All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Doug Bondo from the Cato Institute and also regular writer for the American Conservative Magazine.
This one is at the American Conservative.
It's called Why the Hawks are Wrong About China Too.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you?
Happy to be on.
Very happy to have you here.
So, boy, it's hard to keep count.
I'm glad we don't have to do the math on just how many different things the hawks are wrong about, but we'll definitely add this to the bottom of the page there.
China, the pivot to China.
You know what?
Some Americans got it in their head that they ought to teach the communists over there about capitalism so that their people would stop starving to death by the tens of millions.
But then what happened was they pretty much just adopted fascism, not so much capitalism, and they're building up a giant totalitarian empire that's going to conquer the whole world, including this side of the Pacific Ocean, probably if we don't get to containing them right now.
I've seen that on TV.
Well, that's certainly the view of a number of people as scary as some of those are policymakers.
I know.
Well, it seems like maybe they have a reason, possibly, to come up with something to do.
I could see that.
But then again, I'm looking at my map right now, and China's really big, and they got a billion people, and possibly their government is using their whole population for a near-term future plan to conquer the planet Earth, maybe.
Well, the good news is there's no evidence they have much interest in trying to conquer Earth.
And the other good news is it's pretty hard to imagine how they would do it.
We have a lot of nuclear weapons, far more than them.
They're not going to be showing up on our shores trying to conquer America.
There's this kind of lurid image.
People talk about this great threat against America, but of course it's really not a threat against us directly.
It's a question of trying to threaten our domination of East Asia, which is convenient for us, but the question is, who wants to go to a nuclear war to conserve that?
Yeah, well, good question.
Not me, because nukes, they burn real hot.
But now here's the thing about it, though, is what about our good friends the Japanese?
Are they going to be subsumed into the new Chinese empire, and we're just going to stand back and let that happen?
Is that any kind of real danger, Doug?
I don't think so.
Again, the interesting thing with China is we've seen, as the communist government has gained more economically, in a sense, their view is it's time to overcome centuries of humiliation.
You go back in history, you look at what happened to the Chinese empire, all the Westerners showed up.
I mean, that's where Hong Kong came from, Taiwan, all of these things, they had wars with Japan or with the West.
But they've never shown any interest in conquering people who weren't Chinese.
The issue between China and Japan is over the islands, the Japanese call them Senkakus, the Chinese call them Diaoyus, so if there's a war there, it's going to be over a few pieces of barren rocks which nobody lives on.
The idea that China's going to show up and try to conquer Japan is really far-fetched, especially Japan has a pretty good military.
This is not something which China's just going to show up and say, hey, by the way, we're in charge.
It's not likely to happen.
So again, there's this lurid sense of what the Chinese want.
The Chinese, they're a challenge.
This is not that the regime has not turned out the way I would like, but that's very different from running around saying, oh my God, they're about to conquer the world, it's all over.
This is a country that has a lot of challenges itself to solve.
We should not kind of build them up far past where they are.
Well, but so the other side of that would say, look, the policy of kill them with kindness didn't work.
It's only backfired and empowered them, and now they're a greater threat than they ever could have been, and it's still the Communist Party rules the whole thing and all of these things and that maybe we need to really start cracking down now before it gets too much worse.
Well, of course, you're cracking down now is a little late.
That is the notion that if we don't trade with them, the rest of the world won't trade with them, of course, is a fantasy.
Other countries will happily fill the gap.
The Europeans are nervous about things with China, but they're not going to kind of say, oh yeah, we're not going to have anything to do with China.
If we're worried about China, it makes sense to have a better relationship with Europe instead of threatening them with a trade war.
The U.S. has this weird sense that if we're mean to everybody, somehow we're going to do better.
So we turn Russia into an enemy and then we're shocked because Russia and China work together.
We go after the Europeans and we're surprised that maybe they aren't so interested in helping us in a trade war with China.
What we've managed to do is kind of by being so arrogant and hubristic is to kind of get everybody organizing against us.
And that doesn't make much sense and it's certainly not helpful if you're worried about China.
All right.
So what do you make of the situation in Hong Kong?
Well, it's very dangerous.
Look, the folks in Hong Kong have a very good reason to worry.
The Chinese government has been cracking down.
It's just been a steady process over the last half dozen years of kind of slowly shrinking the space in terms of local elections and other sorts of things.
I'm very concerned, though, that the demonstrators being violent are basically encouraging China to crack down even more than what we're seeing is an acceleration.
And the challenge here is no one should have any illusions.
The Chinese government is not going to give Hong Kong independence and it's not going to create democracy there.
It doesn't matter what anyone does or says.
That isn't going to happen.
So the question then is how do the Hong Kongers best protect the liberties that they have?
I mean, there's no internet controls, there's freedom of speech.
They have a legal system that actually works and is independent.
How do you preserve that stuff?
And that requires them, I think, to be judicious in terms of protests can work.
But when you're violent, you're closing down the airport, you're having molotov cocktails with the police.
You're encouraging the Chinese to crack down.
So I'm very nervous where this is going.
All right.
Well, it is actually true that if I had magic wishes or say Sheldon Adelson cash, I would make it where you were the national security advisor to this president.
What would you tell him to do in this situation?
I would tell this president that what he needs to do is sit down first with the Europeans and our Asian friends and suggest what we need is a unified private move to the Chinese to say, look, guys, you don't want to make this violent.
You want to live up to your commitments to kind of respect a different system here, because if you don't, it's going to have huge implications.
If there's blood in the streets, you know, the West and I mean, Asian countries, they're going to have to respond.
I mean, they're not they're not simply going to ignore it.
It's going to have a huge impact in terms of relations.
It will foment all the hawkish sentiments that they don't want.
And I do that privately.
And what you want to do is kind of get as many people behind you as possible and say none of us want this to happen.
And I think that you're much more likely to get the Chinese to say, OK, we're going to be real careful with this.
And frankly, I do the same thing to some of the protesters.
I try to it's it's grassroots.
It's hard to know how you influence it.
But you want to reach some of these folks and kind of privately tell them, in essence, the same kind of thing, which is, guys, we like your goals, but you can't do what you're doing.
What you're doing is inviting them to crack down.
And it's much harder for the West to protest a crackdown if they're cracking down on people who are throwing molotov cocktails.
I mean, the point is, you're losing your legitimacy in the West.
And I do that privately as well.
High profile lecturing gets us nowhere.
You know, this is a nationalistic rising power.
China's not going to listen to that.
It's kind of the private representation where you say we want to be friends.
Don't make it hard for us.
Yeah.
Well, are you worried, though, that maybe the U.S. government is helping to back these protests and even to make them worse through the National Endowment for Democracy and things like that?
In this case, I mean, you know, they've obviously done that in a lot of places in this case.
I don't think that's what's going on.
I mean, my understanding, I have friends over there, journalists and others.
My sense is this very much is driven, youth driven.
People who are frustrated, they have no say over their government.
And I think this is really all exploding kind of in terms of what's been going on within Hong Kong.
This is one of those rare cases where the U.S., I think, actually hasn't done much directly to inflame it.
The problem is, you know, we see what happens is where the protesters show up at rallies waving American flags and basically saying, save us.
I mean, it shows that America has gotten this reputation that's going to run around the world intervening.
And of course, this makes the Chinese really upset, because you can understand why if you're in Beijing watching a rally and they're waving American flags, yeah, you can imagine why they think the U.S. is behind it.
And then they respond accordingly, you know, Congress is voting on legislation, this kind of a thing.
You know, it does make things worse.
Boy, do they not have TV in Hong Kong or something?
They want us to turn their city into Fallujah?
Am I hearing you right here?
Well, I think that the problem with this is, see, people in other countries have this, I think, illusion that if only the president says something, right?
I mean, you've got that here in the U.S. where back in Iran, for example, America should support the demonstrators.
And the question is, well, what does that mean?
OK, we support the demonstrators.
Thank you very much.
Well, that didn't help.
I mean, so what does it mean?
There's this weird sense that it's kind of magical, that it's almost like pixie dust.
I don't know if the president's...
My sense is that's what the Hong Kongers seem to think, is they don't expect American troops to show up, but they imagine there's some way the U.S. government can kind of do something, whatever that something is, and it'll force the Chinese to be nice to them.
And I'd love to sit down with them and say, OK, tell me what you think this means.
This is a fantasy.
But unfortunately, part of that, I think, is this reputation, because the U.S. is always out there telling everybody what to do.
Rarely do they listen.
But I think Hong Kongers have seen that and imagine the U.S. can do that for them and it'll work.
Yeah, boy.
Well, I sure don't want to see it tried, but it sure does.
It seems like this is going on for weeks and weeks, and I don't know if there's any kind of real countervailing pressure, you know, on the side of the protesters that would convince them to, you know, call it quits for now, or if, as you were saying, any kind of real victory over the government of mainland China here is pretty much out of the question.
The only question is, how much response are they going to provoke?
How much worse it could get?
But they sure seem to be well-funded and well-motivated to keep going here.
Well, I mean, this motivation is very powerful.
Look, I mean, some of this stuff goes bad.
I was over there at Mont Pelerin Society Conference in 2014 when they had the original Umbrella protests, and there was no evidence of outside involvement.
I mean, this was very much a youth-led thing.
I mean, you know, they occupied public space and roads, and I mean, this is, I mean, amazing.
Part of it, I think there's a real passion there, and I mean, they recognize it and they're worried about losing.
Well, but wait, let me stop you for just one second.
Isn't it the case that with all the color-coded revolutions, you always have some minority who is excited to be part of it and all that kind of thing?
Yeah, but this is one where I'm not aware of any kind of serious involvement of National Endowment for this, that, or the other, or Western money going in.
And there have been particular episodes that have energized them, where they kind of, in the way they protested in getting elected, and the Chinese intervened and threw out the people who were elected.
I mean, that generated, so there were episodes that kind of energized them.
And you know, this go-around, I mean, the violence is what I don't understand, because to me that's, I mean, they've really moved in a very different direction, and that's made it very dangerous.
And that's something where even, I mean, I just don't think the U.S. even wants that.
I think this administration understands that's playing with fire.
I mean, this is lighting the fuse that it could blow up so spectacularly.
And then, I mean, it really is a mess for everybody, and I mean, no one's going to quite know how to handle it.
And now, in mainland China, is there anything like pressure to legalize political parties on the national level?
They do have some kind of municipal elections and things like that, right?
No, I mean, they've moved in the opposite direction.
Under Xi Jinping, the current guy, I mean, he is a really, really nasty thug.
I mean, I go there, and I mean, it's become much harder, for example, for Westerners like me to go to conferences there.
You now have to get Beijing's approval.
I mean, I showed up for a conference in April.
They hadn't bothered getting the approval, so they told me when I arrived, sorry, you can't speak, you're going to play tourist tomorrow, as opposed to actually speaking at the conference, because the rules have been tightened.
So there's a lot of tightening going on, so there's no one, I mean, there is privately a lot of sentiment.
I mean, there's a unique rule which has been closed down.
Unique rule wanted economic reform.
Really good people got the Cato Award for, the Friedman Prize Award.
I mean, good academics, very careful, never challenged the Communist Party, but pushed reform.
You know, they've been closed down.
So in recent years, that space for kind of advocating, you know, things has started to shrink.
The local level has always had a bit more space, so they've had municipal elections.
They're pretty controlled.
But they've also had a lot of protests there, but nothing at the national level, and things really have been clamping down, unfortunately.
Yeah.
And now, that really isn't what was supposed to happen, right?
Economic freedom was supposed to provide some space for political freedom, and yet it seems like it's easier to go ahead and just keep their head down.
Well, yeah, I think that, I mean, this is a case where, for many years, I mean, while it didn't advance a lot, there really was a sense that it was a system that was, you know, it was authoritarian, but relatively loose.
I mean, you could have debates.
You couldn't challenge the Communist Party's monopoly on power, but you could talk about issues and, I mean, Cato would go over and hold conferences.
I mean, there's a group of libertarians we've gone over regularly and taught at the university there in the summer, and when we taught there, we'd also append to that, you know, meeting with groups like UniRule, so we'd all have these wonderful libertarian conferences.
I mean, everybody would be careful.
I mean, you don't go out there and denounce the Communist Party leader, but at these conferences, you could be reasonably open in terms of talking about things.
All of that really has changed.
So until the current president, you could argue that the system, while not opening up dramatically, was still a good bit more open and encouraged, I think, in that opening because of its context with the West.
This just shows that somebody who's very determined, who's at the top of the heap, he can impose his will, and he is very actively trying to make the Communist Party very much in charge again.
I don't know if this could be reversed, and we all hope it will be, but in the short term, at least, things have been going in the wrong direction, you know, and those of us were disappointed.
I mean, I will say that, yeah, I was wrong, but where we're at today is not where I expected to be.
Yeah.
Well, it's not worse than it was.
I know that.
No, it's far better than under Mao.
I mean, it's still a much, much better place, and hundreds of millions of Chinese are no longer living in, you know, kind of horrid poverty.
I mean, that's a very positive thing.
Yeah.
You know, when Jean Kirkpatrick is saying, well, authoritarians aren't as bad as communists, totalitarians, that's a pretty cynical take from her at that time, but just not in terms of, I mean, because China's not a client state of the United States, right?
So not in that sense, but just, yeah, you know what?
They're doing a lot better under authoritarianism than they were under totalitarianism.
That's right.
So.
No, and I mean, I would give her credit in the sense that at the time she talked about that.
I mean, if you look at, say, the Franco dictatorship, or I mean, a lot of these places, the authoritarian ones did seem to pass away easier.
I mean, it wasn't until 89 and that kind of dramatic burst where suddenly all the communist ones, you know, go down and, you know, which for a lot of us, I mean, it was that grand moment because we all wondered if she was right in the sense that will we ever get rid of the communist ones?
And thankfully we did, but it was tougher.
Yeah.
Hey, 30 years ago, just a couple of weeks ago was the anniversary of the fall of the wall.
Absolutely.
I wrote about that for fee.
I mean, it was a great moment for us to remember and to look back on because it was such a moment of human liberty.
Oh, that's great.
Well, I'm going to go find that right now and poach it for the Libertarian Institute site.
How do you like that?
I love that.
That's great.
Great.
All right.
Well, I think you're just absolutely by far worth me times Daniel McAdams, the very best foreign policy guy we got in the Libertarian movement.
The great Doug Bandow.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Scott.
You're very kind.
All right, you guys.
This one is called Why the Hawks Are Wrong About China Too at TheAmericanConservative.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
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