 Good afternoon. Welcome to Global Report. I'm your host, Lowy, hosting All the Way Life from Singapore. We have with us today Dr. Adam Garfinkel. He is the former speechwriter to secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Dr. Garfinkel is also the founding editor of The American Interest. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Garfinkel. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to say something I've always been wanting to say for years. Hello, Hawaii. How are you? I'm Lulu Lu. Can you do it again with Aloha? Aloha. Hello, Hawaii. It's an old song, you know, from 1913 or 1950. One of my favorite songs. I think people in Hawaii know the song. Well, thank you so much. Before we start, I do want to share with you that, you know, quite a few viewers wrote in after the last show to thank you for your very insightful input. So thank you very much. Now, today I'd like to get your take on US China, except it's such a big can of worms. I don't know where to start. Maybe we can start from the present. What do you think of US's approach towards, excuse me, towards China nowadays? That's a big question. People have written many books about this only in the past year or two. I don't answer that question without without launching into some kind of a lecture, which we don't want to do. Let me just start with what I consider to be the bottom line as of June 3, 2020. Things are bad, really bad. I would go so far as to say that they're dangerous, more dangerous than I have ever in my lifetime can remember. And they're dangerous because there is no bright line between domestic and foreign policy when you get down to how things really work. We have two leaderships, very different kinds of leaderships, but two leaderships in Washington and Beijing that tend to subsume many foreign policy judgments under political rubrics. President Trump cares pretty much only about his own political circumstances, especially so in an election year. And all of his judgments with respect to China this year and before are really signals that are designed to affect his domestic political standing and to arouse his domestic political base. So what looked like foreign policy decisions, and this isn't just China, this goes with respect to the entire withdrawal from the world and things like that, but these are really domestic political signals. And their actual effect on the world and on American foreign policy and national security policy are secondary in this man's mind to how they play out in terms of politics. Now, every American president going back throughout the entire 20th century and before thinks about politics when they think about these kinds of foreign policy and national security decisions. But Donald Trump is unique in this regard because he is unlettered. He doesn't understand these issues and doesn't care to his previous life did not prepare him for any of these kinds of challenges and subjects. So whereas it's a matter of the proportion he cares only about the politics. He doesn't understand the rest. And he surrounded now by C team types who don't understand very well either. That wasn't the case at the beginning of the administration when General Mattis was around in general and McMaster was around. Now it's certainly the case now in China. It's different, but it's similar. ZGP has a lot of political pressure weighing down on him some of it is on making some of it the consequence of the fact that it isn't an authoritarian neo totalitarian system. There are wolf warriors, hyper nationalists now rising in China, possibly within the PLA as well. So he has his political concerns. So, both of these leaderships right now are feeling a lot of pressure. He's feeling for reelection, of course, but he still feels political pressure and political opposition. We can't see what's inside the Politburo it's a black box. Dr Garfinkel. So, so who are the actual ones to make decisions on foreign policy. Is it the State Department, is it the Defense Minister, is it the, the sea level, you know, executive like you said. It's a big government, and there are lots of policy relationships that have been ongoing for years and years and years. So when somebody in the White House or somebody up high in the administration doesn't mess with these ongoing relationships, and they're handled by the various executive agencies that executive departments that typically handle them. You mentioned the State Department that certainly one the Defense Department Justice Department the Treasury Department is very important. When it comes to international economic relations the Office of the Trade Representative and so forth. So as long as nobody messes inserts themselves in these relationships they run normally. Okay. They lose energy after a while from a lack of direction and leadership but they still function. There's a difference between making foreign policy and foreign relations which is carrying out sort of ordinary everyday quotidian relationships when it comes to initiatives or reacting to crisis, then you need high leadership. And in this case in the United States we don't have the kind of high leadership that is capable of actual strategic thinking or even even a creating policies in the normal sense of the term. I mentioned this before, possibly on the show, but these people don't have ideas. They have as Lionel Trilling once said back in 1950, they have irritable mental gestures masquerading as ideas. They don't actually have real ideas. So nobody is making policy in that sense right now in the administration over the past I would say two to three years the man who has emerged as more important than others in the in the schemes been Mike Pompeo, who was the current secretary of the presidency, and the reason that Pompeo has developed this premise center Paris kind of status is because he is doggedly loyal to the president, and that's what counts in this in this White House. If you're loyal to the president, right, then you have power that that that that emanates out from the president himself if you don't have his personal sense of approval, right there there's some disagreement or some, some uncertainty about the loyalty of the president. So then that person doesn't have any power. So you saw what he can't disagree with this president. So what happened to General Mattis, what happened to John Bolton my friend John Bolton, all these people if you disagree with him or if you give him trouble he fires you, or he forces you out. So all that's left are loyal yes men, and Pompeo was the most loyal yes man around. And so he has accrued more power than, than all of his colleagues. So the final thing about this typically in a typical administration in a normal administration, you have National Security Council meetings from time to time on an important subjects, these are called principles committee meetings. So the Secretary of State Secretary of Defense will get and the Secretary of the Treasury sometimes depends on, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, sometimes the head of the, the NDI will show up in a room with the president or with Vice President they'll talk about some important issues. In this administration, there are no anymore, there aren't anymore, and a C meetings, the principles do not get together and discuss things that hasn't happened since April a year ago. That's extremely unusual. So right now all you have is the president this guy Robert O'Brien who was the State Department negotiator, not on the level of any National Security Advisor we've seen in recent decades, and Pompeo, and a couple of, you know, private friends that President will turn to from time to time. It's very informal. It's not regularized. It isn't systematic. It's not written down. Lord help future historians who want to want to consult the archives, because there won't be any in a typical sense. It's very, very weird. Now Dr. Gaffinger in the in the earlier interview you said that instead of working with the allies to United States is actually kissing off all the allies. What do you think they should be work out doing with the allies in order to do better with China what should they be doing. Again, you know, let's just let's just refer to the word diplomacy, the word diplomacy is in a sense a very simple thing it only involves two functions. There are only two things that that diplomats do diplomacy involves negotiation, and it involves consultation. That's it. Those are the two only things that diplomacy consists of. Most of it consists of consultation, and most of the people you consult with are your allies your friends partners, it could be formal allies are not not formal allies. And that's just to keep everybody on the same page and make sure that everyone's interests are continue to overlap sufficiently to do business with one another. We don't do that in the in this administration the United States doesn't do that we don't do normal consultations at high levels. Again, the quotidian stuff. For example, our FSO is here in the embassy in Singapore, we are, I mean they talk to people in the government here in Singapore, that's just normal everyday kind of stuff they don't have authority to initiate new ideas new proposals, new understanding. Just sort of, you know, keep the egg timer running so to speak, right. But we don't consult with our allies, we don't consult with anybody. President gets angry makes nasty noises and he imposes tariffs on people that's pretty much the, the sum total of the diplomacy. Now what you should do of course with the point of a of an alliance, the point of a relationship with a friend or a partner is to direct your, your, your efforts, and direct them toward others in a way that is propitious for your interests. We don't do that as I mentioned before. I mean if you want to look, it was necessary to adjust the trade relationship between the United States and China should have been done a long time ago, right, any administration following the Obama administration would have done something because things were getting out of hand. You know, you don't, you don't, you know, screw all your allies first, and then, and then try to face the Chinese by yourself. That's just stupid. That's the technical term for it. Stupid. So that's what these people do. Because as I said, they don't have policies. They don't think they don't plan. They have no policy imagination. They're just irritable mental gestures, masquerading as ideas or masquerading in this case as policy. That's what they do. No, Dr. Gaffinger, I think the US does at least make some effort. You know, for example, in the case of the Huawei technology, it does try to get, you know, its allies to rebuy Huawei technology. I don't, the 5G technology, I don't think they're very successful. Well, it's not successful. So whether that's a very good 5G thing is very complicated. Like a lot of this stuff has technical aspects and it's very complicated. But it's not been successful. It's not clear that it would have been successful with a more astute and normal consultative administration. But relationships with allies as well as with adversaries are in a sense seamless. Everything connects to everything else. There's a mood in the relationship. That's part of what the personal relationships do. They create this sort of seamless sense of trust. It's really about trust. So if you, let's take the European allies, America's European allies, if you tell them right off the bat that, you know, you don't really care about Article 5, which is the essence of the NATO treaty, right, mutual self-defense. And you give them a laundry problem, wondering if they're really still under the American nuclear umbrella and things like that. If you shake their cage that way and you give them reason not to trust you. And then three weeks later you come to them and say, we want you to join us on new maximum pressure sanctions against Iran. The fact that you have dissed them three weeks earlier is going to affect the way they approach that. Same thing with, you know, leaving the Paris Climate Accord in Asia, leaving the TTP, the Trans-Pacific Trade Arrangement. If you do that kind of thing, and then you go back a couple of weeks later and say, I want you to, hey, let's get together on this. They're going to say, wait a minute, and I trust these people. Right. So it's these relationships are seamless. They're seamless bilaterally. And to some extent the multilateral, you know, clot of the relationships is also a seamless thing. The mood matters. Right. You know, the policy that the conversations we have with our allies are the lyrics, but you don't have lyrics without the music. And the music is the mood. So this administration is very bad musically. It's tone deaf. Put it that way. So do you think this current strategy, if there's a strategy, is trying to contain China? Are they trying to isolate China? You know, these people use a lot of language very lazily these days. For example, right now, if you look at the American, you know, periodical literature on this subject. The phrase new Cold War is ubiquitous. It pops up all over the place. Are we about to enter into a new Cold War with China? But with all due respect to my colleagues who use this language, this is very misleading and foolish language. Unless you dumb down the phrase the term Cold War, really dumb it down. Just to mean any rivalry with another great power that's short of bloodletting, then any great power relationship in history can be called a Cold War. But if you actually look at what the Cold War was, that is to say the US-Soviet competition between roughly 1947-48 and November 9, 1989, it had three elements that do not apply to the relationship between the United States and China and never will. Very briefly, the three elements were the Cold War was a highly ideological kind of thing. Both sides believe that the future of the planet in moral cosmological terms depended on the outcome. There is no ideological dimension in the US-China relationship of that kind. There's a difference between a preference for democratic versus authoritarian forms of government, and this is a cultural deep difference. It's not an ideology in the conventional sense. Second difference was that the Cold War wasn't fought between two countries. It was fought between blocks, right? You mentioned alliances. It was fought between two blocks, the Western block and the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet block. China doesn't have a block. Is Cambodia a block? I mean, this is silly. And the fact that it was conducted by blocks and that it forced choices on third parties, you know, on neutral countries as to whether they wanted to join or not join one block or the other, that gave the Cold War essentially a global fluidity. That you could call it actually a global system because every country was implicated in it one way or another. And it was possible to have peripheral strategies. It was possible to fight proxy wars without inviting a central strategic or hegemonic war. All those things were characteristic of the block nature of the Cold War. There's no such, there's no such thing with the US and China. The American relationships with its allies in Asia are much looser, a hub and spoke like they're not multilateral like NATO. And as I say, China has no block. So the phrase Cold War just makes no sense. So it will be correct to say that. So it'll be correct to say that you don't think there's any ideological competition between the two is all right. Not really, not not if you use the word ideology in a strict fashion. Again, there are differences in culture that that exude into politics and the way people leadership think about politics and they're serious. I didn't think of any, any two, two peoples in the world that are liable to misunderstand each other more than Americans and Chinese. But that's not ideology. That's just, that's just not understanding the other way the other way the other side things. That's a good way to take that to take that a step further. You do not think that Chinese is trying to impose the autocracy across the wall. No, I don't. I think I think what what the Chinese government is interested in doing. I'm not an expert on China but I, you know, I read and I talked to people. China is still getting over its 100 years or it's really more than that 150 years of humiliation. And what China what China would like to see. I know who you've been talking to. I know who and he's the best and I talked to lots of people. Obviously that, you know, the, during the DG ping era, Chinese have come become much more assertive and much more nationalist but that's because the, the, the only credential that communist party has in China is for the economy to keep growing leaps and bounds and of course it isn't going to do that, because of the little income trap, because of the talk about a trap about demography the one child policy, basically dooms the Chinese economy to a plateau, pretty soon, and other other issues. So they can't, it's not going to grow economically it's not going to, you know, keep being that dynamic equin economically. So all the all that the party has has left to fall back on as Chinese on nationalism right, and that's a problem. So I'm not saying I'm not saying it's a nice government I'm also also in the in the ZGP era, it's no longer kind of market authoritarianism. It's a neo totalitarian state. It's trying to do things that the Soviets were trying to do say in the 20s and 30s. You see the social. I think I think the Chinese, I don't get me wrong. But but I really think that that China's concerns are mostly defensive. And they're trying to sort of recreate their tributary system from 1200 years ago or 1400 years ago. I don't think China is a military threat to the United States. And I don't think I don't even think China is a threat to the US allies in Asia anymore than the United States has been a hegemon to its neighbors in the new world for the past 150 years. The China wants a kind of a sort of semi exclusive sphere, and it doesn't want other great powers, you know, right on its literal right on its coast. How about the United States feel if the Chinese had something like the seven fleet. All right, something equivalent to the seven fleet, and was sailing along outside the outside the coast of San Diego or Honolulu. Okay, all the time, how would we feel if the Chinese were doing that to us. Robert Burns, a great, great poet, one of the most famous lines he ever wrote poetry I love to quote this. Oh, would God the gift to us to see ourselves as others see us. Right. It's a beautiful, brilliant, profound remark and poetry. Sometimes I wish that people in the United States could try to see the world in Asia the way that Chinese see it. I certainly hope that when you go home you can share some of this with, you know, with your circle at home. I agree with you I don't think Chinese trying to impose the autocracy across the world but I do think they're trying to create some kind of safe space for autocracy so that they can cement the Communist Party rule at home because they want to keep that story. Let me put it this way. Everybody knows that there's such a thing called American exceptionalism. But there's also a form of Chinese exceptionalism Han Chinese exceptionalism but they're inverted American exceptionalism says the following. We are the best. We know best universal practice this comes from our enlightenment liberalism, but we're very nice about it. We are the best we're special but everybody can be like us. Everybody can be like us. American policy sometimes virgins into a global, a global version of the Monroe Doctrine. Right. Not only can you be like us, you should be like us because the world will be safer. This is democratic peace theory. The world will be safer if you're like us. Right. If you're democratic capitalist open market minded Chinese have a very similar but inverted view Chinese view is we're special. No, but we're special. Nobody can be like us. And we don't want anybody to try to be like us. So they're too exceptionalism but they're inverted. You see, and I think if you understand that you get a real feel for the underlying currents of the misunderstanding in the relationship. Chinese look at the United States. What's the what's the what's the origin of the relationship with the United States was traders and missionaries. And remember the Taiping rebellion in Chinese history. The Chinese still think of the United States as a missionary country as a country trying to spread its thinking and its ways to other countries including to China. But the Chinese don't think of themselves as a missionary country outward toward others, just their exceptionalism is exclusionary, not inclusionary. Nobody can be like us. That's their view. You see the difference. Yes, yes. Dr. Garfinkel, is it possible to have a two inches on because you mentioned American universalism. I remember something that LKY Leakland you once said is that you know the American people think that their ideas are universal. They believe in the supremacy of the individual derived to free unfettered speech, but those values are not into in a universal they never will. And maybe every nation should have is right to his own social cultural political institution and value system. And maybe no country even in the name of universal values in the name of good intentions should be imposing that kind of values on other sovereign nation. And speaking to the converted when you talk to me I mean I certainly agree with that, as long as a country doesn't try to impose its views on others live and let live I think is a very good. But there is the interesting thing though, we are living we have been living in a world for the past at least the past 25 years, that's increasingly more integrated. So we have capital flows and labor, my migratory and other forms of labor flows and cultural ideas flow, everything flows. That's the nature of globalization. So integration in order to work and not be a corrosive to international political and security relationships has to find a way to segregate out these cultural and ideological factors. Right, because integration and live and let live are contradictory in some respects. It takes a delicate, careful way of thinking to keep these things separate. So what you get in terms of economics and cultural exchange, the more friction you get in terms of, you know, moral values and an ideology. So this is one of the problems. I mean there would be no need to contain China with their not that that's I think a good idea. It's wrong language. There would be no need to contain China and look when we were containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we had a mutual autarkic economic relationship we in the Soviets didn't trade very much. It's wildly untrue of the US China relationship right. That's why people are talking about hard decoupling partial decoupling just, you know, readjustments, because we are integrated economically to a considerable degree. That's another reason why the Cold War metaphor is completely Lulu when it comes to this kind of thing it doesn't apply at all because of the economic relationship. But if you want to have a tight economic relationship worldwide. If you want to if you want to integrate a global economy for good and for ill purposes sometimes. And then it's going to be harder to to develop and maintaining a live and live attitude toward these higher value kinds of subjects. It's just the way the world is. I hope this doesn't come across as bad news to people but you know, wake up and smell the tea. But the fact is, though, that American is involved in a lot of conflicts around the world. It seems I mean in our previous interview we talked about America's troubles in the middle is with Russia. That's the assistive wars in the middle is that's the escalation escalation of tension and arms race with Russia. And now there's a spat to China over trade over coronavirus. My question is, why is the United States engaged in so many different conflicts. Part of it. Well, first of all the United States is not necessarily just engaged in conflicts were also engaged in all sorts of you know cooperative relationships. A lot of this is legacy from the Cold War the United States extended itself after the Second World War into every nook and cranny of the international system, because we had near hegemonic power at least in the first 10 or 15 years. And American policy became global and once you get the habit of that you build up the Iraq policies that do that, you can't suddenly flip a switch and say okay, finish not going to do that anymore. So a lot of these relationships have developmental heft behind them, and we continue to exhibit a metabolism in our international relationships that really harks back to an era that's already 2530 years gone now you would argue, but argue that the world since the world is more integrated, and everything is more connected than it was before and since all these stakes are seamless with one another, that the same kind of very high metabolism is necessary you could also argue thirdly, that you know, any international system any any international order however frail it may be or incognito maybe needs leadership needs guidance. And so a lot of you still hear a lot the argument that if the United States does not sit at the table to make the rules for how the world order will evolve and somebody else will. And what we want is an open democratic system transparent system, but most other great powers don't want that Russian certainly don't want that Chinese don't want that so if we don't sit at the table. We don't involve ourselves in a lot of these discussions, for example the future of the internet not all these things are our military strategic and character at all. If we don't sit at the table and put in our two cents than others whose values are inimical to ours will make the rules. That's that's one of the arguments why it was it was so stupid to leave the Trans Pacific trade arrangements right. The whole point of that was to create a system, you know, a trans specific system that would benefit everybody economically that could be regulated, but that would reflect an open transparent order. Right. And that cared about environmental standards cared about labor standards. If the United States leaves the table, then who's left to care about that. If the Chinese make the rules the rules will end up looking much different. And it won't and it won't be good for the little guy remember an international relations typically is history typically. There are only two kinds of actors they're the diners and they're the entrees, and the small countries tend to become the entrees in balance of our mocked politics systems. So what the United States and its allies have been trying to do, more or less successfully, since the Second World War was create a world that's safe for small powers, where small powers can also get around the table and don't have to be the entrees. It can also be one of the diners in a pure great power mocked politics system. The small powers are in trouble, like they've always been. So, it's I mean, it's, I think it's, it's a mischaracterization to say that American international activity is solely based around conflict zones. That's just not accurate. Yeah, but I'm just wondering who's benefit from all of this. I mean, there are conflicts who's benefiting benefiting from all of this because there seems to be this massive military industrial complex in United States. Is this of anything to do with, you know, the arms manufacturers, the loving? It really doesn't. This is a, this is an old, you know, kind of Marxist idea that, you know, economic interests, private corporate economic interest interests, determine everything about the way that American foreign policy is and that's just nonsense. If you had money, 15, 20, 20 years ago, eight years ago, the last place you'd want to invest money would be in a defense contractor. I mean, defense contractors are monopsonies. They don't have a lot of customers. They have just governments as customers and governments don't want them or don't need them. They don't do well. So this, this, this whole military industrial complex stuff is a kind of a Marxist red herring that is no very little with any basis in reality. I mean, there are even in stranger arguments about this that, you know, for example, the Iraq war was fought because the United States wanted Iraqi oil. I mean, this is just, you have to be almost terminally ignorant to think of thing like that. The international oil market is vertically integrated market. It's an international market. It's denominated in dollars, but nobody controls it. Again, you just have to not understand what's going on in the world to think conspiratorial stuff like that. It's just not true. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Garfinkel. I wish we have more time. I know half an hour doesn't do justice to your true ability to elucidate the entire picture of everything for us. But I truly appreciate the generosity of your time and the sharing of your institutional knowledge. I think very few of us have memory of it anymore. So thank you so much, sir. Thank you very much. My pleasure.