Aaron Friedberg: On US-China Relations and the Threats We Face

[Music] hi i'm bill kristol welcome to conversations i'm very pleased to be joined again today for the third time my conversations with uh by my friend aaron friedberg a professor of politics at princeton uh foreign policy national security uh scholar and expert and in particular china expert who's written extensively on u.s foreign policy particular u.s china relationship and author of a forthcoming book getting china wrong so i want to talk to erin about that about who who got china wrong and why and how what it would mean to get it right in a minute but maybe we should begin as we're speaking here what is it september 2nd president biden announced the conclusion of the u.s military uh effort in afghanistan after 20 years earlier this week so probably we should begin by spending a few minutes on american foreign policy in general and where we stand don't you think yes well first thank you very much for having me back um pleasure so where do we stand i mean we got out of afghanistan uh eric edelman said on a previous conversation a couple of months ago before the chaos was withdrawal that he's when badminton just announced it really that this uh he thought it was the most consequential foreign policy decision of the bison button presidency so far how consequence hard to know we're speculating but in the short term how immediately consequential and what do you think more broadly about this moment and its implications there's no doubt that this is the most consequential foreign policy decision uh of this administration so far and it's only what seven seven months old and this is this is a big one uh and it's clearly not a not a good outcome uh i guess on the one hand i'd say it's it's too early to say which is always almost always true uh i guess i would say also that it strikes me that the long-term effects of this are not going to be as severe as some people have suggested uh but it's it's not it's clearly not good um so the most likely outcomes i think are somewhere in between this it's the end of the american era kind of thing and on the other hand the sense that oh it really does matter and now the administration has freed its hands to do more important things like competing with china i think it's it's more complicated than that what do you i mean just so let's go through each of those possibilities quickly i mean the end of the american era uh i'm inclined to agree that people keep proclaiming the end of it and then it turns out here we are you know and certain realities that don't go away uh whatever the particular decisions and particular conflicts or or aspects of the overall of the world situation but biden's speech which was just this past tuesday two days ago as we're speaking did say sort of the whole 20 years has been a mistake and no more use of military force for to change other nations and uh terrible that we've been you know that no american has grown up not knowing the time when we worked at war and i guess i commented that something i wrote that you know that would be true for the last century you know we've been a war within every 20 period uh uh uh span and uh you could dislike some of those interventions but it's just as a factual matter is that really such a surprise but i don't know so that would be sort of that that speech providence pushed me a little bit in the direction of well maybe this is a big moment he really intends to fundamentally change not just 20 years of american foreign policy but 30 or 50 is that is that possible or do you think unlikely i don't think that's my sense is that that's not what he intends although the language might suggest that i giving him the benefit of the doubt i guess you could say the view that he's presenting is that and that his administration generally has presented since it started is that we have bigger fish to fry we have big foreign policy challenges in particular china we've been preoccupied for the last 20 years with these arguably lesser although very costly conflicts and those have distracted us and divided us perhaps and if we really want to get serious about the big game uh we need to wind down these smaller conflicts so i think that's i think that's how my guess is that that's how he sees himself behaving now the question is whether that's actually what's going to happen uh whether in fact what has taken place over the last couple of weeks will make it more difficult for the united states to focus on the bigger competition with china i worry that that that might be the case so instead of clearing the the decks and preparing for this other uh rivalry we may find ourselves drawn back into worrying about exactly the problems that have preoccupied us for the last 20 years to the detriment of our ability to compete with with china so there could be an ironic uh unintended consequence of this um it's drawn back because things get so much worse in afghanistan or because there's terror implications elsewhere and so forth yeah yes that uh we don't know what's going to happen in afghanistan it's prob it's possible that the taliban will be more cautious about allowing people to operate from their territory but i don't see any particular reason to expect that moreover more generally and i'm not a specialist on terrorism but it would be surprising if jihadists the world over didn't regard what's happened in the last couple of weeks as a tremendous triumph not only for the taliban and afghanistan but for their movement more generally which was how they felt after they drove the soviets out in the 1980s so it's certainly not going to damp down jihadism in other parts of the world middle east africa and so on um so we may find ourselves getting drawn back in for or maybe not in the major way that we've been in afghanistan or that we were in iraq uh but having to worry more about uh terrorism counterterror operations homeland security uh all of these things uh have now been bumped up to the top of the agenda at least for the time being uh and to me the bigger problem the long-term problem of competing with china may be kind of losing losing altitude um i don't know if i ever told you but when i worked for vice president cheney 2003-2005 i used to get all the paper that was flowing through the system every day and i would keep stacks of it by topic just to see you know what were we spending most of our time thinking about and in those days it was iraq giant pile afghanistan almost as big you know war on terrorism big and then things dropped off dramatically maybe there was north korea every once in a while and china way down at the bottom just on a day-to-day basis and at least for the time being i suspect the flow of paper and the concerns in the administration are going to be pulled away from the long-term competition it may not that may not be true in the long run there's also the question that some people have raised about the impact of uh the manner of our withdrawal on others assessment of our resolve and our credibility and of course there's a tendency i think for people to be melodramatic about that and some people have been saying that this proves that the united states is not a reliable partner and of course the chinese themselves have been very happy to push that line particularly as they talk about taiwan it is an open question my own view is that it's not likely to produce major changes in the alignments of the countries that we care most about if only because at least as regards china they don't really have much choice it's not as if japan looking at this says well we can't count on the united states we better cut a deal with with the prc or taiwan so i think some of that is is overstated um i guess another issue is uh in particular the the impact on the calculations that the chinese themselves actually make it's one thing to say what they say but what do they actually think because we don't really know that uh i think one thing we do know is that they've had a narrative uh which they've been uh which has been building over the last 15 20 years and really in some ways going back even further that the united states is in long-term decline uh and that that decline has accelerated accelerated with the global financial crisis um it's accelerating even more and that their opportunity to rise and assert themselves and take on their rightful role is is growing their moment is here i think they genuinely do believe that this is one data point in that in that story i don't think it's decisive i don't think they're going to turn around and invade taiwan tomorrow because they think we're not going to do something based on their judgment of what's what's happened in afghanistan but it is possible uh i think there may be some evidence of this that uh they will believe that the united states for the next few years at least is going to be even more preoccupied with its domestic problems and maybe with other problems foreign policy problems like terrorism and that that presents opportunities if you go back to the 1970s that was the way the soviets read the situation after the u.s withdrawal from vietnam and they did try to take advantage of that uh ironically for them what they did wound up waking us up uh and setting in motion the events that ultimately led to their demise but they thought in the mid to late 70s that the tides were flowing in their direction so it's always possible that these authoritarian regimes with their ideologies and their predictions of inevitable success will misread the situation and overstep yeah the happy story of the seventies and it was just finishing our discussion of afghanistan here is is you know in 75 and you and i both remember that we were talking you should say a word more about your own reaction to it as a college student i was in grad school you know it just seemed horrible it was horrible and uh the soviets went on the offensive for the next four or five years and that's half the story and the other half of the story is you know we went on a counter-offensive i think you could say beginning in the lake carter administration and obviously very much even more so in the reagan administration and the cold and soviet union collapsed 15 years after the great victory of their client state in north vietnam so you know history does work in these funny ways and doesn't go in in a straight line so i guess we could have both of those in the next five and 15 years right but one can't just count on the reversal and the happy ending of course right no that's right and and as we were discussing the other day i was a freshman in college so 74 75 would have been my first year in college so the us withdrawal was april 1975 and i remember sitting around watching on tv the famous pictures the helicopters leading the roofs of the buildings in saigon uh and as i i think i said to you i was i had a an epiphany at that moment which affected the trajectory of my development uh my political development because many of my fellow students seemed to think that this was a good thing uh and my instinctive reaction was this is terrible this is humiliating for us we're being defeated we're leaving behind these people who fought with us uh it was very depressing and of course it came uh in conjunction with a whole bunch of other depressing things the 1973 oil embargo and that the impact on on our economy watergate only a year before going back a few years before that real social unrest political assassinations things did not look good uh at that point and yet uh as you say within a few years there have begun to be a shift in the thinking in washington about the need to confront the soviets and compete more vigorously with them end of the carter administration and of course reagan uh and then you know within 15 years of the u.s withdrawal the soviet union was feeding on collapse and soon did collapse so i guess you're always shaped by your younger experiences and as i look at this that is one template that's one reason why i'm somewhat more optimistic about the longer run than than perhaps my students who don't remember any of that uh at the same time you know what is the wall street uh uh warning you know past uh returns and no prediction of future performance just because we bounced back in the way that we did in the 70s and 80s and the soviets tripped in the ways that they did doesn't necessarily mean that this is going to play out in the same way by the way of course another irony here one of the things that the soviets did that turned out to be really foolish was invading afghanistan and that was that was perhaps the thing that that alarmed people in washington most uh of course in the end it turned out to be a disaster for them you know i suppose if when we're analyzing 1975 to 1990 you'd have to of course analyze both the domestic situation the soviet union and the domestic situation here and then of course the interplay of of those and actual foreign policy event so maybe let's turn to that with respect to china and you in our last conversation which was a little over a year ago i think you emphasized much more than most uh experts what had been changing was in the course of changing domestically in china in terms of their own uh governance almost and and perception of themselves and of the world and that that's very important in addition to the obvious you know kind of jostling in different areas of foreign policy so where do you think we stand in terms of chinese china the chinese regime the regime in china and its view of itself and its view of the future well that i think is the most troubling piece of the equation right now uh as i said i think there's been a growing sense on the part of uh leadership in in china before xi jinping but even more so since he took power in 2012 that uh the trends were running in a way that was favorable to china the united states was in decline its model had been shown to be ineffective and china by contrast was a success story that really started uh with the financial crisis and it's been building since and there's reason to believe that uh xi jinping uh has doubled down on that that he he reads virtually everything that's happened in the time that he's taken power as indication that his impulses his assertive or aggressive impulses are are correct and that this is the time to really press ahead now i do think although this is not something that the chinese leadership says of course i do think there is some reason to believe that there's an underlying anxiety there as well so there's a sense yes the americans are back on their heels and maybe in the longer sweep of things the west is in decline and so on but china has numerous problems uh internally and it is likely as it grows stronger to face greater resistance externally that's something that they've been predicting and expecting for about a decade so they're not surprised by what's happened uh and that therefore uh there may be a window of opportunity for them and there may be a moment when if they are smart about it and aggressive about it they can really uh solidify their position and take advantage of what might turn out to be a temporary period of relative weakness on the part of the united states and its allies and there too that is potentially a former a formula from this calculation uh because you you think that that the clock is ticking and you may make decisions that have disastrous consequences i don't know that that's what's going to happen but in general i think they feel pretty good right now having said that maybe we can i don't want to talk about this now or later but uh there's some really interesting things happening inside china now uh now let's yeah let's talk about i'll talk first about a little bit though about how distinctive is the xi you know government as opposed to its predecessors and so it's they feel good but is it also does he personally have a kind of ambition and uh also has he been able to centralize his his control in such a way that we're sort of dealing with somewhat different almost regime than we were 15 20 years ago and then secondly uh let's go to the question of uh also how stable is the situation in china well i don't think we're dealing with a different regime we're dealing with a leninist regime that's operating on leninist principles uh so in that sense there's there's continuity i also think that there's a great deal of continuity in the objectives that successive uh chinese leaders have sought since don xiaoping arguably since now amounts to don't um but the means with which those objectives are being pursued uh have have evolved with the circumstances um so i think you know if you had to sum it up uh the ccp leadership has for decades had certainly had the objective of maintaining its monopoly on domestic political power arguably that's you know number one maybe number one two and three that's the thing that they're most worried about uh number two that they've had the objective of as they would see it uh reclaiming for china its rightful place in its own region so eastern eurasia and emerging once again as the dominant player in that part of the world which they think naturally they should be uh and then third and this is something which is emerging more now more clearly now that they really do have global objectives and that they're not simply interested in being the dominant power in their region as important as that might be but i think there's growing evidence to suggest that they see themselves as competing directly with the united states for the position of the dominant power in the world and all of that has become more evident under xi jinping i i think of him as someone who's sort of clarified the objectives and in some ways said more clearly what his predecessors were thinking and also intensified the means with which he's pursuing those objectives and even literally stepped up the timelines for achieving them so to me there's a lot of continuity there um it is true that individuals make a difference and uh jintao was a bland and kind of boring uninspiring uh and maybe somewhat unimaginative figure by comparison uh and cautious and weaker in terms of his relative power within uh the leadership in beijing and xi jinping is none of those things he's very ambitious i think he probably sees himself in some ways on par with dum champing and maybe now himself um so it's the great deal of personal ambition there he certainly has accrued enormous personal power within the system as far as we can tell he's eliminated uh or neutralized any sources of opposition within the party and of course in the country itself he's also done things to further solidify the party's grip on society and the economy more so than jintao but all of the things i think we've seen undersea were actually evident and were beginning to become uh uh come to the surface and become evident uh under his predecessor he's not um i don't think he's a revolutionary uh i don't think he's someone who has you know grabbed the wheel and turned this system in a drastically different direction uh i think he's pointing in the same direction but he has stepped on the gas he's a revivalist he's trying to make the system work the way he thinks it was meant to work which can be uh you know which doesn't mean that his ambitions are that are that limited or that he couldn't uh get us into a pretty big get himself and us into a pretty big conflict i suppose i guess how much he will continue to have power for the foreseeable future is that how it's going to work i mean well uh we're coming up to a big uh an important milestone to be next year as a party congress and since deng xiaoping this unwritten rule norm has been that leaders would serve uh general secretaries of the party would serve two five-year terms and then would then step down um we don't know whether xi jinping is going to do that his second five-year term will be up uh next year 2022 because he started in 2012. i think there's good reason to believe that he won't uh step aside and said that he'll break with that norm and that would be um i think quite significant and some of what he seems to be doing now is probably in anticipation of that he wants to further solidify his position put his mark on chinese policy domestic and foreign and continue to rule the country uh for as long as he possibly can and do you agree with i've read somewhere that you know if he does stay in power in particular um doesn't feel like he just wants to have even more belt and road initiative and even more you know incremental gains and various you know relationships and parts of the world and that there would be something big he would want as his prize so to speak and i don't know is that true maybe hong kong is a way part of that accidentally and b how much is that what does that imply about taiwan nothing good because i do think he's he has set objectives for himself he talks about three eras you know that china under mao stood up so the chinese nation stood up and shook off for an oppression uh that under dung his successors china got rich and now in this third area era under xi jinping china is getting strong uh i didn't realize that so that's an explicit kind of yes the trichotomy whatever you say the triad of uh eras yes and and he's he's done this for for a variety of reasons but one of the things he said is we're not going to have any of this criticism of the past the soviets made a big mistake by criticizing stalin and they pulled on that threat and eventually the whole system fell apart we're not going to do that so we're not going to criticize now uh everything that has happened up until now was necessary and we're going to continue to to move forward proclaiming this new era i guess also allows him to do what he's done in other ways which is to put himself in the position of being the arbiter of ideological correctness and purity which is the characteristic of of dictators in these ideological systems so it's third era he's the guy who defined it he's the guy who's going to lead it now what the objectives would be um some of them may be measurable like trying to exceed the the size of the u.s economy depending on how you measure it uh that would be one um taiwan could conceivably be on that list and people have have expressed a concern about that there's some people who believe that that's the thing that he sees as his most important legacy uh and there are reasons to be i think quite concerned about that uh and there's growing concern in the region i think there's growing concern in parts of our military uh that we may face some kind of confrontation over taiwan in the relatively near term that this is not something that's going to be left to future generations to to resolve so let's come back to them just one second but hong kong have you been surprised by the severity and thoroughness of the crack down there and uh do you think they think that it's been a success for them i haven't been surprised i i think this is another example of something which i believe uh they intended to do in the long run in other words absorbing hong kong fully into their system making hong kong just another chinese system city doing away with the remnants of the of the system of independent judiciary and measures democratic procedures that the british or that had taken root at the latter part of the british stay there i think they intended to do that all along uh the one thing that's striking is is how quickly they've moved towards that and this was set in motion uh probably in 2014 with some initial protests and then more recently with the protests uh and they've just decided i think enough is enough we're going to we're going to absorb hong kong fully we're going to crush any kind of resistance revealing about that i think and what's troubling about that is it suggests that they are not concerned about the western response i think they might have been more cautious earlier if they because they were worried about disrupting their relations with us disrupting their relations with the other democratic countries it's pretty clear under xi jinping that they have not been concerned about that and i think they've made a bet uh which so far seems to have paid off which is there'll be a lot of huffing and puffing and people will complain but they won't actually do anything they won't take measures that would seriously disrupt our economic relationship because that would damage them and we're going to get away with it and so far they have i think they have a similar attitude about their treatment of the weakers and sin junk there i've been struck the extent to which they uh they're not really hiding they were hiding what they were doing but as it became uh public they didn't deny it and in fact they said this is something that's necessary we have to put people in camps and we have to re-educate them so that there won't be terrorism there's no shame there i think they they feel that they're doing the right thing and no one can tell them otherwise so talk through the taiwan situation people toss it around an awful lot and some people think of course we're not really going to fight for taiwan and other people think no it's absolutely the red line and the chinese aren't foolish enough to think it's like the wiggers or hong kong and that they're doing fine without causing too much trouble in taiwan so why won't they just keep on doing fine for the next 10 or 20 years that way i mean what's i'm sure that we don't know but i mean what what do you think how likely is a crisis how likely are they to do really overt stuff or more you know more try to do a little more salami the tactics and how much what are we how are we likely to respond i think the uh the calculation that the regime has made up until now is that they could accumulate advantages uh and draw taiwan towards them and also developed military capabilities that would be overwhelming that would make it obvious that taiwan couldn't resist and beyond that that would deter the united states from coming to taiwan's aid and that at some point it would become clear that resistance was futile and people on taiwan would accept the dictates of the mainland the likelihood that that would be a a willing outcome or the likelihood of a peaceful resolution of the taiwan issue to be satisfactory to the prc i think has dwindled effectively to zero uh and that's in part because of the way people in taiwan see what china has done in hong kong because there's talk you know the one country two systems that was supposed to be the principle on which hong kong would have a distinct identity and that's gone and at times the ccp has talked about one country two systems with taiwan nobody i think really believes that that's possible anymore uh over time there's also just a sort of long-term trend in the way in which people on taiwan identify themselves that the numbers of people who think of themselves you know as more chinese than taiwanese or has gone down the numbers of people who want to be unified with the mainland have gone way down and more and more people especially younger people think of themselves as citizens of a democratic country i have no desire to be absorbed by by the mainland and that's only gotten stronger as time is going on so from the ccp perspective the political situation has gotten worse the military situation has gotten better from their point of view because they've been spending year-on-year significant sums on a whole variety of capabilities but in particular on the so-called anti-access area denial capabilities that are meant to make it more difficult for the united states to intervene in a conflict anywhere in the region uh they've also built up the kinds of capabilities they would need to subdue taiwan maybe without a direct invasion with missile attack cyber and so on i think what's um what's disturbing at least to me as an outsider uh kind of trying to read the tea leaves that are a couple of things the chinese are always engaging in sort of blood curdling rhetoric about taiwan there's nothing that i'm aware of that's really new there on the other hand their activities their military activities have gotten more and more aggressive so more flights that cause the taiwanese air force to scramble more naval chinese naval vessels coming up to the to the edge of taiwanese waters so they've been behaving in ways that are more menacing the other thing that's that's troubling again as an outsider is to listen to the responses of people who presumably are following this day-to-day very closely uh and are saying as i believe it was i forget if it was the uh indo-pacom commander of the chief of naval operations but saying a few months ago that there was a high likelihood of a conflict over taiwan in the next five or six years this is our our senior general yeah yes uh and uh over the last several months japanese officials saying things about the importance of taiwan uh this they've talked about stability across the straits uh one uh japanese politician who wasn't expressing the official policy but probably was saying what officials are saying on the inside used the term a threat to japan's survival or defense security and that wording is significant because in their constitution it's that kind of threat that could justify their involvement in so-called collective self-defense former japanese military officers have said we need to get busy now on active planning with the united states for a taiwan contingency so people who are following this closely seem to be very concerned about it i i don't know all the reasons for that but you can guess that in addition to what we're seeing there may be other things and most recently i think it was yesterday uh i believe it was the taiwan defense ministry of defense white paper an annual report and i haven't read it yet but uh seemed to paint a much darker picture of taiwan's prospects and conflict against the mainland than they have done in the past there's sometimes been a kind of odd optimism that you find in taiwan the belief this is never going to happen or if it does the united states will inevitably bail them out and therefore they don't have to worry too much that i think may be starting to erode um then there's the question of what we would do uh in in a contingency uh where the chinese were using force directly or even coercing taiwan and posing some kind of blockade for example and under the terms of uh the blanking of the name but the timeline security uh act i believe right um which goes back 14 years yeah so just as we're de-recognizing taiwan in order to recognize the name when congress steps in and says wait a minute uh we have a commitment to taiwan uh and it's that legislation that provides the justification for arms sales u.s arms sales to taiwan and also leaves open the possibility that the united states would be engaged more directly militarily if china were to attack or threatened um so that's on the books uh there have been shifts in public opinion recently there was a poll that came out a week or so ago that joke for the first time uh a majority or uh plurality near majority of americans when asked agreed that the u.s would or should use force if china attacked taiwan and there are a variety of other indications of increasing public support for taiwan in the abstract then the question is whether we could do it and how we would do it just on that on the on the what we say front the body administration has been wouldn't you say tougher so to speak uh more for taiwan than one would have expected perhaps uh more like the trump administration than like previous administrations to be the party yes i think that's true uh they've they've as part of their assessment of where we are in the relationship with china i think they've taken this these threats seriously i assume that a part of what they're trying to do and this was arguably a justification for some of the things that happened to the trump administration is to signal to the prc that we really mean this uh and we're committed uh we have this tie to taiwan we're not gonna do things that you know upset the apple cart we're not supporting taiwan independence there really isn't anybody serious uh on taiwan i think who advocates that let alone here uh but we are serious about helping taiwan to stand up to you to beijing so i think that's that's what they're trying to do um continuing with arms sales uh talking with the taiwanese about making adjustments in their defense strategy which people in the u.s military have argued in favor of for quite some time uh which would be to put less of an emphasis on the sort of big ticket items you're going to buy big top-line fighter planes and you can only afford you know 50 of them uh and they'll be destroyed in the first five minutes of a war but they're symbolically important spend less on that and more on essentially their own anti-access area denial strategy so missiles inexpensive missiles that could sink ships or bring down aircraft maybe some kind of people's defense uh that would impose costs on the chinese even if they did succeed in putting troops on the island there seems to be evidence that they're taking this more seriously in general how challenging is the actual defense or the actual defense requirements for us of of of taiwan very challenging and getting and getting more so and this is a this is something that people who have followed it closely have seen coming for 25 years so back going back to the 1990s uh the initial evidence of china's interest in missiles the early evidence of what we call this a2ad anti-access area denial strategy some people in the defense department were beginning to pay attention to that as early as the 1990s this is where 911 iraq afghanistan really knocked us off our game and deflected a lot of energy and attention and resources away from continuing to focus on that problem and coming up with solutions to it to other things and we've come back to trying to work on that problem uh the obama administration uh at least initially talked openly about strategy for counting countering with the taiwanese were what the prc was preparing the so-called air sea battle doctrine or for various reasons that kind of disappeared it's it's a very complicated problem in in large part because of geography and logistics so taiwan's of course quite close to the mainland uh taiwan of course is far away from the united states maybe a little less far from guam and hawaii less far from bases in japan but the thrust of what the chinese have been doing is to develop weapons and reconnaissance systems that would allow them to strike at virtually all the major facilities fixed facilities from which u.s forces would operate in the region in the opening stages of a war and also to track and attack uh weapons platforms including us aircraft carriers which would be a major part or would in the past have been a major part of some effort to defend taiwan uh so they built this sort of bubble uh that's potentially pushing us out further back making it harder and more dangerous for u.s forces to come in close i don't think we have a good solution to that yet people have described a number of ways of dealing with it we're starting to do some of the things that we might need to do to counter it uh but for a variety of reasons i think we have not gotten as far as we need to get when the when the pentagon talks about the say do gap which is seems to be the latest uh pentagon ease although i i when i looked it up i discovered that like so many of these barbarisms it comes from management literature business management literature uh but secretary of defense austin saying you know we've been talking about this but we're not actually doing enough to deal with it we need to get serious about that what exactly that's going to consist of is not yet clear the administration had a classified defense department review of uh defense posture defense balance in asia that producer report the results of which are not are not public uh so we have to wait and see but at least they acknowledge this uh severity of the problem and of course it's not just taiwan it's military operations throughout the western pacific yeah so that brings us to the us which we should now discuss how serious the change is here but i just want to say one more thing on just on taiwan focus i was thinking we chatted before the beginning of the taping here that uh recording about that this is more or less the 80th anniversary 82nd anniversary i guess so the beginning of world war ii and these analogies are all extremely problematic obviously but i was thinking about it as you spoke you know there are different models for taking over a smaller neighboring country uh about which one has claims of you know ethnic or racial you know uh you they should be part of you one way or the other historically they were or they're the same people and one thinks of 1938 1939 and you know i suppose you maybe put it this way tell me if i'm totally wrong that the chinese communist party invasion once thought hoped that taiwan could be austria sort of peacefully succumbing to the bigger neighbor with which it has common language and common ethnicity so to speak and all this that seems to got out the window now maybe they hope it's czechoslovakia where they are too weak to fight and there's they are betrayed by their big allies here in this case would be us not the british and the french but of course it could also be poland which triggers where they did conquer poland obviously within a month but uh where it does trigger world war ii and i suppose that's kind of the there are many ways in which therefore uh we don't know and they don't know i suppose which of those is i think we're beyond the austria possibility that you agree with that i mean yes yeah yeah it's a good and it's a good analogy because uh part of what the nazis did was to try to demoralize the target countries but they were also trying to persuade the great powers that uh essentially that germany had right on its side yeah it wasn't worth yeah the complicated issues so you know what right well and even even more that uh you know the geographical boundaries that had been drawn after world war one produced these problems and that it was unfair that the peace settlement had been immoral and imposed unfair burdens on germany and of course there were many people uh certainly in britain who who agreed with that in the interwar period um i think that's kind of fading as well um you know the ccp talks about well our you know it's a remnant of our civil war and how would you feel if we got involved in your and your civil war uh i think uh particularly as perceptions of the ccp in the west in the united states have gotten darker and darker so as i would see it as the true character of the regime has become more and more evident uh that kind of argument i i think carries less and less weight so who cares you guys actually never did rule ccp controlled china never did control taiwan what is the real basis for this claim and moreover that there is a there's an ideological and a moral piece to it taiwan's a prosperous successful self-governing democracy uh are we really going to allow it to be coerced and subjugated by this big powerful authoritarian country one of the things that worries me is that at least in the past i've had the sense sometimes in reading writings of chinese authors and talking to chinese interrogators that they didn't take that seriously enough or they didn't think we really took it seriously that their view of things was so kind of materialistic and sort of cynical that they thought that talk of you know standing up for free people and opposing oppressive regimes was just cover for geopolitical motivations you know you just want an unsinkable aircraft carrier off our coast or even commercial uh uh interests that you just want to sell weapon systems to the taiwanese and if they think that uh that's troubling because it means they're mistaking us they're underestimating our willingness actually uh to fight for principles but just to finish on that there's no evidence on the other hand that they have backed off the notion that this at some point in the 21st century let's say you know a great power china would include taiwan right not at all not at all to the contrary uh this is you know the biggest and maybe it's not the last but it's the biggest remaining injury that they feel was done to them by the century of humiliation and the intrusion of outside powers and also japan and that it must be corrected and the ccp has wrapped its whole identity not its whole identity but it's wrapped a good portion of its identity around this promise that it's going to fulfill uh by reclaiming taiwan and there's reason to believe that there is strong public support uh in the prc for for doing that you know how deep it runs whether people are really willing to go to war over it uh we don't know but of course in that system it doesn't matter either because if the leadership wills it it will be it will be so so they're very serious about it yeah and you know thinking about this uh troubling question that you raised earlier about xi jinping's ambitions um it it would be a tremendous victory uh for c for the ccp uh if they were able to do this uh it would demonstrate the weakness of the united states and the lack of value of our security commitments even though we don't have a treaty with taiwan it would be a real blow to our credibility much worse than what happened in afghanistan um it would demonstrate again their rising power and the sense that they simply are too strong to be opposed uh it would crush uh you know another ethnic chinese democracy so they've done away with hong kong now if they would like to do away with taiwan because the existence of those argues against the ccp's claim that democracy liberal democracy is sort of a western thing it's not for chinese people and it would also have military and operational effects it would allow them to break through uh the so-called first island chain and put them in a much better position to project power into the western pacific so it would be a huge victory for them and a defeat for us it's just the last thing i don't know it's hard to get off taiwan i guess maybe that shows something though how central it is in a way it could be it is important actually practically right it's not just because we have you know a long time relationship with them they're a democracy as an actual military matter the balance of power would be affected by taiwan not being our ally and being part of communist china yes i think so it gives them easier access to the deep waters of the western pacific whereas now they have to pass through these kind of shallow waters off their coasts um it puts them within 60 or 80 miles of the southernmost island of the japanese island chains uh it puts them directly uh adjacent to the major sea lines of communication running from south to north so in addition to the south china sea there's tremendous amount of traffic maritime traffic that goes to japan into south korea so yes i think it would have it would have big practical implications as well as symbolic implications so let's talk about the united states then um getting china wrong is the title of your forthcoming book and i i uh you were in a minority and i think have been vindicated honestly in terms of your worries and concerns about what direction china was going in the fact that economic integration would not lead necessarily to political liberalization or or better behavior in terms of the wakers or hong kong or anything else um but what about the u.s it sounds more like uh even the biden administration that even with the blind administration has been surprisingly in congress in a bipartisan way i'd say hawkish compared to five or ten years ago but what do you make of that how serious is it do our actions match our the words what would be the key actions walk through some of that i think there has been a big shift uh and it's in the last five to ten years um i also think it's not complete so it's not as if you know we've gone from one consensus to a new consensus the old consensus has broken down but a new one has not yet fully taken shape or it's only taken shape in part and that part has more to do with the acknowledgement of the existence of the problem so it's more about the diagnosis than it is about the prescription uh and even there you get people who say oh it's exaggerated they're not really so much of a problem but um we had a we had a theory about how all this was going to work and it wasn't just the united states it was western liberal countries more generally and the theory was that engagement with china would eventually transform china it would make china more like us uh economically their system would sort of converge uh and their foreign policy objectives and interests would tend to align more closely with ours and in the long run their political system would evolve towards something resembling democracy um i think when we've talked about it before i've i've made the point that there's a certain amount of retrospective cleaning up of the historical record and people going back and reinterpreting things that were said you know we never really meant that well i think the people who mattered most like presidents of the united states said it and they meant it um so what's happened is we've there's been an accumulation of evidence to suggest that that whole approach has has failed the trump administration kind of took a hammer to that and said it explicitly in a way that hadn't been said before but i think the feeling had been growing that it was not working out so an accumulation of evidence their economy is getting in some ways more status rather than less the political system is obviously becoming more repressive rather than more liberal and increasingly we see this assertive or aggressive foreign policy which is intended to change the status quo people were arguing about whether china was in fact a status quo power 10 or 15 years ago i don't think anyone believes that now it's a question of how revisionist they are you know how much they want to change so okay so an accumulation of evidence growing concern about the direction which things were going um but uncertainty about exactly what to do about it and we're sort of in between right now uh it is notable that the byte administration in almost every respect at least for now has persisted in moving in the same direction as the trump administration was going on on almost all fronts so uh hasn't lifted the tariffs uh it is talking more about a kind of industrial policy that's intended to strengthen us for long-term competition um restrictions on chinese foreign direct investment uh moving towards possible restrictions on the ability of american entities to invest in china so in the economic domain there's there's continuity uh in the military as well um talking about china as the primary opponent uh something that again the the trump administration did explicitly more than had happened before the blind administration hasn't rejected that to the contrary they're saying we take it seriously we're actually going to do more about it than our predecessors did ideologically and more so than the trump administration the binding administration has been calling attention to the uh clash of systems and the president himself has talked about this as a competition between democracy and authoritarianism um the biden administration has has made a point of doing something which they accused their predecessors not doing uh which is working more closely with allies again for the purpose of trying to counterbalance uh china so all of that is is pretty much the same but there are a whole bunch of important uh issues that have not yet been resolved in a way we haven't gotten to the really difficult parts and remains to be seen whether this kind of general sense that we need to do something about china is going to hold up and by the way that general sense doesn't include everybody in the political spectrum and bernie sanders had an article in foreign affairs about how we shouldn't start a cold war with china so particularly on the so-called progressive side of the democratic party i think there's an active attempt to push back against what they see as kind of cold war tendencies in in the mind administration you have that you also have the various commercial interests which strategy aside want to continue to make money and are trying to influence government policy in ways that would weaken our response to what china has been doing so that they can continue to do business in the way that they would like so it's not resolved yet agreement i think generally on the diagnosis but the prescription has not yet been fully filled in yeah i mean it seems to me if you just so put aside the history which is usually a bad idea but in a way it can be clarified just to say okay you came down from mars and you saw the us and china and you saw that china's behaving the way it is behaving and might behave and people here say it's a threat what would you expect the u.s to do and i guess for me just thinking in a very simple-minded way you'd say well you'd be spending more in defense against the china threat both here but also in terms of taiwan you'll be strengthening alliances in a pretty visible and conspicuous way and doing everything he could to contain china i guess you could put it that way in the region and then on the sort of broader economic technological sphere you'd be strengthening our comparative advantage in various areas and trying to weaken china and because obviously so much one presumes the future competition does hinge on sort of the various technological abilities that one has cyber but also just tech in general obviously tech in general and so many other things so i guess in each of these areas are we i mean how much are we doing as opposed to saying not that saying doesn't matter and it may be the predicate to doing but so alliances um defense and sort of technology slash economic slash industrial policy i guess well on the alliances the current administration is talking the right talk and i do think that matters particularly after four years of trump they've got a somewhat difficult task which is to try to restore confidence in the long-term commitment of the united states uh and our allies both in europe and in asia look at what's happened here what's still happening here and not without reason ask themselves whether this is just an interlude and whether our policies the current policies will continue uh after 2024 or after that i don't think in the end for the most part our allies feel that they have that much choice maybe the europeans feel they have more leeway because they're not directly at the pointy end of the japan of the chinese spear but in asia to the contrary i think there's a general sense that they have to stick with us they may not be fully comfortable doing that and they start to do some things to try to hedge against the possibility that we will bug out on them but what else are they going to do so on alliances progress uh movement in the right direction and that's that's not uh 180 degrees opposite to what trump was doing it's just that he interspersed that with insults and threats and uh suggestions that our allies were just freeloaders and which did induce a real concern and doubt uh on the definition do you think on the alliance side it's sort of like the cold war in the 80s i guess headaches and some some allies less strong than others and maybe europe less committed than japan certainly and but basically all right and sustainable i don't know if i'd go there okay maybe i overstated that this is something that's worrisome i think we're trying to do the right things but here too and maybe come to this in a minute i think the really difficult uh decisions have not yet been made the things that would really be costly that i believe are going to be necessary if we're going to maintain the balance uh that ensures our security against a still growing china uh i don't know how that's that's going to come down and you can read the evidence in various ways i think generally if you look at the allies uh certainly if you look at public opinion polls um it suggests that there's been a real revolution in public attitudes towards china in europe and in asia democratic countries in both europe and asia and there's been a real marked shift towards a much darker and more worried pessimistic view about china just in the last couple of years and it's interesting to examine why that's so i think the pandemic in china's behavior in the pandemic head is partly to do with that uyghurs everything else but there's been there's been a real shift in public attitudes in some places government policy may lag but that's that's quite significant um on the defense front uh again i think the current administration is talking the right talk uh but there is a question of whether they're going to walk the walk and the most recent uh the first administ binding administration defense request uh is actually i think it increases spending by 1.5 so it's not even at the rate of inflation so it's not real growth it's actually a decline and the independent defense policy review commission that included republicans and democrats i think was last year our friend derek edelman was one of the chairs uh argued that the us needs and allies too need to increase real defense spending by three to five percent um my own sense is that that's that's correct um but how exactly are we going to do that how we're going to pay for that especially when we're doing all of these other things increasing spending on other kinds of programs and running up the debt and so on so it's not an easy problem but it remains to be seen whether the administration is going to be willing and able actually to do that so it's great to talk about it and to be focused on it but will there be the resources i think there's also a question about whether there's a coherent procurement strategy there and i i don't have a strong view on this yet because i don't know enough about the various programs and where they stand but uh there is a tension between uh spending on capabilities that would be useful now or a couple of years from now if we really think we're headed towards this period of maximum danger or greater threat and devoting more resources to kind of longer term research and development development of next generation capabilities that would allow us to not only keep pace with but to stay ahead of china because they're clearly trying to do that so are trade-offs there and the trade-offs are more painful uh if overall spending is not increasing if you that's one of the reasons why i think you have to increase the budget overall because maybe you need to do both current capabilities but also and that's not enough to be saved from reallocating away from afghanistan or from i don't know you know taking a few troops out of europe who maybe aren't quite as necessary as they once were or something like that i don't i don't think so certainly not afghanistan i don't think that i i don't know the exact figure but it's uh it's probably a drop in the bucket in the 700 plus billion at this point or it would have been if we had stayed there uh so no i don't i don't think so so there are tough decisions to be made and there's going to have to be strong leadership of civilian leadership from the defense department from the secretary of defense and from the white house from president because you already see real tensions between the military services uh over who's gonna get what uh the army obviously obviously but given the nature of the pacific theater the army uh has less of a role likely than it would have in a war in western europe or it would in a war on the korean peninsula or even then wars in the middle east so there's a strong argument for cutting back on spending on on ground forces but of course the army doesn't like that then within the services there are strong commitments to existing programs some of which no longer really make sense building more big aircraft carriers is not the wave of the future given the development of all these chinese precision conventional uh missiles uh spending more on super expensive uh f-35 aircraft that have to fly out of bases that are vulnerable doesn't make sense in the long run so some strategy is going to have to be imposed on this system and it's going to have to come from the top and whether there is the leadership that's strong enough to do that i think remains to be seen but the intention is good i'm sorry to say that last night i think their their intention the facts they're not saying yeah this is not a problem or right we can defer this for another five years they're they're they're saying the right things and i think they're trying to do the right things but actually doing them which is where we are now is really hard i mean sometimes i read a story about a defense department procurement i think oh my god what a mess how could you possibly you know this is not suitable for the 21st century and we're buying the same old stuff and it takes forever to get something new and then you read a story about missiles drones or precision strikes somewhere and special operations do you think you know what maybe beneath the surface they're adjusting a little more quickly than if you read some debunking story about wasting you know hundreds of millions or billions on quote wasting you know it's something where do you think the truth is between there i mean is it is it sort of how much do we need a real fundamental rethinking and revamping of processes and how much is it maybe a little better than we realize and i don't know it's probably better than we realize in in pockets just like during the cold war i mean concerns about waste fraud and abuse in the defense department as you know go back decades and they're perennial um they're i suppose they're less pressing problem when you have uh a less pressing opponent and when you have growing budgets than when you have a very vigorous opponent and you're fighting to maintain budgets if let alone to increase them you can't afford it under those circumstances so it's not that it's not a problem but it's always a problem maybe it's more of a problem now uh people argue that this may be the case because the kinds of unmanned systems for example large numbers of unmanned aerial or undersea drones networked uh artificial intelligence the kinds of those kinds of capabilities may not be the ones that the big defense contractors have been most interested in they're not the ones that they've been most interested in and yet they may be the things that we really need uh and so you're gonna have to break through that and best interests uh may be a source of resistance to precisely the kinds of changes that are most needed now so i don't want to understate that at the same time uh as was through during the cold war i think you see pockets of activity intellectual activity and then some attempts at doctrinal change in various places particularly in the military so the marine corps has come up with a new uh operational concept that's clearly focused on giving marine corps a role in a future conflict in the western pacific that would involve the use of relatively small mobile forces that would take up positions on these many islands that can potentially contain china's navy and move around to be less vulnerable and deploy anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles i was quite surprised by that because it's it's it is quite innovative there are people who don't think that's what they should be doing but it's interesting that they're uh they're able to do that and the marine corps has a history i think of being able to do it and i suspect there are similar things going on in parts of the navy and the air force as well um so it's not it's not hopeless and that was true in you know during the cold war too we also don't know at least i don't know all of the technological applications that are being explored i saw a couple months ago that we'd actually tested an unmanned underwater i think was an underwater drone i don't think it was surface that transited all the way across the pacific so coming from from the u.s to the pacific theater um that's pretty impressive uh and i'm sure there are other things like that that are not that are not visible but there's real urgency to this and how about more broadly than on these sort of let's call it economic technological front do we have a strategy are we implementing something like a strategy do we need a strategy maybe just letting our big tech companies we have a big lead in tech and just letting them chug ahead is is fine sort of like you know the vaccine suggests that for all the criticism of american business and big tech and our ability to turn things from ideas into products you know when we have to we do it pretty impressively so what do you make of all that i think the economic domain generally so both sort of science and technology and industrial policy which used to be a dirty word but now everybody seems to embrace it is one part of that but also more broadly our trade investment policy and our relationship with china in particular as well as with our allies that's the area where i think the biggest changes are necessary and where uh the resistance is greatest and the costs may be significant and where again political leadership is going to be essential because we can't continue if we're now serious about this competition with china i don't think we can continue to operate on the assumption you know what's good for apple is good for the united states of america and you look at our overall policy for dealing with china since the early 1990s uh you know effectively it's been we're gonna we're gonna trade we're gonna open up to china we're gonna try to get china to open up to us we're gonna encourage flows of capital goods technology back and forth and that'll be good for the companies that are involved in it but it will also be good for the country it'll be good for the world again going back to this getting china wrong because it'll transform china so yes of course it'll make china richer and more advanced than it would otherwise have been but that won't be a problem because it'll be a new china that's tame essentially well now we see that that isn't so and i think we're now confronting that reality uh but we have not really worked through the implications of it and in my view the place to start is by recognizing that given the nature of the chinese regime and given the failure of this attempt to change it through engagement we can no longer afford to regard china as just another normal trading partner uh which is essentially what we're we're doing we're doing it less and less because we're making these sort of piecemeal changes so we treat investment from china now differently than we do investment from other countries even though theoretically we're committed uh under our wto obligations you know to treat all everybody the same we can't afford to do that and once that's step number one i guess step number two is to recognize that china as it's involved is an entirely different kind of economic entity um that there really ultimately is no such thing as a private economic actor a private company that everyone and everything ultimately depends on the approval of the chinese communist party and from the party's point of view everyone and everything is a tool of party state policy so you know we can't have huawei building parts of our critical i.t network um so we're we've sort of it's almost like i don't know it's like whack-a-mole where we're striking at pieces of this problem but we're not stepping back and apprehending the whole and rethinking our entire economic relationship with them in the ways that i think ultimately we're going to have to do and i think it's going to involve i wouldn't call it decoupling but would be what would be preferable would be a significant but partial economic disengagement and not only between the united states and china but between the united states and its advanced industrial democratic allies in china and you asked what would we do if you came down from mars and recognized this this challenge well the first thing you would notice is we are still engaging in an economic relationship with this major strategic competitor that helps it grow stronger and that allows it to exert leverage over us and our allies and that fact uh is the biggest obstacle to our ability to compete effectively and of course it's a vestige of the policy that we pursued previously look at the cold war early stages of the cold war with the soviet union we didn't have to cut economic ties with them because we didn't have any uh there weren't strong interest groups in the united states who wanted you know thousands of uh soviet students to study here or wanted to enter into joint ventures with soviet companies uh there was none of that well we're intertwined as people always point out and that is a major difference between today and you know 70 years ago but it doesn't mean that we're not engaged in this intense rivalry and acting as if uh we can continue with business as usual gives a tremendous advantage a continuing advantage to our opponent that's the thing that i worry about most that will be paralyzed because there will be strong interests that'll oppose the kinds of major changes that seem to me to be necessary and i think the ccp is counting on that that's been their strategy up until now make make friends use the foreigners to do the work uh in their own systems to lobby their governments in favor of policies that allow china to continue to grow richer faster and stronger while at the same time restructuring their own relationship with us and with the democracies in ways that reduce their vulnerability to any leverage that we might have on them they've passed through a sort of valley of real vulnerability in the early stages of the post-cold war period they felt that they were at tremendous risk you know they'd just been sanctioned and they were worried about it happening again but they felt they had no choice they had to open up they had to engage more with the west even though that created a vulnerability but they didn't just accept it they thought and they have worked over generations of leadership to try to use that relationship to advantage and in the long run to try to reduce their vulnerability to us and that's part of what we see happening more clearly now just in the last few years so the talk of increased self-reliance technological self-reliance the clear recognition that the chinese leadership intends to build up its domestic industries and displace western companies not only from the chinese market but if they can from grabbing big portions of western markets as well this is not an economic actor like any that we've encountered before and we can't treat it as if it is if we do uh i think our prospects are pretty grim and it sounds nice if you're saying you you're going beyond what a lot of my let's say pro-free market pro-free trade which i am generally pro-business friends would say which who but who also understand the problem of china to some degree and they would say look darpa type stuff investment and make you know both increases in the defense budget okay uh darpa types industrial policy to make sure we have a defense industrial base and and are pushing ahead on the cutting edge of ai and all these other things and using it appropriately for uh for defense related purposes intelligence purposes okay uh cutting back on some of the high-tech stuff that we if we can do it prevent china from having access to easy access to okay but we can still have a world mostly of you know free-ish trade and consumer goods and supply chains going through china and so forth and there's no need to kind of fire those despite our face on that and and and that's so you can sort of have a little bit the best of both worlds sounds like you're skeptical that we can just have business as usual for the 80 percent of our trade i'm making up the number obviously with china that's just you know t-shirts and auto parts and uh not just i guess but you know and uh i don't know the capsules in which the fancy drugs come and so forth it sounds like you're saying a more thorough rethinking might be necessary i think we do have to rethink it i wouldn't rule out the possibility that we could have a relationship that was healthier for us from the point of view of national security but also long-term prosperity that did involve significant uh trade flows between our countries you know why shouldn't we sell them soybeans and buy consumer electronics that are manufactured over there those in and of themselves don't have strategic significance guess a couple of things one even that although i recognize that it's probably going to be a part of this picture unless and until there's some really dramatic uh change in the political relationship even that of course creates leverage that the ccp exploits in our system and even more in some other places like germany where you have big companies that are lobbying their government to you know not say anything too critical about china let alone impose restrictions on on chinese economic activity because they see this big growing market there so that's a problem uh and the ccp leadership recognizes it and talks about it as an advantage uh one of the things she said last year was we want to reduce our supply chain dependency on the west and i think there is referring particularly to these sort of high-end high-technology products that they still are not capable of manufacturing themselves but we want to increa maintain and increase the dependence of the advanced industrial countries on on us and their policies are intended to produce that effect and the reason they want to do that is strategic it's not to do with increasing the welfare of the chinese people it has to do with increasing the power of the chinese state in relation to other states um the other parts of what you describe i'm sympathetic to as well you don't want uh i don't think the heavy hand of government which in fact is bureaucrats who are being directed by people in congress who are trying to satisfy their constituents to have too big a role in sort of managing the the us economy as a whole at the same time i think we have to find new ways of doing some of the things that we did during the cold war to improve the cooperation between private sector and government to to speed up innovation um one of the problems with the way in which the the world is evolving and goes back to our discussion of the military situation is that the dividing line between what's commercial and what's military is has pretty much disappeared i think in many respects uh and especially in these kind of emerging areas surrounding ai and unmanned systems and so on the the things that you want to be able to do in the defense realm are very similar to the kinds of things that people want to do in the in the commercial realm so you know drawing a bright line may uh allow you to have the capability to still build tanks in the united states which i think we can still do but that's not all of what you need one other thing here which um i don't think we've we've really thought through adequately uh and that is the importance of of manufacturing um it's you know it's great to have the intellectual property created here uh but allowing all of the you know the work uh manufacturing of the products that go into the iphone for example to be done elsewhere and to be done in china in particular means that we've had a dwindling capacity actually to do that kind of work there aren't enough trained engineers who have experience in doing that and that's important i think for long-term uh uh economic reasons after all we didn't get to be you know the kings of the internet uh just out of nowhere we got there because we were the kings of uh semiconductors and computers when that was first getting started um but it also potentially has uh strategic or military significance um if we were ever to be involved in a conflict with with china over taiwan for example there's a good possibility that it would not be over quickly we and they might both hope that it would be and our strategies might be built around trying to achieve that but it's quite possible that that isn't the way it would go and if we were involved in a protracted conflict we'd have to manufacture uh new weapons to replace the ones that were lost and at that point we would have all these supply chains and just in time delivery of this and that uh much of it would have broken down so that's a concern as well i don't think you know the idea of that buy american is going to solve this or that we should try to be manufacturing every widget in the us as nonsense it's uneconomical and impossible um the idea that we might prefer that more of that stuff was manufactured in friendly countries and maybe including or especially friendly countries that are not directly adjacent to china is is a very uh a very good idea a very pressing one we see that now in particular in uh semiconductors where people have sort of realized that the chinese realized that they didn't know before which i suspect they did that their commercial uh next generation huawei phones and so on were dependent on high-end semiconductors that weren't manufactured in china that had to be imported from other places taiwan in particular and that the manufacturer of those semiconductors depended on american technology and intellectual property uh so taiwan taiwan is the place where most of these things are manufactured taiwan is just off the coast of china uh if taiwan were to be conquered tomorrow or if that industrial capacity was destroyed it would have major implications of course for them as well as for us but location geography still still matters and we have to be you know we have to be cognizant of that in asia uh some some of our friends and allies have started as a result of the pandemic and the recognition of the risk of being overly dependent on one supplier in particular on china for drugs and for medical equipment have started to try to build a network of like-minded countries that would help one another and would distribute production in the event of an emergency i think we ought to be thinking and talking about the same thing with our allies in the region but also with our allies in the western hemisphere our allies in in europe i think we need a kind of democratic uh industrial base not just a national industrial base and i think we're pretty don't you think pretty far from thinking that way and i mean beyond a certain belief uh which was embodied in the tpp which i don't think that by administration seems to be getting us back into though uh we should talk about that for a second but i mean we don't i think what you've just said is pretty far from uh conventional wisdom or certainly from the actual actions of of our administration or even the congress which is willing to throw a lot of money yet you know technological stuff which might be pretty good of a kind of industrial policy sort but very much focused on us building up our abilities much less competitive or comparative in the way they're thinking i suppose a couple of things one um we're good liberals uh in the 19th century since we believe in free trade uh we believe in improvements in welfare and we're focused on when we think about economics we're focused on absolute gains it doesn't matter if china is growing ten percent we're growing two percent as long as we're growing you know we're getting better off year on year um especially if we would go more slowly if if if china itself grew more slowly that would be a loss for us obviously it would be but this is where the relative gains comes in um they think in terms of relative gains because they think in terms of power everybody can get richer at the same time but power is relational and not everybody can get more powerful at the same time and to them economic policy the economic domain is another domain of political struggle so their economic policies are designed to try to give them a relative advantage and we're seeing that more clearly we have to take account of that fact uh and just broadly in the abstract we would like to have uh to maintain let's just simplify it and say our gdp versus their gdp other things equal it would be better for us from a strategic point of view if our gdp continued to be larger than their gdp a lot of oversimplification well how can we maintain this gdp gap we can grow faster we can do things that help us grow faster we can also do things that make them grow slower you know ideally we would focus on the first rather than the second but realistically we may be in a world soon where we have to think about the second and we may even have to think about the implications of doing that if it involves some reduction in our growth as well because if we're really in a political struggle again it's the relative gains versus the absolute gains that make the most difference when just a sort of overall thought and and this is the way that i've come to visualize this anyway um you know at the end of the cold war the united states and its allies tried to build a truly global liberal system that was the idea and it was a revival of the idea that woodward wilson had at the end of the first world war and that quickly broke down because it was clear that soviet union was not a liberal democracy and wasn't interested in being part of that system and was building this system subsystem of its own in eastern europe um and instead of doing what we had done after world war one which was we tried we failed we withdrew instead of doing that we set about to build a liberal international system that encompassed ultimately a part of the world that was geographically defined and include included ultimately western europe the western hemisphere increasingly parts of east asia as well most of those countries were over time became liberal democracies those were the countries with whom we traded the most um and we kept the soviets out and ultimately they collapsed so union broke down the cold war ended and our governing conception strategic conception was what the clinton administration referred to as enlargement we're going to expand this sphere we're going to do what comes naturally to us what we tried to do after world war one and world war ii and now we're going to do it again which is we're going to encompass the whole world in this liberal system and in the process of doing that we will transform even illiberal countries like russia and china into liberal countries that's what has it worked china is sort of embedded in this liberal system and distorting it and damaging it and exploiting it but it is a threat to that system i think ultimately what we need to be doing is focusing on rebuilding a partial liberal system by which i mean a system comprised primarily of liberal democratic as it turns out advanced industrial countries that share common values and we hope convergent interests if we're able to do that if you look at the gdps of those countries so the eu plus you know the usmca plus the parts of the ccp tpp that are democratic that's over half total world economic output and china is now about 17 you know we're about 25 so we'd have enormous advantages we have enormous advantages uh if we're able to work together and i think that really should be the goal it's not just well we're going to cooperate with our allies here and there i think we ought to be in the longer term thinking about rebuilding a system that resembles the one that we created uh to wage the cold war and of course you're not supposed to talk about cold war and it's in the cold war all kinds of things that are different about it yes yes yes but i think ultimately that has to be a piece of our grand strategy it's not just our domestic policies it's how we integrate with our friends and allies that's going to be tough because all of us including us have these deep ties with china which are going to be difficult to to break and even to change in significant ways and i suppose that the longer longer term as for the cold war you can hope and even work to uh change the character of the opposition and and erode its strength and hope that it changes internally and you know things could have gone differently with russia between uh before up to 2000 or maybe after up to 2010 or so you know it wasn't inevitable i don't think that it would go into putin-esque direction and of course china there was that moment in 89 where maybe things could have gone differently and uh so not whatever had to have happened or didn't have to happen it did happen as you say and you uh but you can't yeah one has to adjust to the world as it is and it's not an unambitious thing to try to have half the world integrated more than half and live will never as you say liberal democratic kind of free market dish order and then contain the rest contain others for for now and hope that one ultimately does change them as well but it's it's such an as you say the way you've laid it out which is extremely helpful i think is still pretty far from the way people are thinking it seems to be both in the in the china expert world and the broader foreign policy world i mean i'll ask for your final thoughts but i mean one thing that strikes me in this discussion is how you can't have an intelligent discussion really about foreign policy and national security without having an awful lot of thought giving an awful lot of thought to china but conversely one can't really give a lot of thought to china without thinking also about the us and the world's the global system the international order as a whole it's not a it's not a discrete problem to be dealt with by a bunch of much respect trend experts by people who you know know the most details necessarily about you know what the differences between each chinese leader have been over 30 years and so forth no to the contrary but maybe that's a conversation for another time yeah you should do it a couple of thoughts one first you know the ccp xi jinping they have learned to talk the talk remarkably well so she goes to davos and talks about how they believe in globalization and win-win cooperation they don't believe in win-win cooperation again it's about relative gains and their vision of globalization is of a world in which we remain open and they can continue to exploit us in various ways and they are able to close themselves off uh in ways that they want to they may be open to some things if you want to send capital fine but if we want to send uh products uh high tech products no so they're they're the ones who have been selectively decoupling and they're trying i think to build their own subsystem that would incorporate parts of asia but maybe also parts of the so-called global south uh africa in particular so it's it's not that just that we're you know trying to draw these lines they are doing that themselves but they're doing it in a very particular way it involves trying to keep us open the the other thing um it goes back to my sense that we haven't yet fully come to grips with this problem um you can't have a strategy without objectives uh what are the objectives of our strategy towards china now we had objectives before and they were not uh crazy they weren't stupid uh they just were unachievable or at least with the policies that we pursued but what are our objectives now uh if we don't think we can transform them into a liberal democracy by being nice to them um what does that mean well one answer is we've got to be realistic and we're going to establish some kind of modis vivendi with them and we've got to cooperate with them they're sort of left and right variants of that but that may be possible in the long run but at least at the moment i would say because the ccp leadership believes that it has the wind at its back we have to push back pretty hard we have to get to a stalemate where they're not they don't feel like they're gaining year on year before we could have any chance of uh achieving some kind of equilibrium it's not going to be a stable formal settlement but it may be a kind of equilibrium sort of like what we achieved during the middle years of the cold war with the soviet union but uh is that our truly our long-term objective i think our long-term objectives should be what it was at the outset uh which is to at least to try to create conditions that will encourage tendencies in china that may have a chance of leading towards liberalization and that's not you know regime change and trying to bring down the regime and so on but we have to i think that should be our our goal that would be the best thing for the chinese people i think uh it's not for us to say but i think there's reason to believe a freer society is a better society for most of the people who make up its population but i think in the long run it's also necessary if we're going to live with a wealthy and powerful china if china is both wealthy and powerful and ruled by a leninist dictatorship of the sort that currently governs it uh that is bad for stability and it's a threat to our interests and as a threat to democratic principles because the leaders of that country see themselves in again this sort of zero-sum life and death struggle with the west it doesn't mean that they believe they can or should try to conquer us and plant the flag you know the red flag capital uh but they think that they need to weaken us and divide us and divide us from our friends and allies to the extent that they can and that's what they're very actively trying to do um so in the long run i think we have to hold open this possibility of of peaceful change peaceful evolution which is what the ccp always accuses us of um and then the question is how well what can you do to to do that and there are things i think we should be trying to do and i would say one of them is to remain as open as we can to chinese citizens particularly younger people who want to come and study and maybe work in the united states you know we used to think that that as soon as people set foot in the u.s they loved us and they loved everything about our society well that's clearly not the case but it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody who comes here hates us i think a lot of them see the virtues of an open society um so that's one thing i think we also need to not give up on the idea that it is a good thing to uh increase the flows of information into china and within china not to proselytize and preach the virtues of liberalism but to allow chinese people to have better information about what their own government is doing because that will i think if it's possible put more pressure on the regime to address some of these some of these concerns if you go back and read the um i think it's nsdd 82 that was written at the beginning of the reagan administration um it's really uh it's really an impressive document because it doesn't say what people think it said it doesn't say we're going to try to bring down the soviet regime it says this regime is hostile to us for reasons that are deeply rooted in its ideology its history its view of geopolitics we are currently in an anomalous position of doing things that strengthen that regime and at a minimum we have to try to reduce those things and we have to take the offensive uh ideologically we have to put pressure on this regime we have to make them pay a price for the contradictions in their system rather than doing things that help them get out from under those contradictions and maybe uh in the foreseeable future and they were talking about a decade so into the latter part of the 80s early 90s when these old guys who are in charge now have passed away there will be a new leading group that will be willing to pursue some kinds of reforms and in the long long run maybe that will lead to a freer society what happened was the clock got sped up uh the old guys died in rapid succession the new generation gorbachev emerged and started to make these changes and of course he did it in a way which caused the system to unravel and that's what led to the collapse of the soviet union in the end of the cold war i think we may be in kind of a similar situation with china we have to reduce the extent to which with one hand we're making them stronger if we're really going to try to oppose them effectively we have to try to create conditions which may induce maybe not this leadership group but at some point leaders to recognize that the approach that's currently being followed by xi jinping has failed and is a dead end and to consider the possibility of more accommodating policies and we have to leave open the possibility that in the long run uh china will change uh we shouldn't be silent about that uh it's not provocative in my view to say those things we shouldn't shrink from uh expressing that belief because it's part of what i think should still be our belief in the universal universality of the principles on which not only our system but other liberal democracies are founded i think it's a good a good thought to end on but really uh awfully helpful and thought-provoking and comprehensive conversation erin so i really appreciate your doing this and there's an awful lot to continue to talk about and i'm sure we'll be back in a year to see uh how things are going and uh and uh what new thoughts you have but thank you aaron friedberg for joining me on this on this conversation very very interesting thank you very much bill and and thank you all for joining us on conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

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Length: 101min 23sec (6083 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021