The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Mr. Blinken goes to Beijing || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading to China to attempt to reset relations. He's getting flack from both sides, and I won't talk about that, but I do want to bring up three things... Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/mr-blinken-goes-to-beijing

Hey, everyone, Peter Zion here, coming to you from Golden Horn just above Littleton, Colorado. The news over the weekend is that Tony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, is going to China to see if he can try to reset relations. He's getting a lot of criticism from all sides. Folks on the left are saying that, you know, this is a country that is a trade foe, so maybe we should be using this as an opportunity to tighten the screws on the right. They're like, why should it be Blinken that is going to Beijing when it's things that have happened in Beijing, that have wrecked the relationship. I'm not going to comment too much on that one way or the other,

but there are three things I do want to bring up. First of all, China under Chairman Xi Jinping has descended into a full cult of personality, and that is very much in play here. Let me put in a context that more Americans would identify with. The last, well, a pseudo-cult of personality he had was under Barack Obama. And according to the story I've been given from folks in Washington, in his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs, you know, military,

he walked into the room, said, I'm smarter than all of you, I could do your jobs better than you. Now, let's assume for the moment that that is true. The President of the United States could not actually do the job of the President and the job of all the Chiefs at the same time. And Chairman G. has now prosecuted or purged everyone within the People's Republic who is capable of conscious thought, including in his inner circle. He has no confidence, he has no advisors that matter.

it's just him. And in that sort of circumstance, we are seeing catastrophic decision-making across the length and the breadth of the Chinese system because nobody in the bureaucracy wants to act unless they're given direct orders that are very clearly from Xi personally, or you get zealots who think they're interpreting

the propaganda on his behalf and doing really crazy shit. In this sort of environment, having normal diplomatic relations is impossible because there's no cadre of people to take the broad-stroke guidance that the Premier in this case provides and translating that into day-to-day actions. So a great example is the Chinese had an opportunity a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago,

one week ago, recently, to meet with the U.S. Secretary of Defense and work out some confidence-building measures to avoid catastrophic confrontations and mistakes. But orders couldn't come down from Xi on that topic because he was busy dealing with everything else. And so Blinken is likely to experience the same thing, that there is no diplomatic position in the People's Republic of China right now, and he's going to be talking with people who don't have anything to say. It's going to feel like a stonewall, but that's not what it is. It's a lack of direction.

And when countries hit places like this, it's just a question of what gets dropped. So we know because of China's mismanagement, again, because of lack of direction of things like African swine fever, they're facing a pork crisis. We know because of their siding with Russia. They're more exposed in terms of energy trade than they've ever been before. and they're seeing the Europeans and the Americans start to melon scoop out choice chunks of the economy and there's nothing they can do about it

because there is no direction from the top. And even if Xi thinks of himself like Obama, the smartest person in every room, doesn't matter, can't do it all himself. Okay, that's number one. Number two, managing decline. One of the biggest criticisms that I think is accurate of Bill Clinton's reign as president is that he kind of ignored Russia

after the Soviet Union fell. I mean, here we have one of the second, probably the second greatest military power in human history, which at the time had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, and for the first three years of his administration, it just didn't even register on the radar, and I would say in the second term, nothing registered on his radar.

We were lucky with the former Soviet world. We were lucky with the low amount of imperial debris, whether it was the Chechen War or the Yugoslav wars, or things in the Balkans with the Serbs or Afghanistan, we were lucky that none of this spun out of control. We were lucky there were no loose nukes. Hopefully we don't count on luck to manage the Chinese decline. We have a much larger country in terms of population and economics.

Maybe the reach isn't as big, but we should probably be burning a little bit of oil on thinking about what a post-China-China looks like and preparing for that world. And in that context, I think Blinken is doing the right thing going. Not that I think anything is going to come of this. It is it, of course not. But a dying superpower that you ignore is one that you have no options for managing.

And the first step of having those options is to engage. And so even if it's nothing more than finding out that the Chinese can't function, this trip is worth that trip. Which brings us to the third thing, intelligence gathering. Chairman G is not like Trump or Putin. So Trump and Putin both had a tight circle of people around them and a handful of trusted confidants. Now, the Russians were able to take advantage of this for Donald Trump

because Donald Trump kept using his presidential phone to call these friends on their civilian lines. And so the Russians were able to hack and tap into Trump's circle of friends because they couldn't tap the White House themselves. It gave them a pretty good look into all things White House for four years. And in the case of Putin, he's got a half a dozen. people in his inner circle and the United States has thoroughly penetrated their email, their faxes, their meetings, their calls, everything.

Xi doesn't have that vulnerability. Xi is a one-man show now. There is no one who's in his inner circle. There's no one whose phone you can tap. It doesn't have conversations with anyone. You can't even tap his phone. And that means our only decent window into what's going on in China at the top is to engage directly as high up the pyramid as you possibly can, which means we shouldn't think of Lincoln's

trip primarily as a diplomatic visit. We should think of it as intelligence gathering in one of the very few ways that it even matters in China anymore. Okay, that's it for me. You guys take care.