Election 2024: Cooperation, Competition, or War with China?

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Welcome to Podsuke of the World.

I'm Ben Rhodes, and this is another special episode in the lead-up to November's election, where we're looking at what the stakes are for our foreign policy and for the entire world in a Harris and Trump matchup.

Now, over the last two episodes, we talked about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Today, we'll be talking about perhaps the biggest geopolitical competition in the world, and one that threatens to turn into another war.

That's the relationship between the United States and China.

There is no question that China has emerged as the biggest competitor to the United States for global influence.

It has the world's second largest economy.

It has made massive investments in clean energy and technologies like artificial intelligence, which will determine the future.

It has rapidly modernized its military and is expanding its nuclear arsenal.

It is building a whole set of institutions like the BRICS and the Belt Road Initiative to challenge the U.S.-led international order and has more influence in America and much of the global south.

And the Chinese Communist Party has an ideology that is in direct competition with democracy.

Since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, China has become more hostile to the U.S.

and its version of the international order.

And, China has increased its threats and military presence in flashpoints like the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.

Since Donald Trump won the 2016 election, talking tough on China has become part of American politics and policy for both political parties.

What's going to happen, and who's going to have higher prices, is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.

I charge, I was the only president ever.

China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars, and so were other countries.

Under Donald Trump's presidency, he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military.

Basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century.

Now, here's the challenge though.

China isn't going anywhere.

Yes, America can get pushed around.

We have to stand up for American jobs and push back against aggression, from cyber attacks to threats to invade Taiwan.

But how do we do that without ending up in a war?

And how do we do that while also doing things like combating climate change or regulating new technologies like AI, which we cannot do without some cooperation from China?

Meanwhile, even as both countries have taken steps to untangle their economies and their supply chains from one another, the truth is, Our economic fortunes, like the global economy, remain interconnected, much more so than at the height of the Cold War competition between the U.S.

and the Soviet Union.

So in this episode, we'll talk about what may actually be the most important relationship for the United States in the world.

How do we thread this needle between conflict and collaboration with China?

You'll hear my conversations with U.S.

Trade Representative Catherine Tai on what the Biden administration has done to reframe our government's relationship to China.

I'll also talk to Ryan Haas, a leading American expert on Taiwan at the Brookings Institution.

But first, we'll start with my interview with Evan Medeiros, who gives us the big picture view on the relationship.

He's my former colleague who oversaw China policy at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

He's currently a professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University.

I began by asking Evan to describe the current status quo of how China is viewed in Washington, how both parties have become hawks on China.

There's basically two questions or two issues that are at the heart of China policy.

Number one, how do you see the challenge?

Number two, what do you do about it?

And you're absolutely right.

There's been a really substantial convergence of views, but more on number one, less on number two.

I would say, in a bipartisan sense, there's strong belief that China represents a comprehensive challenge, right?

And that's why strategic competition is now commonly used term.

You know, when we were in the Obama administration, it was sort of less frequently used, you know, largely under, you know, previous leader Hu Jintao.

So real convergence on views in the nature of the challenge.

Where the differences are more substantial between Democrats and Republicans is what do you do about it, right?

What are the right set of policies domestically and internationally that best position the U.S.

to compete?

I kind of want to roll back the tape and look at the past and start with Trump, right?

So how would you characterize the difference between Trump's get tough on China China approach and Biden's?

And we can kind of start with Trump.

What would you say were the main characteristics of his first-term approach towards China?

Well, his first term approach, it's difficult to describe because there were really two Trump policies, right?

There was Trump's relationship with Xi Jinping and what Trump's priorities were.

And then there was the rest of the administration, you know, a group of folks that had much greater concern.

And this is, you know, I'm thinking of

people like Secretary of State State Pompeo, National Security Council official Matt Pottinger, those folks.

So on the one hand you have Trump who sort of has this fetish for Xi Jinping, talks very favorably about him.

You know he's a tough guy, you know, that sort of thing.

And you know, invited him to Mar-a-Lago.

There's the chocolate cake, if you remember that whole saga.

And then...

Yeah.

Who could forget?

Right, exactly.

So you got Xi Jinping, you have chocolate cake, cake, you got mar-a-lago.

What could possibly go wrong?

So you have Trump's relationship with Xi Jinping,

and then you have Trump's focus on

what they call the phase one trade deal, which was basically, you know, a deal in which the Chinese promised to buy lots more of American goods, which they ultimately didn't live up to.

And then in the last year of the administration, and this is, you know, obviously during both COVID and the election cycle,

Trump sort of let the hardliners on China take charge.

And he himself got a lot more critical of China, in part because it played well politically, but also he was pissed at them for COVID.

And people like to say, oh, Biden's policy is basically just Trump policy.

It's actually not just Trump policy.

There's some important differences.

There are similarities, the tariffs.

Biden keeping the tariffs, but there's some really important differences.

Number one is Biden's investment in America, right?

The infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act.

I mean,

you know, Biden, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, they recognize since we're in a strategic

competition, we need to invest in the United States.

And they did that.

And, you know, passing three big bills like that is complicated business.

It takes a lot of time and political capital.

Second big difference between Biden and Trump was the degree to which the Biden administration reinvigorated our alliances,

reinvested in those alliances, and importantly, got our alliances, both in Europe and Asia, I might add,

much more aligned in dealing with the China challenge, not just on security issues, but on economic issues and on technology issues.

And of course, the question going forward is, if Trump gets a second term, what happens to allies?

I mean, we're already seeing our European allies on some of their China decision-making, France and Germany in particular, already hedging, right?

If Trump gets elected, they may actually need a better relationship with China, and so they're not prepared to perhaps do some things we want them to do right now because of the sort of the Trump hedge informing their China policy.

Okay, so looking forward, let's stay with Trump and then we'll get to Colin Harris.

It feels to me like what's obvious is that the Chinese have kind of, in some ways, they're trying to build their own parallel alternative world order set of institutions, right?

They've got, you know, the Belt Road Initiative, they've got some nascent security partnerships that they're trying to build.

They kind of have this no limits partnership with Russia that is challenging kind of U.S.

primacy and the U.S.-led international order.

And as you point out, they kind of seek to peel off U.S.

allies in Asia and Europe from the U.S.

on as many issues as they can.

Describe kind of, on the one hand, a Trump presidency would bring, you know, probably more belligerence on issues like tariffs.

But on the other hand, how would you describe the opportunity that a Trump presidency might present to China geopolitically?

I think a Trump presidency could be a huge opportunity for the Chinese.

So, you know, they look at Trump and they think, well, as uncertain and volatile and challenging as it may be to manage relations with him, he is not somebody that is going to keep the United States on the trajectory of long-term competition, right?

So the way I look at the world these days, Ben, is we're going through one of these very significant historic, really, tipping points in international politics.

And we're transitioning to a world that's really going to be constituted by three broad groupings.

The Global West, the Global East, and the Global South.

The Global West is the United States, our allies in Europe, and our allies in Asia.

These are people that believe in the liberal rules-based orders.

And that's both, they share both our interests and values.

The global east, you've got Russia, you've got China, you've got North Korea and Iran, who want to make the world safe for authoritarian leaders.

They believe that state-directed development strategies are sufficient.

And then you have this huge group in the middle, very heterogeneous group, you know, the global south, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America.

And the Chinese ability to position themselves to advance their vision of global order, to advance their values, you know, authoritarian political systems,

state-directed development, all of that sort of stuff, their ability to advance that vision improves under a Trump presidency.

And what do you think the consequences are for Americans

in this scenario, right?

Why should it matter to Americans that China might have a lot of running room to kind of write the new rules of the world order if Donald Trump is alienating us from other countries, including our allies?

Well, most practically, if the Chinese start to write the rules of global order, especially on trade and investment, I think it just means that our lives become a lot more difficult, getting access to goods, paying for things.

I mean,

it's a world in which everything is more inflationary.

It's a world in which

perhaps America is no longer driving the key technologies of the 21st century.

Semiconductors,

AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, right?

It's a world in which perhaps Chinese technology in coordination with other countries

sort of sets the standards.

And here there's going to be competition.

The U.S.

is kind of leading the race in the development of generative artificial intelligence, but China's right there too.

And I've actually been struck by their capacity to kind of work around technology restrictions.

They're bringing their own large language models online.

They're going to begin to export those technologies.

They're very good at things like robotics and industrial AI.

The question is: what is the balance between trying to kind of win this competition for the development of AI?

But at some point, we need to develop some international norms and regulations around even extreme risks like

AI and nuclear command and control or AI related to the development of biological weapons.

I mean, I think that your point

is one of the central challenges in this new era of global order we face.

And the unfortunate reality is

policymakers are going to privilege the competition side over the norm development side because we are in this very early stage of this long-term strategic competition.

And in part because,

to be very frank, as a China specialist,

I'm confident in stating the Chinese are just not interested in having a serious conversation about norms.

I mean, conceptually, they have not accepted that restraint, either unilateral restraint or mutual restraint is in their interests.

And what history tells you, Ben, is that the US and the Soviet Union didn't come to that understanding either until after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And look, I'm not predicting a US-China-Cuban missile crisis.

I'm just saying historically,

it's it's very hard for great powers when they're involved in a pretty intense competition

And in the case of the US and China, a broad-spectrum competition, right?

Competition on economics, security, technology, and

governance ideas.

Very hard for either one of them to get to that point.

So, as you know, there have been discussions between the US and China on AI, so that's a good thing that they've started.

But I think that,

you know,

as a practical matter, that whole issue set will tend toward the competitive dynamics more than the norm development right now.

Okay, so if let's take the better scenario of Kamala Harris presidency.

First of all, what do you think if she takes office in January, what do you think the most important issues are going to be for her in the U.S.-China relationship in the next few years?

Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to make sure that you're well positioned in Asia, right?

It's become almost cliché in the Asian studies world to say, you know, the best China policy is a strong Asia policy.

Because, you know, having those solid, reliable, capable allies in Asia is in many ways the platform from which you can shape the environment around China and I think influence China's choices about

you know, whether it's going to be aggressive or whether it's going to be restrained in both its economic policies and its security policies.

So I think that's sort of that's very much task number one.

And I think that one big challenge for the next administration is going to be making sure that the US and Europe stay very aligned.

I mean I'm very concerned about the China-Russia relationship.

And I think that we're going to need more policy coordination with the Europeans to communicate to the Chinese how costly their commitment to Russia is, because a very robust China-Russia axis

has huge geopolitical consequences for us.

And then, of course, there's the whole issue of dialogue, right?

Setting up channels of dialogue with the Chinese to make sure the Chinese understand what our goals are, what our goals aren't.

It's no coincidence.

that the channel of communication between Jake Sullivan and Xi Jinping's top diplomat Wang Yi have really been central to so much of the management of the most complicated issues in the relationship, especially on the Taiwan issue.

And some of the Trump team has been very critical of the Biden team for opening these channels of communications, just somehow lessening up on competition, which it wasn't, and somehow signaling weakness to the Chinese, which I don't think it is.

And I think that's a very that's a very dangerous way to look at communication because communication is one of the central components of deterrence.

And so just to tie this all together, one more question is just simply, how would you sum up the

choice?

And I mean, I think we probably have our preferences here.

Why would a Harris presidency be preferable to a Trump presidency when it comes to U.S.-China policy and the state of the world?

It really has to do with ensuring that the United States remains strong and our interests are protected and our values are defended and the global and the global rules, norms, and institutions we believe in

are all supported.

What the former Trump administration officials now talk about is confrontation, confrontation, confrontation, right?

And if the U.S.

goes down that road of exclusively a confrontational policy toward China, with almost no dialogue, and at the end of the day, calling for or suggesting an end state

of regime change,

we're not going to win that competition.

That's a competition where our allies and partners globally, you know, much of the world doesn't sign up for what we're offering.

And so that's a world in which America loses credibility, a world in which America loses influence,

loses market access.

You know, and

that's profoundly not a world in our interests.

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So as you heard Evan describe, both parties, they're getting tough on China, but there's a difference in how they're doing that.

Now, Biden has prioritized building alliances so that we're not pressuring China all by ourselves.

And he's also focused on investing in the United States so that we're on a stronger foundation to compete with China.

With Trump, it's a bit different.

He prioritized when he was in government his trade war with China, all the tariffs that he put in place.

And he also prioritized his relationship with Xi Jinping, which is complicated.

My own view is that there's a little too much groupthink right now on China and Washington.

There's this kind of competition to see who can be tougher, who can sound tougher.

And look, that's important.

It's important to be tough on some things.

But we also have to be smart about it.

You don't want to be so tough that you end up in a conflict over something like Taiwan.

And you also don't want to avoid negotiation when you need to negotiate something, like I think we probably have to do on issues related to nuclear weapons or the future of artificial intelligence or definitely the need to combat climate change.

Now, Evan is right to be skeptical about whether we can secure Chinese cooperation on issues like that, because, you know, frankly, Xi Jinping might not be interested.

But I think Evan would agree that it becomes dangerous when we don't even try.

If you make the effort, you can at least kind of keep tensions down and maybe, maybe you can open some windows to make some progress.

Now, Evan gave us this big picture view of the geopolitical competition between the U.S.

and China and why we have to be careful with that mindset of strategic competition.

We want it to be strategic rather than just reactionary to everything China is doing.

Next, we'll get down to brass tax with U.S.

Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

We're going to take a look at how specific specific trade and economic policies pursued by the Biden administration over the last four years have positioned a potential President Harris or Trump, although we obviously don't want that to happen.

Now, this gets a little wonky, but this is really, really important stuff.

And it's actually like quite populist stuff, too, because over the last decade, the U.S.

has shifted away from the kind of neoliberal consensus of the post-Cold War years, the kind of full embrace of globalization that saw a lot of American jobs shipped overseas to China, that saw a lot of concerns that the playing field wasn't level, that Chinese companies were stealing U.S.

intellectual property and subsidizing their own industries in ways that led to really an unfair advantage in some cases.

So increasingly, the United States is using a range of tools, a range of measures, from tariffs on Chinese goods to restrictions on U.S.

exports and investments into China, to try to protect American jobs and American industries and ensure that the United States is leading in the development of key technologies like artificial intelligence.

So it's really important to understand this.

Now, this was on display when the U.S.

slapped tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, among other products, earlier this year.

The fact is, American workers

can outwork and out-compete anyone as long as the competition is fair.

But for too long, it hasn't been fair.

For years, the Chinese government has poured state money to Chinese companies across a whole range of industries.

Steel and aluminum, semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, the industries of the future, and even critical health equipment like gloves and masks.

China heavily subsidized all these products, pushing Chinese companies to produce far more than the rest of the world can absorb, and then dumping the excess products onto the market at unfairly low prices, driving other manufacturers around the world out of business.

Now, to unpack this approach, I sat down with Catherine Tai.

Coincidentally, we spoke about the same time that the United States rolled out its last round of tariffs on China.

Here's what you had to say.

So I'm going to take you back and review a little bit of history.

In 2017, I believe it was, the Trump administration had initiated a Section 301 trade enforcement investigation over China's alleged intellectual property rights abuses and forced tech transfer policies.

This is the idea of them basically stealing intellectual property from

U.S.

From American and other foreign companies, exactly.

And in 2018,

the first sets of tariffs started being imposed on Chinese imports into the United States as a way of responding to and trying to remedy findings that there had been IPR abuses and forced tech transfer policies that had harmed the American economy.

There were multiple sets of these tariffs that were put down.

I think over the course of the next months, there were four tranches of tariffs.

So President Biden comes into office and did not decide to just lift, you you know, like he could have reverted to some pre-Trump status quo.

Instead, the decision was made, we're going to kind of keep this architecture in place.

I think that there are some people who were surprised by that.

I think there are people who maybe aren't very read into the challenges of the U.S.-China trade and economic relationship.

Ben, I know you served in the Obama administration

in that second term of the Obama administration, so 2012 through 2016.

I think that it was pretty clear that this relationship,

the tensions were really intensifying.

Over the course of that time, if you remember, there was that moment where President Obama brings Xi Jinping aside, at least as it's been reported, and says, hey, we know what you guys are doing with respect to cyber thefts.

No, that's, yeah, I remember that well.

You need to stop it.

And that got reported out and it was commonly known.

So, you know, I think just on this issue alone, but more broadly in the the economic competitive tensions between the United States and China,

I feel like no matter who was going to take over as U.S.

president in 2017, that this relationship was going to be on a very, very different track.

And so coming in to this term in 2021, President Biden and I and the rest of the team are looking at the relationship between the United States and China, and it's been through a lot more.

And it's very clear that the direction, the trajectory we're headed in is just intensifying in terms of the challenges that we have.

So you've got a few different concerns.

Obviously, one that you mentioned is things, pretty straightforward things like the theft of intellectual property.

The other thing that's kind of been in the news a lot lately is that, and periodically, and we are in one of these phases where it feels like, and it's not just the U.S.

that's complaining about this, China has a lot of oversupply in certain areas of the economy.

And they're, you know, dumping is the word that is used for people who don't follow, you know, trade parlance that much.

It basically just means you're dumping an oversupply of stuff into markets that is messing with prices and messing with

industry here in the United States that feel like the Chinese are...

are kind of flooding markets with their oversupply in ways that are unfair.

Did that factor into what

your decisions are?

And where have you seen the most harm being done from China kind of flooding markets?

So let me take your China flooding markets piece up head on.

So I agree with exactly how you've described dumping.

What I would say is it's an overproduction, oversupply.

And then in terms of the price effects, if you're producing more than the market requires, you're going to pull the price down.

Yeah.

Right.

And so a big part of this particular type of practice, which is a bit like predatory pricing, is that you've produced so much, you're selling at such low costs that in the receiving market, like the US market, producers of the same goods or types of goods can no longer compete and are driven out of the market.

And over time, then, one of the harms that you see is it's allowed Beijing through its policies

to corner the market in China for the production of lots and lots of different types of goods where

we used to be an up-and-comer in terms of

solar production.

Yeah, they're trying to basically corner the market.

That's exactly what it is.

And things like solar and batteries.

That's right.

I'm going to step back a little bit now.

And if you're reflecting back on the last

almost four years now,

trade is something that everybody knows is really important.

And there's been a lot of anger in recent years about

the way in which trade has hurt certain communities and sectors of the American economy.

On the one hand, on the other hand, everybody kind of knows we're in a globalized world, there has to be trade.

What are you proudest of in terms of the changes you've made

and President Biden's made in U.S.

trade policy and how that interacts with

the ordinary day-to-day life and economy that Americans live in?

We have justified a couple generations' worth of trade policies with this thought that we're cutting costs, we're maximizing efficiency, we're taking away barriers, we're liberalizing so that the more trade that there is, the more peace there is, the more prosperity, and people are going to benefit because the low, low prices.

But one of the challenges is that as we lower barriers and liberalize trade, what we're doing is we're advantaging and incentivizing our trading partners to undercut us and each other in terms of basic protections for our people and our workers, but also for our environment and our planet.

And that kind of game where we keep undercutting each other to offer the lowest price jurisdiction for production has taken us to a completely unsustainable place where you might have low, low prices, except that those prices may be built on the backs of

slave labor.

It also

is, say, in our market, right, providing low, low prices to people who are experiencing downward pressures on their own wages.

So that even as productivity might increase in the United States, we haven't seen the same level of increase for wages that we would want to see.

So that is absolutely the connection between the consumer who may benefit from low prices may also be or almost always is the same worker

whose wages are being depressed and who overall could be worse off than better off because of this system of trade liberalization, what we call globalization, and

a neoliberal philosophy of how we pursue trade.

So when you hear President Biden say this, and I hear him say this all the time, that his vision for the American economy is to build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up.

You kind of have to imagine his hands going middle out, bottom up.

It's the reverse of trickle down, top down, right?

Where President Biden Biden will talk about, you know, in my household when he was growing up, they didn't see the wealth and prosperity being created trickle down to their kitchen table.

And we see that across the board in terms of the widening inequality here in the United States, but around the world.

Vast amounts of wealth, overall prosperity being created that's not actually being widely shared.

And so today,

when we are grappling with challenges, both domestic and foreign, and we are thinking about how to strengthen our democracy, and that's about empowering our people to participate in our economy,

there is this international component where we are perceiving governments

taking on monopolistic behaviors that are threatening not just our economic opportunities, but also our democracies.

And so,

what I really want to emphasize.

That's interesting.

So, when so, take China, like China engages in kind of monopolistic behavior by having these almost state-selected

areas of the economy where they're going to try to dominate the market.

And they'll do anything.

They'll cut corners to do it.

They'll steal intellectual property or they'll pour

government subsidies into an area in ways that then hollow out American communities, in ways that contribute to dissatisfaction with democracy, because that's happening.

That's bad.

I mean, when you talk to China, what's that like?

I mean, do you make these arguments directly to the Chinese government or to other governments that are involved in monopolistic ways?

I mean, as a trade negotiator, how do you raise these kinds of issues?

So this is an area where, again, I'm extremely proud to be a part of the Biden administration, where

our teamwork is extremely strong.

So from the president on down, I know Secretary Yellen has recently gone to Beijing, Secretary Blinken as well.

And in my conversations with Chinese counterparts, we've all been exactly on the same page talking about this excess capacity.

And in this particular moment, our collective concern here in the United States and on behalf of our administration that

as China grapples with its own economic downturn, that it is going to rely on its tried and true playbook of exporting its way out of its economic troubles.

And that means doubling down on manufacturing, production, excessively producing, pumping goods into the global economy, and then inflicting a significant amount of harm on our economies and our opportunities and our ability to compete and thrive.

I think that this is in many ways a crystallization of the problem that we have with the legacy of our neoliberal economic policies, where you are literally pitting your middle class against someone else's middle class.

The survival and the success of your workers versus someone else's.

And so this brings us back to the central challenge that we have at this time to articulate a new set of rules, new set of norms, a new vision for globalization where we stop doing this to each other.

How can we create different incentives in the world economy?

How can we start building towards that by selecting first strategic sectors with strategic partners to prove the concept that you can have a version of globalization that is sustainable, that is brighter, and that doesn't pit people against other people, governments against governments, middle classes against middle classes?

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Okay, so you just heard from Catherine about how the Biden administration maintained a lot of Trump's kind of get tough on China approach, including his tariffs.

But you also heard how they went well beyond that, building a whole new set of tools to compete with China economically to try to bring other countries along with this approach.

Of course, it's really important to note that economic competition like that, yes, it's important in protecting American jobs and American industries, but inevitably, it raises tensions across the board in the U.S.-China relationship.

So yes, it helps the American economy, but it also pushes China closer to countries like Russia.

It makes it harder to deal with hotspots like Taiwan and the South South China Sea.

And it raises the stakes for the United States and China as they compete for influence around the world, including in the global south.

So, if she wins, Kamala Harris inherits a lot of tools to compete with China, but also a lot of tension with China.

So, next, we're going to focus on the biggest potential flashpoint, the one that is most likely to lead to a war, and a really big war potentially, and that is the future of Taiwan.

Now, for many Americans, this may seem like a distant concern, but I think you'll find after listening to this next conversation that our policy towards Taiwan is deeply tied to our own ability to be a global innovator, to be a standard bearer for democracy, to maintain our relationships in Asia and around the world, and frankly, it's important to the stability of the entire world.

So one plug before we go a little bit further.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a long article for The Atlantic about Taiwan and its unique circumstance.

I interviewed the president of Taiwan, senior officials, a lot of really interesting young civil society activists.

So you can check that out if you want a little more background.

To explain all this, in this episode, I spoke with Ryan Haas, who's the perfect guy to talk to.

He is the chair of Taiwan Studies at the Brookings Institution.

He's a leading expert on Taiwan.

He worked with me in the Obama administration.

And I began by asking Ryan, How do people in Taiwan view the Harris and Trump matchup?

Well, it's interesting.

I was just just in Taipei a few weeks ago, Ben, and at the end of the Trump administration, a lot of people in Taiwan were supportive of President Trump.

It was one of the unique places in the world where there was enthusiasm for President Trump because they felt like he was strong and had clarity of conviction around basically his opposition to China, which gave comfort to people in Taiwan that he would be on their side.

Fast forward four years, and the picture looks a bit different.

I think part of that is a function of the fact that the Biden administration has done a lot of work to reassure the people of Taiwan that they have their back.

But part of it is basically what President Trump has said over the past several years.

And what he has said is that Taiwan has ripped the United States off, stolen America's semiconductor industry, and that Taiwan doesn't pay enough for its own defense.

In other words,

it's like an insurance holder that isn't paying a high enough premium for America's defense.

And I think that that's sat pretty poorly with people in Taiwan.

And as a consequence, I think they're much more open-minded to the idea of Vice President Harris than they would have been a couple of years ago.

You know, I think sometimes Americans, you know, they hear about Taiwan, but they're not quite sure what the stakes are, what the issues are.

How important is the next four years in U.S.-Taiwan relations?

President Xi has instructed his military to be ready to go by 2027.

That's the deadline that the PLA has to be operationally capable of conducting a military operation against Taiwan.

Taiwan's leader is more supportive or inclined towards Taiwan having separation or independence from mainland China than previous leaders have been and more willing to be sort of outwardly expressive in his views on this.

And the United States has a lot on its plate.

We are dealing with Ukraine, we're dealing with the Middle East, and we're dealing with a defense industrial base that's struggling.

at the same time that China is producing ships at a pace that even exceeds the pace at which the United States built ships at the height of World War II.

And so you sort of add all these pieces together and then layer on top of it the fact that President Xi is aging and may be growing more impatient as his actuarial table sort of comes closer to being realized.

And it creates a very dangerous combination of factors that have focused minds appropriately on risking the Taiwan Strait in the coming four years.

Let's actually just start with kind of the semiconductor issue, the chips issue.

Because I think not everybody's familiar with just kind of of how essential Taiwan is to the American and global economy

in ways that could be disrupted in any kind of military contingency.

I'm sure you get this question a lot, but why does Taiwan matter and why does it matter specifically to

not just the American Alliance Network in Asia, but to the kind of global economy and global technology supply chains?

Yeah, 90% of the world's advanced chips are produced in Taiwan.

Taiwan is the beating heart of the global economy.

What gets produced there is what drives innovation and industries around the world.

NVIDIA, which is the growth engine of the American stock market, relies almost entirely upon Taiwan for production of its chips.

And

so

what happens in Taiwan has ripple effects for the entire world, for the global economy, and also for the livelihoods of people in the United States.

Bloomberg has done an estimate of what would happen in the event of a cross-strait conflict, and the number that they've come up with is a $10 trillion hit to the global economy.

That's real money.

So that matters significantly, but it's broader than just economics.

Of course, you alluded to this in your question.

Taiwan is a real bellwether for the credibility of America's security commitments.

And so, if the United States is seen as pulling back from its commitments to Taiwan in the face of Chinese pressure, I think it'll have consequences for our relationships in Japan, South Korea, Australia, and elsewhere.

But there's also values that sort of tie the United States and Taiwan people together.

We share a view in democracy and individual liberties, universal values, and that matters a lot.

And then there's finally, I think the American people care about

sort of a David and Goliath story.

They don't like seeing people being picked on by bullies.

And we're seeing that in Ukraine today.

I hope that we never see it in Taiwan tomorrow.

All right, so let's inhabit the two possible realities here.

And just to start with Trump, you talked a bit about kind of how he's been more erratic in his statements on Taiwan

out of the presidency, strangely, than when he was there.

What is the risk of a Trump presidency?

You know, because to me, it's actually if he really means what he says, that he doesn't really care and they've been ripping us off.

Ironically, you know, there's two ways you could have the U.S.

help bring about a conflict.

One is if we're overly provocative in ways that that trigger the Chinese.

But the other,

is the risk of Trump that he signals he cares so little about Taiwan that it kind of opens the door.

I mean,

what are you concerned about in the scenario of a Trump election in this four-year window?

I think, Ben, I'm scared about the fact that it's impossible to predict where President Trump will come out on questions related to Taiwan.

If you think back to when he was in office in his first term, on Xinjiang, he said basically to President Xi, Xi, do whatever the hell you want.

On Hong Kong, he said, I don't really care.

I care about a trade deal.

It raises fundamental questions about if a choice were ever presented to him on a Taiwan scenario, how he would approach it, what factors he would use.

The other cause for concern is that he is basically so transactional.

It's not hard to imagine a scenario where he has a higher priority with China.

and sees Taiwan as a source of leverage or a tradable item to achieve the goal that he is pursuing with Xi Jinping.

Either of those scenarios leads us to a bad place.

It undermines the credibility of our commitments and it puts at risk the lives of 23 million people in Taiwan.

We'll spend a little bit more time on Kamala Harris because in some ways that's a more,

well, rational scenario to consider.

There's this kind of tension between the need to

increase arms sales to Taiwan that are focused on giving them the capabilities they need to defend against a potential Chinese invasion in part to try to deter that invasion, right?

The tension between that and the need to kind of not ratchet things up too hot in the Taiwan Strait, to have lines of communication with Beijing to avoid, you know, miscalculation or escalation.

How would you advise an incoming Harris administration to think about that balance for the next four years?

Well, I mean, this is a question that people much smarter than me have been wrestling with for the past 50 years.

And so I approach it with a fair degree of humility.

but a few things sort of come to mind.

The first is that we need to sort of maintain clarity on what our first principles are.

We're not advocates for unification, we're not advocates for independence, but we care about America's national interest is in preserving peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.

Period.

That's the North Star that should guide all decisions related to Taiwan.

Second, it's worth bearing in mind that this is a unique issue for American foreign policy.

We're typically inclined towards solving problems,

fixing things.

This isn't a problem that has an American solution to it.

And so really what we're trying to do is preserve a certain degree of equilibrium.

If China is putting too much pressure on Taiwan, then we want to find ways to counterbalance that.

And the ways that I would recommend to an incoming administration Ben are to do more and say less.

In other words, mass capabilities that really matter in a Taiwan contingency in the Asian theater, but not in ways that are humiliating to Xi Jinping or that make him feel like he's backed in a corner.

Maintain continuous communication with Beijing to clarify the intentions of their actions and also to make sure they have clarity in their understanding of our own.

And to really underscore to folks in Beijing that a unsatisfying status quo is a hell of a lot better for them than a ruinous conflict would be.

And with Taiwan, to the extent it's necessary, you know, to really remind them that our interest is in peace and stability.

And that's what's going to guide our approach.

And

just when you look at the direction of American politics, it's gotten increasingly

at times anti-China.

China is an easy boogeyman to hit.

There's this kind of bipartisan consensus that we needed to get tougher on China.

Does that worry you at all that there's this kind of

drift into

a kind of conflict paradigm,

you know, with Taiwan obviously being the biggest flashpoint?

Yeah, you know, Ben, I think that the pendulum may need to self-correct a little bit in terms of our threat perception from China.

China is an enormous challenge.

It's an enormous threat.

I think it's probably the largest challenge that we face in the world over the mid to long term.

And they have tremendous strengths, but they also have acute vulnerabilities.

And I think we need to be able to see both its strengths and its weaknesses side by side in order to form a more accurate picture of the challenge that we face.

But I also think that we need to try to break beyond this everywhere, everything, all-at-once anxiety that we have about China and really begin to look at issues on their own merits to understand what is it that we most want to achieve, what do we most want to avoid, and what tools of statecraft will help us get there.

Right now, it seems like we're just sort of

a bit insecure.

And insecurity is not attractive in human beings.

It's not attractive in countries either.

I think the more that we can sort of regain a bit of confidence and strength and conviction about our vision for the future, let's let China react to us rather than us constantly being in a defensive, reactive posture to their actions.

Okay, so as you heard, the stakes are incredibly high, right?

I mean, there are questions that are going to be answered probably in the next few years about whether there's going to be a war in Taiwan.

You heard about how the global economy really depends upon the semiconductor industry in Taiwan.

So the next four years are going to be critical.

And again, the stakes are nothing less than war and peace and the future of Taiwanese democracy and the international order itself.

So

these are big issues.

But of course, the issue that has the largest stakes for the future of the planet and all our children and grandchildren and ourselves at this point is one that curiously doesn't get a lot of attention in our politics, hasn't come up a lot in this campaign.

But as we've seen in just recent weeks with enormous hurricanes hitting the United States, climate change is already here.

It is already transforming our world.

And so in the next and last episode of our election series, we are going to look at probably the clearest possible contrast that you can imagine between what a Kamala Harris presidency would mean for the future of the planet and efforts to combat climate change and what a Donald Trump presidency would mean for the future of the planet.

If you have any qualms about who you're going to vote for,

I think this issue alone should tip you over the edge.

But please check out the next episode as we complete our series by looking at the stakes for climate change in the 2024 election.

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