The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Rising Sun

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard start the program with a discussion of Japan’s recent lobbying of the G8 for deeper trade, military and technology cooperation. What is Japan up to? Why is China being seen as a regional threat by Asian powers like Japan? The second half of the program for Munk donors explores Brazil’s copycat riots of the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. and whether Canadian real estate is headed for a hard landing thanks to new lending regulations. To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.comBecome 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.

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Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. You are tuning in to the regular Friday Focus podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas, moving the news, shaping the public conversation. I'm joined each and every week with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School

of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you this the 13th, unlucky, Friday the 13th of January. How seriously do we take this Friday the 13th, Richard? I have no idea. Some listener, please, send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Where did this come from? Is it something as prosaic and stupid as a horror movie? No.

Okay. Anyway, someone will email us to explain why Friday the 13th is supposed to be unlucky. I'd be fascinated to know. Well, Janice, three topics I want to move through on the show with you this week. I want to start with the visit to Canada this week, but also, you know, a big kind of circuit of the G8. countries that the Prime Minister of Japan is doing to try to drum up support for a sense of urgency about the security situation in Asia. What's going on here? And how seriously should we take this? This is a Japan moment, Richard. Japan is back. It's gone AWOL really since the 80s. It is back in a big way now.

Japan has signaled a willingness to increase defense spending, $400 billion over a period of years, not small change, as we would say. It coined, it led the development of a free and open Indo-Pacific. It is restructuring its supply chains. That's a big part of the visit to Ottawa. Can you please expand that terminal? We will provide investment funds, please.

so that Canada can export more LNG. Japan is emerging Rudyard really as the counterweight in a very rocky Indo-Pacific. Let me just add one more quickie. The president of South Korea came out yesterday and said, gee, we might think about getting nuclear weapons as the North continues to expand and test missiles. Japan is the key player in the region. And is this all about, in instance, China, a perceived threat from China to continue to assert its regional hegemony over the South China Sea, over the disputed atolls and islands with

Japan? I mean, to what extent is this the Japanese kind of following the Americans in this kind of China containment strategy or Japan genuinely on its own trying to shore up kind of lines of defense, alliances, energy, you know, military security, et cetera, to anticipate a more bellicose and aggressive China. It's really interesting about Japan is actually leading. It started to worry actively about China before the Trump administration. You know, the comprehensive trade partnership that Japan really led, it started it,

frustrated as anything when Trump walked away, but kept at it, which is really interesting because it sees a fundamental restructuring going on in the world. This is a great example, Richard, of what I call the new geopolitics of economics. These two are fused now. You can't separate them anymore. A very large delegation of Japanese business people will be in Canada in the next couple of months to try to see what kinds of partnerships can be done on critical minerals. That's a supply chain issue. On LNG, that's a critical issue for an energy hungry country and on AI.

which is in some sense probably the most fundamental issue of all because everything will require AI. And as we move into this aggressive technological competition with China, those are all critical building blocks. Final question. How do the Chinese react to this? I guess you always worry about a dynamic where you have a high level of mistrust and suspicion about people's, you know, relative interests and objectives vis-a-vis one another. Does this, in a sense, play into the hardliners narrative in China that, yes, we're under threat here.

You're, you know, they're trying to put this necklace of effectively island states, Taiwan, Hong, Philippines, the Philippines, you go on and on. they're trying to create this alliance encircling our geography and especially our maritime geography, that being China's. And this is all in a sense what Chinese have said they will not accept, which is containment. They see the rise of China, the return of China after 150 to 200 year absence from its 2,000 year history of relative global dominance as a civilization, as an abnormality. that is and will come to the end under the stewardship of Chairman G.

No question. This is this. This will, you know, affirm China's fear. So you're absolutely right. The tragic thing is this started a decade ago, if not earlier, when China began to militarize its demands on the South China Sea. And not for the first time in history, not for the last. is a classic spiral of escalation, where what each country does feeds into the worst fears of the other, they then respond, you go up the ladder. We are, I'm sad to say, I think that train has left

the station now. We're in it, and you just hope we can put enough fire breaks in it as we move along. You know, just one of the comment for our Canadian listeners, this is a real moment, again, where Canada has resources, both

material resources and technological resources, especially what we are doing in AI, that the world wants. South Korea's been here. Japan is here. Both are coming back. You have to hope, Richard,

that we rise to the challenge. because the world is getting tougher, not easier for us. Certainly not building any pipelines soon to move that, those much needed hydrocarbons to our allies vis-a-vis, you know, seawater at either coast. But we'll leave that discussion for another day. We're going to say goodbye here to our complimentary free monk members and just a friendly reminder that if you do want to catch the entire version of each

and every Friday focus podcast. Please consider becoming a donor to the monk debates for as little as $25.50 an episode. What a deal you can get each and every Friday focus episode for the entire year and support more civic and substantive debate and discussion on the big issues of our time. So back after the short break with our mug donors. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this. program, simply go to our website,

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