Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Chas W. Freeman Jr., Senior Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and other important jobs in the federal government, including he was the principal American interpreter for Richard Nixon when he went to Beijing in 1972.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm glad to be here, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show.
And wow, can we start with that right there?
Because I think if I have the history right, it seems like this is one of the most important positive events of the 20th century was when Nixon and Kissinger went over there and shook hands with Mao Zedong and forget strategically breaking them off from the Soviet Union, but really more importantly, I think, paving the way for Deng Xiaoping and the reforms that turned China from a communist dictatorship to a fascist one, which is still really bad in a lot of ways and yet has finally stopped starving people to death by the tens of millions as it was under Mao.
And so it's it seems like, you know, you played a really important role in possibly saving millions of lives there by sort of creating the space for, I guess you'd call it the right wing of the Communist Party to come to power after Mao died.
Is that pretty much your take to not to pat yourself on the back too much?
No, but it's certainly Nixon said at the time rather tritely that it was the week that changed the world, but it did.
Essentially, the United States had been using Taiwan to contain China.
Now we turn to using China to contain the Soviet Union and the cooperation we had with the Chinese in the 1980s, not only in Afghanistan, where, for example, in 1987, we bought six hundred and thirty million dollars worth of Chinese weaponry for the Mujahideen, but also in other ways, many listening posts in China that enabled us to gain insights into Soviet weapons development and so forth.
The Chinese sold us their version of the MiG 21 to use in training our pilots to combat it.
We played together a key role in bringing down the Soviet Union and the world is a better place for that.
I would say, however, that we really had no interpretation, no, no inkling at all that what we were doing was going to result in China abandoning the Soviet system internally and moving to join the American led world order, which is what happened six years, seven years later when Deng Xiaoping basically decided to use the United States to demolify China.
I see.
So that wasn't part of the plan and was just sort of a happy result that that developed later on.
Yeah, we didn't our engagement with China was very much strategic.
The objective was almost entirely foreign policy oriented.
It wasn't we weren't trying to change China internally, but we ended up doing so inadvertently.
And, of course, between 1978 and December, when Deng kicked off his reform and opening process, and and today China's poverty rate has fallen from about 90 percent of the population to less than 2 percent.
And China's emerged as a huge market for the world's commodities and manufacturers and goods, as well as a major producer.
Living standards have risen incredibly in China, and it has very much become part of the world that we helped to create after World War Two.
OK, so this is the topic of your recent speech we republished at Antiwar dot com.
I think we got it from Jim Loeb's blog.
It's after the trade war, a real war with China.
And this is remarks to the St. Petersburg, Florida, conference on world affairs from February the 12th here.
And it's about the rise of China and America's reaction to it.
And so I guess there are some who say not to sound too much like Fox News, but I can't remember who I'm quoting here.
But I've read some things that said that, you know what?
It turns out it was a big mistake opening up China.
We should have let them dwell in their Maoism because now we've created a monster and they're more powerful than America.
And so we have, I guess, everything to lose by Chinese gain by the Chinese gaining from the current global system.
Well, you used to hear the same argument about the Marshall Plan in Europe.
Why should we help Europeans get back on their feet and run trade surpluses with us and so forth?
The world is a better place for that.
And it's a better place because the Chinese lifted themselves out of poverty and became a responsible member of the international community.
And you have to remember when Nixon went to China in 1972, the Chinese were calling for the overthrow of the World Bank, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization, the American order.
They were calling for revolution everywhere.
That all stopped.
And China instead became part of the order it had originally decided to overthrow.
So I would say, you know, yeah, sure, we have a powerful rival now.
That is true.
But there's so many better things that happen that you can't reach the conclusion, I think, that it was all a mistake.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, those same people would be anti-communist hawks who would say, who would point to Maoism as proof that, you know, this is the worst regime in the whole world, that anything would have been better than that.
And they'd be right.
Right.
And that probably quantifiably was the worst government that had ever existed in the world.
Oh, I think probably North Korea takes that prize.
But, well, I guess it depends if you're going per capita.
I can remember a Chinese friend who was assigned temporarily to North Korea in the early 80s coming back and wouldn't tell me much about it.
But he finally I pressed him and he said, oh, you know, there are quite a number of North Koreans, including senior officials who've sought political asylum here in China.
And he said, just think about it.
What kind of a place would you have to be from to want political asylum here?
This was as China was just beginning to change.
But, you know, in many respects, China has opened up internally as well as externally.
At the moment, unfortunately, under Xi Jinping, I think the trend is in the opposite direction, which is disappointing to many Chinese as well as to those of us who had hoped that China would, in fact, continue to open up.
Well, and so that gets to the question of America's and particularly, I guess, the Trump administration, which has a much different policy than the centrist status quo on this, has all these tariffs and is waging this trade war.
And I guess as part of this, I'll go ahead and mention this because it's the context of your whole article here, this whole speech that you gave, and the context of the trade war, too, is that there's a real panic going on about the rise of China in the halls of power in America.
And they kind of have determined that they're going to do something to halt the rise of China.
Maybe they're not even certain why they need to, but they know they need to, but they don't know how they're going to.
And it sounds like they're really kind of throwing a tantrum here.
And but so in that context, I guess you could clarify that.
I don't mean to paraphrase you too strongly.
But if you can, you know, talk about characterize the state of the relationship there.
And then also in the and then talk about the tariffs and what change that really represents.
Well, one of the nice things about going to St. Petersburg, Florida, to talk about China is that people are not caught up in the hysteria that seems to reveal within the Beltway.
And that is a strong community effort that week on foreign affairs, world affairs that they put on.
And I found a lot of very thoughtful people there who are open minded in a way that people in Washington these days don't seem to be.
So I think it's true that both on Russia and on China and maybe on Islam, we have become a bit deranged as a country.
In the case of China, the Trump administration's not only got a trade war going, but there are China hawks in the inner circles of the administration who are basically trying to contain, smash, suppress China, reverse its rise somehow, prevent it from technological advance, cut us off from the Chinese, deny the Chinese students entry to our universities, shut down cultural exchange with China and so forth and so on.
It's a pretty broad onslaught.
And I think it's really quite remarkable.
The Chinese response so far has been so moderate.
But I fear we're in for a long haul issue here.
And I just say that the trade issues are a very good illustration of a problem.
We have failed to ask the question, and then what?
You know, before you do something, you then ought to ask, and then what?
What's the other side going to do?
Where is this going to lead?
We didn't do that.
So our soybean farmers, for example, I think have lost the market for decades, not just for a short period.
Why on earth would the Chinese mortgage their future to food supplies from the United States that we've shown we can cut off on a whim?
Why should they base their technology on chip exports from the United States when we use their dependence on us to shut down their factories and prevent them from operating the supply chains that they do?
I think there's going to be a long-term effect from this, regardless of how the current negotiations turn out.
And nobody's really thought about that.
We really ought to think more before we leap into adventures abroad.
And now, so just how, I mean, I guess soybeans is one thing, but how severe are the sanctions?
How wide-ranging and how many other examples are there like soybeans, do you think?
Well, major examples across the board, for example, pork exports from the United States.
Ironically, the Chinese bought a pork producer here, Smithfield Ham, in order to increase U.S. exports to China.
But those exports now are subject to retaliatory tariffs, and the result is the Chinese are investing in places like Spain and Chile to produce pork.
They're not investing here.
I mentioned microchip semiconductors.
Most of our laptops are assembled in China.
There are some Chinese components in them, but they represent a true international production chain, much of which comes from the United States.
So we cut off Chinese solar panel exports to the United States, and the main result of that is that the materials from which those are made, which had been exported from the United States, no longer are bought by the Chinese.
They're looking elsewhere.
So we're doing a lot of things that are going to have long-term effects that we haven't really weighed.
And, you know, this is a question.
We have a constitutional issue in this country.
Supposedly, tariffs are under control of Congress, not the executive, not the president.
The reason the founding fathers did that is they wanted a deliberative process before we did the sort of thing we're doing now, not announcing a policy with a tweet in the middle of the night, which is exactly how some of this has been announced.
So I think the Congress, which has defaulted on many, many issues, from the ability to declare war to the ability to set tariffs and regulate trade, needs to do what we pay them to do, which is debate, decide, have hearings, educate, shape policy, and monitor it, and not just default to the president.
Well, and that's the thing, right, is they transferred all that most-favored-nation status authority and this and that and the other thing to the president in the era of Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, who could be reliably countered on to pursue that centrist agenda.
But then now they have left that power in the hands of somebody who sees things very differently.
Is there any kind of real strategy on the American side there that would—I mean, is that the point, is to cut off all this trade in a permanent way, or there's a means to an end that they think they're really accomplishing with this?
Well, the president is a real estate mogul, and if you're in the real estate business, you're dealing with fixed assets.
They're buildings.
They're people who live in them or work in them.
And you look at each building separately, and you say, you know, am I putting more money into this building than I'm getting out?
And he looks at trade in those terms as a bilateral exercise.
You know, am I spending more money than I'm taking in?
He doesn't look at the overall global picture.
And therefore, you know, he started all this with a demand that we import only as much as we export to China.
Well, you think about that.
That's crazy.
We benefit a lot from the imports that we get from China and other places.
And if we don't import them from China, we'll import them from somewhere else.
We're not going to go back to the kind of sweatshop labor that we used to have in the textile industry, for example.
So I think there is no strategy.
There is a very medieval mercantilist economic philosophy at play.
And we have not thought about the long term.
We don't have a strategy.
If we did have a strategy, we would have to start with improving our own competitiveness, not trying to tear down China's.
Everything we're doing is designed to tear down our competitors, whether they're Chinese or German or Japanese or who they are.
It's not designed to increase our competitiveness.
And we need to do that.
We need to return to where we once were, which is looking at best practices abroad and seeing how we might apply them to our own benefit at home.
Hey, guys, check out Tom Woods Liberty Classroom.
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You may be long out of college and you have a family and a job, but you really want to know this stuff.
Well, they got all of these classes on history, economics and libertarian theory and all of these things.
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Follow through from the link in the right hand margin on my page at ScottHorton.org.
Well, I certainly agree with you, of course, about the economics not really being a zero sum game the way Trump seems to imagine it and see all the mutual kind of beneficial policies going on there.
The richer they get, the richer the whole world is, the better off we all are.
That kind of thing, of course.
And yet next to that is the question of the Communist Party's revenues and their ability to build up the People's Liberation Army and their Navy and everything else.
And so I want to get to the nature of the Chinese regime as it is now.
And in regards, of course, to the panic on the American side about China's rise, just how massive is their naval buildup, for example.
You mentioned their policy of area denial.
That sounds pretty defensive, at least in title.
But are they trying to build more of a blue water navy and create a world empire of bases like we have and challenge our hegemony on the planet?
I don't think that's the Chinese aim.
We're in their face.
They're not in ours.
They're not patrolling off Puget Sound or Norfolk, Virginia.
We are patrolling right off their coast and sometimes doing mock attack runs to get them to turn on their radar so we can see what their defenses are like and be able to break through them.
So we're very much in an offensive posture.
They're in a defensive posture.
And I don't think it's at all surprising that they feel that they need to be able to control their periphery, their borders.
What's different is that after World War II, we controlled those borders on that periphery.
We seem to believe that that is our God-given right forever and forget that the region got along for several thousand years.
In quite a different mode, we weren't there.
So I think actually the military dimension of this is far less than people imagine.
The one real question is the Taiwan question because the Chinese Civil War is not over.
We suspended it with the 7th Fleet going into the Taiwan Strait back in 1950.
And it's still going on in the Chinese mind.
And we don't really have a strategy for dealing with it other than sticking our chin out and maybe inviting the Chinese to take a whack at it, which goes back to the question you asked.
Do we have a strategy?
And the answer is clearly no, we don't have a strategy.
We have an attitude.
Do you think – would you put a percentage on the chance that the Chinese would try to invade Taiwan in the next 10, 15 years?
And would America necessarily really go to war with China to protect Taiwan?
Well, if you talk to people inside the Beltway, the answer is yes.
We do plan to go to war with them if they try to reincorporate Taiwan into China.
And that's – the Congress passed a law that implied that, the Taiwan Relations Act.
And the military are planning for that, our military.
So I don't think there's much question about that.
I don't think the Chinese want to do anything military to Taiwan, but I think they do want Taiwan to agree to terms that reduce and maybe end the division of China in some sense.
They've put forward a number of proposals, none of which are very attractive to Taiwan apparently.
But they've made it clear they want a peaceful settlement of the issue, and they'll do their best to achieve one.
If they can't get a peaceful settlement, they might resort to the use of force, in which case we have the makings of a nuclear war.
Well, you know, so let me ask you about that because it seems like a lot of talk about Russia and China from the blob, the foreign policy wonks and all the writers and think tankers and whatever.
They seem to just sort of leave nukes out of the discussion and sort of it is – well, of course, it goes without saying that there's nukes.
But they leave it out so much that they really act like nukes aren't in question and that somehow you could have an air-sea battle against China that wouldn't end up in the loss of Los Angeles.
Well, I think you're right.
I think actually in some ways it's worse than that because our withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces or INF Treaty is premised in part on the desire of the nuclear war managers to build a new class of shorter-range theater nuclear weapons, which they could, they think, persuade somebody to – someone in the country and near China to put on its territory.
Of course, nobody in the region wants to do that because then they become a target for Chinese retaliation.
But we're actually apparently thinking about the use of nuclear weapons in the tactical sense.
We're developing what are called dial-down weapons, which means that you can adjust the level of explosiveness of the warhead.
And if you listen to the rationale for this, it's pretty clear that the nuclear allergy, that is, the aversion to the use of nuclear weapons on the grounds that once you use them, everybody will use them, is in trouble.
It's going away.
And so I think this is a bigger issue than just China.
It involves Russia, but it involves North Korea and others as well.
And it's pretty depressing.
And in fact, I read a thing – was it in your article?
I'm sorry.
I forgot where I read that part of the motivation behind America's withdrawal from the INF Treaty is really because they want to be able to station theater nuclear weapons closer to China and doesn't have anything to do with Russia's violations, so-called, at all.
Well, I think we're in a posture with the Russians where they have accused us of violating the treaty.
We've accused them of it.
There's some merit on both sides, I suspect.
But it's really kind of childish to be engaging in that kind of argument and using it as an excuse to get ourselves back into a nuclear arms race from which nobody can possibly win.
But you don't think it's about China?
You think it is?
No, no.
I think you're right.
That is a large part of the argument.
So that our government is getting into this major dispute, this mutual withdrawal from this treaty with Russia over some strategic policies in regards to the containment of China.
Right.
That's huge.
The idea would be we would put nuclear missiles somewhere in the region like, let's say, the Philippines, which is quite concerned that we might plan that, and then use them against China in a war.
And this is a ridiculous theory.
The theory that you can use a nuclear weapon against the Chinese and that they won't take out targets in the homeland is crazy.
This is not sensible.
This is worthy of Stanley Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove.
But that's where we are.
Are you referring to this so-called escalate to de-escalate thing where you set off a couple of small nukes and that'll teach them that they better back down?
And then the bet is that they won't retaliate with a bigger nuke, that they'll go ahead and say, whoa, the Americans really mean business and stop?
Well, really crazy people do have that kind of theory, and that is not how human nature works.
You take out Shanghai and then say, OK, well, we've done enough, and you just sit there and don't do anything.
No politician in China any more than a politician in the United States after Los Angeles was taken out could just sit there and do nothing.
So this is just crazy stuff that is theoretical, impractical, and terribly dangerous.
Yeah.
And so let me ask you a little bit more about their economy.
Sorry for jumping around so much, but David Stockman, the former Reagan-era budget director and curmudgeon and writer, he calls, he refers to the country every time as the China Ponzi because he says the whole thing is on a gigantic paper money inflated bubble.
And that they have a 2008 coming due to them, the likes of which nobody's seen in a long, long time.
And then part of his argument then is, therefore, all the scaremongering about them can really just be put on hold for a little while because the current system over there is not going to last.
Well, so far, the system over there is performing pretty damn well in terms of employment, rising living standards, general growth in the economy, and so forth.
And yes, there are problems in China.
There's debt on the local level that has to be dealt with.
Deleveraging has to take place.
But the fact is that the Chinese have a pretty good record of facing up to their problems and dealing with them.
Many would argue they've done a better job of that than our system is currently doing.
And I would just point out also that however it came about, physically, China now manufactures about half again as much as we do.
Their manufacturing sector is one and a half times as large.
We have a lot more insurance salesmen and bureaucrats doing healthcare.
And they have a lot more people producing real things.
And if we got into a contest with them, I suspect that how many insurance bureaucrats we have is not a great strength on our part.
Well, you got that right.
That's a good profession to pick on, too.
Thanks for singling them out.
They deserve it.
All right.
So, sorry.
Now back to the navies and things.
What about all of this hype about the South China Sea?
You say here that Vietnam and Korea and Japan, they have their own interests.
They have their own independent power.
Nothing, I guess, really compares to China's military.
But you say there's no power vacuum to fill, really, by America or China.
I think maybe you're saying if America really pulled out of there that not much would change.
Well, I think we should go back.
We started out talking about President Nixon back in 1969.
He gave a speech in Guam, which was called the Guam Doctrine.
And the basic thesis was that the United States should let our Asian partners be in the lead, let them be on the front line.
And we should be prepared to back them, but not out front.
And we have gotten ourselves out front of our allies and partners.
They're really not allies in the sense they don't have any obligation to us at all.
But we have assumed a unilateral obligation to protect them against all enemies, at least foreign enemies.
So I think there is a case to be made that we need to reach an accommodation of some sort with the Chinese.
They're entitled to have some role in managing the affairs of their own region rather than being excluded, as we have heretofore excluded them.
And we need to look to the countries in the region, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, India, and others, to do more for their own defense.
And we should be the last resort, not the first resort, in the event of a conflict between them and China.
Well, maybe we should just get a regime change there, and then everything will be fine.
Well, some people would like to have a regime change here, too.
Yeah, well, put me at the front of that list.
Well, so the doctrine overall, they call it the full-spectrum dominance, right?
No near-peer competitors, American hegemony over everyone, and obviously Chinese and Russian independence stands in the way of that.
Is there a long-term strategy that says, well, eventually we will have total hegemony even in China and Russia?
Or is it accepted that, no, they'll remain independent from us, but we'll rule the rest?
Is that it?
We are definitely in slow retreat.
That objective of eternal dominance is totally unrealistic and unachievable.
And it's the sort of absurd goal that caused the Soviet Union to spend itself into self-destruction.
Well, that's a fact, but does that mean that the rest of the establishment now finally agrees with you about that?
Of course not.
We have a military-industrial-congressional complex that lives off inflated threats and inflated responses to inflated threats.
And that's just a fact.
We use the defense budget like a jobs program.
It doesn't derive from specific analysis of issues that we have to deal with.
It's more is better, is the basic philosophy.
We never can spend enough.
And the fact that we have been spending so much money, $6 to $7 trillion, on wars in the Middle East that we can't win and won't win, but produce nothing, is exactly why we have a $4 trillion infrastructure deficit in the United States.
And it's a reason why we are disinvesting, have been disinvesting, in our educational system, science and technology, research and development outside the military sphere.
This is not a formula for national success.
And our allies, the countries that we protect, like Japan and Europeans, have been very sensible.
We offered them a free ride, and they've taken it.
And they've put their money into stuff other than military equipment and preparations for war, and they're doing pretty well.
But on the American side, the policy at worst is containment, but not rollback of Russia and China, not at this point.
Totally unrealistic.
Well, that is certainly the case.
But I've never known that to stop them, so that's my problem.
Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Chas.
It's been great.
Well, I'm glad to be of help, and it was a pleasure talking to you.
All right, you guys, that is Chas W. Freeman.
Check out his great piece at antiwar.com, After the Trade War, A Real War with China?
And these are remarks to the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs in St. Petersburg, Florida.
And again, you can find him pretty often at Loeblog.
And he was—oh, he's Senior Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute and former Assistant Secretary of Defense.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
