The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: China Poses an Existential Threat to the United States and the Idea of Freedom

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Is China the greatest threat to liberal international order today? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, debates Ian Bremmer, President and Founder of the political risk research firm Eurasia, on the motion Be it resolved, China poses an existential threat to the United States and the idea of freedom. SOURCES: AP, AFP, Reuters, CNN, CBC, CNBC  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debate podcast. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Our mission every episode is to provide you with civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day.

Free of spin, focused on facts, and animated by smart conversation. By the end of each debate, our hope is that you'll be armed with enough information to make up your own mind about any given issue. On this episode, we debate the motion, be it resolved. China poses an existential threat to the United States, and the idea of freedom. The Chinese Communist Party is not just radical, they're dangerous. This is a mortal threat to the West. These two systems are not compatible.

I've seen the enemy, and he is us. But I think the biggest, the most existential threat to being able to do that comes from America's ability to lead by example, not from the Chinese to beat the Americans. It's been 30 years since the Berlin Wall came down, a global turning point that signaled the end of the course, Cold War and ushered in an era where America bestrode the world as a hyperpower, promoting its values and interests internationally.

Flash forward to 2019 and the world looks like a very different place. The rapid rise of China, economically and militarily, is threatening America's hegemonic status, and with it, the U.S.-led liberal international order. Beijing is using its growing economic might to bring developing nations from the Americas, Africa, and Asia firmly into its orbit. Some believe that China's actions are precipitating a new Cold War, with Beijing taking the place of Moscow as the existential threat to the current U.S. world order. For others, this is at best an exaggeration, at worst, fear-mongering.

China is indeed a rising power, and the future of global peace and stability requires cooperation and power-sharing between Washington and Beijing. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the resolution, be it resolved, China poses an existential threat to the United States and the idea of freedom. Arguing for the motion is Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to U.S. President Donald Trump. Arguing against the motion is Ian Bremmer. He's the founder and president of the Eurasia Group and GZero Media. Steve, let's put three minutes on the clock for you, and let's have your opening remarks. Look, I'm very honored to be invited back to the Monk debate, and particularly on such an important topic, and really honored to be debating with Ian Bremmer, who I consider probably the most thoughtful and practical of the experts in this area about China.

And, you know, Ian, I think, would agree, as all his recent comments and analysis have been, that this is, much, much deeper. The situation we find ourselves in with China and the Chinese Communist Party is much deeper than just some trade war. We are confronted in the industrial democracies and the liberal, democratic West, with really an enemy. And that is not the Chinese people. It's not really the nation of China. It's this radical cadre of the Chinese Communist Party that has a very well thought through an expansionist geopolitical strategy to become a dominant, it hegemon, not just in Asia, not just in the Eurasian landmass, but throughout the entire world. And they've had a plan for 25 or 30 years that they're executing upon.

They refer to it internally as unrestricted warfare, and that is both in information and in economics. Hopefully, never gets to be kinetic, but they're prepared to do that as they build up their military. This is a, the Chinese Communist Party is not just radical, they're dangerous. and we can see that every day, whether it's in streets of Hong Kong or what they're doing. The suppression of their people, whether the Uyghurs, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhists, the Falun Gong, the House Christians or the underground Catholic Church or just their basic citizens. This is a mortal threat to the West.

These two systems are not compatible, and we have had our elites who have essentially sold us out. That is the financial and corporatists, at least, and quite frankly, some of our intellectuals. have sold us out to the Chinese over the last 20 years and looked the other way and actually profited off this substantially as China has grown and through one belt one road made in China 2025 and the international role out of Huawei are now converging on a geopolitical strategy to first unite the Eurasian landmass and then to dominate Western Europe in the Western hemisphere. And I think the question before us today is not as an existential threat. It's obviously an existential threat, is what can we in the West do about it? How do we combat this? Is it about

engagement and accommodation, or is it about confrontation? And I have a great fondness for the Chinese people, great love for the Chinese people, but I see a gathering storm, a gathering storm that you can see every day as China rises and unites Iran, Turkey, and Russia into a into a group of totalitarian dictatorships that try to unite the Eurasian landmass and confront the liberal democracies of the West. Thank you, Steve Bannon, for those opening remarks. So, Ian Bremmer, Steve's painting a picture here of a gathering storm, an imminent threat, China as a existential threat, not only to the United States, but the idea of freedom.

That's our resolution. We're debating. Let's have your opening remarks. I truly do believe that the top foreign policy priority, and challenge for the United States really is China. And I also agree with Steve that, you know, to a great degree, the political and economic models are not really that compatible.

I mean, we're finding out, like, if you're the NBA and you want to make $5 billion in China, you're going to have to do some things and say some things that are really going to undermine you back in the United States. And the National Basketball Association, or NBA, in the U.S., it's facing a huge backlash from U.S. lawmakers for its reaction to this tweet by the Houston Rockets General Manager, a tweet backing pro-democracy demonstrations

right here in Hong Kong. It's getting harder and harder to actually walk that tightrope for a lot of major American players. Where I take issue is that I don't think the threat is existential. I mean, I think climate is potentially an existential threat.

It clearly is to a lot of species outside of humanity, already has been for many of them, and is increasingly for us on the planet. I think AI is an existential threat in the sense that it's fundamentally changing the way we think about humanity's role in work, in capitalism, with each other, with human beings and social interactions. China, I don't think, is an existential threat, in part because of their lack of military capability. And by the way, I mean, in three years of Trump, not only as the United States spend more than the next seven countries combined,

but actually the gap between the US and Chinese spending is growing. It's not reducing. They're a regional military power. There's certainly an existential military threat for Taiwan or for Hong Kong, even for the South China Sea, but they're really not for the Americans globally. Economically, the United States is the world's largest producer of oil, of gas, of food.

These are things that are not only critical, but they're becoming more critical in a climate-constraining. and the Chinese really need those things. They need those things from us. And so I think, you know, the United States is increasingly in a stronger position, bilaterally, in that regard.

But I think the real issue that we might get into a big debate on is how we should respond, because I do think that Trump's response so far, while we do need to be more assertive vis-a-vis the Chinese, we've also been much more unilateral vis-a-vis the Chinese. I'm going to understand that. I'm going to instruct the United States trade representative to bring trade cases against China, both in this country and at the WTO, World Trade Organization.

China's unfair subsidy and its behavior is prohibited by the terms of its entrance into the WTO, and I intend to enforce our rules. That's all. Very simple. And they know it's coming. And I worry that that unilateralism actually makes it much harder to eventually put the Chinese in an environment that we're going to be happy with. In other words, we need the Europeans, we need the Asian allies.

We're doing everything we can to alienate them right now. We're not building that up. Final point is the one place I think I agree most with Steve as to the existential nature of the Chinese threat is on technology. That is a very big danger. And it's really underappreciated not only by this administration, but by pretty much everybody in Washington.

You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. China poses an existential threat to the United States and the idea of freedom. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Steve, your chance for a rebuttal here. Ian's made some pretty compelling arguments. Let's hear your reply. So let's go to the ones that Ian thinks are the existential threat, which is climate change and AI.

Even if I was to agree to that, and I definitely agree on AI, maybe less so in climate change. but both of those are inextricably linked. In fact, his last comment about technology are inextricably linked by this radical cadre at the Chinese Communist Party in the rise of China. It is China that is the driver, I think, of most of the problems. If you believe in, you know, man-made caused climate change,

it is China that is driving this huge problem because, quite frankly, they really don't care about the environment, and people in China verify that every day. In AI, we have no earthy idea, how advanced they are in AI, particularly the weaponization of artificial intelligence. And it's a massive problem, the technology. But Huawei and what they're doing, artificial intelligence, is Inexture can be linked to the danger that they pose now to not just the Chinese people, but to all peoples of the world.

The Chinese Communist Party is not a friend. It's not a strategic, you know, strategic economic dialogue partner of the West. And this is just not the United States. I think what Trump is doing, and remember, he won. because of this issue. It was about the jobs leaving the Upper Midwest. Up in the upper Midwest, the factory workers understand the jobs and the factories left. We have a $500 billion deficit. And the opioids came in to fill that kind of angst, that, that betrayal, that emptiness of people have when they don't have jobs. We're like the

piggy bank that's being robbed. We can't continue to allow China to rape our country. But the key point was that they would support somebody that return America to a greatness, and particularly to stand up to China. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world. What we've had is elites who really have bought into the fact of this concept of Thucydides' trap, that the West, and is not just America, but the entire West was in decline, and that China was the rising power, and somehow we had to accommodate that. Thucydides' trap. And Thucydides' trap is a big idea. What's this trap? What is Thucydides' The big idea is that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, stuff happens, bad stuff. Basically, alarm bells should sound extreme danger ahead.

Ian said about the great changes happened the last couple of years, that is because of Trump, and it's because of Trump's leadership to say, hey, and I realize sometimes that he gets narrow cast into the trade part of it, but is essentially that we are the stronger economic power, we are the stronger military power, with stronger cultural power, right? But we have to assert that. We have to assert that, and particularly the values of the Western democracies

that we've taken from Athens and Jerusalem and Rome over many millennia to make us the liberal democracies that we are today. And that is the key. And that's why this confrontation, it is a confrontation,

it cannot be an accommodation. And as serious as climate change and as serious as artificial intelligence and all these issues that are driving us to the singularity, the one that faces us today and that the elites of the West in Canada, the United States, Western Europe, South America, that we have to confront. We have to confront that we have a totalitarian mercantilist dictatorship

that has enslaved the Chinese people and now in cahoots with Iran and Turkey are trying to, and Russia are trying to unite the Eurasian landmass, control the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea, drive the West off of the Eurasian landmass and suppress people throughout the world. Okay, let's have Ian come back on that. Ian, do you see some grandmaster plan that the Chinese have for world hegemony, for world domination? There's an awful lot in what Steve just said to unpack. Some places I agree, some places I disagree. One that I disagree is this idea that China's building some kind of grand cabal alliance with the Russians, the Iranians.

You look at what they're doing in the Middle East. The Chinese have a pretty good economic transactional relation with Iran. They have a pretty good economic transactional relations with Saudi Arabia. They don't have a military footprint in any of these places. What they want to do is ensure that they actually have access to the commodities that they need with all of these countries. They're not really building a Beijing consensus in that regard, especially because increasingly most of the oil isn't coming from the Middle East. It's coming from the U.S. So, you know, I think, I would say I've seen the enemy, and he is us.

I agree with Steve that there are real threats to the ability of the Americans to continue to promote the kind of liberal democratic values that we believe in. But I think the biggest, the most existential threat to being able to do that comes from America's ability to lead by example, not from the Chinese to beat the Americans. And I do believe that the United States, for a lot of. long time now, and Trump's not helping it, he's making it worse, but it didn't start with Trump. He's a symptom of this. He's not the cause. Has been eating itself over whether or not we actually do stand for a lot of these values, whether you have civic harmony in the United

States, whether there are things that we collectively stand for. I don't think that people voted for Trump because of a concern about China. They did see that jobs were going away, but most jobs that have gone away in the last 10 years come from displacement from technology and automation, not from trade taking jobs outside the U.S., all the economists have shown the numbers around that. And while we do see insourcing to the U.S. right now, it's largely jobless. I absolutely believe that China's going to be in trouble in the next five, ten years because so much their job costs, their labor costs have gone up dramatically.

And the environment for U.S. corporations has gotten more challenging because they're still state capitalists. So you see a lot of American companies with the next downturn CEOs that are planning on reducing their Chinese footprint. That's more of a threat to China. It's an advantage to the U.S. But where I really disagree with Steve, I just think the Americans are a lot stronger geopolitically around the world than I guess Steve does. He thinks that the Chinese are set to take over. We have to this threat is coming after us now and we have to combat them. I think we're much stronger with our allies. We're much stronger together as a country.

And I don't think that there's an existential threat from China right now. I think that in many ways the world is heading more towards the United States. It's not heading towards many of our allies. Steve, come on to that point. But I want you to address two things that Ian's brought up. One, this fact that, you know, America still has a lot of moral leadership on the world stage. I mean, millions of people are trying to immigrate to America. No one last time I looked is trying to become a Chinese citizen, not,

necessarily that they let them. But doesn't that speak something, you know, to the soft power, the, these intangibles that America has that continues to allow it to really shape the world in its image. If you don't back up soft power with something, look in the streets of Hong Kong, where you have millennials and everybody's written off the millennial generation, where you have these amazing kids under the age of 30 that are standing up to a totalitarian dictatorship, supporting the rule of law, supporting a free market capitalism. Well, now a familiar scene unfolding in Hong Kong, but with a new level of tension, police drawing their guns on protesters. At one point, demonstrators attacked them with sticks and canes.

And yet they've got almost zero support from not just the United States, but also from the West. I want to go to Ian's point about unilateralism. Steve's right about that. Here's the point. Post-war international rules-based order is essentially a set of capital markets, commercial relationships, trade deals, an American security guarantee, from Western Europe and NATO to the Persian Gulf, to the South China Sea, to the Northwest Pacific near Korea and Japan. What we've devolved to the United States is to have an imperial outlook.

We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. The key is for us to strengthen those and make these areas of the world not protect rates, to actually make them allies, to get NATO back up on its feet, and to really have these countries spending and to look at a unified vision of the world, to not have them as protectors, that have them actually stand up, not just put skin in the game, but also troops in a point of view in the littoral nations of the South China Sea and the Northwest Pacific. That alliance from Japan to the South China Sea to India to the Gulf up to Western Europe,

including Brazil, is what will be the unified front that will stop this geopolitical advance of China. And the storm clouds on the horizon. This is like 1935 or 36. It is China, Persia, and Turkey with Russia. They're working every day in unison to try to ultimately provide a united front against the liberal democracies of the West. And that is the challenge for this generation. This generation that has frittered away so much. This generation has one great call, and that call is to unite the liberal democracies

to help the Chinese people free themselves to confront this radical, cadre of totalitarian dictatorship in Beijing. So, I mean, look, Steve, I think that the real question here is whether or not we believe that the United States is doing more right now to align the democracies or less. And I'm concerned that we're doing less. I think we're given away the game. When we moved, walked away from Trans-Pacific Partnership, but the fact was this was something that was a multilateral response with all of our allies, both in A, and

as well as the entirety of the Western Hemisphere to build a more advanced set of not only trade rules, but also rules with new type of economy, data and strategy and the rest, that would show the Chinese that if they don't start integrating more to our rules, they're going to be left behind. And we gave it up. And in a bilateral transactional, no-values-based world,

which is one that frankly reflects more of Trump's America-First style of governance, the Chinese actually are advantaged. So I suspect we agree, that's where we actually disagree more on whether or not Trump is doing things that are constructive or destructive. I believe that since Trump has become president, there's been more of a vacuum that China can actually move into precisely because our allies feel that they can no longer count on us

or trust us the way they have historically. I think one of the biggest things that we've done is the Europeans thinking they don't need to lash up with the Americans on Texas. technology or 5G. Even Boris Johnson, you look at what he says about Huawei, you know, this is a guy that sounds like a transactional, who cares if the Americans are friends, I can get a better, cheaper deal with the Chinese. That's not where these guys should be heading. And I think that our allies and Trump are all inadvertently giving the Chinese a leg up, which

ultimately is really going to hurt us in the area where I think they could become an existential threat. They aren't today, but they could become one, which is a little. an artificial intelligence where the Chinese are actually a superpower today. Steve, I wanted to come back on Ian's point in this idea that, you know, it's an own goal that the United States is undermining its own credibility, undermining these multilateral institutions, which could have hedged in China. Here's the point. The point was they were not. These multilateral institutions were either accommodating China or looking the other way from the

IMF to the World Bank, even across the board. What Trump is said is that this international rules-based order that all rest essentially on the shoulders of the deplorables. And what that means is the trillion dollars we spend in defense because our budget's really a trillion. We're running trillion dollar deficits. That is not a sustainable model. What we need is partners. We need allies, not protectors. And that's why what Trump's policy was was to converge economic security and military security and recut deals with Korea,

recut the deal with Japan, get into a dialogue with India, you know, get NATO to start paying more, get the Saudis, get to UAE, Israel, get our, and make them really stand up as allies. Because the system as it was, as personified by TPP, Ian, which was not great in concept. But when you went through the deal and seen the practicality, it would just been another one of these multilateral deals that the burdened rest of the United States, nobody had accountability and responsibility. And that's why Trump's was, hey, let's do this bilaterally. Well, I think the trans-Pacific partnership was not a good deal for us. I like to be able to negotiate with one country.

And if it doesn't work out, you terminate. And during the termination notice, right after you get sent, they call you and they say, please, let's make a deal and you fix the deal. And that's why we had this set of ambassadors we put into, you know, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines. This was going to be a forward-leaning, you know, actual. not confrontation, but direct engagement with China to confront its geopolitical expansion

and to do that bilaterally first and then ultimately united unilateral. I would just say that, Steve, if you're right about that, Steve, all I can say is that our allies aren't feeling it. When I go to South Korea, Japan, talk to their leaders, they've been saying consistently in the last couple of years that they feel like they cannot count as much on the United States for our leadership that we can't go,

We can't be trusted that we say one thing, we do another. The Europeans the same way, and my God, the decision that the U.S., the Trump made to pull these troops out of back from the border in Syria, you know, the impact that's, and that Europeans can take care of ISIS, not our problem. I mean, the impact that has on the perceptions of these European leaders can the Americans be counted on. It's obviously having a major hit on them. It's not true with everyone.

The Saudis, it's a great relationship, the UAE, Israel, but those are not the allies that you're going to use to fight against the Chinese long term. You need the Asian allies. They're critical. You need the European allies. And frankly, I just don't see that alignment happening. I don't think it's only because we're pushing them to spend more on NATO, which I agree with you completely, Steve.

They are not close to where they need to be. Yeah, but the French, I think, poet and philosopher, Piji, said, Ian, it's not as important the report what we see. The most important thing is to see what you see. And I want to break down both the Asian part and the European part. we have had more engagement in the Western Pacific and in Asia under Trump's administration than all the other administrations combined, not just in North Korea, but in trying to reinforce South Korea and working with the Japanese.

We're spending more money in the Pacific Fleet. Our budget has been increased. We're now get the 7th Fleet. We're patrolling the South China Sea again. We're patrolling around Taiwan. Obama's pivot to Asia was a theoretical pivot. Trump's pivot is an actual engagement of men, resources, and, you know, Obama's pivot. diplomatic focus. In Europe, I do understand the fact that from Afghanistan to Saudi to up in Syria,

we need more NATO involvement. And this is what Trump is facing, that people in the United States are just getting tired of underwriting the security guarantee with both money and their kids. Remember, it's the deplorable kids on the 38th parallel, on the ships in the Chalcine Sea, and on patrol in the Hindu Kush, and up in Syria. And that is what we need allies, not protectors. And I don't agree with what's happened in Syria. I think the Kurds and I think what's the Syrian Christians and others need to be supported. So I'm adamantly opposed to this, but I can understand the feeling that, you know, we need NATO to step up, individual countries to pay more, and we need more engagement. We need the French. We need the British and we need

the Germans down there helping us. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. China poses an existential threat to the United States and the idea of freedom. Arguing for the motion is Stephen Bannon, former chief strategist of the U.S. President Donald Trump. Arguing against the motion is Ian Bremmer. He's the founder and president of the Eurasia Group and G-Zero Media. And I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Let's move to tech. And maybe Ian, let's start with you. I mean, the people have commented on not simply China building out its own surveillance state, but China now exporting the technology, the know-how of their surveillance states to their client states in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.

So let's focus a little bit on the second half of our resolution today, which is that China is an existential threat to the idea of freedom. And, Ian, you know, is China's tech threat just that, an existential threat to the idea of freedom, not just in China, but globally? I don't know that it's an existential threat to the idea of freedom globally, but it certainly is. is in China, and it certainly is in those countries where they're able to export their 5G, their data systems, their filters, their surveillance. And I think this is a very big challenge. Again, one that we're really not responding to well

here in the United States. It's not clear who's gonna win. I think that most in America still think, and most in the foreign policy establishment still think that China, China basically just rips off our tech and they can't innovate themselves. That was maybe true 10 years ago. It was maybe even true five years ago.

It's really not true today. Today in AI, there are two superpowers in the world. One's the U.S., one's China. And we've got better scientists, and they've got much more data. And it's not clear which one of those actually wins. I mean, there's some areas that we're certainly doing the big moonshots on things like artificial general intelligence. They're doing the incremental stuff, and they're ahead of it.

us in voice recognition, facial recognition, in smart cities, infrastructure, and in autonomous driving. And that's a big deal, right? And I think that we are increasingly in a technology cold war. Again, I don't see it as an existential threat for us, but I do think that the fact that the Chinese now have taken away as a lesson in the last year. that what they really need to do is build their own operating system to compete with the monopoly systems that Google and Apple have historically had is something we need to address, and we need to

address it with our allies that are not protectorate. Okay, Steve, why is China's tech revolution? It's increasing tech competitiveness, a global threat to the idea of freedom, not just a threat to the liberty of the Chinese people. You know, the 5G rollout, Huawei is all over the world. not just its component as handsets, but also its systems in much of Western Europe throughout Latin America and a lot of the United States. And that's why this Huawei has become, as I've said, a much bigger of the economic war we're engaged with China, the trade part, the capital markets part, the currency part, and the technology part. The technology parts by far the most serious. And that's why to me, Huawei's got to be shut down.

Huawei is the People's Liberation Army, the PLA. And it is the People's Liberation Army in an expansion. and who controls 5G is going to control all great quantum computing and all great technological advancement in the future. And so I agree with Ian. They will partner in Turkey. They're going to partner in Iran. They're going to partner in Russia. And this is part of this geopolitical, not just organization for the Eurasian landmass, but become a global hegemon.

They will lead, not with their economy, they will lead with technology. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. China poses an existential threat to the United States and the idea of freedom. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. If you're enjoying this debate, check out our website, monkdebates.com, for dozens of debates on the big issues of the day. Let's rejoin the debate in progress. What's the strategy? What's the approach for all those countries?

Canada included, how do we seek out our own interests in a very different geopolitical order? It may be the end of the liberal international order we don't know yet, but it's certainly something very different than the order that all of us have grown up in for the last 25 plus years. That's right. I mean, I do believe that the old American order as we knew it is over. I think we're in this G0 environment with a lack of global leadership. But I think it's pretty easy for Canada. It's kind of like Mexico. I mean, if the trade that you have is overwhelmingly oriented towards the U.S. and the tourism and for Mexico, the remittances, the drug trade, I mean, all of it. you can talk about wanting to do more with China having a strategy, but your strategy is the US. I mean, you know, Trudeau and Trump don't exactly like each other,

but Trudeau did everything possible to make sure that the new NAFTA got done. And when Trump hit the Mexicans hard and said, we're gonna increase tariffs if you don't close up your border, that border got closed up real fast, even though Lopez Obrador is about as far ideologically from Trump on most issues

as you can get in Mexico politics, because Mexico has no choice. So I don't think there's an interesting strategic decision to be made, for the Canadians and the Mexicans. But I think for the Europeans, it's going to be more challenging. For the Japanese, for the South Koreans,

for the Singaporeans, it's going to be more challenging as they see that the U.S. is this juggernaut with great military strength, with extraordinary natural resource wealth, geopolitically insulated from the arms races and the refugees and the terrorism and other parts of the world. Trump was right, and very much like Obama

in saying that, hey, ISIS is 7,000 miles away, why do we want to deal with it? Obama saying, hey, Syria is 7,000 miles away. Why do we want to take these refugees? The problem is that that's not true for a lot of other American allies and not just in terms of the instability in the Middle East or the predations of Russia across their borders

in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but also for China. And China's ability to increasingly dominate the economies and the technological systems in Asia, in Southeast Asia, as well as sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe, and probably in that order, right, is something that is going to be a big challenge for these countries.

But again, I would close this by saying, we've seen the enemy, and he's us. To the extent that there is an existential threat to America's power in the future, it has much more to do with our ability to lead by example and ensure their allies are with us and not open the door to the Chinese, then it does the Chinese themselves

being able to destroy our, ability to maintain our institutions and our priorities in our country and abroad. So, Steve, what's your advice to middle powers? Because, you know, it was interesting on the renegotiation of NAFTA. The Trump team put in a clause that said that not only could Canada not enter into a free trade agreement with China, we couldn't even negotiate one without the permission of the United States government. So is that the future for middle powers in the world that they're going to have to align with one of these two geopolitical titans. There is no middle ground anymore. You've got to pick a side and you've got to fight for that side.

I strongly believe that. I think that that's what America first is to basically, where it's in the vital national security interest of the United States, it'll be in the vital national security interest of our allies. Remember, new NAFTA, or USMCA, whatever they call it, was really to unite Mexico, Canada, and the United States into one geostrategic manufacturing base. that can compete with East Asia, that can compete with China. That was the entire purpose of it. The focus, I think, is you're not going to have a choice. These are two, you know, under the Thucydides Trap concept,

it was that the United States and the West were the declining power. China was the rising power and its inexorable rise. So it would avoid to a kinetic war, devastating global war, that the West would have to accommodate China's rise. We have to accommodate their totalitarian values. What Trump did in one fell swoop. And Ian says about how, you know, we have the leadership. That's not how people thought about it in 2016.

In 2016, they thought the West was in the decline. It was Trump to turn around and said, hey, we actually are stronger. We have to confront these people. So the elites in our country have looked the other way. Trump has turned that around. I don't think the middle countries are going to have a choice. You're going to be in one camp or the other. And right now in the Eurasian landmass between Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Turkey, and Russia.

Yeah, I think it's looking pretty grim. We've got to unite India. We've got to unite Japan. happy to think, Ian, that what we're proposing to people as far as American military engagement, American military spending, economic trade deals, trade deals, as Trump says, reciprocity that work for both sides, is what's going to make a more vibrant, robust response to this. And I've got to tell you, this is the next five or ten years. Not just will be the most central part of our lives, that it'll be something that people will talk about hundreds of years from now. Okay, let's move to

closing statements. Ian, your final argument for why Listeners should not agree with our motion today that be it resolved, China poses an existential threat to the United States and the idea of freedom. Well, you know, Steve's mentioned a bunch, the Thucydides trap. I think he's mentioned four and five times the idea that, you know, war frequently happens almost inevitably between a rising power, declining power. I really strongly object to the idea that the U.S. is a declining power. I think the U.S. influence globally is in decline, but the United States domestically is absolutely. Absolutely not. And I mentioned this in terms of its geopolitical resilience, its institutions, I mentioned it in terms of its oil, its gas, its food. These things are making it more important globally over the coming years, not less.

I think that it's more complicated than the idea that all countries have to choose. The fact is that the world's energy market is more globalized, not less, today than it was 10 years ago, because of the U.S. The food market, more globalized, not less. technology market, actually much more fragmented. That's a danger. So you can't say, to say that it's an existential threat implies, you know, a much more simplistic view of, I think, the kind of decisions that countries that these middle countries are going to be making, which won't be black or white. There'll be more gray. We haven't had to deal with gray in a while, not since

the collapse of the Soviet Union. We're going to have a lot more gray in this environment. Excellent summation. Steve, we're going to give you the last word. The society's trap is absolute nonsense. we're not the declining power, not just America, but the entire Judeo-Christian West. We have enormous strengths, but we need our elites to focus on the strengths. For countries of the world, just look at the NBA. If you do not Calto, if you do not take the party line to Beijing, if you do not agree 100% with their totalitarian dictatorship mentality, then you're going to be crushed.

You have to agree with their mentality. You've seen this in popular entertainment with both Southport, Park in the NBA, where they've now, you know, they're banning anybody in the NBA that says anything bad about them. They're banning South Park. They're banning people, even that like the South Park episode that poked fun at the Chinese leadership. You know, this is the, the confrontation with the totalitarian mercantiless dictatorship in Beijing is the great challenge of our time. In the first half of the 21st century, will be about the freedom of the Chinese people. Only the Chinese people can free themselves. But they're going to be.

going to need to do it in combination with the Western democracies. This is the great challenge of our time. Right now, it's an information war, and it's an economic war. If people like Ian and others have their wisdom, their practicality, their pragmatism in all the countries of the West, and we unite together as allies, not as a protectorate under some imperial American power, you know, this will be a great victory for mankind, it will be a great victory for humanity, And we will then be able to solve problems like climate change in this hurtling artificial intelligence that threatens to engulf humanity. Ian Bremmer, Steve Bannon, thank you for a stimulating, far-reaching, and informative debate. You're both a huge asset to the public conversation of ideas, and it's been an honor to host you today both on this Monk Debate podcast.

Thank you. Real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Monk Debate. debate podcast, a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, www.w.w. monk debates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate along with a full transcript. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and

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