Biden's first six months and the future of the Republican Party | George F. Will | Tom Switzer

hello and welcome to the center for independent studies my name is tom switzer well it's been more than six months since joe biden became president of the united states every president faces their own particular set of challenges but president biden was probably right when he said this on inauguration day few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now indeed the challenges are daunting a pandemic that has killed almost as many americans as during the civil war of the 1860s the greatest economic crisis since the great depression the 1930s and widespread racial and cultural tensions usually renowned for its optimism america has been consumed by self-doubt and deep divisions so how do things look for america today in 2021 how have conservatives and republicans dealt with biden in the post-trump era to what extent are cancelled culture and critical race theory threatening public discourse across the united states and how's the united states dealing with the rise of china which of course has important consequences for us here in australia well i can't think of a more prominent commentator to address these issues than our special guest today george f will he's an award-winning columnist at the washington post george has been writing his nationally syndicated column twice a week for nearly half a century george has been a regular fixture on leading u.s political television shows for decades he's author of several influential books most recently the conservative sensibility and it's a great pleasure to welcome george will back to the center for independent studies hi there george glad to be with you and congratulations on turning 80 recently well as the english actor and playwright alan bennett has put it quote at 80 years of age things do not occur they recur george is that how you feel you know not a bit every day is fresh it's amazing how many things you can you could not have done and not have seen and not have expected in your first 80 years the great thing about being 80 is that you're in no danger of dying young and if you're american who's 80 years old you've lived almost exactly one-third the life of the republic so i i'm feeling scribed venerables yes and you recently wrote in your washington post column to be 80 is to have beginning in the second half of the 20th century lived through the emergence of today's therapeutic culture and we will get on to cancel culture later on in the program yes and survived it indeed well we'll talk about cancer culture later on in the show but just let's start with biden's first six months it's it's been more than six months since inauguration day january 2021 how do you measure the change in presidencies from trump to biden well i think most americans voted for a restoration of normality i'm not sure that's what they got the interesting thing is that when biden was pursuing against a very large field the democratic nomination the two leftmost or as we say in this country progressive candidates where bernie sanders and elizabeth warren combined they only got one-third of the vote they might as well have won because biden came into the office and it turns out that he's not a progressive but he is a democrat he's a party man and the democratic party's energy now is firmly on the left in the progressive wing and he has adopted their agenda with a vengeance i don't just mean the astonishing spending that's been going on uh many years ago an american political leader everett dirksen the republican leader of the senate said a billion dollars here and a billion there it adds up to real money well now it's a trillion here and a trillion there adds up to real money we are piling up debt as never before it's never before in peace time republicans are busy reminding people that debt is taxation deferred there's only two ways to pay for a government current taxes or future taxes so there's an explosive growth of government unseen since 1933 or 1965 and we'll come back and talk about those two years and how they differ from this one what about the state of the nation though because a significant segment of voters still won't accept the president's election legitimacy we all know the public trust in american institutions has declined dramatically in recent times well before the arrival of donald trump i mean can any one president or congress do much to boost public confidence in america's institutions well there was a kind of continent-wide sigh of relief when mr trump left town and people said well this is going to be more relaxing i don't think the american people in 2020 were angry i think they were exhausted on the edge of a nervous breakdown and they wanted relaxation i don't think that's quite what they received from mr biden so far because the numbers are so staggering i i i do think that the american people had a certain moment when they began to give a an encouraging answer to the poll question that american pollsters like so is the country on the right track or the wrong trade right track had a surge but in recent weeks it's been going down one because inflation to the surprise of no one paying attention has made it has surged for good milton friedman reasons he said that all inflation is always everywhere a monetary phenomenon and this is a response to what i consider reckless monetary policy but also there's been a considerable spike in violent crime in cities that means in in democratic-run metropolitan areas because they've done almost all the american cities and uh you if you combine inflation which is a great radicalizer of a middle-class nation i mean when savings is no longer a store of value that that that generally upends the serenity of the country and you add to that well-publicized spike of crime following on the 2020 campaign when democrats were almost defeated by three words defund the police the professors got that out there and the country said well that's a seriously dumb idea and came very close to uh reelecting trump and uh giving the house of representatives to the republicans and then of course that's not to mention the covert pandemic now in australia right now george uh our political leaders both at the federal and the state level have supported a covert zero policy uh so we've basically shut down the borders not just between states but also the national borders but our covert cases are relatively low compared to the rest of the world we've suffered something like 918 deaths but the criticism of our government is that we've had a very slow vaccine roll out only 15 of our country has been vaccinated whereas the united states it's about 55 to 60 percent but having said that the the case loads are increasing dramatically in the united states as we speak because of this delta variant the question here is can america learn to live with covert without shutting down the economy well i think we're going to find out i think we can i think it's important to note that the the failure to achieve a higher level of vaccine in the united states is not a problem of the mechanics of the rollout it is resistance to vaccination on the part of a significant cohort of americans who simply don't trust anything endorsed by the government and this by the way is not just uh dyspeptic trump voters during the campaign kamala harris is now the vice president and others in the democratic party said well we would not want to take a vaccine produced by the trump administration so vaccine resistance and hesitancy and skepticism was fomented uh by the left before the right got into the game that's interesting yeah yeah but the point here i suppose is that even if a country is 55 60 vaccinated there's always still a threat of lockdowns there is i i think it would be very difficult politically to impose a lockdown first of all because we have strong federalism here the police powers as they're called in our in our jurisprudence belong to the states uh mass mandates lockdowns these are not things the federal government can do and your vast disparities in the approaches to this from michigan which is very locked down to the state of florida where uh the masks themselves are are considered somehow a problematic and a difficult political statement yeah now it's a reminder of the differences between the united states and australia let's return to the biden public policy agenda i know it's only been six months but you mentioned that big spending stimulus package that's gone through congress and other infrastructure another big spending infrastructure spending is awaiting senate approval you mentioned inflation and this has been a big issue for the center for independent studies we're a minority voice on this issue in australia george but surely there's a big danger and you're not alone here even bill clinton's treasury secretary larry summers has warned that this big spending stimulus packages and we're seeing this around the western world won't that just overheat the economy and put upward pressure on interest rates which of course could just increase the risk of a serious downturn in the next 12 months that's exactly right first of all we're stimulating an economy that is over caffeinated at the moment an enormously successful drive to get people back to work and to the extent that they're not back to work it's because part of the stimulus was radically increased unemployment compensation making it rational economically for a large number of americans not to go back to work because they'd lose money because they would no longer be eligible for the increase in employment compensation add to that that the beginning of inflation coincides with difficulties in the supply chains around the world uh attributable to the pandemic so that you have increased demand and and uh diminished supply classic example of too much money it's them too few goods a classic definition of inflation well one of the big public policies in australia in recent times has been climate change and the centre right government of prime minister scott morrison is under all sorts of pressure from the corporate and media elites to slash australia's emissions net zero emissions by 2050 and we're all too often told that joe biden's leading the world in decarbonising the economy now biden has suggested that america will slash carbon emissions by half below 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050 however to make the paris targets legally binding and forcible and verifiable doesn't buy to need senate ratification and my understanding george is that he won't get the two-thirds of the senate to ratify the paris climate treaty so given all that are biden's promises on climate just empty gestures well there are to this extent first of all mr obama who negotiated the paris accord called it an accord it is not a treaty it is not binding because he knew he would have great difficulty getting 68 that's ratified it's a little bit like the iran accord it was another thing that should have been a treaty but there was insufficient political confidence on the part of the obama administration second uh these are all non-binding on any of the nations and most of the nations are not going to reach it the united states has done better than most nations much better than the european union nations in reducing its emissions because of fracking and the biden administration is hostile to fracking you would think that if people really believe their rhetoric about climate change being an existential threat to life on the planet they would say the first thing we're going to do is ramp up nuclear power generation no they don't want to do that either so it's a little bit hard to take this seriously i must tell you all of these these commitments to drastic reductions or net zero by uh just over the horizon in terms of time strike me is rather like the old soviet union grain quotas they're avowed but not constraining no one expects them to happen and i certainly hope and i've written in the past that who believe a bunch of politicians making commitments for 30 years time a time when none of these politicians will be in power and most certainly in the case of joe biden most will be dead but look getting back to the united states it does account for 15 of global emissions and its missions as you've been saying have been falling fairly significantly over the last 15 years and that's driven by as you say fracking natural gas renewables have replaced coal power but rising emissions from china india and the non-oecd they're steadily rising i think this is an important point to bear in mind how does biden encourage xi jinping someone he's called a thug how does he encourage the chinese leadership the indian leadership the developing world leadership how does he encourage them to slash emissions when their net emissions are steadily escalating he doesn't because the developing nations are a little bit weary of having the developed nations to tell the developing nations to quit developing so fast because that's what it amounts to if the agenda of the developing developed nations is to impose upon the world a regime of expensive energy no one's going to buy into this remember the the chinese commitment under paris is by 2030 to begin to reduce the rate of growth of its emissions so china is under paris required to do essentially nothing some people listening into this would be very nervous about this because if you can't get emissions down this is going to lead to catastrophic climate change this is a widespread view it's taught among our students at kindergarten to year 12 that you know climate change does indeed represent an existential threat um if indeed these international gatherings can't actually make serious efforts to reduce emissions what does all that mean how do we deal with climate change we deal with it largely by mitigation measures if there are if there's going to be a rise in the seas and of course the sea level has been rising by some measures for 20 000 years by others certainly since the middle of the 19th century you have to build some sea walls around miami it's a whole lot easier to do that than than to fine-tune the rheostat on the uh on the planet uh the fact is climate science is extremely complicated journalism is extremely simple never in the history of the world has it been possible because there weren't things like the internet and mass communications and all the rest never in the history of the world has it been anything like the degree of monarch mono mania developed by journalism about climate change they have a heat wave in seattle every media outlet in the united states says well that is caused by climate change it is quite simply impossible to say with any degree of responsible certainty a a particular weather event is caused by climate change so it's it's you you can't it would be a full-time job to simply go around and try and stamp out the nonsense so one one the the the good news is that while many people say it's existential their behavior doesn't indicate that they mean it you've been very critical of the republican leadership on capitol hill and obviously president trump but on that issue i think you're more aligned with the republicans than democrats that's quite evident let's talk about the post-trump republican movement the republicans of course under trump lost both the house of representatives and the senate and of course the white house so republicans are the minority party in washington for the first time since the what early obama era how do you think republicans have come to grips with uh the biden era and their own movement in the post-trump era well i think that they they're more intellectually comfortable now in opposition against mr biden particularly because mr biden is ignoring thomas jefferson's famous advice do not undertake large departures and policy on slender majorities the penalties to them 50 50. the democrats have a five-seat advantage in the house and yet they're proceeding as though it was 1933 when they had the first explosive growth of government under franklin roosevelt's new deal but he was coming off a landslide victory in the repudiation of herbert hoover the next explosive growth of government was in 1965 when lyndon johnson embarked willy nilly on creation of the great society program but he was coming off an enormous landslide victory bigger than roosevelt's in 1932 in 1964 when he won 44 states against my man barry goldwater this is a very different setting but the american people did not vote for this in proof of the lack of confidence that biden has is that his going in position is 98 of americans will be spared any need to pay for this in taxes that is he said as a candidate he's repeated as president that no american will have an increase in their taxes if they're making under four hundred thousand dollars that's all but two percent of the american people which indicates to me that when he says the american people want this is an asterisk over that statement they don't want it enough to actually pony up a nickel as long as it's free money that's appearing in their mailboxes and there's been a lot of that going on with with these stimulus checks guess what free money pays tolls very well indeed so joe biden essentially has been the trojan horse for this increasingly left-wing and interventionist uh faction of the the democratic party that surely august well for the republicans of the midterms in 22 next year right i had breakfast uh uh earlier this week with one republican senator i had lunch today with another and both of them think that joe biden is doing everything possible to produce a good republican year in 2010. now listen uh the former republican speaker of the house paul ryan whom you know recently addressed the ronald reagan presidential library he dedicated a washington post column to his address and i'd encourage all cis members to find the speech you can easily just google it it's paul ryan a ronald reagan presidential library i think it was in late may of 21 now notwithstanding ryan's criticisms of identity politics in cancel culture george is it fair to say that ryan's embrace of a ronald reagan cis-like agenda of free markets and fiscal discipline i mean does that really resonate in today's republican party today's republican party is a minority party in the united states and the ryan will if you will the ryan will view of reagan uh policies is a minority within the minority republican party one of the sobering things i think we have learned in the conservative movement in the united states is that conservatism understood as classic liberalism commitment to free trade small government uh individual rights is a lot smaller cohort in the united states than we had hitherto thought doesn't mean it can't be a larger cohort the last time [Music] the united states had a surge in belief in the paul ryan kind of conservatism was when the democrats produced in the 1970s stagflation they produced inflation they produced stagnation simultaneously which is a remarkable achievement never been done before as far as i can tell and that concentrated the minds of the american people on certain home truths they had forgotten i hate to say it but i think difficulties are coming and difficulties are going to be very good for a revival of the paul ryan ronald reagan kind of conservatism well that is interesting because if you look at conservative parties around the world let's take britain for example the tory prime minister boris johnson has smashed the british labour's red wall of working-class constituencies and for all his flaws didn't donald trump make significant inroads into the democratic traditional blue collar heartland so again i'll get back to this question how do free markets and fiscal discipline how does the economic reform agenda resonate with those folks who are you know coming to grips with the pandemic they've been displaced by economic globalization widening inequality how do we sell the agenda of free markets and free trade to that important electoral constituency george will interestingly the most encouraging and surprising development in the 2020 presidential election was the surge not yet by any means a majority but a surge of support among hispanics and hispanics are a very diverse group the cubans in miami and the mexican immigrants in denver colorado and very dissimilar but there seems to be a common receptivity to the idea of entrepreneurship that's why they came to the united states they didn't they don't come to the united states to get on welfare they come to the united states to go to work and they have a workforce participation rate higher than native americans native-born americans so it is here the sense of they have a great stake in economic dynamism that is is the opening for the republicans you're quite right donald trump made enormous gains became president because of the enormous gains in the old rust belt in the united states extending pennsylvania ohio michigan wisconsin he lost because he lost ground in those states but that had more to do with the his handling of the pandemic than it did with any repudiation of his low tax high growth policies which he rightly bragged had reduced african-american male unemployment to a record low george uh following on from trump's electoral success in 2016 of course one of the reasons why he did so well with that working-class constituency is he tapped into legitimate anxieties about identity politics and cancer culture this so-called woke left activism and nothing better demonstrates that than the the rise of what's called a critical race theory and we at cis through the work of one of our leading scholars peter kurdi has written a lot about critical theory generally now when we last met on zoom in 2020 it was shortly after the death of george floyd and since then of course the former police officer in minneapolis who who murdered george floyd he's been convicted and sentenced now before the jury had reached a decision uh president biden said he was praying for a guilty verdict and after the conviction biden said systemic racism is a stain on our nation's soul question is american law enforcement corrupted by racism that goes back to slavery no and neither is american society after the president's state of union address the republican response was delivered by tim scott an african-american from the deep south state of south carolina and he gave such a forceful defense of the essential goodness of america that joe biden and kamala harris were asked the next day is america a racist country and they both had to say no the political race theory asserts that the united states real founding was 1619 when the first enslaved africans were brought to the country that the country is saturated in racism that its essence is white supremacy and that almost no progress has been made and indeed there's been racial regression for the last i don't know decades perfect squalid nonsense and most americans know it's nonsense and they are extremely tired of a being lectured that they're racist running around calling people racist is really not the way to their hearts if you really want to want to prosper politically and furthermore there is now a very substantial broad-based grassroots reaction against schools importing critical race theory to teach their children at age eight that they should check their privilege and understand that they're part of an oppressive cohort now these are what you identify as the toxic precepts of critical race theory quote silence is violence but debates perpetuate oppression reason is a myth disguising power differentials an individual is a mere fragment of a tribe society is always in everywhere an arena of zero sum conflict pluralism is an instrument of repressive tolerance white people who deny their racism thereby confirm it teaching is a political act etc because the american educational culture from harvard graduate school to kindergarten and flagstaff arizona is a common academic culture it's spread as smooth as honey on toast across the entire american continent so there's really no difference in the kind of people who are doing our teaching but they are a minority they do not represent uh the parents of america who are sending their children to these schools critical race theory is marxism for people who realize what a grave disappointment the proletariat has been for marxist marxist driver of history will be the proletariat enraged and made revolutionary by the miserization of the proletariat by awful capitalism capitalism didn't cooperate it made everybody rich and prosperous and happy and free therefore what did they do they said well we need to find some other way to reduce politics to a power struggle and nothing but naked power and a zero-sum policy a power struggle uh the the fascinating thing about this it seems to me is that uh it's so discordant with the american experience i mean go to a go to a southeastern conference football game alabama against mississippi the head referee is an african-american he's bossing everyone around in what is the closest we come to an established religion in the united states which is southern football uh this is 50 years ago that the african marriage weren't plain in the sec so things have the progress in the united states is so astonishingly good uh so that they're they're generating a backlash that's going to complicate matters for the democratic party in 2022. and as you say there is already evident signs of a backlash among many school parents across the union correct absolutely i mean in san francisco as we speak which is the most city the most soggy with progressivism in all the united states there is a move underway and it looks as though it's going to succeed to with to recall three members of the hyper liberal school board a school board which wouldn't get their schools open during the pandemic but had found time to rename 44 schools because the the names were somehow tainted with racism or imperialism or something else for exam and they were so ignorant about it they decided to rename a school called the alamo school because they thought it referred to the battle of the alamo in texas and was therefore part of american expansionism and imperial actually the alamo was a kind of tree they'd named it after didn't matter when this was pointed out to them so got to get rid of it anyway we could go on about cancel culture and it is profoundly depressing for anyone who truly believes in liberalism let's cheer ourselves up and talk about the u.s china competition which is intensifying now president barton can i say one more thing about go for your life george sorry because you are one of these invaluable uh classic liberal outposts at your think tank the amazing thing is that critical race theory advertising itself as forward-looking scientific and advanced and progressive is in fact deeply reactionary the great rupture in politics the arrival of modernity through john locke and others and through the enlightenment was to begin to think about the indo citizens as individuals not as members of a class not as members of guilds not as serfs not of this driver that tribe but as rights bearing individuals and it is this core belief of modernity that critical race theory rejects and would have us drive backward away from into the re-tribalization of world politics he hear from all of us at cisu put it very well china uh president biden by all accounts is continuing the tough us anti-china policy the trump tariffs are still in place biden's reaffirming ties with taiwan if anything he's strengthening those ties and unlike trump he's called for human rights abuses to be called out and of course he's placed more emphasis on reviving u.s alliances in the region now you've called biden's foreign policy true monesque now that's after president harry truman who enunciated the containment doctrine during the early cold war how do you see the intensifying u.s china economic security competition playing out i think henry kissinger is right that we're in the foothills of a cold war and i think we are marching up beyond the foothills into a real cold war the difference is this the soviet union was such a backward country and remains a backward country economically whoever described it as upper volta with missiles got it about right the soviet union was not enmeshed in in the world trading system which itself was not nearly as developed as it now is china is a mesh in the world trading system and that's both good and bad the bad is china is a robust economic power and therefore a formidable competitor the good news is however that being enmeshed in this system and all the world's supply chains it is i won't say quite bound down like gulliver among the lilliputians by all the threads of commitments it has commercially but it is somewhat immobilized and it is somewhat restrained now a leninist state a leninist state in which the survival and primacy of the party is everything will in the end of the day and this is odd for economic determinists they will sacrifice the economy to the survival of the primacy of the party so we can't count on economic forces taming them we have an extremely aggressive president in president xi who has said i happen to think taiwan is the taiwan straits are far and away the most dangerous place in the world right now it's the only place a thermonuclear war could start he has said we cannot pass this problem the problem of taiwan as a renegade province as they say uh down from one generation to another a a very senior american uh military official who said he can see a war with china over this in the next six years the good news is not only is australia where you're really on the front lines of this and are acutely aware of the bullying and the dangers involved in dealing with china but japan's rhetoric has changed remarkably about its commitment to the defense in in in conjunction with the united states of taiwan against the attempt to settle the question of taiwan by force the biden administration from south korea to japan to australia to the philippines to vietnam to in to india is marshaling extraordinary amounts of gdp and potential military force to give i think the chinese second thoughts china suffered a trauma in 1996 when in their attempt to intimidate the taiwanese when they were having a crucial election they launched missiles into the waters around taiwan the united states response was to send not one but two aircraft carriers through the taiwan strait the trump of 1996 galvanized in beijing the determination to build up the people's liberation army which they have done and they now have a kind of dangerous confidence the military is saying and is being quoted in the state-controlled presses saying we can take the united states now in any conflict uh in in the western pacific that that i think that may not be true i know for a fact that uh war games conducted by uh the american military show a very dicey situation should work again uh but uh so this is ripe for a miscalculation on the part of the chinese yeah well keeping with taiwan and you mentioned your friend henry kissinger who's now in his late 90s july 21 marks the 50th anniversary of kissinger's secret trip to what was then known as p king and that paved the way for president nixon's historic trip to china in early 1972 and that of course set the scene for the renormalization of sino-american relations had that long period of a policy of engagement until trump in retrospect george do you think that nixon and kissinger sold out taiwan to maozi tong with the one china policy it was made very clear before kissinger got there as soon as he got there and while he and nixon were there it's made very clear to them that if if taiwan were not if there were not some agreement about 21 there'd be no agreement about anything so in the imperative of the first goal which was to bring china in as a counterweight to the soviet union uh i think what they did with the sharing high communique in the uh one china two systems band-aid that they put over this problem was defensive but much has changed since then not least the fact that a taiwan is a robust democracy putting the light through the fiction that somehow the chinese people are not suited to democracy second the no the percentage of taiwanese who think of themselves as taiwanese and not as part of mainland china has increased steadily and increasing uh more more rapidly i think it's about 85 percent consider themselves taiwanese not chinese extraordinary yeah absolutely so the united states which has been practicing a policy of strategic ambiguity for years as to whether or not the united states should be committed to a military defense of the independence of taiwan more and more people the head of the council on foreign relations in the united states senator tom cotton of arkansas who will be a presidential candidate for the republicans are all saying the strategic ambiguity has exhausted its usefulness and i think you will continue to see incremental ways of increasing the status of taiwan and the strength of u.s relations okay but if strategic ambiguity which was the heart of the one china policy 50 years ago if that's no longer prudent public policy as you've just argued let me push back here why should we push the issue given that taiwan is not claimed by the us or as vital to the u.s whereas taiwan is claimed by china question is preserving the independence of taiwan which nixon and kissinger conceded 50 years ago as part of china is it worth a war with a nuclear-armed china george will it's not worth a war but it's worth uh it's worth risking high tensions let's put it that way for the following reason this is not taiwan is not like vietnam where there was a civil war in a country peripheral to the great cold war at the time taiwan is vital to the united states in this sense nile ferguson a very fine historian uh writing now in the united states guested cis several times george but go on and he has very wisely said that for the united states to to uh witness the forcible takeover of taiwan would be a a a moment akin to the british moment over suez in 1950 56. and when the suez crisis revealed britain to be over overstretched and passed its apogee as a world power this if were china to forcibly take taiwan which they could probably militarily do in a matter of weeks were they to do this with the united states unable to respond in seoul in tokyo in new delhi all kinds of people would say ah the united states is no longer a power in the indo-pacific and we have to come to terms with china it would be a a moment of ethical uh change in the world balance of power according to peter harcher the prominent sydney morning herald columnist quote australia needs to make the most of the u.s alliance in its unfolding confrontation with beijing but it would be a serious error to again trust in the infallibility of u.s strategy and a grave error to assume the permanence of a nation's friendship or its interests harcher concludes australia ultimately can rely only on itself so how would you reply to the likes of peter harcher who reflect those doubts about u.s staying power in east asia i would reply by saying that australia independent of the united states is is not a safe australia it's an australia uh open to the the nasty kind of diplomacy of the so-called wolf warrior diplomats of china uh austria would be on australia open to the kind of bullying that we've seen in china's uh measures against economic and commercial relations with with australia over australia's interest in the origins of the pandemic and all the rest the united states certainly has made more than its fair share of foreign policy blunders since the korean war coming on but that said the united states still has irreplaceable assets principally the united states navy if the united states navy does not patrol the global commons which is the two-thirds of the planet covered with water no one will maintain order out there so the united states is still in that sense not the infallible nation but the indispensable nation the secretary of state madeleine albright called it at one point uh furthermore the united states is well positioned it seems to me to organize a a crescent of resistance to chinese expansion and to and to show that the the there are great reasons for confidence at a moment when i i think people may look back upon this as is the apogee of chinese power the chinese manipulation is going to shrink it's baked in the cake by the demographic reasons demography is to some sense destiny for a nation as china comes to terms with the folly as well as the cruelty of its old policy of the one child policy china is now susceptible to what's called the middle income trap that is it grew as rich as it got by selling cheap products made cheap by cheap labor in china now labor prices are rising in china so it's it's it hence this what's called the middle income trap uh china is a nation that's going to grow gray before it grows rich that is it's going to have an enormous number of elderly people requiring a safety net uh china has is a big country has big problems too yes we have a question here from one of our brisbane members and supporters ian dinkinson he he asks you george isn't following on from your very that very point isn't xi jinping more afraid of his own people rather than the us and its allies well i think so first of all again to repeat any leninist has an overriding goal and that is to preserve the power of the party uh to the which end uh he the the bargain in the last 15 years or so in china has been the regime said that the chinese people we'll make you rich you be obedient well the west had always hoped and this was the great wager made by every american administration republican and democrat alike since nixon went to china was that as china got rich there would be a middle class that would demand uh liberalization it was the starbucks fallacy people say once once starbucks china and the chinese people have a choice of 20 different coffees they're going to want at least two political parties [Laughter] turn out to be quite that way but look at a great nation that cannot come to terms with the uyghurs it has to to wage cultural genocide against the uyghur people it it can't live with an independent tibet i mean this is not the behavior of a secure confident nation yes you just reminded me um of something that richard nixon apparently said before he died now bill sapphire another legendary newspaper columnist in the united states he died more than a decade ago but sapphire of course worked for richard nixon in the white house in the late 60s and early 70s he was one of his speech writers and sapphire went on to become like you one of america's most distinguished columnists and sapphire said he actually asked nixon just before he died in 1994 whether nixon in the west had overstated the political benefits of increased trade with china and nixon replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he'd once been and this is a quote that nixon gave to sapphire quote we may have created a frankenstein george well the the theory was it was a cheerful liberal theory which was that once china was enmeshed in commerce once you had even a market dominated by the state it needed courts to adjudicate commercial disputes it needed a free flow of information because capitalism thrives on on the free flow of information and that there would the culture of capitalism would seep into the country and would lead to a civilizing effect that was a wager the americans made the west made and the wager has been lost let's face it so we have to go back we're now in the process or in the western world of developing plan b for a a a society that proves something we didn't want proven which is that you can have authoritarianism and rapid economic growth yeah i mean many people say that cis has been somewhat discredited on this question because we've long believed that more capitalism and economic openness will lead to not just prosperity but also political freedom and that clearly hasn't happened in china but as you say virtually every well every american administration from nixon right through to um obama subscribed to that liberal view now sticking with china you've been very critical in your columns particularly since the russian incursion in ukraine in 2014 you've been very critical of the russian regime of president vladimir putin you're not alone this is pretty much the orthodoxy in washington and you've supported nato expansion and other policies to be tough with russia but let me push back and ask you given that the biden administration is keen to create a coalition of states to keep a check on beijing's ambitions why on earth should we continue to punish russia and thereby push russia closer into russia into china's strategic orbit china of course being a long time strategic foe of russia why does that make sense from an american strategic perspective george for two reasons first of all trump has the normal autocrats feeling of not affection but of alignment with the autocrats in beijing so the idea that he needs to be pushed into collaboration with uh kindred spirits in beijing strikes me as a story you mean putin not trump i'm sorry yes second uh let's not lose sight of the fact that putin's government is a gangster government it poisons dissidents abroad it collaborates almost certainly with belarus when belarus forces the landing of a plane uh an international aerospace so that it can remove from the plane of belarus dissident this is gangster behavior add that to the fact that ukraine the largest geographically largest nation in europe is being dismembered has been dismembered in the crimea annexation is still being subject to piecemeal dismemberment by the russian government this is this is gangster government behavior attacking the post-war settlement in europe we really did think at the end of 1945 that the revision of european borders by force was a thing of the past well it's not because putin's russia continues to engage in it and if we don't stop it let me give you my nightmare scenario i believe the revenge's impulses of newton stem from his great grudge his great resentment that he nourishes which is the fact that as he said the great geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the disappearance of the soviet union which he reasonably blames on nato so suppose putin's real aim is to destroy nato how would you go about it well you'd try to prove that article 5 which says that an attack on one member is an attack on them all and there must be a unanimous collective response prove that article 5 is a dead letter how would you do that you do it by stirring up trouble in the baltic states where there are large numbers of russian-speaking ethnic russians uh in these baltic states so there there are all kinds of ways for putin to commit mischief more serious than any we've seen from him yet okay but it's been 30 years since your very good friend and another legendary columnist charles krauthammer coined the term the unipolar moment which represented american global preeminence strategic preeminence after the end of the cold war and the collapse of the soviet union 30 years given that america is pulling out of these wars in the middle east afghanistan iraq given that you know i'll push back here russia is a giant gas station it's a declining power surely there's some priorities now in washington to reorder its strategic priorities away from the middle east and europe and focus more on asia where there is indeed a rising power that threatens that regional equilibrium surely there are limits on american power george they are there are and that's one of the reasons why there is a de-emphasis of the middle east which took a disproportionate share of american attention on the morning of september 11 2001. that is receding the idea of that international terrorism is our main problem is now eliminated no one believes that anymore uh so you're quite right we don't want to have a fixation on russia neither however do we want to lose sight of the fact that we have an interest in the post-war world in which borders are not changed by violence uh and i think the united states can't do everything but it can do two things at once it can deter contain and and try to influence both russia and china just got a question here from james grist and he says george when will joe biden announce the transition to a new leader and do you think that kamala harris has what it takes to campaign and win the presidency in 2024 george i think there is a growing consensus of two things one is that joe biden will not run for reelection joe biden had very recently an absolutely appalling performance at a cnn town meeting in fact a lot of americans watched on their telephones a clip from an australian commentator i wish i could remember his name making riotous fun yes he's on sky news yeah so i think first of all i do not think he'll run but it's not the sort of thing he would announce any sooner than he has to because that would turn him into a lame duck prematurely regarding kamala harris i believe people are not impressed by her she was not impressed or liked in the united states senate uh nothing she has done since she's become vice president has done anything to increase her stature on the one hand that so the democrats have a problem if biden steps down how do they deny the nomination to an african-american woman that would be that would be politically difficult on the other hand it would be politically difficult to put all their eggs in her basket as she is i say she is neither liked nor impressive now let's conclude by trying to cheer us up george now only a generation ago and i was in washington working at the american enterprise institute in the 1990s and these were the great days of uh of um of a pax americana if you like the new american century the benign global hegemon only a generation ago america was rightly famed throughout the world for its democratic idealism but let's be frank during the last at least two decades american public life has undergone a terrible deterioration there have been some serious setbacks that have helped shatter american confidence obviously there's the post-9 11 wars that we mentioned at the great recession of 2008 2009 the various political scandals those mounting trade and budget deficits the massive debt the covert pandemic the technological disruption that this that has clearly displaced many working class folks and of course that intense polarization the cancer culture all of that given all this why are you still confident about america's ability to bounce back from these setbacks first of all america is unique in the world in welcoming and attracting immigration which i consider to be a great source of strength for our country some people look at people and see a problem i look at people and they see resources and people are still clamoring to get into the united states for all its problems because for all its problems it's still a good place to try and improve your life second the united states with its stupendously productive research universities it's industrial-based it's continental market it's industrious population the united states is still an enormous energy a source of economic energy and growth no one ever got rich betting against the united states and we're not going to do that then we have enormous problems we are seeing all the possible pathologies of democratic politics writ large in the in the promiscuous printing of money as though there's no tomorrow by a political class that feels uh that it has noun theories new monetary theory and all the rest to justify this these are transaction costs of democracy at all times but uh the united states you know it's been churchill is supposed to have said that the american people invariably make the right decision after they have exhausted all the alternatives i'd like to think we're pretty far down the list of alternatives and we'll start making the right decisions well when you turned 80 recently george you wrote in the washington post quote to be 80 years old in this republic is to have lived through almost exactly one third of its life and to have seen so many ephemeral excitements come and go that one knows how few events are memorable beyond the day you went on to argue quote this makes an american 80 year olds finishing sprint especially fun because it can be focused on this fact to live a long life braided with the life of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to an imperishable proposition is simply delightful george it's been an absolute pleasure having you here at cis which i hope will bring me to australia sooner or later pandemics permitted well we have to wait for the borders to open up and we do look forward to bringing you to australia eventually to meet all of our members george will thank you so much i've enjoyed it let's do it again well for decades cis has been a fiercely independent voice working hard to promote sound liberal principles to be notified of future videos make sure you subscribe to our channel then click the notification bell we rely solely on the generosity of people like you for donations to advance our classical liberal cause check out the links on screen now to see how you can get involved [Music]

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 12,101

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, Classical Liberalism, freedom of speech, Liberal Policy, Classical Liberalist, George F. Will, Fox News, Washington Post, Tom Switzer, Cancel Culture, Trump, Biden, China, Republican, Election 2020, Kamala Harris, Xi Jinping, Critical Race Theory, George Floyd, Derick Chauvin, Taiwan, Conservative, nixon, regan, truman, australia, covid response, mid terms, lefties, paul ryan, alan bennett, peter hartcher, free trade, small government, woke, CRT

Id: kafLblzlenw

Length: 59min 14sec (3554 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021