The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - China Cancels Summit with EU's Foreign Affairs Minister Borrell || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

The news of the day is that the Chinese have canceled their upcoming summit with EU foreign minister Borrell. You all know I'm less than pessimistic about China's leadership as of late, and this is just icing on the cake...we'll talk about the cherry on top tomorrow. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/china-cancels-summit-with-eus-foreign-affairs-minister-borrell

Hey, everybody, Peter Stein here coming to you from a place in Colorado that it doesn't really matter where I am because you can't see a damn thing. Anyway, today is the 5th of July and within the last few hours. The Chinese have flat out canceled the upcoming summit with the EU foreign minister Borrell. For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know that I'm not very impressed by the quality of China's leadership of late. Chairman Xi Jinping has established such a cult of personality that no one has been. will bring him any information. He's shot the messenger so many time and purged the system so thoroughly that anyone across the entire country who is capable of independent thought and is willing to share independent thoughts

is dead, imprisoned, exiled, or worse. And as a result, the government has become a one-man show. If Xi doesn't say that it's going to happen, it doesn't happen. And that means whenever there's any sort of adjustment that is necessary for the ship of state at any level, everything gets frozen, either. in a cult of personality where it just becomes this allergetic scream of blind, idiotic Chinese nationalism, or things just don't happen at all. And that's exactly what's happening with the EU summit. And I think the best way to compare this is to what happened to the Blinken Summit.

Now, Tony Blinken is the American Secretary of State. And a couple weeks back, he went to China. And it was the first meeting of anyone of substance in the United States with anyone of substance in the Chinese system since before COVID. The Chinese have been in lockdown for most of that time, and during that time, Xi completed his cult of personality and his purges and removed everyone who's capable within the entire system. So it was really hard for the United States to get any sort of read on what was actually going on in the country because no one in China would say anything because no one in China knew anything or had any instructions. So it was worth blinking going to China just to kind of take the temperature of the regime. and reading the tea leaves and from what I've heard from folks in Washington,

what happened was just there's a complete stall in government policymaking right up to and including the foreign minister. And knowing that is really useful for the United States. If China is completely incapable of governance, then you should expect to see a mounting series of ever more serious foreign policy and internal policy disruptions, mistakes, and collapses. We're seeing some of that. We'll talk about another one of those with the next video as regards to economic issues. But back to the Europeans. The Europeans are in the process of trying to rejigger the relationship with China. And they're trying to find a third way. The first way is what they've been doing so far, where they just kind of roll over and let the Chinese do whatever they want. The second one is the more American style, which is a little bit more in your face and more direct and confrontational. They're trying to find something in the middle. And it's not clear that there is a path there. but, you know, the European thing is to try for a third way on everything anyway.

Now, Boral, the European foreign minister doesn't go anywhere alone. There's a number of representatives of the commission, there's representatives of the national government, there's a small fleet of bureaucrats. One of the things that most foreign powers find really problematic and frustrated about the Europeans is everything is about the EU bureaucracy and going through layers of approval that involves the French and the Germans and everybody else. And that's before independent countries put intelligence agents

as part of the delegation, especially in the case of Germany and France and Sweden and the Netherlands and Denmark and Romania and Belgium. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few of the high up one cent. Europeans are pretty good at this. But mostly you're talking about a small army of bureaucrats there to renegotiate every possible bit of minutia

that makes up the relationship. This is what makes Europe go, the bureaucratic minutia that allows them to kind of act as a sovereign country, like a single country, but mostly is about creating a webwork of relationships and interlinking bureaucratic regulations in order to stabilize the relationship. If you're not European, this is frustrating as hell. If you are European, this is how we make the system work. And there is nothing about that system that works with a cult of personality where only one. person can make the decisions. So regardless of what the goal of the Europeans were here, there was no way that the Chinese system was capable of engaging with Europe competently because there's no way that one person could manage this sort of interaction. And in the case

of the Europeans, they were going to bring everything. And in the case of the Chinese, they could negotiate nothing. So the Chinese were left with a very simple choice. Face the Europeans, with an American-style wall of just hostility, or canceled the meeting. And so they canceled the meeting. And it's probably never going to have another one again, because for the Europeans, this is how they normally operate. And for the Chinese, they are now completely capable of carrying out complex negotiations of any sort.

And as long as that is the case, there's no point in meeting in the first place. So we'll be up to the Europeans, either talking with the Americans or other foreign powers or among themselves, to figure out what happens to the bilateral relationship with the Chinese when the Chinese are not capable of engaging at all. That's going to be a topic for another day. But anyway, next topic, we'll talk about some of the economic things that the Chinese are doing in this mood of a cult of personality.

All right, bye.