The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Finally, Some Clarity on US-China Relations || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...some long-awaited clarity on US-China relations. Here are the two major developments that we're tracking and what they mean moving forward.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/finally-some-clarity-on-us-china-relations

Hey everybody, foggy morning here in Colorado. Peter Zine here. Today, we are going to talk about American-Chinese relations because we're finally about to get hopefully, hopefully, maybe a little bit of clarity. Two big things are going on this week. Number one, defense secretary Pete Hegeseth has said that China is the threat. If Taiwan is invaded, of course the United States will respond in kind. Military options are not just on the table. They would be our go-to. It is the clearest repudiation of this concept of strategic.

ambiguity that we have been existing in East Asia for decades. That is the idea that Taiwan is not technically recognized, so the United States will not say one way or another whether or not we're going to defend them. The Biden administration, let me rephrase that, Joe Biden personally repeatedly repudiated that, but this is the clearest, most detailed repudiation we've ever had from any American authority ever. The question, of course, is whether or not that this is what the Defense Department is ready for. Hegset apparently did not even discuss this. issue with his own office, much less with the joint chiefs or the military chain of command at all. So I will never tell you that the military is not preparing for every eventuality.

That's why it exists. But it seems to be a disconnect between the political message that Heyseth is trying to send and what the U.S. military has actually been doing since January 20. So that's kind of piece one. Piece two. Donald Trump and Chairman Xi of China are having their first phone call this week. This is something that has been pushed off again and again and again. It's been a very weird power play carried out by four years.

year olds. Xi wanted Trump to make the call, Trump wanted G to make the call thinking that whoever came to the mountain would be the weaker party. You know, if it makes sense to them, it makes sense to me, whatever. This will be the first time that the two leaders have really had a conversation since the last time was Trump president. And there are, of course, a number of big issues on the table. The most important one is the trade war. Trump put tariffs on China, which were 145%, 185%, 510%. It's hard to keep track. And then after a few weeks, I've basically seen trade between the two countries go to zero. Something that we're going to start feeling soon because there are some holes in the inventory now that are

starting to leak out. Trump abrogated his own tariff level, dropped it back down to low levels, and said, you know, we have a deal, and all the deal was that they agreed to talk. Well, now we're talking. The problem we have on both sides of the Pacific is to be perfectly blunt, the leadership. Chairman Xi spent the last 13 years purging the Chinese government of anyone who will tell him anything, not just bad news, just anything. And that is in turn gutted the bureaucracy of the Chinese system so that Xi is now the world's least informed leader of the world in general, of his own country. He has no idea what's going on aside from the ideology. Trump is trying to catch up to him. Trump has executed his own purge of the government, is having his cabinet

Secretaries destroy the capacity of the United States to collect data long term. He's sending back intelligence reports that don't support his ideological views, no matter how far from reality they might be. And of the top 1,600 positions in the U.S. federal bureaucracy, a lot of them are still unfilled. When Trump came in, he didn't just clear out the people at the top. He went as far down as he legally could go and then even a little bit further. But those positions have not been filled.

And even when he has nominated people and sent them to the... the U.S. Senate for confirmation, a lot of those haven't happened because he's tried to achieve basically 17 bills worth of stuff in one with this giant super mega happy bill. And, you know, it's taking every little piece of attention that Congress has. And so the Senate hasn't been able to pick up the confirmation roster. So he is arguably today the second least informed world leader. The two of them manage what used to be the world's largest economic trade relationship. Now it's the third largest. We, Mexico and Canada are now more important to us than China, but it's obviously a massive strategic relationship that has to be handled carefully.

So we've got two old guys, driven by ideology, who don't think the rules apply to them, who have blinded themselves to information, and now they're going to have a talk about what's going to happen for the rest of us. It's going to be consequential one way or another.