The Exit Interview
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Welcome to the Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Andrew Schwartz at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome back to the Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green, and I'm joined as always by Jude Blanchett, except this time is Jude's

two teardrops falling on the console jude's last podcast with me as co-host so i'm going to turn inquisitor and really see if i can get jude blanchett unbound for his last appearance on the hhs board for now but what i'd like to do jude is put you in the examination chair and quiz you on all the issues we've talked about since we've been doing this together but particularly your take on

on our collective ability to understand China and the geopolitics dynamics within Zhongganghai, what we've gotten right and wrong, all that stuff. Want to try to squeeze that out of you while I still have the chance. So let's get right into it, Jude. And thanks again for doing this with me. So let's start. Biggest hits, greatest hits. What has your field, sinology, paganology, gotten right?

in the time you've been at CSIS or the time you were in China last five, 10, 15 years, what has the field gotten right that we can take some comfort in? I'll go to what we got wrong in a minute, but what do you think was actually pretty impressive work? First of all, thank you, Mike, so much for giving me the chance to co-host this with you. It's been a pleasure in a good way since you physically left CSIS to stay in constant contact with you. This is a great question. And you're right that we spend so much of our time

Looking at analytic failures, how the information environment in China is getting closed, who lost China, how did we not get Xi Jinping? I will say, looking out across the broad spectrum of academics, think tanks,

not only in the United States, but if we think about the work being done at good organizations like Merix, many of the great academics who are working in Australia, Japan, the scope of analytic capability that people can now bring to China and the tools that people have built, whether that's satellite imagery, data scraping, large language models, advanced methodologies that academics are creating, we can focus on the black box part of China, which is really the

What does Xi Jinping think? If you zoom out of that, the amount of knowledge that is being produced about China to understand what it's doing in battery technology, what are traffic patterns in third tier cities, surveys looking at sentiment in China to track how people, and again, finding proxy questions to understand how people are thinking about the leadership when it's politically impossible to ask that question directly. Research happening on global China,

What are Chinese corporations doing in Africa? What are Chinese diplomatic actors doing in the messaging space and the information space to reach the global south, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? It is shocking how much we do know and how well broadly the analytic community is doing to understand China. Whether that knowledge gets in the hands of policymakers and informs decisions is a separate problem set.

But I'll just say in many ways, this is the sort of golden era of understanding China as a global power. So the demand side is unmistakable, you know, in the private sector and think tanks and universities.

What about the supply side? Are there new methodologies, AI, overhead imagery? Are the universities producing good sinologists? What about the supply of methods and people? Is that encouraging? Yeah. I'll have to speak with a bit of humility here because these are secondhand conversations, but if anyone who, the three listeners who listen to Pakingology will know that a question I often ask academics is the state of the field, as well as my own conversations in private. I think

Looking at this holistically, there are really wonderful tools that people are developing, you know, scraping technologies, sentiment analysis. But I think everyone knows that in many ways, these are substitutes for traveling to China and doing field work. And so we do have great new tools here that give people capabilities that we just couldn't have imagined 15, 20 years ago. But it's a trade-off because folks are just not able to go...

and be rummaging around and talking to local government officials to learn how municipal trash collection works or how the high-speed railroad network is regulated. So yes, new methodologies, but I think the most important methodology, which is the ability to go study a system up close, we've definitely lost that as the system over there has really closed up. What are the failures? Obviously, it's harder with a more closed, opaque, repressive, surveilled system.

polity, but are there some analytical failures or assumptions that you think were just fundamentally wrong in recent years that the field needs to reflect on? Part of it is the framework of assumptions that any analysis is embedded in. I think it was clear that we're always using a lagging framework, which is not catching up to where China is now and where it's headed. And I'll just say right now, I think we're in a

emergent failing framework in thinking about Xi Jinping. I think we're still wired to thinking about the consolidation of power under Xi Jinping, his strengthening of his position.

very much a post-2017 19th Party Congress view. And I think it's time we shift our framework to start thinking about Xi Jinping and the pressures he is creating in the system and the way that those actors in the system who are marginalized, who are penalized, who are seeing their wealth evaporate, who are looking to exit the country, who are trying to send capital abroad, who

local government officials who are not being paid. I think it's now time we start thinking about pressures building up in the system and how those are going to manifest. So I think you see this sort of consistent pattern of we lock onto a heuristic and a framework that drives analysis. China starts changing, but it's often hard for think tankers back here in Washington or academics in Chicago or San Diego to

to be tracking these shifts. People who are seeing this upfront, and again, I lived in China for much of the Xi Jinping, certainly the first term, are seeing this stuff, but don't necessarily have the analytic chops

to be writing about it. And so, you know, we were late to see Xi Jinping. We could say that it was because he really didn't show his true colors for the first few years. But again, I was in Beijing when he first came to power. I remember a lot of my liberal friends and liberal in the Chinese context means sort of free market rule of law.

They saw him pretty early for who he was, and they were worried, even before he assumed the position of general secretary, that he was going to be a staunch nationalist and a China firster. And I don't know if you remember, in the WikiLeaks dump of State Department cables, there is a, in the China community, a well-known...

cable from, I think, 2006, 2007, of someone who knew Xi Jinping and had grown up with him talking to a political officer in the embassy. If you go read this cable, that person nailed it. But that wasn't the droid we were looking for in 2012. We were still in a framework where China was starting to get a bit testy.

We were seeing China act a bit more belligerently, a bit more aggressively, but we were still in our sort of China entering the WTO paradigm, normalizing political systems, still some green shoots of liberalism and reform. And most importantly, the interlocutors for businesses and for government were these sophisticated Western educated technocrats.

who spoke the language and really gave us hope. And so we kind of, we were so locked into a framework that as China started changing under Xi Jinping, I think it took us a while to catch up with him. So I think that's just a perennial problem of the framework determines what you work on. And these frameworks get really sticky. So I'm not sure that's a failure. It just seems to me to be a feature of this. It's a perennial problem. I'm not making a

a sort of moral comparison between she's china and germany or japan in the pre-war period but if you read the diaries uh and about uh u.s ambassadors in tokyo and berlin joseph grew in in tokyo for example they were talking to the internationalists and who were projecting their own best case scenario and it took there's a famous uh cable the crew sent

called the green light cable saying, I've tried everything. My interlocutors are now powerless. Do what you got to do in terms of sanctions and so forth. And the rest is history. And your point about the system dynamics is really important that the growing impact of China on interests we have around the world fixated us on the external impact and not the internal dynamics.

When you were saying it, it reminded me, when I was a PhD student at SAIS at Johns Hopkins, I was a research assistant for Harold Brown, who was there, the former Secretary of Defense. And he was a brilliant material science physics PhD student.

And he was the best analyst of politics I ever met because he could think about sort of hydraulics and you crank up the pressure over here and the pipe starts to leak over there. And he just had this three-dimensional way of thinking that political scientists and even historians struggle with. I'm not suggesting everyone listen and change their major to physics, but it is tough.

understanding the hydraulics, if you will, of international and domestic politics. So let me pull on that string one more way, which is the famous who lost China. You're not allowed to say all of the above. If you do, you have to rank them.

The sort of popular version that you get from both Trump and Biden officials selling their Asia policy is often who lost China? Well, everybody before us, all the China hands in the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama administrations, or even back to Nixon, who failed to see the inevitable Leninist strategy unfolding.

Although there is something to that. So how do you rank them? There's, you know, who lost China? You know, Washington lost China. Xi Jinping lost China. Contingency, the global financial crisis, things people didn't know or thucydides. Basically, it was inevitable. We

You must in your head rank these. We ask our guests all the time, but I never get to ask you. So here's your chance. Well, if I can, one throat clear is I very much do not subscribe to the we lost China in the mid 1990s and should not have pushed forward with WTO accession because it's easy and cheap now to say that

We were hoodwinked by the Chinese. We had this Whiggish dream that through inexorable forces, China would liberalize and democratize. And aren't we so silly and naive? And the only reason I take such a vociferous view on this is

I wrote an entire book about how a conservative reactionary movement grew in China because the conservatives in China thought WTO accession was going to liberalize China and that the capitalists had taken over the Communist Party. If you were reading intellectual magazines on the left and the right all throughout the 1990s, they're battling over the WTO.

liberal reformers think the WTO is going to be this catalyst for change in China. Arch conservatives say, we think so too, which is why we've got to basically dig in our heels because we're looking at a pattern of facts here starting in 1992 with Deng's Southern tour and pushing forward PNTR and then WTO accession. And we think the capitalists have taken over. And then remember, Jiang Zemin announces the three represents, one of which is that capitalists can now come into the party.

Retrospectively, I think some have tried to shoehorn this to say that this was actually the party's way of subsuming

market forces. But at the time, it was very clear that reactionary elements in the system saw this as a peaceful evolution, color revolution from within. I don't say that maybe we should have been wiser and understood more deeply the Leninist roots of the system, but it's just to say that if we got China wrong in the 90s, so did an awful lot of Chinese there. Second thing, just to pick one, because I think you're right, it's unfair to say all of the above.

I think to me personally, events that occurred, contingent events that occurred starting the mid-2000s up really until the time Xi Jinping came to power cannot be underestimated the seismic importance of these. And I'll just run through some of them. You not only have, of course, the global financial crisis, but you had a series of violent clashes in Tibet and in Xinjiang in 2008,

which really, again, I was living in China at the time, shocked the security system. You had, of course, events like 2011, the Wenzhou train crash, this really horrific high-speed rail train crash driven by corruption, where two trains smashed into each other. But more importantly, this led to this seismic outpouring of discontent with the party on Weibo, which was an emergent Twitter-like platform, which shocked the party about how information technology can be this

radical tool for dissent

You, of course, have the external environment, color revolutions, Arab Spring. And I think about, if you go back and reread Vladimir Putin's Munich Security Conference speech of 2008, something was in the air for autocrats at that time where they were on notice. And the conversation that is clearly happening between China's authoritarian system and external events, whether those are in the Middle East, whether those are in Russia's periphery. And then, of course, domestically, you have...

events like Bo Xilai and the attempted unseating of Xi Jinping. So I can't run this counterfactual. And I'm not saying if these events hadn't happened, China would be this flourishing democracy. But having lived through that entire stretch in China and seeing where China was in 2006, which I'm not pretending it was a friendly giant, but certainly felt like it was on enough of a trajectory where we were thinking about a reasonably a responsible stakeholder trajectory

path for China. And then where we are in 2012, 2013, it was a dramatically different country, just living in it. The presence of security, the closing ideological and information environment, all that changed dramatically in those five or six years. So I just... It doesn't answer your question entirely, but I think pinning this on Xi Jinping...

is so is is dramatically underestimating the importance of that series of contingent events. And of course, I'm going to steal from Chris Buckley, who was over here for dinner last night, but he had a great line, which is Xi Jinping was born in that period of like 2007 to 2012.

Right. That's really what forged Xi Jinping. And that that makes a lot of sense to me. The other thing about the who lost China debate is if you do wind the clock back to 2006, let's say, for example, the advocates of the U.S. failed to see the Leninist path, went back in a time machine.

to the situation room in 2005 or six, and I was in the situation room in these meetings in 2005, what would that person tell the president? All right, I need you to go to all the US allies and say we're cutting off trade and investment with China. I need you to stop any technology. I mean, it's pretty, you can imagine some slightly different spin on the ball, a somewhat different approach.

But this is not a binary reality. It was a spectrum of possibilities. And I can tell you, Jude, that when I first started in the White House, President Bush, first thing he said to me was, we're going to try to get China right, but I want to join this job because I'm not sure it'll work and we're going to need Japan and we're going to need allies. And that was true for all the presidencies. Nobody was making a binary bet. It was always a matter of how you mitigate risks.

You could probably think of some things enforcing WTO compliance, maybe talking to Apple a little bit about their exposure or some other firms, but it's mostly tactics, not strategic or something. You could not have done what we're doing today in 2005. I think there's a serious debate on this. And then there's the flippant one, which I totally agree with you. Again, I'll only bring him up once. And this is the only time I've brought him up on the podcast, but John,

I remember reading something once where he said, we should have started this in the mid-1990s, right? We should have started this all-intensive campaign to deny China growth.

And I think that intellectually is a coherent statement, but it's practically, it's nonsensical. Because to your point, you're counterfactual. What is the case you would make in 1994? What evidence would you base that on? And how are you going to build a consensus domestically, internationally, that we should strangle the Chinese economy in the bathtub?

So it makes sense of sort of pure IR logic, but it makes no political sense. I think this sets this fantastical discussion. The serious discussion is, of course, it's just absolutely obvious we did not do nearly enough to advocate

as we're bringing China in, harden up the system, whether that's companies being much, much smarter when they're operating in China. And I can say this having spent more than 10 years as a private sector consultant for companies. I mean, I started in Beijing and when I was at the conference board, my interest was always the communist party. I couldn't get a single senior leader to take a briefing with me, you know, CEO C-suite on the party in 2014, um,

By 2017, 2018, suddenly people wanted to know what the heck is the Communist Party because suddenly the party committee in their company or the party committee representing the joint venture partner saying, hey, let's rewrite the articles, the agreement of this joint venture, and let's give the party committee a strategic vote in all important decisions the company makes. But that was when it was really had gotten so bad that it was in your face. But 2012, 2010,

From a political standpoint, companies should have been doing far more to protect their assets, to protect their IP. And same, universities should have been doing much, much more to put procedures in place. The United Front existed in 2008. It existed in 2006. So that to me is the more serious lesson of not, we should have strangled the Chinese economy in the bathtub in 1996. It's more...

Yeah, we should have been as we made this bet. And I think it was a smart bet to make, given the alternatives of making China an adverse enemy before they had done enough to clearly prove that they didn't warrant a shot at this.

We should have just been smarter about protecting. It's a little bit of a parlor game. It's kind of analytically engaging and fun to have these debates, but I think it matters because as you frame a strategy going forward, you really need to be nuanced in your understanding of how we got here, what worked and what didn't and why it did or didn't and avoid these broad stroke. We should have strangled them in the cradle or it's all our fault because we were too confrontational. There are lots of things that

Every administration probably could have done differently, but I think what's needed is more of a forensic understanding of ways and means and not a kind of broad brush, like throw the whole practice of statecraft over four administrations out and become the next canon. And to take the other part of this, which you just mentioned, which is the we lost China because we treated them poorly and didn't give them the seat at the table. That again doesn't stand up to the pattern of facts because again,

You're seeing this evolution of China on the military front, on the foreign policy front, on the domestic politics front, way before we're overtly taking on a much more confrontational policy starting around, pick your time, 2017, 2018. This development is well, well mature by then. And it's not because...

Obama announced the pivot. It's not because of what the Bush administration did. It is because of the internal logic of the Communist Party, which seeks self-preservation at all costs. And it's not just self-preservation. It has a very ambitious view of where China should be in the world, how peripheral countries should behave relative to China's power. And so I think that's the other, like, one other factor I'll add in there. It's not just these contingent events.

I think arguably the other most significant factor in changing China's behavior was

They'd been going to the gym for a long time. And suddenly one day you look and you can see a six pack and you can start making those pecs go up and down. And I think power changed China's calculus. And your relations with your neighbors changes when you, I mean, poor Yang Jiechi made that one quote years ago, which I bet he wishes John Pomford at the Washington Post had never overheard of him. That's the one where he said to the foreign minister of Singapore, there's big countries and small countries and you got to know the difference. Right.

I think, you know, if you'd imagine China's economic development had stalled in the late 1990s, if Deng had never made the southern tour in 92 to revive reforms after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and China had stayed in this much more status period, which started right after 1989, and Deng basically kicked open, the economy had stalled, resources for military modernization had stalled. It still would have been a big country, but I think we'd be having a different conversation. I think the steroid shot that they took

And W2O Accession certainly contributed to that. I mean, it certainly helped make them a manufacturing powerhouse. FDI flows from the United States certainly helped. The intangibles of U.S. companies teaching Chinese companies how to operate, how to get better, we certainly contributed. But I think if you hadn't seen that

accumulation of resources and power, we might also be in a different place with China. If it hadn't been for the Chinese economy, the US would not have had the same resources it had in the same period. Abe would not have stayed on as prime minister for eight years because his economic growth and the resources for his strategy, the free and open Indo-Pacific to deal with China,

Good part of that came from trade with China. It's a weird world we live in. Yeah, that some countries are big countries. Some countries are small countries lined by Yang Jiechi. I try on my kids. It just doesn't work. I think there's a pretty broad consensus now about China's general trajectory.

And I don't get a lot of pushback. I do in Australia. The China community in Australia is a little bit different from the US or even Europe, certainly Japan. But in general, I think there is a broad, I don't know what you'd put it among experts, 80% consensus, something like that, that Xi Jinping does seek what you would call

analytically, not euphemistically, a more hegemonic position in Asia, able to dictate turns on anything of importance to China and the region, maybe globally. That's more debatable. The harder call is how much risk he's willing to take to get there. That's the hardest call of all in some ways. So I want to sort of break into that with you. Let's start with Russia and China and alignment. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao's China would have been much more careful

about Russia and Iran and North Korea and held them in some contempt, actually, is my view, having been in some of the summits. They didn't say it explicitly, but it's now very, very different. How much risk tolerance, how much ambition does Xi have for these proxy wars and these provocations by Iran and Russia and North Korea?

What makes us think that Xi Jinping is very risky or risk tolerant? There's another way to say that he just has very low expectations for what the reaction from the West is going to be. I'm not denying the question. I think he is a bold leader. But I think another way is he's just he's made a calculation that he's going to be able to get away with a lot. That's a flip side of the same coin. Yeah. Putin, Crimea, then Ukraine, Japan and China, then Pearl Harbor. I mean, you pick your authoritarian expanding state.

And yeah, they think they see a flashing green light. That's true. Matt matters to me, which side of that coin you take for thinking about which side you think is the explanatory one, because I hear people reference like Hong Kong as an example of how risk tolerant Xi Jinping is. And I think,

Sadly, I think the lesson is the opposite. It's how risk intolerant he thinks the United States is, right? Because they did a lot of groundwork in Hong Kong to suss out what they thought the response was going to be. And I'll just say, I know from major financial companies,

They were approached by elements of the Hong Kong government, which were really from Beijing before the national security law was announced. And they were told the broad parameters of the national security law because Beijing wanted to gauge, are you going to leave? And once they knew, I'm not naming any companies, but big companies are staying. Okay. They also made an estimation that the United States and the UK are going to have very little recourse on this.

Taiwan, I think, is another one where I think he's making calculated gambits that he's not going to face much pushback for this round of exercises, continuing to squeeze Taiwan. I think he feels now he may be wrong. I think Ukraine is another example. I think the leadership in Beijing probably underestimates the price that they've paid in long term ways that are going to affect China's trajectory. But nonetheless, I think their assessment is we found a pretty good Goldilocks where we can support Russia.

And we're going to take some diplomatic and reputational hits, but we're not going to get slaughtered by Europe and the United States. Again, I don't want to say they haven't paid a price, but I think relative to the objective that they have, which is Russia winning, they feel like they actually haven't been too risk tolerant. You're telling me that the strategic report you and I put out with colleagues on how to protect Taiwan, democracy in Hong Kong didn't deter them? Yeah.

It gave them pause. It certainly gave them pause. I don't know, but can I ask you, does that resonate with you? Yeah. I mean, yes. He has more risk tolerance personally and within the system than who or John did for sure, for certain. And my view, and it's harder to prove, is that he knows that, or put another way, he knows that his risk tolerance is higher than ours. And so I think you're right. And it does raise the question whether

We need to disabuse them of that. So the whole strategy is now predicated on, what does Jake Sullivan call it? Intense competition? Competition, yeah. With guardrails. Maybe we, meaning the US or close US allies, need to look at ways to break assumptions and surprise him. There's risk in that on our side, but that's the merit. And maybe that's what's needed. If you're right, that's more about Jiang Nanhai thinks he can get away with it rather than they're just willing to risk it all.

We need to remind them. It could be that the semiconductor exports controls might do that. It could be some transits. I think, I don't know, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia doing a transit probably surprised them. Maybe the EU, but you start going through the list. It's not that shocking. Maybe there's a need to kind of

blow away some assumptions about risk on the US side. And I don't think the way to do it is to be unpredictable, the sort of Trump thing, because our great strength is our allies. So we can't, we don't want to do it in a way where we scare our allies more than we scare China. It has to be something that hits that sweet spot, but maybe we need more of that. What do you think?

I was going to make faint praise of Trump with the massive proviso that you just made, which is unpredictability, if it's vectored on an opponent, can be helpful. If it radiates across all of your partners and allies, less so. And this is the hard area of trying to step up the pressure on China when you are the leader of and part of a thick network of allies and partners who you're trying to move in concert with. You

You're constrained in what you can do because, of course, you have to take into account what countries who live literally next door to China, Korea, Japan, Philippines. So there is a restriction. I think it's easy to say madman theory, keep them guessing. But the massive cost on that is, to me at least, this is a team effort.

And I'm comfortable on that trade-off that it's going to mean at the margin, you don't have as many tools at your disposal as if you're operating alone. But I will say, I think there certainly was in President Trump's ability to think outside the box.

do things where diplomatic decorum would typically not have allowed and to have a degree of uncertainty. I just want to really constrain this point because I'm not trying to make a maximalist one. To see how Beijing reacted to those elements, there's something in that. I also think the Biden administration, you know, taking some time in the first four or five months of the administration to let Beijing sit and sweat is a good example of doing this without

rocking your allies and partners, right? They didn't immediately go dashing off to Beijing to try to set the sort of broad parameters of the relationship. They were fine building their team,

you know, getting an internal strategy, partly because they knew Beijing's sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring. And that's not a bad thing. I wonder if that just made the foreign ministry sweat, though. I wonder if the Central Military Security Mission was actually meeting and urgently decide how do we engage with the Americans. But yeah, it's the right approach. In and of itself, that's not a strategy. But I think that is a tactic that

that certainly gave Beijing pause. I think that needs to be a part of a one-two punch combination. But nonetheless, I think it just shows when we do act in ways counter to what Beijing expects, it opens up space. The question is, you then need to have a second act. You can throw them off guard, but to do what? I could tell you when the next administration's in the situation room spitballing about what goes on that list of things that would backfoot Beijing and demonstrate

that we and our allies have risk tolerance. Two things I would cross off immediately if someone said them. One would be the idea that there's a Russia card you can play against China or a North Korea card. I think that's projecting a certain, and it's not something that I think Harris would do, but Trump would be tempted. It's projecting a certain art of the deal mythology that is completely out of sync with the reality of the alignment among these states. I'd take that off the list. I would take threats off

I'm a Theodore Roosevelt guy, speak softly, carry a big stick. Things that might go on that list, this may be too rich for some people, more active cyber measures, that would get their attention. Moving towards a, this would require some core allies to make a big decision, but moving towards a more deliberate collective security framework, not a NATO necessarily, but a joint combined in command. A bipartisan deal in Congress to dramatically increase munitions production. A few things like that, I think that would start breaking some of their tensions. I don't know if the next

administration has the political, you know, wherewithal to do it. But those are the kinds of things that might do it. The collective security agreement that is not NATO. How does that discussion get started in a way where you don't have to constantly be saying this is not Asian NATO?

Is the ground already seeded for that? If I were in government again, and it's a lot easier to do this on a podcast than in reality, I would be seeding those discussions now with the right people so that every crisis is an opportunity, as the cliche goes. And the next time China does something big and offensive and mischief-free, or to Taiwan or the Senkakus, then you come out with whatever it is. And it could be a joint and combined operations center issue.

with the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada. Could be something with a quad. I'm not sure the Indians would be there. You need to think of what your menu is and then seize the opportunity. When the North Koreans sank the Cheonan, the South Korean corvette, 14 years ago, the Obama administration came very close to getting a collective security statement out of Japan and Korea. Very close. The three foreign ministers, Hillary Clinton and her counterpart, stating an attack on any of us by North Korea is an attack on all of us.

Very close. Seoul got cold feet at the last minute. That kind of thing is a powerful dissuader to Beijing, I think, because it shows that their actions are undermining their own counter-containment, counter-coalition strategy. It takes pretty bold...

diplomacy and it takes counterparts who are ready for it. In bits and pieces, the administration's done an enormous amount in bits and pieces, from the Quad to force posture to the squad with Australia, Japan, and the Philippines. And I'm not saying a NATO is in the offing, but there are many ways to show collective defense capabilities. Can I ask you on this, your sense of how we're recording this on October 31st, just to timestamp it. The seismic news, to me at least, of the last week is...

12,000 North Korean troops in the Ukraine war. What are you hearing? How is that reverberating around the region? And in terms of catalyst events for new conversations on security, now, I'm just curious, is now the fact that we have a bridge between conflict in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and certainly something we can talk about access of upheaval, but certainly now seeing...

Russia and North Korea do something which I don't think literally any analyst that I know in the world nine months ago would have predicted.

How is that shaking out across the region? Well, the development proves your earlier argument about Xi and Putin doing this because they think they can, not because they're crazy. And I think the reaction in the region has been encouraging and discouraging. The Koreans are seized with it. President Yoon has suggested that Korea will move to providing direct munitions to Ukraine instead of the indirect approach they have now. Japan is seized with it. But across Southeast Asia, it barely is even registering.

It's a problem for us in much of the so-called global south that this geopolitical alignment of these authoritarian states barely, you know, outside of Singapore, barely registers. But I do think we should be seizing this. The French blocked a NATO headquarters or office opening in Tokyo, just an office. I mean, there should be much more demonstrable effect of the counterbalancing. History rhymes. It doesn't repeat.

But after Japan invaded China in 1937, the Admiralty in London proposed to the U.S. Navy a joint squadron of battleships, American and British, crews the first island chain.

And Japanese historians have said that might have had a massive impact on the Japanese assumption. So I'm for something big and bold, but not, as I said, the stupid Russia card. You can't drive wedges that easily without doing huge damage to ourselves and not like loud talk with no action. And just to maybe put a nail into the reverse Kissinger thing.

Reverse Kissingers are easy to do. All you need is the two countries you're trying to wedge to be at the

loggerheads and actually fighting each other in border wars. I'm not taking anything away from what Henry Kissinger did, but I would also just to say that was an opportunity waiting to be seized. It was challenging, it was difficult, but waiting to be seized because we were now, what's that, 71? He does his trip through Pakistan. So we are 13, 14 years into a intense Sino-Soviet split. Exactly. And there is no such Sino-Soviet split. Quite the opposite, as Hal Branz has pointed out, China and Russia are

And you can throw in Iran and North Korea, but particularly China and Russia are doing more to help each other than Nazi Germany and Japan did during World War II. Non-linearity is the dynamic at work there because, again, I just think – let's go back to question two about analytic failures. This is a huge one because I think there has been a – and I wouldn't say I'm necessarily better on this, but has –

continue to underestimate that relationship and what it's going to mutate into. And I think the conversations that should be had about this, especially now that, again, this dynamic of North Korea is

What are our nonlinear expectations for what a potential Russian role in a second Thomas Scholl or a Taiwan Strait crisis are? Do I think they're going to send active troops? I don't know if China would want that. I don't think it wants to figure out jointness and interoperability on the fly in an actual conflict. But then again, I would have bet you my house that the North Korean troops are going to not be fighting in a European land war. So necessity and

Seeing an opportunity makes country do interesting things. A non-linear view of this triangular relationship between North Korea, Russia, and China is vital. We have to be absolutely prepared for what I think is more than just a possibility that in a Taiwan or North Korea contingency, the Russian operational tempo shoots way up in the North Pacific.

that Iran is targeting more ships with help. I mean, it's not D-Day where we have five nations landing on the beaches together in their own way. I think that we have to be prepared for much more coordinated expressing of our system. That doesn't have to be coordinated. No.

I think that's the other thing is I think where all of these countries, there is a lining set of underlying interests and incentives and tacit understandings. And also the fact that they're all deeply opportunistic means that Russia is going to find its own niche to play in a Taiwan crisis that serves its own interests. That is going to be extraordinarily challenging for us. They're not sitting still in that.

Again, I don't know if that means Russian troops in the fight, or that just means Russian subs up near Japan scaring the heck out of everybody, or that means wherever the war is in Ukraine, that they, as you say, massively step up operations there. But they're going to take advantage of that. I can tell you the exchange between Australia, Japan, Korea, and NATO, New Zealand, the so-called IP4, NATO delegations to the region. I host them a lot at the center in Sydney. They're up. That's all really good.

But we, the collective alliance system, are way behind where we need to be. And within the governments in Europe or in Australia or in Japan and Korea, they are so overwhelmed with the complexity of what they now face vis-a-vis their immediate threat, Russia itself.

China, North Korea, that they kind of know at some level we're all in this together, but it's very hard for these governments to find the bandwidth to do it. And it is therefore really incumbent on the next U.S. administration to keep pushing as uncomfortable it is. I want to ask you one more risk question before we spend 10 hours on this podcast.

A lot of people work out while listening to podcasts. I hope everybody's doing a second ring at the gym now. The economy, the other piece of this course, and you've done good work on this, and it surprised people, but how much Xi is hardening the Chinese economy, not just for economic competition, but for war, for conflict, to get through these. Can you say a bit about that and whether we're alert enough to it and thinking enough about our own hardening and resilience economically? Yeah, I mean, in many ways, Xi Jinping is doing what

You would advise if you worked in the Chinese national security state and you were looking at the developments in geopolitics and you were looking at policy in the United States and Taiwan and Japan, and you went in to brief Xi Jinping on what he should do that is politically realistic. I think you would say a lot of what Xi Jinping is doing now. I tend to think of sort of four buckets here. There's hardening, diversification, coalition building, and coalition busting.

that I think is part of the Xi Jinping political economy plan. The hardening is, I think, what you're seeing of really trying to firm up supply chains, stockpiling of munitions, chips, energy, right? And I don't think that's with

He circled August 1st, 2027 on the calendar as the day to launch it. I just think he's looking out at the world and he's saying, comrades, we've got to prepare ourselves. So there's the hardening. The diversification is bricks. It's the push China's making into the Middle East to diversify relationships and energy and commodities. It's trying to build coalitions in the global south, having seen what occurred in Ukraine and knowing if you can get most of the UN to shoulder shrug,

when a resolution comes out condemning the Chinese seizure of an outer island. So diversifying relationships, diversifying trade relationships, diversifying, we're talking about payment systems like SIPs, trying to get more cross-border transactions to be settled in the RMB. Coalition building is SEO, BRICS, trying to really making this

huge effort to build this, its own counter coalition and then coalition busting, which is doing what it can to money the waters, throw gear in the sands of US allies and partners. So it's hard for me to understand a lot of economic policy without that sort of framework, I think, of how they're thinking about this. But securitization of the economy is

It's not all of it. I mean, they still are thinking about what they did in the 19th Party Congress with the changing the fundamental contradiction to be focused on improving people's livelihoods. And there is stuff they're doing in that space. But just the overwhelming tempo and pace of this is hardening the system.

Now, I just, as a technical point, say the problems in Chinese economy are not over securitization. That's not really what's driving economic challenges. It basically comes down to the property market, right? The demographic stuff is longer term. Yes, it has a bite.

But the stuff that is roiling, the reason the Chinese economy is going to struggle to grow at the growth target of 5% this year is because in the summer of 2020, they pulled the pin out of a grenade in real estate policy and basically created a liquidity seizure for one third of the Chinese economy. So that I think just the real reason I'm saying this is I think you could see a cyclical recovery of the Chinese economy next year.

That's an important story for BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. I think the story for most of us is...

That piece you mentioned of, look, they're widening infrastructure in Fujian province, which is across from Taiwan to be able to move things through the streets. They're redesigning intersections for mobile missile units to be able to come in, fire, and then go back and reload. Again, you look at the stockpiling. And I really don't think this is, again, as I said, an invasion is coming. I think this is probably the, if you were an advisor in a Leninist system and you wanted to keep your job,

working within those constraints, you would probably with good conscious think, this is what we've got to be doing. Sanction proofing, stockpiling, getting ready for the prospect of conflict. The fair winds will all miss you at CSIS. Of course, I'm in Australia, but still have a toehold there. And look, it's not like the think tank scene is the National Football Conference East and we're all competing directly. We're not. It's more like one's playing football, one's playing cricket, one's playing baseball,

And as you said at the outset, this problem is so being complicated, we need all those approaches. So looking forward to seeing what you do. The Asia Chessboard is going to keep on keeping on. It's not like geopolitics are getting less interesting. Stay tuned. We'll have an episode coming up. But Jude, thank you. We did a longer than normal recording, but I wanted to squeeze as much out of you as I could. And great doing this with you over the years. Thank you, Mike. It's been a real pleasure and honor.

For more on strategy and the Asia program's work, visit the CSIS website at csis.org and click on the Asia program page. And for more on the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, please visit ussc.edu.au.