The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Biden and Xi's Private Meeting at the APEC Summit || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

President Biden and Chairman Xi Jinping will have a private meeting at the APEC Summit in San Francisco. I'm not overly optimistic about getting any meaningful information out of this hospice meetup, but it's better than nothing.Donate to MedShare HERE: https://www.medshare.org/zukraine/Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/biden-and-xi-meet-at-the-apec-summit

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Chicago. I'm recording this on the 14th November. You'll see it tomorrow on the 15th. The news today is that the APEC Forum, that's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. It's a forum that was set up decades ago to help with economic integration among the Asia Pacific region is having their annual Heads of State Summit in San Francisco and everyone who's everyone will be there. But as important that is, and you know, whatever, the real issue is that there's going to be a bilateral a standalone meeting between China's chairman, Xi Jinping, and America's president, Joe Biden. Now, there are any number of reasons why it would be a good idea to have a summit right now. There's big issues going on in trade and security. There's the Ukraine war. There's Gaza.

There's energy. This green transition. It goes on and on and on and on and on. I'd be very surprised if they actually meaningfully discuss any of those issues because there's a much more base problem, and that is China. China's cult of personality. that has gathered around Xi Jinping has now become so strict that information is not being exchanged in the country. And Xi has basically shot the messenger so many times that he has very little idea of what's going on in his own country or the wider world.

Whether that's power outages or remember that spy balloon, we now know that Xi wasn't even aware of it until after the entire issue was over. So we have, the United States, has tried on multiple occasions to meet with some of the uppity ups high up within the Chinese bureaucracy and state. authority systems and have discovered that really no one has reliable access to the chairman at all. So, for example, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense, Austin, have both been to China to speak with their counterparts only to discover that their foreign minister and their defense minister don't actually have access to the chairman. It hadn't for some time. And by the way, they both got fired shortly thereafter. So we're sending in the only gun that's bigger than sec-death and sex state, and that is the president himself.

So, Xi and Biden will be meeting the day you see this, the 15th, and I'm not expecting meaningful policy addressings. We're just trying to find out if the guy has lost his mind at this point. Once you turn 60, you know, things start to go a little sideways, and Xi is now 70. And since no one, except for say Vladimir Putin, has had meaningful access to Xi in years, this will be the first chance for the United States to judge whether the guy on the other side of the table still has his faculties about him.

And luckily, the person who's going to be judging whether or not the Chinese leader has failed because of age is Joe Biden, so, you know, he knows what to look for.