 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Bingo, one o'clock, block. This is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. And today we're going to talk about, gee, I guess it's Think Tech Asia, because Xi Jinping is so clearly involved. Russell Hanma, the author of the APEC Master Plan, right here with us today who follows all the diplomatic events, international relations, and meetings, all kinds of meetings. Welcome to the show, Russell. Yeah. Thank you, Jay, for inviting me. I know today is a very important subject. I know that all the G20 leaders are all meeting in the Ernest Harris, Argentina for the Economic Summit meeting with the leaders. So I know there's a big, crucial concern between the U.S.-China relationships. I know that President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping is going to meet on the sidelines. So that would be interesting how they're going to try to resolve this issue. No, he's warming up to it. He hasn't given any slack on the existing tariffs. He said he's happy with the existing tariffs. I'm talking about Trump. And then he has threatened another $260 million billion, excuse me, of additional tariffs going into the meeting. It's a way to make friends, you know. So let's talk about that meeting. Is that meeting going to happen? Is that meeting set up so that it's likely to succeed in some way? And what will they talk about? I think if you look at it, I know David, the trade delegates between the trade officials, both China and the United States are United States trade representatives office. Robert Eisenhower has a, we have a trade group there, discussion with the Chinese officials already. This has been going on since last year when we tried to work with China prior to that bringing the tariffs on board. So I think the key issues are going to be, I know, like you said, there's a lot of ramification impact from the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed with his executive over. It all started from the aluminum steel kind of tariff, 10% of the aluminum, 25% of the steel. Agricultural products. Right. And the farmers in the Midwest are starting to lose confidence in him. And I think we had a lot of ramification because like I said, our agriculture, our farming industry, especially with soil beans, our cattle, our poultry, that we can be exporting abroad. And a good thing is some of those things that we're going to export to China, where China was going to extract it out from our, because of imposing our tariffs. We kind of diverted, just a lot of them went to some South American countries or even to European Union, especially with soil beans. Yeah, yeah. Well, they can get them somewhere else and other countries are happy to supply them. It's a vacuum and make a lot of money. But you know, one thing is, it's my impression, either confirm or reject, but my impression that when Trump started to impose all these tariffs, especially on China, he kept on increasing them. There's never been a time when he, you know, rolled the back. It's always forward. It's always more, it's always more products and more money. Am I right? Yeah, I think if you, I guess how the Trump administration is moving forward, trying to work out the deal with China, we want to impose the tariffs just to make sure that we want to balance the trade deficit. I think we had all like over $500 billion trade deficit. So I think right now when he imposed all those trade deficits that in order to balance it, I think just that we did the numbers and the U.S. consumers and Commerce Department looked into it and said that there's about three, but impact is going to be about $360 billion so far without a terrorist debt. So in other words that, but tip to tat, China is trying to impose all these tariffs just to make up on the deficit. Yeah, so it's a war. Exactly. So what's happening? Is it working? I think from this point of view, when I look at it in the long run, I think it's sooner or later because of law, dimension and returns, there won't be another marginal benefit. If you keep on imposing tariffs, eventually we're going to have a negative impact and you've already seen that with our general mortars, with the auto vehicle industry. Well, let's talk about that. And they're going to be closing four factories and 180,000 jobs going to be lost because there's going to be four factories. They're going to close one in Mexico, one in Canada. And I think there's going to be the rest going to be in the U.S. or the manufacturing plant. So because of the price of the steel and imposing tariffs on that. So you might see a lot of these impacts from the multinational companies that were manufactured that rely on raw materials from China. And he's mad at them already. They should reject their business analysis, keep those factories open and lose money. So I mean, if you look at his international tariff and trade policy, it hasn't helped General Motors. And General Motors is obviously there in some distress that they should close all those factories and put all those people on the street. This is bad for the country. What do they say, Russell? It's coming back to me. General Motors goes, so goes the nation. This is not a small thing. Yeah, I think, yeah, because I know that GM was investing a lot in Asia. I know they're trying to set up manufacturing plants. And not only General Motors, but even Ford, Chrysler, even our Boeing corporation, they're going to start up some kind of manufacturing fuselage for their 737, 787. That's been undermined seriously now. Now they're taking that back out. And so everything's kind of whole because we don't really have a technology transfer agreement with China yet. So we need to impose that. And hopefully, after this tariff thing with the trade negotiation goes, it might take a while, but the working groups got to set up some kind of time frame of phasing out the tariffs on the schedule. Some of these things are permanent things. You knock off all those factories and all those employees and all those cars and lines and assembly equipment. You can't put Humpty back together overnight. So that's a one-way street. And I think to the extent that this whole arrangement with him has damaged GM's possibilities of selling outside the country, that's not a short-term deal. That's a long-term deal. So the damage to GM is long-term. Yeah, I think so because you look at some of these parts of materials, they hire a lot of these subcontractors. They bring up these automobile parts of materials. And a lot of them are manufactured and overseas where labor is cheap and a lot of them come from China. So you see that kind of impact. So the pricing structure is going to change. And I think they might, from x-factory price to wholesale, from wholesale to retail price. So there's going to be some markup prices. And I know that there's a concern about trucks. I know that I guess this morning our administration, I guess our president, made a press release saying that we're going to try to put more tariffs on the automobile parts from China. So that's like, right now they're like pickup trucks. We're paying a lot of things that's brought in. There's 25% tariffs. So that puts more stress on the automobile industry here. American automobile manufacturers, am I right? Yeah, if they're going to actually build in overseas and bring it back to United States, that would be a problem. But if we're going to manufacture it in the US soil, 100%, then export it out. And then we can benefit on that one. Right. And to say nothing about all the parts suppliers that are American parts suppliers, who are going to be out of work soon because all those factories close, they'll have no market at all. What a great thing he's done. It's really impressive. So if I go with him, you know, to Buenos Aires in Argentina, by the way, let's take a moment and sing the song. What is it again? Don't cry for Argentina. No, we should cry for America. Not Argentina. Go ahead and sing it. Go ahead. Well, you know, I don't think I could sing it, but I don't have the big lungs there. But I want to clarify that neither Russell nor I can sing. OK, so what's going to happen in Buenos Aires? Got G20. Talk to me about what is G20, and why are they meeting, and who's involved, and how likely are they of reaching some success? You know, some people say that 20 is too many rhymes. You know, that you don't really get anything done if you have all those people trying to do economic agreements. No, not necessarily. There's actually 20 countries who are civilized, or industrialized nations. Just like we have our G7, G8 summit meeting, but these are G20. And I think if you have the top 20 countries, you're going to have more saying, because they're not only the Western ally countries. And you're going to see countries from India, Indonesia, China, South Korea, Japan. We're not going there to deal with those countries. I know, but maybe they'll talk to each other. You got the European countries as part of the G22, with the European Union. So I think you're going to see more voice and concern. And a big concern with the platform of the agenda, I know that when we had our APEC conference in November, the joint statement from the leaders of the 21 countries, they didn't come up with a joint statement, because they were so influenced because of US-China trade relationships. No general agreement on anything. So they couldn't do anything, because they don't want to pick sides with the China or the United States. But I think in this G20 summit, they're all concerned about the similar thing, where between US-China relations, it's going to overtake the platform. But if you look at the platform of G20, we're going to be talking about our climate change. Make sure all the leaders follow. Well, the US has a very clear position on climate change as far as this administration is concerned. It isn't happening. So what kind of a conversation can the rest of them have on climate change when the United States is not part of that conversation? I think those countries are going to be moving forward anyway, besides the United States. From the US point of view, we've got our private sectors already developing these products for energy alternative sources. We're in good hands. What? Never mind. We've got our wind power. We've got our solar power. We have a geothermal. We've got all these alternatives. Electric cars are doing good. The world, though. Climate change is global, Russell. OK, so let's look at Trump. Let's follow him around. He gets to Buenos Aires tomorrow. And he has meetings. The meetings start a couple of days after that, to the extent he has meetings. And the big meeting is Xi Jinping. What is he going to say in that meeting? And what is Xi Jinping going to say to him? Take us there, Russell. I think this morning, according to the press release, Donald Trump did speak with Xi Jinping already on the phone. And they were going to discuss about it. But when he left Washington, DC, to go on his Air Force One, to go taking a flight to Argentina, he mentioned that he likes that China doesn't come out with a concrete measure. He's going to stay with the tariffs. Because right now, tariffs are he's bringing in billions of dollars into our resources in the US Treasury's department. So he thinks that the tariffs kind of burn. I hadn't heard that, yeah. But I think in terms of we've got to see what the working group is going to be coming up. Not only between the leaders, but we've got to rely on the working group. What's a working group in the context of a G20 meeting? I think you've got our trade officials, our American trade officials, trade officials from other countries like China. Exactly. And they meet. And they've already been meeting in the past. So they've just got to come up with a concrete measure of how to approach this tariff thing, some kind of phasing out, period. Some leaders are saying that maybe we should postpone the tariff for right now until we resolve the issues. So in other words, picking off the tariffs, like, say, we'll go back to what happened two years ago. Well, you mean take them off? Yeah, take them off until we resolve it, because there's so much ramification impact right now, globally. He didn't say that. He said they're going to put more tariffs on. Yeah, but he didn't say that. But I think some of the other trade officials are kind of suggesting. The whole tariff thing is his initiative, Russell. Doesn't he control it from day to day? Yes, he does that. So I think that's another ways in order to persuade Donald Trump or try to make him realize what the consequences are. I think the China side, under GZPING's trade delegations, got to come up with a concrete measure, making sure that they are going to be working together. They're going to be some kind of phasing out, period. And they're going to be invest. Good example is one. In order to resolve, there's three issues on this with U.S.-China relations. One is a trade and tariff issue and how to resolve it so that we can have this technology transfer agreement so we can work with China. The second is freedom of navigation. There's a big problem right now with all these man-made island-sized China seas. And just recently, they had an incident with Taiwan, the China Naval Force, and the U.S. is sending our fleet over there now and going around the South China Sea right in the Petroleum. These are not happy times. So my suggestion is on the man-made islands, on the 9-9, they can all open up to the international community. China can say, hey, we got this man-made island that we built. We're going to have restaurants. We're going to have merchant marines can come here. They can rest. They can have some kind of safety-free mall. Or anything to open up to the general, to the international community, that they're not going to be using that as a post or military purpose. OK, that's going to give them a change of China. I think that's just a perfect time to segue into it. Exactly. And the third is the humanitarian aspect. Let's take a short break. And Russell has an idea that has as much chance of surviving as I can possibly imagine. What are you even smoking? Never mind. We'll take a short break. We're going to come back very soon. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Truth is, I'm impressed. I haven't been asked such intelligent questions in a long time. Thanks. So we'll do it. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii, called Konnichiwa, Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 PM. Please join us, where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 PM. Russell, it's not going to. It might happen. Back with Russell, he's really exercised about this. So Russell, you mentioned that there was supposed to be this agreement on technology transfer. I mean, if you were there, and if you had any control over this, you would suggest we try to make that agreement with China. What is that agreement supposed to look like? I think if you look at the technology trend, it was started from the technology information agreement, where we were sharing information, make sure there was going to be meeting the right IT information technology agreement. If you do proceed, make sure you pay your intellectual property rights and all that kind of infringement of copyrights. So those kind of things got to be included in the technology transfer agreement. In whose interest does that work? I mean, does that work for the US, or does it work for China? Who wins by an agreement along those lines? That is a very important agreement, because between US and China, for example, let's look into our space technology. I know China has their international space center station. China has their own little moon jade space station. And they're all working separately, but I know between NASA and the Chinese space program over there, they want to work together for the Mars mission or the moon development. So I think in terms of technology transfer agreement, if you want to bring the space technology together, so China working on one way, we have our international coalition of group working on the international space station. If they can work together with the resources, I think that'd be a better way of approach. I sure hope so, from your lips to Trump's ears, so to speak. Well, OK, let's put that aside for a moment and look at the larger context. It seems to me that there are only two meetings of major consequence in Trump's visit to Buenos Aires. One of them is China, where he's building up more and more attention. And they are too. They are too. They're getting tougher too. And then Russia, with whom he has this love-hate relationship. God knows what the bottom of that swamp is. But now with Putin, it gets very complicated with Putin. Putin is making very aggressive moves in the Ukraine. Not only shutting down Ukrainian shipping, but seizing ships in a location through those straits there. Kurtz, I think it is. And the Kurtz straits, where he's going to strangulate them in terms of their shipping. He's already taken a good part of their geography. And now he's going to take their economy. They must be really upset about this. And then Trump says, well, he made a meeting with Putin. And then he terminated the meeting with Putin. And then he made a meeting again with Putin. The meeting in Buenos Aires. And then he terminated it. So it's been on, off, on, off. And the present condition of it is off. Is this directly related to the Ukraine, or is it something else? Could it be related to the Russia investigation in this country? Why is Putin having so much trouble making his mind up as to whether he wants to have a meeting with Putin? I think the meeting was canceled because of our president, Donald Trump, mentioned that because of what happened with Ukraine and Crimea. And one day, I think there were some couple of sailors from Crimea, Ukraine, that was overtaken by the Russian navy. And so they haven't returned them back yet to the Crimea or to Ukraine. So this is in protest. Yeah, so they're actually kind of integrating them still. So what happened was our administration thought about it and said that, hey, if they're not giving them a freedom to return the sailors from Ukraine, we're not going to have this meeting. So that's why we canceled the meeting. Because that's not going to stop Putin. Yeah, so I think a relationship between US and Russia is very important, too. Not only China, but because of our past history, our nuclear arsenal, the Cold War issues, those kind of things. So we need Russia to work together, especially with the issue with North Korea still, because there's the Communist Party within China, North Korea, and Russia. They've got the triangle of the Communist Party. Well, on North Korea, although we haven't seen much news about it, and Trump has trumpeted that everything is swell in North Korea, fact is the satellites show the North Koreans are still doing it. They're building missile launching sites in various places in North Korea. So although there's not that much breastfeeding coming from Kim Jong-un, fact is they're doing it like they were doing it before. So I'm not sure you can say that Trump has succeeded in that element of his foreign policy. Maybe he's confused us and deceived us, but he hasn't actually achieved anything there. In terms of our relationship with Russia, this is a great concern that Russia is back at it in the Crimea and in the Ukraine. And it doesn't sound like putting the meeting on and taking it off and putting it on and taking it off is going to have any salient effect on Putin's strategic policy in that area. We're at great risk in running a fowl of Russia, of having a real contention where the love and the hate turn into hate. So what's going to happen? I mean, if he doesn't have a meeting with Putin, how can we resolve this tension? I think it's already getting between the North and the South Korean. We want to let the Koreans resolve the major issues. I know that Kim Min-un and Moon Jae-in of the South Korean president is working together right now. They have a unification committee there. And he has seen that even with the POWs, MIS, from the Korean War, they didn't return some of the verdicts of the remains. So I'm sure that- Is that important? Yeah, exactly. We did identify a lot of these missing in action soldiers. When you compare that to running nuclear missiles- Yeah, before, it doesn't seem to me to be very important. I know, but before they didn't even give us a chance of giving back the missing in action remains. But now, they even blew up their own old facilities. So it's a start. I think in the Korean way or the Asian way, they're going to take their time and see. But to me, still, they're moving forward, but slowly. And I think at the end of the day, we'd like to see the North and the South Korea work together. Yeah, oh, sure, but it doesn't seem like we're close to that. Yeah, it doesn't take, that's not going to happen overnight. South Korea would love to see- Is South Korea going to be part of the G20 meeting? Oh yeah, they're part of the G20. So maybe Trump can talk to them there, or at least his team can. So what do you think? I mean, they're going there, there's a lot of people involved, there's a lot of press involved, a lot of Trump's bluster so far. And it's deep water in dealing with Xi Jinping, in dealing with Putin, whether he deals with it or not is an open question. But what do you think is going to happen here? Is this as historic a meeting as I think? Is this going to result in any day-to-mom that we can have and treasure going forward? Is this going to make the world safer for America or not? I think if you look at the location and to be realistically being on a Saturday night, having a dinner in Argentina where they've got the tango and all that. You tell it makes romantic. It might be hard for making a deal right there, but it's going to take a while. But they can kind of gesture to the working group people, say, hey, this is the way we want to approach it. And maybe from there, it's going to take time. It's not going to happen like, hey, the issue is so important right now, the US-China relation with the trade. So we've got our number one and number two countries in the world battling it out. We want to make sure that we do it right and so that we can continue on. And as you know, we've got world leaders. You know what leaders got to do? They have to be the problem solvers. They got to resolve the problems of the world for our human race here. But I think this was G20. And I wish President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to come up with a better measure and see if we can come up with a working group or better agenda and see in order to bring the world peace. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I mean, I hope there's something good come of it. You know, one of the things that I'd like you to assume with me for a moment, just for a moment, is in Argentina, despite the romance and the music and the tango and what have you, and don't cry for Argentina, cry for America. Let's assume nothing much happens in Argentina. There's a lot of posturing, okay? But no deals are made. And everyone says that the United States is not capable of making an agreement with China or Russia. Nothing happens, okay? These meetings, I never know when they're gonna happen. Do you know when they're gonna happen? Like the G20's like popped up. So if it doesn't work, okay? When is the next meeting? I think they already scheduled. I think the next meeting is gonna be in next year. They do it annually. So it's gonna be in Singapore, I believe. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay, well, Singapore, that's where he met with Kim Jong-un, isn't it? He's familiar with Singapore. Singapore has a special seat to be part of the G20. And so they can be also an arbitrary kind of country for, but you know, they've been promoting a lot of the free trade agreement for Indo-Pacific region. So right now, and we have our headquarters of APEC is in Singapore. Right. I think they can oversee within the Asia Pacific in terms of policy. Well, maybe we have open next year, you know? One last question is about Brexit, okay? Theresa May wants to get it done. There's all kinds of consternation still in Britain over this. How does, and I'm sure Britain is gonna be there at the G20. Right, right. How does the G20 play on Brexit and on Brexit's trade relation, or rather UK's trade relation with the US and for that matter with Russia and China? Oh, I'm glad you brought that question to me, Jay. Just last week, the UK and the European Union met and Theresa May made an agreement with them that they're gonna try to keep everything intact in certain ways, especially with security issues with immigration and working visa and those kind of things gonna be intact. So I think in terms of Asia Pacific region, I know that United Kingdom or the England wants to be a member of the TPP as well, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Retreat Agreement. So they wanna have their voice of concern. They wanna be part of Asia Pacific region. They wanna move into that. Historically, they've been there, you know, so if you look at the history, that we have so much influence from United Kingdom, from Britain, so. You know, at least in the neighboring country of Mexico, Trump's biggest expression of America's policy is with the caravans that are knocking at our door on the California border. Oh yeah, that's a big concern. And I wonder, and we know that most of those people are from Central America. Yeah, a lot of them from Honduras. Honduras, El Salvador, and so forth. Does the venue of this meeting in Argentina offer any possibilities for him to try to resolve all the trouble that's happening in South America from the South side? Do you think there's any possibility that this meeting can involve countries in South America, Central America, or countries near those countries that can have an effect on these caravans and all the trouble that's happening in Central America? Yeah, I believe so. I think if I looked at the agenda, I kind of glanced at it, and there is a migration measure in the, so I know they're gonna be talking about the people from South America migrating up to the North and see what kind of impact. I know right now, because of the people in Mexico, because they want asylum, and the United States has a procedure with immigration, how to go with asylum with the political prisoners or that kind of aspect. So that's why we have to turn them around and tell them to go back to their country. Even we get their name, their list. I remember like in Barack Obama's administration, last administration, there was some leniency, leniency towards children and women coming in. So we gave them a break, but on this administration, we're not giving any leniency to children or women, so they end up. No, we just lock them up. That's what we do. There was an article about all the people he wants to lock up. Anyway, thank you very much, Russell. I hope you follow this as closely as you have previous meetings. And I hope when it's done, we can regroup and review what has happened and what has not happened. Thank you, Russell, honey. Thank you. Great to have you here. Aloha. Aloha.