few speed bumps since then, but essentially it established a pragmatic relationship between a remarkably weaker People's Republic of China and a remarkably stronger United States. It was a relationship across huge differences of political ideology. And that was already always understood from the beginning. But it was one that had a strategic logic. And that continued through some fairly big changes. There was the death of Mao Zedong in the mid-70s. There was the transition to Deng Xiaoping's rule and his, the project that he led of reform and opening and putting China on a path to

to greater global economic integration and, you know, more capitalist-like development. And then there was very significantly, there was, you know, a period of kind of, you know, for international business. It was sort of a Wild West period in the 80s. And a lot of people had a lot of kind of optimism for change politically in China. But, you know, we're talking today on June 4th. the 31st anniversary of the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square, where an unknown number but a very large number of peaceful protesters,

students, workers, people looking for greater government accountability and sort of more procedural justice at minimum were killed. I mean, it was an absolute bloodbath 31 years ago today, And that was a major downturn in China's relations with the U.S. and a number of other countries who basically on the basis of human rights and defensive democracy said that they couldn't countenance good relations with the Communist Party of China. But I would argue that that was not as big as what we're experiencing now. At that time, there was a ton of public pressure to distance the U.S. from China. and there were, you know, weapon sales bans and other measures put into effect. A large number of activists and others left China and resettled in the U.S. and other countries.

But, you know, there was a top effort from the White House to send over emissaries and to make sure that the strategic conversation could continue because it was 1989. It was not yet 1991 and the Cold War was still kind of kicking. So then the fall of the Cold War, or yeah, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, really opened this sort of cautious embrace, a unipolar moment essentially, at least in the kind of classic view. One could say it was non-polar, but who cares? It's all sort of academic at that point. that just skated forward, I think, in a period of China gaining economic momentum, serious positive developments, continued massive human rights abuses, but periods of some greater optimism than other times. That led us into the more recent years in the Obama administration. you sort of began with the 2008 Olympics right before Obama was elected.

That was in Beijing in August 2008, and it was a period of kind of cautious optimism among both international observers and some kind of more democratic or liberal-minded Chinese activists or just regular people. Well, I can say from regular conversations in Beijing, I was living. there at the time, you know, people had some optimism that China was on a path that would be closer to the world and would be less at odds and would be perhaps, would give more space politically. In 2012, you could locate the change a little bit before that, but in 2012 and 13, Xi Jinping took power. And really, since then, there's been almost no turn toward liberalism at every turn and that's perceptible in terms of public space and civil society and the public sphere and freedoms.

China has been going in a more illiberal direction for almost a decade now, arguably. It's hard to locate exactly when the turn towards illiberalism took hold in China, but it goes back at least about a decade. And some people place it back in 2009 really coinciding with the Obama administration. And the Obama administration had spent a ton of time trying to rebalance, as they called it, U.S. strategic attention from the Obama administration, including the State Department under Hillary Clinton, had spent an enormous amount of time trying to rebalance attention from where they were bogged down or where the U.S. had been bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq to the Asia Pacific. And this was both because they saw a challenge from China. China's military is becoming stronger. its economy was becoming more central to the world economy. And also U.S. interests there and allied interests are enormous. Japan, Philippines, all of the shipping lanes and all of the trade relationships and all of the supply chains that stretch across that part of the world,

not to mention the fact that, you know, a good half of all people on Earth live spread out somewhere between India and China. So, you know, there was a lot of attention on that. And they more or less achieved a simple goal, which is let's pay more attention. Let's move some of the military assets. Let's try to build up our strategic thinking. But even after eight years, the Obama administration hadn't figured out, well, then what? Okay, we're paying more attention. But what to do about this basic stuff?

Because remember, these basic problems are hard. There's a shift in power between the two countries. There's a massive change in technology. And this affects our domestic systems. affects defense, balance, all kinds of different things. And it's also an area of competition. And also the economic situations were getting more and more tense. So, you know, coming out of the Obama administration, now I was one of the many, many people who thought that Hillary Clinton was going to become the president. And it's kind of a funny story. I had a whole book plant that I was going

to write about the future of U.S.-China relations. And a couple of weeks after the election in 2016, while thinking about other things that might be broken in the world now, I realized that my book had been ruined because I had unconsciously, for the purposes of the book planning, assumed that Hillary Clinton would become the president. And for a few days, I got a bunch of things out of the library. And I read some of the crap from Peter Navarro and these other people. And I was like, nope, I'm not going to be able to engage intelligently with this. And clearly, they're in disarray, so you can't predict the future anymore. But what's important is the time before that, you know, the Hillary Clinton people, for lack of a better term, the people who are

trying to, you know, go into a new Clinton administration were trying to come up with strategies. They knew they had to deal with North Korea. That issue was getting more tense. They knew they had to deal with various cybersecurity and intellectual property and trade problems. That was a on the agenda. You know, they knew that all sorts of systems were going to need adjustment. There's all sort, you know, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was still a thing. Clinton had said that she was no longer in support of it, but I think everybody believed the Clinton administration was likely to weasel back toward it with some kind of face-saving changes. So, you know, there was a plan to set up a new China policy and a new China strategy. And it was one that was

tougher than before. It was more hard-minded, but it was also one that was not just totally reckless. And what we got instead was, I guess you would say tough-minded in the kind of chest out, you know, talk loudly and who cares about the stick type of way. And the Trump administration instead has sort of given this feedback to the Chinese side, which says, like, we're just going to try to mess up your situation in every way that we can, even when it messes up our other situations, and even when one effort to mess up your situation is messing with another one of our efforts to mess with your situation, we're just going to try them all. And that really, it's, it's, signaled that at least for the purposes of the Trump administration, it was pretty much open season

on anything that would be seen as tough or aggressive or kind of, you know, dominant against. to China. And obviously, you can tell from the way I'm describing this. I don't think this is working. But still, read it from Beijing. There was a period of time where increased anxiety was widely recognized. People in Beijing and people in Washington knew that each other were thinking about this. Lots of conversations were being had, both officially and unofficially. And then you see the U.S. kind of cancel its rational principle and just kind of throw everything into the sink. And that's where we are now, which it's just that that's been going on for multiple years.

And we got a global pandemic that has China and the United States heavily involved. And now the United States is experiencing, you know, a massive national emergency. Not so much because demonstrators are advocating for black lives and against police brutality, but because the top leadership of the United States is treating it in a way that is sort of recognizable to authoritarian. So, yeah, the stable ground is now unstable. And from a Chinese official perspective, you've just got a hedge because you can no longer trust the Americans to be, you know, maybe a pain in the ass, but basically rational. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred economy.

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But I think one of the things that interesting is a couple of times you mentioned these moments where we might have formed a more coherent strategy but got distracted over the last, call it 20 years, 30 years. And it's interesting because so I had Peter Zeyon on a few. I guess more like a month ago now or a month and a half ago. And his thesis is basically that in the wake of the Cold War, we never really formulated a strategy for what America's foreign policy was going to be. We had sort of adventures abroad, of course, and we had the idea of an American-led order. But there wasn't a real, again, this is his argument. There wasn't a real coherent push. And that was, you know, Bush Sr. was trying to do that. But then when Clinton came in, it was a shift. understandably to domestic politics because so much of the world had been defined by this global contest for so long. It was interesting to hear you then say that Bush, the junior, he had this intention to come in and actually figure out the U.S.'s relationship with China, but again, got distracted. And so ultimately, by the time that we get to Obama, even the words that we're using to rebalance, you've had this sort of superpower growing up for 20 years without

a coherent or at least sort of really intentional strategy or at least a focus strategy, you know, as it's going on, which I think, you know, maybe leads to the idea that when we're looking at the U.S.-China relationship, it's sort of important to contextualize it in the larger patterns of history and global systems than just the bilateral relationship. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's really important to look inside each of the countries and then beyond them. You know, certainly one of my formative intellectual experiences and one that you shared in was a series of courses at Northwestern where we went to college taught by a guy named

Georgi Derlugean, who was a wonderful lecturer and a great teacher and had, I don't want to get it wrong, but I think he'd done his first PhD in the Soviet Union at MGU, as he called it, the Moscow State University. and then he kind of had to leave and had to start over and he got a new set of training. But what came out of it was, you know, this world systems theory influenced worldview that said, oftentimes the nation state is not the best unit of analysis for the things that were interested in. And here I think there's a, you know, on both counts, I mean, you kind of raise two questions, one about why the turn to illiberalism and one about.

American kind of non-stratigery in the period of after the Cold War. But, you know, I think if you look sub-nationally on both, you get something. So starting with the American experience, I don't know exactly what was in George W. Bush's heart and mind about China at the time, but it's well documented that some of his advisors were trying to come up with strategies. But these were cold warriors. I mean, the people who rose to senior levels, I mean, think about Condi Rice, one of, you know, Bush II's top foreign policy advisors. I mean, she was a Soviet expert, one of great distinction, I think.

But viewing the rest of world history through having grown up, you know, working on that, it's as if what would I do in terms of understanding the world if East Asia was completely reorganized? And there was no Chinese Communist Party. Well, I would have some adaptation to do, and a lot of modesty would be called for. But I think it's a deeper problem. I think the Cold War gave the United States a kind of narrative of a national interest in international affairs. And, you know, it was a very contentious one. There were a lot of people who disagreed with the kind of imperialist American agenda, as they would see it. Whereas some people really agreed, okay, we've got to stand up for freedoms and fight this Cold War.

And then I think a lot of people are in between. But once you take away that unifying, you know, reason, and we essentially had one in the United States, at least since the beginning of U.S. involvement in the Second World War, you know, there was always an other against which to define ourselves. And then there wasn't. And once you don't have the unifying other, you actually do have quite distributed interests. And, you know, I don't think the Clinton administration turned away from foreign policy. I think their foreign policy was that of kind of NAFTA and the WTO. And that's now really salient to Americans. So that type of, you know, economic foreign policy focus that arguably was captured by large moneyed interests and didn't sufficiently take into a

account the interests of people with less influence, you know, is kind of coming home to roost. Just to say anyway, that all these international systems will tend to reveal that there is, there are differences of opinion within each country. Of course, a democratic system is meant to take pluralism and turn it into legitimate rule. And an authoritarian system such as China's is based on the idea that we are one and the oneness is kind of governed and defined and protected by the Communist Party. But that oneness in China was also very much in question. And this here is not with the U.S., we were just talking about kind of at the end of the Cold War

and into the turn of the millennium. With the Chinese case, the example we're talking about is at the beginning of the 2010s, when there was a transition out of the 10 years during which Huchintau was the top leader and into the period of Xi Jinping. And what, you know, anyone reading the news at the time would have remembered this. But what outsiders need to remember now is that Xi Jinping came to power after a really high wire kind of zany set of political events that involved an apparent move by this guy called Boshi Lai, who was a very high official to, you know, I think I'm forgetting all the details right now, but, you know, he had people spying on other central leaders. And there was essentially what appeared to be a power move where Boa was trying to beat out Xi Jinping for the successor's spot.

And even then, Xi Jinping and Li Kucheng, his number two in the top leadership to this day, you know, were kind of from different parts of the system. So there was a decision inside the party to go for she and how that exactly came about as a matter for later historians and probably for some things that I haven't read yet. But, you know, there was a bit of a power struggle. And so when she came into power, he needed to solidify power if he was going to move forward and kind of accomplish anything. And at least as it appears from the outside, the mechanisms for doing that included a major campaign against corruption, which I think was both real. Like there are a lot of corrupt officials in China, as in many countries. And rooting them out was probably a good idea.

But it was also a convenient way to get rid of your political rivals. Because if most officials are at least a little bit corrupt, you can choose who you're going to go after in a way that's convenient to you. And, you know, right after that started happening, people were like, oh, my God, is he going to make it? Is this just going to, are they going to fall apart? Well, quickly it became clear that at least in this sort of short term, Xi Jinping had solidified that control. But it also meant that types of open debate politically about all kinds of different issues, rule of law, you know, I mean, things as sort of seemingly. objectionable to a communist party as women's rights and, you know, anti-sexual harassment and these types of things became hot-button issues just because they were things that people were advocating about. There had grown space for public interest lawyers who were able to take on, you know, kind of in the previous years had been able to take on more and more types of cases where people had gotten screwed in one way or the other by even kind of local officials.

You wouldn't be taking on the top minister of something, but if there's some local official who's done something wrong or if there's some other harm, you know, people were taking on more and more public interest cases. This type of space to challenge the kind of one narrative, the one national idea space became much more tightly controlled. And, you know, not coincidentally, this is the same period during which social media took off in China. So, you know, there was this early explosion of the public sphere in China, such as had never occurred. You know, the most rollicking public sphere seen before the Internet was probably from the late 19th century, and it involved things like circular telegrams and some newspapers that were published in the treaty ports that were controlled by foreign powers. And then were passed across borders and that type of thing. But now people had Weibo and WeChat and for short periods of time, even had Twitter and other kind of Facebook access.

That stuff all got clamped down. And, you know, the way that I've kind of come to look at this is inspired by something that one of America's most prominent students of Chinese law and U.S.-China relations, Jerry Cohen has said, you know, when we look at what you. Xi Jinping is doing, there's a question of whether at any given time it's ruling with an iron fist or white knuckling it and running scared. And I think a lot of the time it's both. I think there's just a lot of power and dominance inside the party, but there's also deep fear of that, which is unpredictable. And the last thing I'll say about that is that the period after COVID emerged in China, was the most remarkable display of dissent and sort of, well, not dissent itself, but solidarity with somebody who had been targeted by the censors. There was this doctor named Lee Wenliang

who tried to raise the alarm. And then he was targeted by local authorities for, you know, starting sharing rumors and creating trouble. And then he died of COVID. And the the outpouring on Chinese social media from people that I'm friends with who work in government circles and are very careful about what they say publicly. It was just everyone was sort of mourning for this guy. And that must have looked like a very scary moment for the Chinese leadership. So, you know, I guess I brought us up to today. It's a little rambling. I apologize for that. No, no, no, it's great. I mean, it's really interesting. I want to go back actually to this point about the introduction of social media because it is this, you know, in America obviously it had

been this like sort of slow burning force. And it, you know, it has, it's interesting, even in America, which is obviously, you know, comparatively radically open as it relates to technology, it has, we are still just trying to grapple with the force that social media has created or that it exerts in society, right? And I think obviously Trump's war with Twitter. is part and parcel of that, right? The fact that we're having these big-scale conversations about, you know, people realistically putting forth that these are public commons that need to be either nationalized or governed as though they're public space.

You know, these things are, we're still coming to grips with how significant and powerful these forces are in America. And so the idea that the increase in illiberalism is somehow, from a time perspective, aligned with a totally different type of tool for spreading dissent makes some intuitive sense. Although I'm sure even just repeating it like that, it's oversimplifying it. But it's not something that I had kind of thought about is we tend to associate the introduction of new communication technologies with growing liberalism. But there's, if you're within an authoritarian regime, it creates a motivation to clamp down

rather than kind of have the appearance of openness or increasing openness. Yeah, and I mean, a few years ago I had a fairly unpopular argument, which is that for different reasons and for reasons that I wouldn't agree with, but nonetheless, the Chinese government was quicker than the U.S. government and many others to recognize the risk to social systems and political systems presented by basically a free and open Internet. It was obvious to the Chinese authorities who were introducing the internet in the late 90s that totally ungoverned public communication wasn't going to fly. I mean, it wasn't really a question. It was a matter of how to capture some of the benefits without suffering the downside from the perspective of the ruling party. Around that time in the U.S., and really, I mean, through certainly through the time, through the kind of first decade of the century, I think a ton of people were convinced that, you know, the Internet was just naturally because of its open architecture, that it was a force for good and for freedom. And this all started, you know, then there was Yovkinny Morozov, who I don't remember what year he wrote his net delusion, but shortly, well, around then, you had the Arab Spring where, sure enough, assisted by digital technologies.

it may become easier to unseat a regime, but what follows isn't necessarily great all the time. You know, it went better in some places than others. I don't think the U.S. really got around to understanding this risk until 2016 and the Russian interference with the election, the nature of which we still don't fully understand, but definitely took advantage of sort of lack of attention. to political system risks, and essentially to maintaining a fairly broadly held U.S. view of what's right and just in society, you know, open platforms made it possible for others to mess with that, or even just for, you know, kind of contrary forces in the U.S. to try to mess with it, too. So identifying that risk and figuring out what to do about it consistent with one's values is hard. And I think the U.S. is at, you know, we're not much off of, what do you call it, square one here.

Because it's going to take some national leadership to actually figure out how to balance these things. And at present, you know, the White House and the Senate are dominated by a party who benefits. from it. So let's actually shift. I love this image that you presented, by the way, of not knowing if you're, what was it exactly, white knuckling it or, or, or, it's iron fist or white knuckling it. Iron fist or white knuckling. Yeah.

Yeah. Iron fister, running scared, but I think I made it white knuckling because it's like. Yeah. That's, as I mean, it's a much more evocative image. So if you did make that change, kudos. But the, you know, I think it's a, I think that's really interesting. I guess one other question on that specifically is one argument that I've seen as it relates to nervousness among Chinese leadership and potentially explanations for certain types of shifts in

behavior has to do with the fault lines or the, like the fear that this sort of implicit bargain between the leadership and its people that you don't get kind of full political freedoms, but you do get rapid economic growth, is getting, it's harder to get that growth, right? I mean, the world as a whole has not for a decade been growing the way that it was. And now numbers get reported around the world that may or may not reflect the reality, but that's something that we talk about a lot in the context of kind of the Bitcoin and the crypto space because that the difference between asset, price appreciation and real economic growth is one of the central fault lines in, certainly in the

U.S. that we're seeing on display, I think, in some ways. But how much stock do you put in that in terms of that adding to the Chinese leadership's nervousness at the given moment? Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, it's such a big question that, you know, I want to be modest about imagining my brain into the minds of the, you know, the few people who are really, really influential in decision making. So whether there's a line between, uh, the need for economic adjustment and, uh, illiberal moves, I, I don't know exactly how that would look, but I know that that's a major concern in the Chinese leadership and, um, the way it looked before the kind of U.S.-China economic confrontation and really any way pre-Trump was that

Chinese leaders and kind of anyone watching carefully could understand that the Communist Party's performance legitimacy was based in part on continuing to deliver improved conditions for the people of China, basically solving the subsistence problem for the Chinese. people. And, you know, there's, it's a contentious thing to say that, uh, the Communist Party lifted, uh, you know, hundreds and millions of people out of poverty. But suffice it to say that during the communist period, a truly disastrous, uh, economic situation coming out of a civil war, um, also experienced some further disasters, including in the, in the great leap forward. But eventually, at least in the last kind of 30 or 40 years, you know, there's been an upslope. And you can only upslope so far

with heavy industry in a place where the environment has already been thrashed. And you can only upslope so far in a place where the population's level of education and kind of indigenous innovation is limited so far. And so there was a lot of push to get a to basically move up the value chain for lack of a better term. And there's an enormous amount of financial pressures and bad debts and all kinds of other things coming out of the financial crisis that are also sitting there, ready to blow up at any time in different ways. So that, you know, before there was a kind of all-out U.S.-China shouting fest, which we've experienced for certainly for the last year or two. and at least pretty consistently since Trump was elected, there was an everyday, and there must remain an everyday concern among the top Chinese leadership about maintaining economic progress and prosperity. And, you know, after COVID and all of the other economic destruction or disruptions coming from both the pandemic in China and then relationships around the world.

and whatever are the ultimate implications of all of the stuff that Trump has tried to do, it's tough. And there's going to be a fallen growth. And maintaining people's confidence is going to be harder. You know, Michael Bloomberg rightfully got a huge amount of crap online for saying essentially Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has constituencies. It was a dumb thing politically to say, and I think it's probably fair to say he's a dictator. But this isn't, you know, one person standing on a pedestal making orders and it will all happen no matter what. It's a dictatorship with huge sets of pressures and a huge bureaucracy and lots of different interest groups and frankly a very stressful life for top leaders and people who are trying to navigate for their various interests.

It's super interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating to look at kind of the trying to understand. I mean, I feel like American markets are trying to some extent to use Chinese markets and industry as a preview of the future, you know, as a time machine to two months from now. And we're seeing, you know, the huge, the challenge of when you have a demand shock and a supply shock at the same time, because even as manufacturing comes back online, the demand for the things that get manufactured might not. But so I want to go, you know, you made the argument at the beginning that we're currently living through the biggest realignment in U.S.-China relations since that period in the 70s. And I know that, you know, when you and I were talking and planning this a little bit, you went through, I think it was something like eight different dimensions of American policy towards China, right? even that the frame of U.S.-China policy in some ways glosses over just how many dimensions of that conversation there are. So I'd love to go through, even just touching on briefly what

some of those different dimensions are by way of, you know, we don't have to get comprehensive, but just helping people introduce and understand the key parts of this relationship. Yeah, so I don't have a reified eight, and I think my eighth one was, et cetera. So suffice it to say that there's a bunch of different things going on. But the message is that, you know, the various things in U.S.-China relations, the various problems are interrelated and they can't be dealt with separately. I mean, they must be dealt with separately to some extent just because, you know, no one can handle literally everything at once. But dealing with these issues without kind of reference to one another and without thinking about give and take and the ways that one priority. might affect others is folly. And that's what the Trump people have been doing. You essentially

have people in the Trump administration who are, you know, pushing hard for a new Cold War and who believe maybe that the new Cold War has already started. I mean, that's the more sympathetic way to say it. I think that that question is not yet answered. But some people think, okay, well, the war is on, we better fight it. That's kind of a Steve Bannon position. You know, there's those people. And then there's the people who say, well, you know, the basic global system is, you know, we ought to, we just have to rebalance a little bit. And that's, that's kind of more of the Steve Mnuchin, you know, traditional capitalist types. You know, and then you've got Matt Podinger, who's now that the deputy national security advisor, who's a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked in China.

And he works on a bunch of these issues, but his fixation seems to be largely on human rights issues and on the illegitimacy of an authoritarian regime, which is, you know, another view. And all of these things kind of have push and pull with one another. So, you know, just to list a few of the things that I think Americans should be thinking about, and really people around the world should be thinking about with policy toward China. The first is kind of the classic international relations thing. how to manage U.S., China, military balance. Some people are going to push for dominance.

And there's all these wonderful words, preeminence, predominance, primacy. They all amount to, you know, we're number one. And, you know, China has to be a subsidiary or a kind of a not totally autonomous power. Right. There's people who really just want to keep U.S. number one. Maybe that's a good idea, maybe not. It certainly will cost a lot, and it certainly could provoke negative reactions on the other side. Then there's U.S.-China economic competition and economic system competition.

You can have all sorts of debates about what the U.S. system is and what the Chinese system is, but one way or the other, they're not totally commensurate. And people will argue that one is right and the other is wrong and simply the other must kind of submit. and adapt, or as an alternative, there are international forums like the WTO or some successor to the TPP that hypothetically China might at least partially exceed to that type of thing. Who knows, right? Big question. So military competition, economic competition. Then there's this universe of questions about technological and innovation superiority.

people really worry about who's going to be the home of the next round of tech innovation. And I think it's kind of a silly question as it's viewed in Washington because it sort of has, the folks in Washington who look at this often have this idea that somehow the U.S. had been this font of all things new and fancy. and that if we just take these five measures from my policy report, then you can keep China from taking leadership in any way. Well, that's not very realistic. All the stuff that we actually get is going to touch China,

if not be majorly manufactured there and with capabilities that are not built into the U.S. economy and this sort of thing. But when it gets to specific technologies and specific applications, you know, it does matter. If, you know, something that's on the front of the newspapers these days is who's going to build the first COVID vaccine that works. And if, you know, any country who's in a rivalry with another is going to have to worry about if their rival is the first one to develop it, does my country suffer? You know, are we low on the list of people who get to benefit from that technology? There's the 5G question.

All of these things are kind of separate. And then, you know, so we've done military economics, tech, all of which are whole universes. And then there's human rights and, you know, political system justice issues. The human rights situation is absolutely appalling right now. I mean, certainly in the United States, we're having huge protests. But, you know, in Xinjiang, the numbers vary, but at least a million people are said to have been rounded up and put in camps for essentially reeducation. They're very well-documented reports of people, and these are predominantly Muslim people being put in these camps. And it sort of disappeared and isolated from their families for unknown periods of time, for offenses that are basically non-existent in most cases.

some of these people are being farmed out as labor, forced labor to factories and other parts of China. It's absolutely disgusting. The turn on, I'm getting a little emotional about it. I don't know how to, what's difficult about it is that's a reality in China. And it's a human reality on Earth. And what Americans can do about it or what the U.S. government can do about it is a really hard question. And it's especially a hard question when you have military and economics and tax. and all these other things working in the same pot, and inescapably they are. There's no U.S. president is going to say, well, our only priority with China has to be stopping these human rights abuses there, or whether in Hong Kong or in any other country. There's always going to be this issue as one among several that people are paying attention to. And then there's sort of, you know, a big constituency in the U.S. who want to make money.

in China and a big constituency in China who want to make money in the U.S. And those people are both people and institutions and systems. And that whole push and pull about basically just trying to gain capital is a huge, you know, set of systems that can be either interfered with or optimized or prioritized or made subsidiary. There's, you know, even aside from the most acute human rights issues, there's global inequality. Both China and the United States have seen major increases in inequality in recent decades. You know, that doesn't seem right to me. And a lot of people, it could be the case that a lot more people in the U.S. government will be concerned about that.

You know, one of the things that you can say for the kind of the movement, around President Trump is that a lot of people are concerned about wealth distribution. I think the administration is actually making things worse, but at least there's a consciousness among many of the people who would support President Trump of that unfairness. And certainly there's that consciousness increasing among people on the opposite side in the U.S. Well, what are we going to do about that with China? How do you think about wealth distribution between Americans and Chinese? You know, what's the justice there?

Who knows how that's going to go? And then there's, you know, regular kind of hardcore national security, defensive national security. How can Americans and Chinese make their societies secure against aggression by one another or sabotage? How can they defend against third parties and criminals and other types of disruptions? this is highly embedded with the tech issues around 5G and infrastructure, who becomes vulnerable to whom because the machines were designed or manufactured in the other's country, all this stuff is a big deal. So far, these have been basically bilateral.

Then there's the whole category of competition around the world. how to think about U.S. influence, both after Donald Trump and in a time when China is a much bigger player than it has ever been around the world. What does that mean for alliances? What does it mean for development assistance? What does it mean for kind of international justice when it comes to environmental impacts or environmental impacts or? you know, these two large countries seeking resources. You know, now we've come to the last bit, which is actually my first bit. All of these things are among the things that are, you know, big issues of debate.

In Washington and in the newspapers and on Twitter and all of this, there are people who are more aggressive and less aggressive against China on all of these questions. But to me, I mean, the one overriding issue of our day is the climate. None of this stuff means anything in a few decades if the world does not find a way to mitigate and stop the worst effects of climate change. And I don't know. I mean, it's sort of a question that I don't have an answer to. I have a suspicion. But how much conflict can there be between the U.S.

U.S. and China and still leave space for the innovation in collective action necessary to avoid this existential threat to human civilization. How much? There's a certain amount. Like, the amount that we have right now, I think it could still be done. At least I thought that three months ago. Let's see. You know, we might be over conflict budget right now.

But, you know, there's some amount of conflict that's inevitable and necessary and doesn't just prevent all collective action. But there's some amount, you know, basically the easy example is if conflict goes to global thermonuclear war, then it's moot anyway. So somewhere between, you know, here and there, there's an amount that's too much conflict to solve that central problem. And there's all this focus on these other things that sort of us versus them dynamic that is so just contrary to the obvious fact that the climate is a common interest of all the peoples. So it's, I don't know what to do with that, but for various reasons, I've had the occasion, there was an illness in the family, I had the occasion to drive across the American West a bunch of times over the last few months. And somewhere around the salt flats in Utah, I spent a lot of time thinking about why in this period when, you know, a pandemic has basically shown precisely how.

common the challenges are. It's just a perfect example of something that kind of, you know, maybe it has a source, but the fact is once it's out there, everybody's vulnerable who's a human. And how dispiriting that that happened and the result was just turning up the recriminations in the blame game to 11. And I mean that both between U.S. and China and within the U.S. political sphere and within a bunch of other discussions. But really, I was thinking about U.S. China. Like, if we can't kind of rise above and try to do something about this immediate challenge,

it's just, you know, it's a small, it's a microcosm prototype of just the apparent, inability of people in these countries to get it together when we really need to. And I, you know, I have to be hopeful that that can change to some extent because there's just no other way forward. But it's been a dispiriting time. And as, you know, I just, as you can tell the climate is my, it's not my job. But it's the thing that I think we've got to do. And if people aren't able to weigh these things and see their interactions and really, realize that, you know, competing to have air superiority in perpetuity in the Pacific is a lower priority than saving the climate than those people need to get out of strategic thinking.

Well, this brings me to maybe a question that we can kind of have as our wrap, because I've already kept you here for quite some time. But how, you know, I know one of the, one of the frustrations you've had, I think it was embodied in, you had a tweet storm yesterday about, about the hypocrisy of Tom Cotton's letter in the New York Times on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. But you talked more broadly, and I think the thing in here about this idea of people who are pushing a narrative that the second Cold War is predetermined or has already begun in some way, versus people who see a range of possible outcomes. So I guess my last question to you is, how predetermined is this relationship from where you sit now,

versus how many different paths might there be? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I'm a big fan of uncertainty. Actually, I don't know if I like uncertainty, but I'm a fan of acknowledging it where it exists. And there's enormous uncertainty. I mean, first of all, if you rewind to all the debates that people were having about that same list of issues,

fundamentally the same list of issues with U.S. and China were being discussed before the last election that I just talked about a moment ago. Well, a huge uncertainty was that the United States would suspend rationality and elect Donald Trump. And that further on, you know, Republicans wouldn't rein him in and then it would really go as badly as it has gone. That was an unexpected event and it has major implications for the road forward. I don't know which direction it pushes on whether there's a Cold War or not. Certainly, the Trump people are trying to make one happen. But that's an example of an event that could change matters.

On the same theme in China, a leadership transition is highly uncertain. One of the big signs of illiberalism in Xi Jinping's rule has been that at the last last major party convention, they formally got rid of term limits. There had been this, I guess now short-lived pattern of leaders coming in after Deng Xiaoping, who were on for what was understood to be two five-year terms in a row, and then they would get out. Well, Xi Jinping has basically formally said that he is not limited by that, and that 10-year mark is going to come up in a couple of years. So does he stick around? Is there a power struggle?

Do some of those forces that were really unhappy with him taking power in the first place, coalesce during this period of instability in China following the pandemic and all the economic downturn? Who knows, right? So, I mean, the basic macro behavior of the governments is highly uncertain, which means that, you know, one has to imagine that there is a possible, total war and there's a possible highly pragmatic, you know, not perfect, but let's figure out how to navigate these differences and a possible good future. There's a bunch of other things that could happen. I mean, you know, maybe a year ago, I can't remember exactly when. Anyways, sometime recently there was another one of these rashes of big storms and big floods and big wildfires. And as those things keep spreading around the world, it could be a signal that climate transition is happening more quickly.

That would be a major change in the way that all those various issues are handled if the carnage is basically beginning. And then there's just all the regular old kind of everyday uncertainties. We just had a pandemic. That was a pretty big one. So, no, I don't think the outcomes are known. And, you know, on the, basically what had happened is, I don't know exactly when people are going to hear this, but Tom Cotton had written this New York Times op-ed that, you know, contrary to good sense, the New York Times published on June 3rd, which is yesterday as we speak now, calling for the U.S. to send in the military to fight what from my advantage in downtown Oakland are. you know, increasingly peaceful and highly orderly demonstrations at this point. And that call emerged like almost, you know, it would have been the same time roughly that the

orders were being contemplated and promulgated for the Chinese military to move into Tiananmen Square 31 years earlier. It was just outrageous. And Tom Cotton has been this, you know, he's a Republican and Senator from Arkansas, he's been pushing loudly all kinds of different approaches to sort of go tough on China and to stand up for the people of Hong Kong against a dominant police state trying to stop their protests. Doesn't that sound a little familiar? I mean, it was just completely gonzo from my perspective and really an outrage. And these are the types of people who either, because they actually think the conflict has begun or because being the person who kind of has that attitude of like, oh, I know we're in the big fight already.

Like, you know, don't be naive. That's a fashionable attitude. And not just for kind of Trump supporting pro authoritarian senators. That's a whole culture in think tank DC. And it's not super partisan. There's a lot of people who've kind of taken that turn. And, you know, if that mindset isn't able to change, then I do think that we're in for some pretty big trouble. All this is to say, though, like, the election really matters in this country.

I think the room for the most conflictual kind of, damn the torpedoes, let's have a Cold War until the climate collapses type of attitude. that has become, there's a lot of oxygen there in Washington during the Trump period. It's already kind of compatible with the most hardline strategic mentalities, and it's certainly compatible with the military industrial complex, although a lot of military thinkers are not super into the idea of increasing military attention with China because they'd be there doing it. But if there's a Biden presidency, I just don't think that that type of thinking is going to have the same amount of oxygen.

It really matters. Who wins that election? It matters that the election goes off freely and fairly. And it's sort of at this point, it seems to me that if you want to save U.S.-China relations or save the climate, or even if you want to effectively fight the Chinese government on all of the things that it does, against the human dignity, it's pretty important to get rid of the Trump people and start over from a coherent strategic thinking perspective that realizes that you're going to have to deal with several things at once. And you can't just throw one policy out there that tramples on

another one and then repeat and, you know, and ramble on with your tweets. So it's a, I do have some hope about that. I don't think a Biden presidency would be perfect, but at least it would be back to the task of seriously trying to do it. And frankly, you know, I'm, anyone hearing this will get that I'm fairly toward the left. But on U.S. China, I don't even think that a kind of regular old Republican administration would have been all that bad. It wasn't a huge partisan issue other than the climate denialism. It's just the particular moment of Trump and the, and the the kind of ushering in these different types of people. And I think a reversion to more traditional American leadership would be a step.

And then they're going to need to be met with significant incoming from people demanding attention to things like climate and human rights and economic justice and all that. The thing I think, and this is a good note to wrap on on your last point, too, is that it's so frustrating. So Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory. They wrote a piece on Tiananmen Square. And their argument, they also have written a piece just before it on George Floyd. And so Epsilon Theory, what they do is they use sentiment analysis to see how narratives are shifting around popular issues. And they come from a narrative kind of orientation, right?

How power is transmitted through story and through getting people to think. And what they are arguing with George Floyd is that basically the narrative is trying to drive people into the same sort of divisions that have been kind of promulgated over the last four years and kind of lock people into that, right? The law and order on one side, the, you know, liberal protesters on the other. when this was a massively sort of nonpartisan issue. Everyone saw that video. And in fact, in the first days of the first protests, you saw the armed rednecks with guns who were showing up where they're talking about protecting protesters,

you know, but avoiding, like, it's just so much more complex than the narrative of left is protesting, right, is saying, why are you breaking things, right? But that's what the narrative machine tries to force us into. And I think that on something like China, you could see a similar place. Like everything that we are, when it comes to the complexity of issues, there is nothing inherently right or left about some of them, right? There are, you know, human rights is something that can be acknowledged on both sides.

Real questions of technology and surveillance and power. Those are issues for both the left and the right. Questions of how to organize wealth distribution. Again, there's a reason that there's populist movements on the right and the left. these things aren't inherently kind of lockstep into political parties. And in fact, I think one of the most problematic times often come in America when foreign policy becomes the provenance of kind of high, you know, high and clear party lines. So I hope there's room for broader conversation as well, although I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm hopeful for that right now. But that's why we podcast,

because, I don't know, the 12 people who listen to this, just kidding, it's way more of you guys, and I love you. But, you know, I think the goal for me is just to give people a chance to hear a lot of perspectives and be advocates for whatever type of change makes sense to them. So, Graham, really great to have you here. I'm definitely going to have you back at some point when we have to talk more about something, either good, good, bad or ugly with this relationship. All right. Well, thanks so much for having me.

It's been a lot of fun. And all you folks out there, you can get me on Twitter and say hello if I've said anything that's, you know, good or bad. I don't mind hearing about it. So I look forward to keeping the conversation going. I'm recording this wrap up a day after this conversation. And the piece that I keep coming back to is this desire for people to try to push the narrative that serves their interest best onto this issue. the idea that this is becoming yet another partisan political football to be easily lumped in with any other thing that is a part of the identity of being on the left or being on the right.

I get worried, extremely worried, when foreign policy becomes part of that easy political dialogue because it is almost always so much more complex than fitting into a clear party line. How do you resolve markets and human rights? those are really important and difficult questions that are not either-ors or they can't be either-ors. How do you deal with an incredibly important economic force in the world that is a part of a relatively illiberal political regime? These are questions that really need a smart dialogue that is not predicated on fitting into other existing conventional wisdoms and narratives. And with the stakes so high, which I hope if Graham has convinced you of anything, it's how high those stakes are.

It just, we can't let it become an easy political dialogue. This is not an issue that's going to go away. In fact, the focus on China and the changing relationship with China is certainly something that I will cover more. I will bring more experts on. I'll bring people who completely disagree with Graham probably at some point and who have that perspective of being really convinced that China is a threat to us and to the world, because I think we have to have the real full conversations. But for now, I hope that this was

helpful as a primer, as that 101 level course. I hope you feel like you understand better how we got to the place that we are, even if you maybe have a different assessment about where we go next. Anyways, guys, I hope you've had a great week and hope you're looking forward to a great weekend. Until next time, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.