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Hi again, I'm Barry Weiss. This is Honestly, and as you've likely noticed from the title of this podcast you just clicked on, this is part two, part two of my deep dive into what I think is the biggest story in the world. That's the story of the rising power and the global influence of the Chinese Communist Party. If you haven't yet heard part one, it's just a short click away.
Here in part two in my conversation with Josh Rogin, we broaden out from the origins of the pandemic and the failure of the media to understand the virus, to look at the CCP and its ambitions, how we can see its power over Hollywood, over the NBA, over big tech, and over Wall Street. We also talk about the recent news out of Afghanistan and how a world in which America is in retreat and China is ascendant will be radically different from the one that we were born into.
Once again, I'm so grateful to Josh for doing this. And I think if you haven't followed his reporting, you will find it absolutely essential right now. Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. I want to sort of broaden out the conversation and talk about how the view of China, the sort of public view of China shifted from
has been shifting for, I think, a few decades now and how the pandemic really sped up that shift. So when I worked in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I think I joined in like 2012, 2013. And the slogan of the op-ed page famously is, you know, free people, free markets. And the common thinking at the time vis-a-vis China was,
was basically that if you opened up China's trade and its economy, that there would be sort of an opening up in terms of the society at large, kind of like what happened in the Soviet Union. And that seemed to me to be the consensus view on the center left and the center right for a pretty long time. I'd love for you to reflect on how they got it so wrong and what you see as sort of the hinge point for when that began to shift.
The discussion over the rise of China, which I think is often incorrectly characterized as a U.S.-China spat, but is more accurately described as an international response to China as it rises, was confined for decades.
decades to a small group of China hands of the ivory tower variety. And these China hands, again, having their own biases and conflicts of interest in many cases, fought bitterly against the realization that
Their large project to encourage China to liberalize was failing, and they fought bitterly against the implications of that, which affect them directly. And what I tried to do over the course of the book was to bring more Americans into that conversation for just that reason is because, as you correctly point out, now after the pandemic, everyone –
knows we can debate how much but you everyone is certain that the Character and actions of the Chinese Communist Party affect them in their lives if you're sitting in your basement You haven't seen your grandmother in a year, you know to some degree the what happened at the top levels of the Chinese Communist Party Exacerbated your suffering your family sub continues to do so so that that did have a big effect, but what what I what I documented the book is sort of also a generational turnover in other words a
The generation that managed the relationship for all of those years was a party to that bet. But the younger generation of Asian hands, while not a monolith of opinion or analysis, have no stake in it and see China for what it is, not for what the older generation wanted it to be. And, you know, that younger generation came of age, especially in Washington. And I say younger generation cautiously because I'm 42 years old. But the point is now they're middle aged and they found themselves during the Trump administration in positions of influence and
And they saw in Donald Trump, a president who was willing to abandon all conventional wisdom and think out of the box. And and and that inside the government, which was a tough story to report, freed up a lot of people to do a lot of things on China that they thought were long overdue, like confronting economic aggression and confronting influence operations and not just worried about which island in the South China Sea has this runway or how many missile silos. That's like kind of like.
You know, that's not really the edge of the competition. It's not. OK, it's not really about how many nuclear weapons they have. It's about technological, ideological, economic competition for most. Right. OK, and that's a different game. And the anarchists of the world don't have the experience in playing the game. Plus, they're conflicted because they're getting money.
cash, okay, from the other side. Now, the point that you got to with your position at the Wall Street Journal editorial board, I would just point to the first two words of that paper title, Wall Street, okay? And this is the part of our society that is the most compromised and the most egregiously funneling billions of dollars of American wealth and technology and know-how into the hands of
Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated companies hand over fist for years and years. And in fact, as the rest of our society sort of starts to rein in its relationships with China to decide where we need to decouple and where we don't, because we shouldn't cut off Chinese people. We can't live in two different silos. We can't live in two different worlds. But
But trying to make a lot of tough choices, what the Wall Street firms have been doing, along with their media backers, is to speed up the transfer of wealth to the CCP as quickly as possible. And in doing so, funneling hundreds of millions of Americans' retirements, pensions, funds, and other passive investments into the hands of Chinese companies that are building concentration camps and missiles and hacking us and all of the rest. And that's the bleeding edge of the China competition. It's really not...
On the islands, it's in the markets. And that's what you see in our news today. That's what you see Xi Jinping cracking down on today. It's raising all of the money. And that's like an entire podcast by itself. But the quick tradeaway is that, you know, that –
that transfer of wealth and power through our capital markets is meant to build a constituency inside of our society for continuing to support those Chinese companies by tying our financial futures and our financial interests to their political agenda. And once they have...
our money and our investments in their hands, we will have less ability to confront them on all the things that we care about. And that's why it's a race against time. Yeah. And there are ways that that, you know, becomes a national story. Like when John Cena, the actor, apologizes for calling Taiwan a country in Mandarin. Former pro wrestler John Cena has touched off an international controversy. Apologize to the people of China.
after calling Taiwan a country during a promotional interview with a Taiwanese broadcast. I must say that now is very, very, very, very important.
Right. Or when the Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, when he tweeted in support of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. The NBA makes billions of dollars in the Chinese market. And it's apparently siding with Beijing, calling Daryl Morey's tweet regrettable. And suddenly big stars like LeBron James, who are very vocal about domestic politics and about social justice. I don't want to get into a feud with Daryl.
They're speaking out against him.
not only financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually. And the backlash from the CCP is severe. Despite his apology, several Chinese businesses are now suspending ties with the Houston Rockets over that tweet. The NBA's response is also raising questions, questions over the lengths that businesses in the U.S. have to go and are willing to go to stay in favor. It's strange, like it's through the back door of celebrity headlines or sports news that suddenly people who generally ignore foreign policy are like, hey, who's
Why does China have so much power over these people?
You're right. There are watershed moments when people realize the scope and scale of the problem. When one tweet can get the NBA punished to the tune of $400 million, well, a lot of people can instantly realize that we've got a problem here. Exactly. And the problem is that the Chinese Communist Party is now exporting its social credit system and its censorship to us, telling us what we can think and what we can say and what we can tweet. Yes. In other words, we care very much about Chinese repression of their own people, the Uyghurs and the Tibetans and the inter-Mongolians.
and the political dissidents and everyone else. But we care first and foremost about their
efforts to repress us, to tell us that we don't have our rights, even inside of our own country. That's the first line of battle. That's the first thing we can't tolerate. There was this amazing example the other day that my sister wrote about in our newsletter, which was Kodak's Instagram. I mean, something so small as a Kodak's Instagram feed shared photographs, incredibly haunting photographs by this
photographer Patrick Wack of Uyghur province and what it looked like over the transformation of the past five years. And they're really, really kind of barren and powerful photos, posted the photos, outrage online. And then they offer this like just Soviet style, pathetic, cringing, abject apology for doing so. You know, every American company that does business in China is finding out that it's becoming a corporate hostage of the CCP. And that's a very difficult thing.
and complicated problem to deal with. I argue that we should deal with it on a policy level, not on a corporate level, because the NBA is not strong enough to stand up to the CCP, and neither is Kodak. So it's really about a government-to-government solution that we're really not engaged in, because in our society, our institutions don't like asking the government for help, and our government's not that good at it anyway. But that's what needs to happen. Now, all of these companies have a
are facing the same choices, whether or not to stand by their values or their financial interests. But over time, the house always wins over time. The Chinese communist party is cracking down, you know, LeBron James defended the CCP when they punished the NBA because he wanted space jam to, to be playing China. And they didn't, they didn't play it anyway.
They took the kowtowing and they screwed over LeBron James just to be pricks about it. OK. And, you know, there is no slight to to minimal to offend the delicate sensibilities of the CCP. And there's, you know, their defense of their own genocide is first and foremost. And unless we shut up about their genocide, they're going to punish anyone who doesn't fall in line no matter what the circumstances. So.
I think that's just a road you can't go down. I think that, you know, all,
All of these companies should sort of work together to make clear to the Chinese Communist Party that Americans can tweet or say what they want. But in the markets, it's a much bigger problem because what they're doing is they're investing your money and my money, right? Your pension fund, your school's endowment, state pension funds. These are things that we don't decide. You don't like, oh, where should my pension go? You know, I just I don't. As for me, I just let my pension manager deal with that. So.
So to know that Wall Street is taking that money and giving it to a company that's building a concentration camp or a forced labor cotton mill or whatever, that, again, is not a problem that we can deal with on an individual level. It's something that our government needs to address.
wrap its head around. And, you know, all the data and all the signs point to that this is only getting worse. And, you know, there's a fear of an escalation ladder that I think is really important to keep our eye on. What do you mean by that? There's now a sort of a popular narrative in Washington that, well, we can't confront China
because then they're just going to get more angry and then we'll have to confront them more and then they'll just do worse stuff and then we'll have to confront them more and then we're headed down to the Thucydides trap or the Cold War or whatever, whatever bumper sticker. Yeah, yeah. Isn't the fact that people are fearing an escalation ladder proof that China's winning? Well, again, I think it's...
Because there is no we can't measure it. In other words, we don't really know the relative power of countries over time, especially over the large sweep of history. What we know and what we can measure and what we can see is where the rise of China affects us in our lives, in our schools and in our markets, in our tech companies and in our movies. So that's where we can address it first. And then if we were smart, what we would do is we would join with our partners and allies and other countries that are facing the same threat as we are and come up with solutions.
complicated and not cost-free solutions to push back. Is the reason that that hasn't happened in a comprehensive way simply because of greed and money? That has a lot to do with it. And, you know, um,
It's very clear that the Wall Street guys are getting rich on both sides of the Pacific by compromising our national security and by transferring wealth into the hands of our greatest adversary. But it's also clear that, you know, the Chinese Communist Party is changing its strategy actually right now in real time. And in addition to becoming more aggressive and more repressive and speeding up, in other words, they see our response and they're speeding up their plan.
They're on shoring more of their capital. They're on shoring more of their technology. They're building their resilience. OK, there we thought they were going to get mad that we were decoupling from them. And now they've begun to decouple from us. OK, and this is a new phase of the competition, one that I think we're not quite talking about and understanding yet. And the implications for that are dire, because in the end, we're going to have to figure out what things we're going to need in the case that we do decouple.
regretfully slip into a Cold War while still presenting the CCP with the opportunity to avoid that by saying to them very clearly that we want to have a constructive relationship, but not on your terms, not on the terms where we sacrifice our security and our freedom and our public health, not on the terms where you hide a pandemic outbreak, not on the terms where you tell us what to say and what to tweet and do a genocide against Muslims, but we are actually interested in avoiding the Cold War. But in the case that they can't be convinced,
In the case that they insist, then we have to respond and change our behavior accordingly and protect ourselves. And that is also a very complicated and costly and risky endeavor that we have to talk about honestly amongst ourselves.
all of the people in our country and all these institutions which are all affected. We're not having that discussion because our public discussion about China is always like, oh, China virus or oh, you can't say China virus. That's the level of the discourse. And it's actually a much more complicated problem than that. But the bottom line is that the Cold War is actually not the worst outcome. And while we should avoid the Cold War, there are things that are much worse. Like what? The hot war. OK, much, much worse.
Okay, the hot war is more worse than the Cold War, but there's another thing that's worse than the Cold War That's where we ignore the problem and the Chinese Communist Party gets so rich and powerful that we they can tell us what to do that we lose what Christopher Hitchens would call our way of life our ability to determine our own rules in our own society because We have failed to address this obvious and growing threat to our national security our public health and our freedom So those are two outcomes that are much much worse than a cold war. That's not to say I want a Cold War. I
And I don't think it'll be like the Cold War. It'll be something different. We'll have to come up with a new name for it. Right. But the bottom line is that, you know, that's not the worst outcome and some decoupling will have to happen. And we have to take in the information about how China's acted, especially during this pandemic, by the way, using its first mover advantage, using its power and influence. It's real first test as a global power, as a superpower.
to coerce and bribe and pressure countries all over the world to do whatever it wants while threatening their lives, while holding up right above their head life-saving medicine and telling them to shut up about a genocide, telling them to ignore the origins of the pandemic and telling them to de-recognize Taiwan. That's what's happening. That's the reality. Okay, that's very scary reality, but it's not a reality that we can afford to turn away from. And what I say is that while continuing to present China with a choice, the choice is you can...
change your behavior, not your character, not your system, not your country, but your actions as they affect us, or we're going to increase the costs on you for that action while increasing our self-protection and our self-reliance.
And that's what I think the Trump administration was trying to do. But they screwed it up in many cases because the president of the United States was not necessarily on board with that. OK, and nevertheless, that's what the Biden administration is trying to figure it out now. But they're also caught by their own biases and their own contradictions and their own processes, which are taking a very long time. But meanwhile, the threat continues to grow. The idea that you mentioned, Josh, of Christopher Hitchens, this line about the threat to our way of life.
I'd love to go a little bit deeper there because people look to China and they say, oh my God, look how repressive, look how totalitarian. They have this horrible social credit system. They have cameras, they have surveillance everywhere. Isn't that also here, but in a softer way? And I'd love if you could kind of lay out what you see the cost being to all of us if we don't wake up
to this threat that I think is already affecting the way we live our lives. You know, there's a lot of empty talk in Washington and Western capitals about this thing called the liberal international world order, okay? Depending on
If you're at a think tank or if you're in Congress or if you are running for election, this could mean a bunch of different things. But essentially, it's what the blob, the Washington establishment, the blob, the blob. That's what Ben Rhodes used to call us, the blob. Right. This is the chattering class, the people in Washington who think they're in charge of foreign policy. Right. The people who, despite.
making a lot of mistakes and blunders were made. Don't get me wrong. I'm not denying the list of blunders. Essentially constructed a semi-functioning international system, incomplete to be sure, that was to govern international norms, customs, international law to an extent, multilateral cooperation, multilateral organizations, the UN system, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the international markets, the patents,
all of these systems that are meant to promote essentially the ideas of the European and then American Enlightenment, right? The project that failed in France, failed in England, and then succeeded in America, and then we exported to the world. And again, I'm not
I'm not justifying the excesses of American imperialism. I'm not trying to whitewash the abuses of the American security state. Those are real. Those are problematic. I spent many years of my life digging up and exposing those very abuses. What I'm saying is that if you're of the idea that, in essence, what America is and what America was always designed to be—and I think this is most exemplified in the writings of people like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson—
was to be an example, a model of liberty, a model of individual rights, a model of the idea that humans are endowed with these rights, not by a creator, not by a king, not even by a president, not by a Congress, that we own them, that we're born with them. And then if you agree with that, then you
can take the next step and say, well, we as Americans are not the only ones entitled to these rights, that these rights are actually endowed to every human being and that we have responsibility not just to protect them for ourselves, but to advocate them for people who live in other countries who are just unlucky enough to be born in a country that doesn't recognize those rights. Not that they don't exist, that they don't recognize them. Then we have an obligation, a moral obligation, but also an interest in promoting those rights. Now, again, in that history, their mistakes have been made. You
You know, in that implementation, starting with Thomas Jefferson, many, many, many, many mistakes have been made. But either you believe that is the basic principle of America or you don't. I happen to agree with people like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and Darwin and Spinoza and Orwell and Hitchens, who spent their entire life saying to people all over the world, no, no, no, these are your rights. And if we can help you,
achieve them and live in them, then you will have dignity and you will have agency. And whether or not that turns into democracy or whatever is a separate issue. But first of all, that's the common bond of humankind. That's what I believe. As a colonist, that's what I try to advocate for. Although I have to say right now, it's not going that well. Okay.
Because you're running up against a kind of neo-isolationism on both sides of the political spectrum, I think. And I think also a sense of exhaustion and...
I don't know, like a like a breaking of faith with the fundamental good maybe of the American promise at its best, which is what you just articulated. That's right. But but but also it's because that, you know, globalization failed to account for the inequities it was causing. And it was the benefits were not distributed fairly. And that's that was a mistake. And the American people were never educated civically about the purpose of this worldwide system. And they don't.
And they don't trust in it. And at that exact same time that that was happening, you know, foundational and emerging technologies changed the way that we communicate and live our lives and and made communication and interaction much more accessible.
difficult and confusing and complicated. And then you have what you're talking about, the rise of populism and nationalism, which again is spurred by some quite frankly evil sources in some cases. And in some cases is the response to people's own dissatisfaction with their own governance. So all of those are big problems that we have to fix. But what I'm trying to say is the Chinese Communist Party doesn't believe in any of that. Their model is against the Enlightenment. In other words, they believe that people are the
the chattel of the party state. Exactly. This is how I get to your question about our complicity. You know, our system has flaws. We have corruption. We have abuse. It's not equivalent. Yes. And I think there's some honest and some dishonest efforts to paint the false equivalence between what's going on in our society and what's going on in Chinese society. And, you know, when Yang Jiechi, the state counselor of China, meets with Anthony Blinken and he lectures him about Black Lives Matter, he's doing that for a reason. He's doing that to deflect from the fact that he's
presiding over a country that's committing a genocide against Muslims. And they're both bad, but they're not the same. And what Tony Blinken said is that we have an open discussion and a constant improvement effort to reach the ideals that we profess to believe in. And I think there's something to that. But more than that, I think that the model that China has put forward is not just a problem for Chinese people because their plan is to export it around the world, to sell a package of technologies and
capabilities and tools that could subject billions more people than are already suffering into abject suffering, that they essentially become chattel of whatever despot or dictator they happen to find themselves unlucky enough to live under the rule of. And that is, again, the global scale of the China challenge. It's not just about China's rise. It's not just about the genocide. It's about what kind of world do we want to live in?
That's why I think this is, again, not a U.S.-China Cold War, not a spat between Trump and Xi Jinping, but a struggle for the future of a world based on either basic values and interests that we want to preserve, that we enjoy, that we advocate for in others, or whether or not, you know, basically this entire project, whether you call it democracy or enlightenment or freedom, is just a failed experiment, because I think that's exactly what
The Chinese Communist Party wants to prove, and we know that because that's what they say. After the break, I call Josh back to talk about what we just saw happen in Afghanistan and how it affects all of this. Stay with us.
We begin tonight with the stunning collapse in Afghanistan. Afghans are running from the Taliban, now in full control, setting up checkpoints with the very weapons American taxpayers bought for the Afghan army. So right as Josh and I were having this conversation, the Taliban regained control in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghans stormed onto the runways, desperate to leave, clinging onto aircraft, trying not to be left behind as the Americans pull out.
The whole thing was an absolute mess. Late today, for the first time, President Biden addressing the American people, saying, "I stand squarely behind my decision." After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. And watching President Biden essentially blame it on the Afghans. Afghanistan political leaders gave up.
To say that this actually proves just how right their policy was. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
Well, frankly, it struck me as shocking and defeatist and astonishing coming from the leader of the free world. And it made me wonder how Josh saw all of this. And of course, how the Afghanistan story affects the broader story he was telling me about the CCP's ambitions. So, Josh, thank you so much for hopping back on the phone with me. I really want to just start with what this week has been like for you, because it's
It feels historic to me. And just so many moments that I don't know if I'll ever forget, beginning with seeing the Taliban in the presidential palace, watching Afghans cling to American airplanes as they try and fly out of the country. And then just, you know, a few hours ago, watching the Taliban hold a press conference in Kabul and
I'm curious about what you've been thinking about this week and what you think about as you see these images come out of the country. Sure, Barry. I mean, my first thought is with the people of Afghanistan who were realizing that their lives have just changed, millions of them, for the worse, right?
for perhaps a very, very long time. And, you know, we talk a lot about things like freedom and democracy and human rights as sort of catchphrases. But when you see people lose them in front of your eyes on TV, in fact, all of a sudden that brings into stark relief what this really means for human beings. You know, to see women put back on the veil, you know, to see children kicked out of schools, to see institutions crumble in days, and to see, you know,
a fanatical, psychotic, extremist, fundamentalist group, you know, not only take control of another country, but be welcomed by half of the world in doing so as the U.S. government trips over its own feet and places, you know, all of those people, including 10,000 Americans who are still left in Afghanistan, in horrible, dire danger. I mean, it's insane. You wrote...
Yeah. Yeah.
How could something like this happen? We knew that we were pulling out. We announced to the world that we were pulling out, for better or for worse. Was the intel completely off? How is it that you have an official saying this? How is it that you have 10,000 Americans trapped there to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with us for the past two decades still stuck in this now Taliban-run country? No, I mean, it's a disaster in every imaginable way, but...
Mostly because the planning for all these things didn't exist. There is no plan to get people to the airport. There was no plan to evacuate them, at least none that they...
put into place in enough time to actually execute it. And it's not for a lack of being aware of it. There were people screaming at them, mostly from Capitol Hill saying, hey, you should have started evacuating people months ago. As for the intelligence, listen, it seems like the intelligence was wrong, but guess what? The way it actually works in Washington is that the policymakers agree with the intelligence that they want to agree with. So they'll always find an intelligence product to justify whatever decision they want to make, right? That's what always happens. And so in this case, they
picked the intelligence products that they thought justified their presumption that everything would be fine, at least for a while. And it was totally, totally wrong. And, you know, and then the victim blaming, I can't like, you know, I thought Democrats weren't supposed to be about victim blaming, but all of a sudden all of the president and his team are putting it all on the Afghan government and military, which I think is, you know, outrageous, frankly, because
They suffered a lot. They sacrificed a lot. 70,000 Afghan soldiers died. Now, that's not to minimize our blood and treasure and sweat and tears that got spilled in Afghanistan. But to turn around and say that they – oh, well, there was no way to get them to have the will to fight for their own country is a colony. It's an insult to the sacrifices that those people made in, I think –
that's realized by the people who fought with them, who are the American military, who were also feeling betrayed. And then there's the betrayal of our allies on the ground. You know, I got calls from diplomats all over the world who were like, hey, do you know how to get, how I can get my embassy staff to the Kabul airport? I'm like, you're calling me? You know what I mean? Like, you're even worse shape than I thought, you know, if you're asking me. And I didn't know what to tell them. And if there's one thing that I think is the most pernicious is this sort of idea, oh, the Taliban's changed. Right?
Oh, they're going to be it's going to be better this time. This time they want legitimacy and they want they're going to want our aid. OK, and what's about to happen is that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and probably the Turks are going to recognize the Taliban government and get what they want from them. And we're going to try to stop the Taliban from achieving international legitimacy. But oops, we just squandered all our credibility by cutting and running without any sort of competence or planning whatsoever. So it's not going to work.
And so these millions of people will be subjected to a less free, less humane existence until, you know, something happens, until sometime hopefully in the future they could be liberated again. So speaking of China, you know, you and I had just been talking in our conversation before about the ambitions of the CCP and China.
their desire to exert their influence and export their model, their deeply liberal model throughout the world. And we'll get into the CCP in a second. But I feel like, you know, now the Taliban is retaking power in Afghanistan. And it feels like one of those moments where something that all of us were aware of and talked about in an intellectual way, the idea of, you know, America in retreat, China, you know, asserting itself, China rising, right?
All of a sudden, I feel like we're seeing like the visual manifestation of that theme that you have been talking about for a while. Is that how you see it? Well, yeah. I mean, it's not good for the U.S.-China competition. We have this habit now in Washington of making everything about China. Not everything is about China, right? This is a disaster, you know, in and of itself that doesn't necessarily need to be tied to the China challenge. But
It does have implications for our grand strategic competition in China in five ways that I can see, right? One is that, you know, it undermines American credibility the worst possible time with all of our security partners. And you see that in the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda just today and yesterday. They messaged very clearly to Taiwan, hey, if they won't save Afghanistan, you think they're going to save Taiwan, which would take a lot more saving, you know, because we're the Chinese Communist Party, not the Taliban? Yeah.
And there's something to that, right? So that's one way it undermines our competition with China. The other one is that, as I said before, we threw all our NATO allies under the bus, all the Western democracies that we're trying to preach to, that we're back, right? America's back now, and we're going to join together to compete with China, not in that unilateral, asshole-ish way.
Trumpian way, right? Well, in the first test of that new refurbished alliance, the Biden administration failed because not because they withdrew, but because they didn't tell the allies what they were doing and they were all left scrambling to send helicopters in to save their people, which is atrocious.
Three, you know, if you think about what they're saying now, right, the Biden people are saying, well, the forever wars have got to end and we got to end our 20 year engagements and this and that. I get that. Right. There's that's been a calling card of the progressive left for a long time. I may not disagree with every bit of it, but I understand that sentiment. But that's a different message than the president was giving before, which was, hey, the grand struggle is between autocracies and democracies.
And that's the most important thing. And he can't say that now because he's lost, what, three democracies on his watch so far? Afghanistan, Tunisia, Myanmar. I'm probably forgetting one. You know, so how's the grand struggle between autocracies and democracies going, you know? And, you know, I think the fourth one is that look at all the mess he's created. He's got to take all the focus of his administration to fix, right, just to fix the mess that he just created.
and monitor it and make sure the Taliban don't kidnap a thousand Americans on their way to the airport. And if you just think about that, that's all the senior time, that senior official time that is not getting used for the China challenge, right? We're supposed to get out of Afghanistan so we can focus on China, but now we're gonna have to focus more because we just sent in 7,000 troops who weren't there before. So is there anyone in the Pentagon or the state department or the NSC who's not going to be thinking about Afghanistan every hour of the day for as far as the eye can see?
No time to finish that China review that's been sitting on the almost done shelf for the last six months. And fifth, guess who's going to be the new player in Afghanistan? China. Exactly. And in yielding American leadership, now the Chinese are going to do what they always going to do. They're going to welcome another psychotic dictatorship into the fold.
They love psychotic dictatorships. They get along with those guys. It doesn't matter that they're killing Muslims in concentration camps. Just the pure joy of two psychotic dictatorships working together between them can get them to ignore a lot of ideological and fundamental political differences. And that's what's going to happen. They're going to pay off the Taliban, take the resources. And then next time we're going to want to do something in Afghanistan, we're going to have to –
go, you know, hat in hand to Beijing or Moscow. So overall, not everything that happens in U.S. foreign policy about China, but the strategic competition with China takes place all over the world. It takes place in Southwest Asia, too. This week, China's official state news agency called the U.S., quote, the world's largest exporter of unrest. One writer even said that the power transition in Afghanistan is even more smooth than presidential transition in the United States.
It looks to me like they're using this debacle as another way of saying the way America does things, the liberal democratic way, period. That's the past and it failed and it certainly failed here in Afghanistan. And if you want to look to the way of the future,
to the way of success, you got to look to Beijing. You got to look to the model of the Chinese Communist Party. Is that how you see their message? Listen, Chinese Communist Party propaganda changes every 15 minutes. When you're in Afghanistan, you're an occupying Nazi army. When you leave Afghanistan, you're abandoning the region. So whatever we were going to do, they were going to say that makes us the devil and makes them
the angel. So, you know, I'm not really as worried about what the Chinese Communist Party messaging is. I'm worried about what our friends and allies and our next partners, the next group of people that we pledge to stand with are going to believe.
People around the world aren't stupid. They know the Chinese Communist Party, actually, especially after the pandemic. You go to any country in the world, they're like, oh, yeah, those guys are definitely going to try to bribe or coerce or force us to do their bidding. And if you're a dictator, they're definitely going to sell that dictator a package of surveillance and repression tools that is really, really advanced. And they're going to—
It's not as if the world doesn't understand what the Chinese model represents. It's just the fact that if we don't show up with our alternative, then we leave them no choice. And we can't go around to all of these countries and say, hey, listen, we have a better model for you. And we're going to stand behind that model if we're not going to stand behind it. In light of all of this, I'm curious about what you make of—and this is not just a right or left thing. This is coming strongly from both sides. The people who are saying, you know what—
Yes, these images coming out of Afghanistan are horrible to look at. They're tragic. It's terrible that women are going to have to be thrown back into what the seventh or eighth century in terms of their rights.
But we had to get out of there. The idea of American nation building was clearly a flawed ideology. It failed in Iraq. It failed in Afghanistan. And we got to clean up our own house.
In other words, I believe, and Josh, I'm really curious if you feel this way too, that that critique that felt 20 years ago like it was kind of coming from the left has now spread to the right. And on both sides, we're seeing this kind of retreat and this desire in a way to return to whether you call it America first, whether you call it anti-imperialism, a kind of new isolationist worldview, right?
I understand exactly what you're saying. And here's what I would say. I think, first of all, we have to separate out the two issues that are kind of getting conflated here, the political and the strategic. Now,
In a democracy, no war is sustainable without the popular support of the people. That's actually one of the great features about democracy. You're not supposed to be able to go to war unless the Congress and the people approve it. And it's very clear that due to the horrendous mistakes and bad messaging of many administrations on both sides, that the American people had lost faith with this intervention.
I don't think that's disputable even. So in that sense, yes, we could. It was impossible to sustain the mission because we had lost the thread with the American people. And there's no one reason. It's for a whole host of reasons. Now, that's a good political argument for getting out. I get that. I can't argue with that, actually. The American people wanted out of Afghanistan and we're in a democracy. The people get what they want, theoretically. Right. Right.
But that's different from the strategic argument. And the strategic argument depends on what your ideology is, what your prism is, what your understanding is, what your belief is, and how the world works and what America's role should be in it. In other words, there's always been a sort of overlap of neoconservatives, neoliberals, center-right and center-left,
who argue that in certain instances, you know, in different ways, the U.S. military can do a lot of good in this world. And if linked up with our diplomacy, can actually alleviate a ton of suffering in that if we can do that for a reasonable cost, that's something that we have a moral and strategic obligation to do because in the end it turns the
These people who we save, and I'll point to Eastern Europe as just one example, but there are others, they become better allies in better countries. And we also, you know, advance the cause of human enlightenment and, you know, really reduce human suffering. It's a win-win. Okay. That's not to say it always went well. Mistakes were made. You know, I'm not justifying the history of failed interventions. Quite the contrary. I'm just saying that's the theory of the case.
American foreign policy is a force for good in the world on balance, and the military can be one tool of that, although it shouldn't be the first tool. Then you've always had sort of the libertarian right and the progressive left saying that, no, no, no, no, the military should never be a part of that sort of mission. So I've always been of the view that, especially in instances of genocide or crimes against humanity, that yes, we do have a moral obligation to intervene. And in some cases, in a limited way, the military could be a part of that.
So strategically, I can make a very sound argument as to why we should have kept a few troops in Afghanistan because it would have had much more benefits than the downside risks that we're seeing now. But that strategic argument is really irrelevant, to be honest, because unless you've made the political argument, no one's going to listen to the strategic argument. That's what happened here. There's also –
something that I've been noticing, which is, I don't know what to call it other than like moral illiteracy. You know, when I see someone like Michael Moore posting a two pictures side by side, a kind of meme of the Taliban retaking Kabul and, you know, the January 6th protesters, insurrectionists, whatever you want to call them, shirtless with the
Viking helmet saying, you know, they've got our Taliban, we've got our Taliban. And you also have people on the right saying things that are essentially like, you know what, at least the Taliban are dedicated, kind of like, you know, the Taliban are chads and we're cucks and we kind of deserve what we're getting because we're not committed. Right. I mean, listen, I think, again, on the progressive left, there's a
fair argument that I happen to disagree with that ties the development of domestic terrorism to our expansion of the war on terror. I'm speaking now of Spencer Ackerman's new book, Reign of Terror, which I haven't finished yet. I'm a few chapters into it. But basically, it makes this argument that these things are all linked.
Now, separate that out from those voices in our discourse that just want to draw false equivalence between the Taliban and Americans, which is not true. It's not – it doesn't make any sense. It's not intellectually sound. I mean this, again, is a fundamentalist extremist group that's guilty of real atrocities.
arguably crimes against humanity for years and years and years. And to think that they're going to change their stripes is naive. And to think that, you know, they're not going to continue to be what they are, which is a psychotic group of murderers who now run a country and who want to impose, as they say, a draconian barbaric set of laws on the people of that country to say that that has an equivalence in our society, in our discourse. It's just not right. Yeah.
I want to capture for you a little bit more specifically what I mean when I, on the right, and the response, not just to what we're seeing right now, but really just the past few years. This comes from Sourabh Amari, a conservative thinker and activist.
editorial editor of the New York Post. I'm at peace with the Chinese-led 21st century. Late liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue. How do you respond to that? I mean, it's asinine. It's ahistoric and it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the Chinese Communist Party and what's going on in China in a sort of half-hearted way.
attempt to, you know, own the libs. It's just, it's, it's drivel basically. That's mainly because we're not dealing with the Chinese communist party. That's ruining its decisions in some sort of confusion value system. They're a genocidal expansionist repressive regime that is, you know, consolidating power and money and,
and expanding its reach with the intent to do us harm. And the pandemic should be proof of the fact that a Chinese-led world order is not good for us because look how they handled the pandemic and everything that we see, including what happened in Hong Kong and what's about to happen in Taiwan if we don't do something quick.
reveals the plain truth of the matter, which is that a Chinese-led world order would be a very, very dark world. And it's much, much worse than our laissez-faire bourgeois society. I don't mean to kind of dunk on the right or the left or Saurabh or Michael Moore, any of these people in particular. I'm just pointing to this kind of like
Maybe we would call it like like almost like a casual nihilism, this kind of questioning openly about whether our way of life is worth defending. You know, again, I think there's you know, I spent a lot of time with my friends on the progressive left debating these issues because I believe that there's a lot of overlap in the sense of this.
They want a U.S. foreign policy that achieves its goals, that promotes the things that we believe in, that helps people around the world. They just don't think we've been doing it the right way this whole time. So I think there's a common sense of patriotism and humanity. But when you talk about
you know, sort of the nihilism of people who are like, oh, well, I guess let's just, you know, all live in our bunkers and convert to Bitcoin. And if the Chinese are technically in charge, that's fine. I think, I don't agree with that. I don't know what to tell you. I think that, I think that's, that's a, I'm,
a marginal and, and, you know, idiotic view. Yeah, I guess. And this is a longer conversation. I just don't see that view as marginal anymore. I see that as increasingly mainstream in a way that makes me think that, you know,
There was that famous Charles Krauthammer speech that he gave, I think around like 2004, 2005, that was called something like decline is a choice. And it feels to me like we've made that choice. You know, I think we're making as a society and as a government hundreds of related choices each and every day. And again, I don't even want to, I'm not even trying to look down my nose at
people who hold the view that we shouldn't have a foreign policy, right? I mean, if you did everything Rand Paul said,
It would equate to no foreign aid, very little diplomacy, very little military. I get that. That's got a long tradition in American history, too. Is it higher or lower than it was 10 years ago? I think we can't really measure it. And I think sometimes the weirdest voices get the most attention in our current discourse. And, you know, that's just a product of the way our information flows. So, you know, I say let a thousand flowers bloom. And, you know, if people want to argue for,
a Chinese-led world order, luckily we live in a free country. They can do that. I'm going to argue against it because I've seen what that looks like on the faces of people who have suffered under it. Going forward in the next few weeks and months, I want to know what you in particular think
Given your expertise in China, what you're going to be watching out for in Afghanistan and also just more generally? Sure. Well, in later this month, we'll get the results of the Biden administration's 90 day intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus report.
Spoiler alert, they're not going to figure it out. They're going to say we didn't figure it out. Probably. My sources say that they're going to say they couldn't figure it out. Now, that doesn't mean we have to stop looking. It just means that the intelligence review can't be the end all be all. So then we're going to have a series of congressional investigations. They're going to raise the pressure on China. That's going to throw an irritant into the U.S.-China relationship. Another one at the time when the Biden administration is actually trying to set up a meeting, they want to set up a summit.
in Rome at the G20 on October 30th, when both Biden and Xi Jinping will be there. And they haven't been able to set it up yet because relations are so bad that they can't even talk to each other about it. But that's what they're aiming for. So while the administration is trying to cool down the relationship, Congress is going to be trying to turn the heat up. And that's going to be a clash. At the same time, there's going to be a push by the business community and Wall Street, which has already started.
to release the tariffs and the sanctions and go back to business. Now, I don't think that's going to happen either because the genocide hasn't stopped and the bad trade practices that the tariffs are meant to punish haven't abated. Nevertheless, that's what the Wall Street guys, the Wall Street clique is going to push for, is pushing for. Now, add into that that we're hampered by what is now at least 7,000 troops in the middle of a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan trying to evacuate
80,000, 90,000, 100,000, nobody knows, 100,000 people, and it's all going to go fine? No, it's not going to go fine. And then we're going to have to go hat in hand to Pakistan and every other country that, you know, the Taliban might be influenced by and beg them for help too. And that's going to be a huge distraction. So things are going to get worse before they get better. Beijing is sure to try to propagandize all of that and to use it to advance their interests, but we don't have to let them.
The beauty of our system is supposed to be that we can recognize our mistakes, although the Biden administration doesn't seem to be so great at that. Well, Josh, thank you so much for all of your insights, for making time. And we'd love to have you on again soon to talk about all those developments as they unfold. Anytime. Anytime.
Thanks for listening. If you haven't yet read Josh's book, I can't recommend it more highly. It's called Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. You can also follow him on Twitter at Josh Rogin. See you soon.