 So I want to talk about the world's future. You know what will determine the world's future? structural forces bless and the rain, the sun, the terries These things will determine the world's future much more than the quirks of presidents and dictators, right? Whether it's Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez which are Biden in office Doesn't really matter that much. There are American power projections. It's not in Not irrelevant, right? Maybe it matters up to 10 percent, 15 percent But that's about it So I got this Time Magazine article here talking about how the world is going to be run by the witness of President Xi Watson's Bay What a beautiful day An apotheosis that threatens unprecedented instability So this is Time Magazine cover story from Moscow. The world's future is in the hands of one man China's dictator President Xi Little dramatic, a little overstated, mate Over the past decade, she has preached China's autocracy as a new option for other countries who want to speed up their development Yeah I don't think many people are gonna look at the Chinese model. Oh, yeah, that's how I want to run my country, particularly when they're seeing it falling apart in front of our eyes While overseeing policy blunders that undermine global prosperity She's deepening demagoguery signals an entrenched superpower rivalry Okay, demagoguery, right? John Mirschimer makes the case that the nations don't effectively Lie to other nations right Because other nations are not incentivized to believe when President Xi says something or when Donald Trump says something or Joe Biden says something So nations don't even bother By and large to lie to each other right Political leaders the extent they lie they lie to their own citizens So it's not clear that any of China's policies are particularly dependent upon the whims of President Xi and Cascading hazards for all those who depend on China's 17.7 trillion dollar economy China contributed 28% of GDP growth worldwide from 2013 to 2018 Yeah, so GDP doesn't actually Measure that much that is significant China had the biggest GDP in the world in the 19th century In Great Britain sent a few boats over and absolutely kicked its ass So you can look at Michael Beckley's analysis YGDP really doesn't matter that much for power projection So China's economic statistics have always been wildly wildly inflated looking across here from Watson's Bay to Manly So Manly and north is the North Shore This is Watson's Bay Been walking much of the day up from Kuzhi And is the top trading partner to more than 120 nations But she's fanatical adherence to an increasingly untenable zero COVID policy has locked down hundreds of millions of Chinese people Shuttering factories and leaving container ships loitering outside ports Okay, a lot of nations have struggled with COVID So it does seem like China's vaccines don't work very well but nobody's Vaccines are 100% foolproof So used to think I get the COVID vaccine and then nobody's gonna die But we've had more deaths since the vaccine prior now. I don't blame the vaccine for that Vaccines a good idea probably reduces the death toll Covid presented an unprecedented Problem in China's response has seen fairly inept She's belligerence is also stoking resentment overseas The World Bank has named supply chain disruptions stemming from China lockdowns as driving a cut in global growth Forecast this year at 2.9% Down from 5.7% in 2021 so People are increasingly shifting their manufacturing from China China's no longer so reliable And this is just going to accelerate All right, we have the on-shoring movement in America More and more manufacturing jobs are coming home So we're less and less dependent on China even Apple is shifting manufacturing to India In July the heads of the FBI in Britain's MI5 jointly declared Beijing the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security Of course the second biggest power is going to be the biggest threat to the number one power She has overseen border clashes with India economic warfare with Australia and standoffs with Vietnam the Philippines and the US and the Okay, where the heck am I? I'm gonna be have to get out of here I'm lost in outback Australia Okay, I see a path There's a way back to civilization guys Whoo-hoo All right trespassing Okay Can't get past here. Oh well. That was fun while it lasted speuted South China Sea in the West Confidence in China may never recover from she's announcing a no-limits partnership with Putin just weeks before it Okay, that's not gonna shift the West confidence in China right People look out for their own best interests so Whatever strategic relationships trade relationships China makes with Soviet with Russia All right That's not gonna shake the West's confidence West was quite skeptical at the beginning What confidence? That's right What confidence did the West ever have in? in Residency and Chinese Communist Party Confidence doesn't get shaken by such a minor thing invasion of Ukraine It shows the disdain that Xi Jinping has toward the US that he would be seen on a stage with Vladimir Putin who is of course we Tend to have disdain For other nations that threaten our power We want to overtake We don't bother to have disdain The people you don't count right we only have disdain For people we recognize as formidable rivals You never have anger disdain even bothered a gossip about people who are way below you This is where they used to mount their guns guns over What confidence they're actually justifies not a natural ally Says John M. Huntsman a former US ambassador to both China and Russia It's their shared antipathy toward the US that brings them together All this sets the stage for a new Cold War No, what sets the stage for a new Cold War is a fundamental structural conflict of interest where you have China which appeared to be a rising power over the past three decades Peer to be on a trajectory to overcome the United States. There was number one economic and military power. There was this structural Challenge right just built into a system of international relations that leads to conflict between nations So Germany seemed to be on a trajectory to overcome Britain's supremacy the early part of the 20th century and that's what drove Germany into World War one to be even more devastating because of economic interdependence never Economic interdependence doesn't prevent nations from going to war Great Britain and Germany for each other's number one trading partners before the beginning of World War one How did it stop them going to war? No Four in human history has the global economy and the livelihoods of so many billions Been so at the whim of one man The future is bright for Xi Jinping says Professor Steve Director of the so is future is bright. Well, China pulls apart. I don't think it'll be so bright for him Shouldn't care about the competition. The problem is this game is not Competition means the stronger their economy the stronger their military the more incentive other nations have to ally with China against us economic power always leads to military power and So China if they continued in a more powerful economic direction than us We tend to dominate the world militarily and as far as alliances which would threaten American autonomy an institute at the University of London and Dark for everybody else China's reversion to the politics of Mao era absolutes has galvanized the idea that the US-led engagement sparked by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s has been a failure That would be reductive China's rise from collectivized penury to the world's top trading nation has hauled hundreds of millions out of poverty While making trillions of dollars for American companies Yeah, it's also enabled China to rise to be our number one geostrategic rival So remember economist Russell Roberts saying that the rise of the Chinese out of poverty was just as important to him as The benefits of Americans getting to buy cheap Chinese goods All right, the stronger China's economy gets the strongest military gets the more of a rival they are to America But Donald Trump's winning the Republican nomination for the US presidency in 2016 shifted the tenor of bilateral relations What shifts the tenor of bilateral relations is a fundamental clash of interests. That's what what shifts the tenor It's not a matter of personalities and a matter of oh, you know Donald Trump His personality he just shifted the tenor. All right, even under Barack Obama We had the United States pivoting to Asia a fair trade deal and 5g Should have been an easy deal. Well, the stronger China's economy gets the stronger Their military gets so no Don't want to facilitate the rise of your number one geostrategic rival So, yeah, it's still a lot of cheap Chinese goods in Australia, but China Australia being in a very Difficult trade war over the past few years such China and Australia are starting to increasingly detach from each other Well, many Democrats opposed the trade tariffs and Trump's racist rhetoric around the COVID-19 pandemic Racist rhetoric as in the China virus. Well, that's where it came from. What's what's a racist? Mobilization against China is now bipartisan consensus Yeah, it's bipartisan consensus pretty much all around the world because China consistently acts in a way that other nations find distasteful The China has almost no allies in the world United States has powerful alliances One of the reasons why America is in far better position than China in this conflict President Joe Biden has framed both his domestic and foreign agenda as a righteous battle between Democracies and autocracies. Okay, the rhetoric you use to justify policy is one thing. It's not even that important what's important is the structure and Biden has been even more nationalist and more of a China hawk than Donald Trump and So he is cut down on China's ability to get access to computer chips Which is absolutely necessary for China's economy to thrive Saying she firmly believes that within a decade China is going to own America because autocracies can make quick decisions Yeah, that's just absolute nonsense. So there are some advantages to autocracies But they don't tend to get very accurate information at the top. So they also deal with considerable disadvantages China is getting crushed right now Today the chill is marked Some 82% of Americans have a negative view of China. Well, the chill is mocked Because of fundamental structural conflicts of interest in the nature of reality and the nature of the international system It's not a matter of personality bugs up from 40% when she took power in 2012 Chinese graduate students and visiting scholars in robotics Aviation and advanced manufacturing are limited to one-year US visas. Why are we? Why are we educating our greatest geostrategic rival? Why are they even allowed here? Why are any Chinese students allowed over here? The Commerce Department has also restricted Chinese students from working on certain emerging technologies Before whenever US security agencies sought to limit technology transfer to China business groups pushed back Now weary of regulatory shakedowns. They no longer support engagement Remember when Google pulled out of China about 10 years ago and a lot of other businesses are following Google's lead It's just not worth it. Each side pushes toward technological self-reliance. They are pressing other nations to join their blocks It will be a cost what China's block is pathetic China's technology is pathetic So, you know, what Chinese consumer products do you most associate with quality? None Even before the pandemic global growth in 2019 was the lowest in a decade China and the US together account for over 40% of the global economy But zero COVID and geopolitical headwinds are forcing governments to invest heavily in bringing production chains home or to a friendly country Right and who are China's big rivals? I mean who are China's big allies right North Korea? All Southeast Asian countries now feel pressure to take sides between the US and China Yeah, and they're all pretty much siding with the United States as former Thai Prime Minister aposite, Vijachiva There's clearly a real risk for all the other countries in the world to feel that we're now falling back into two camps Yeah, all right. We were in a unipolar world after the fall of Soviet Union So there's just one great power dominating the globe the United States Then starting about 2010 look like we're moving into a bipolar world with a rising China With the collapse of China the design predicts. It's not even going to survive it as a state in the next 10 years We're gonna move back to a unipolar world So right now the trajectory is the United States will be even more dominant and powerful in 10 20 30 40 50 years and it is right now The diplomatic freeze is most worrying from a security perspective As well as backing Putin's war crimes in Europe. She has repeatedly called reclaiming control of Taiwan Which politically split from the mainland in 1949 followed didn't split from the mainland in 1949 Taiwan was never a part of China And Xi and China have not given Putin the weapons that he Seeks so they've given some rhetorical support All right, they're giving some rhetorical support to Vladimir Putin, but they haven't provided much in material support Onward and upward