Josh Rogin: Biden admin is making the stand off with China worse

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Offer valid for a limited time, minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. Josh Rogin knows this area well, has always had a passion for it, and a frustration where politicians and business people don't seem to see the urgency to understand who China actually is. Josh knows who they are. Josh, welcome back.

Great to be back with you, Brian. So far, Josh, for the first time since we spoke, I'm looking at economic numbers coming out of China. And I see that they have unemployment about 20% among young people.

I see a GDP not growing at 8%, more like 2 or 3%. I see the Chinese people refusing to spend money because they have lost total faith in the economy and their government. Yet people say if those, in fact, are true, China is now more dangerous.

Do you agree? Well, yes, but not because these economic troubles in China are new. They're not. The Chinese economy has been suffering these structural things for years. What's new is that Xi Jinping doesn't seem to want to do anything about it. And all of a sudden, the chattering class in Washington and the investing class in New York have sort of realized that he doesn't care what they think.

You know, they're going to have 5% growth this year, which is like pretty good objectively, but it didn't meet the Wall Street expectations. So the analysts wanted to do things that you would do if you really cared about growing the economy most, which would be like reimplaining the real estate bubble, cutting rates or whatever it is. And he doesn't do any of that stuff. And what that tells us is that he sure China wants a good economy, but Xi Jinping wants power more. He wants control more. He wants to crack down on foreign businesses. He wants to limit economic data. He's taking China in what I call the Great Leap backwards. He cares about security and his own legacy as an emperor, not on whether or not Wall Street analysts are happy. And that's what's freaking people out.

And guess what? That's not going to change. And this sort of speaks to your original setup, which is like, oh, well, why can't we just break off Russia from China? Why can't we do a reverse Nixon, which is like an old idea that Vivek Ramaswamy re-brought up now that he's running for president. He's like, oh, let's just make friends with Russia and then they'll turn on China. But that's not going to happen because those two are sick as thieves and because they're the same. They're both totalitarian, mass murdering dictators, and they're united by their shared hatred of us.

And so we need to get that through our noggins. This is not 1972. It's 2023 and China and Russia are a pair and they mean us harm. And by defeat, if Ukraine is able to defeat Russia and push them back out of their country, how does that reflect on China?

Well, it gives them the green. If Ukraine loses, then Xi Jinping has no other choice but to conclude that we, as the rest of the world, don't have the stuff. We don't have the wherewithal.

We don't have the commitment. We don't care enough to defend these small countries when they get attacked by these big dictatorships. Of course, it's a green light for him to invade Taiwan. Now, that's not to say that there aren't legitimate questions about the aid. That's not to say that we shouldn't be honest about what's going on in Ukraine and really how it's grinding into a stalemate. These are important things that in any democracy we should freely debate, especially in our politics. However, if you're going to tell me that giving half of Ukraine to Russia is going to help Taiwan, I have to call BS on that. And secondly, if you're going to tell me that somehow Russia is going to be enticed to break with China, if we give them half of Ukraine, I have to call BS on that, too, because those things aren't true.

And when we tell the American people that we're lying to them, then we have to stop doing that. Right. It's one of the stupidest things. And he's too smart for that.

But you must know better. Yeah, you would think he goes to Harvard. He's 37 years old, self-made, very close to a billionaire. I just think he's too smart to understand if he if he gets a newspaper delivered to his house and reads it, you know, that would never be effective. So what did he say on Hannity last night? He said that he's going to end the one China policy for four years until we get semiconductor independence and then he's going to put it back.

He's going to go back to the old, fragile status quo that he destroyed. And, you know, it just doesn't make sense. But he's just so good at delivering these lines. You kind of say, oh, well, that was really smart.

But if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense. But I would say this. And my point was this with China, you know, they've had this bolstering economy. They're bursting at the seams. They're looking for more opportunities. They're investing in other countries. Now, if you look at their numbers, I know they don't care about their people, but they can't be they don't have the power in their economy.

Could they be looking for a distraction? And could Taiwan be that distraction? We're going to go take that country.

We're going to go take over Taiwan and finally bring it into our orbit. And does that allow people to no longer look at their economic situation and focus on the common enemy, which would be, I guess, ridiculously Taiwan and America? Right. Yeah.

No, there's two theories about this. One is sort of like, OK, well, Xi Jinping has trouble at home, then he has got to focus on home and he's not going to piss off the entire international community and bring down sanctions when he's got this fragile economy. That's like the optimistic way of viewing it. The pessimistic way of viewing it is exactly what you said, Brian, which is that, oh, my God, if he's willing to suffer this bad economy, he must be prepared for something. And why are they hoarding food and why are they hoarding energy and why are they hoarding all these commodities? And for the first time ever, really building up their military, building a thousand new nuclear weapons.

Why? Why are they doing all that? It's the largest military expansion in human history, according to our military leaders, and it's probably not for nothing. So I tend to be a pessimist in journalism that's proven over the last 20 years to be more often than not the right way to think about it. And but in the end, we have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

So we can't trust Xi Jinping to not attack Taiwan, whether the economy is good or bad. At KPMG, it's people who make the difference for their clients with talented teams leveraging the right technology to uncover insights that illuminate opportunity. KPMG advisors embed themselves in their clients business, working together as true team members to help grow and transform their enterprise. Ready to make the difference together?

Visit their website at visit.kpmg.us backslash transformation to learn more. Of course, Josh Rogan, our guest. Here's what. But yet we've sent our secretary of state over despite sending a spy balloon over here. Then we said John Kerry over. Then we said our treasury secretary over who they fed, who they put mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms in her tea. Unbelievable.

And then Gina Raimondo went over is over this week. Here's what she said. We hope to reduce misunderstandings of U.S. national security policies. The United States is committed to being transparent about our export control enforcement strategy.

I want to be clear. We are not compromising or negotiating in matters of national security, period. Yeah, but what is your thought about us sending four officials over there with them not being reciprocal?

I mean, first of all, it's just bizarre to hear like top U.S. officials to say we're going over there. We're not going to talk about anything. We're not going to get anything.

We're not even going to negotiate on anything. We're just going to go there. And mission accomplished and well done us. You know what I mean?

That's that's where we are. You know, Gina Raimondo, she wants to be president. She wants to go to China to bolster her bona fides on foreign policy. She's got to be tough, right?

She's got to be a hawk. But at the same time, she's got to please the business community. So she talks out of both sides of her mouth.

She's like, oh, well, we've got to get back to business, but we're not going to compromise on anything. And so it's a big sort of waste of everyone's time. But the Chinese love this, OK, because they want us to waste our time. They want to tap us along the Chinese Communist Party while we ignore everything that they're doing and sort of that. So that's great for them. So they're going to set up some dialogues and they're going to set a meeting for a year from now.

And they're going to continue their economic aggression of pace. And so that's that's that's kind of how stupid we are. We think that meetings are some sort of big accomplishment. The Chinese think that meetings are great because it stops us from doing anything to stop them. And that, you know, that's just the deep failure of our understanding of what we need to do to confront this growing threat. And we got to do a massive military buildup. And I think people should understand that it's not to fight, it's to avoid fighting.

If we show weakness, we're almost guaranteed a conflict. So I want you to hear. So you heard with Chino Armando. I know where you stand on that.

Mike Gallagher almost sounds like you, Josh. He sees them as a threat. He's relatively heartened that on his bipartisan select committee on China, he sees a lot of Democrats who feel the same way. Here's what he said last night.

Cut 36. There's two things going on in the Biden administration. One, they believe that the preeminent national security threat is not China.

It's climate change. We delay key defensive action. We make preemptive concessions just to get to the negotiating table. And meanwhile, China doesn't make any concessions.

They don't do anything meaningful to stop fentanyl flows. They continue their cyber warfare against us. It sends a signal of weakness. And is he wrong?

No, I think he's spot on. I think that, you know, the Biden administration talks a big game. But when it comes down to it, what we've seen is them sort of pull back on all of these tough on China actions because they don't.

Joe Biden wants to meet with Xi Jinping in November. He thinks that this is the way that we're going to avoid the Cold War. But we're already in the Cold War. It's already started.

There's no avoiding it. We might as well compete and try to win the thing, you know. And so, you know, one of the things that I think Gallagher and his committee have done really well is they brought Wall Street into this conversation. You and I have been talking about this on your show for years. But in Congress, I've never seen before 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans come together to be like, hey, wait a second, should we be investing all of our pensions and our 401ks and all of our Wall Street money into the Chinese companies that are building the concentration camps and the missiles that are pointed at us and the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls?

Isn't that crazy? Why are we doing that? And it took sort of like Gallagher and his Democratic colleagues actually to come together to be like, oh, this is not something that we can ignore. So there's a lot of part, you know, military build up.

Sure. But this is an economic, technological and ideological competition also. And those are the fields of battle that we're really not president. If I if I can, can we pivot back to the Ukraine war? The fact is we are supporting and we do have another 200 million dollars worth of weaponry going over.

But we seem to fall short when it comes to giving them what they need to be successful. And, you know, I've had two admirals, Breedlove as well as Starvita said, why are we not escorting those grain ships out? Why did we give up the Black Sea? Then I have Lindsey Graham say what they want is they want the demining equipment, which is not expensive and we're not using it. Why are we not giving some of this stuff that's been around since the 50s to demine these land?

Instead, the Ukrainians are out there with hand shovels in the middle of the night. And number three on the F-15s, F-16s, Norway, Sweden are giving them up, Denmark are giving them over, which is OK. That's your decision. We still have not trained one. We are still writing the syllabus to train pilots who are pilots.

And why is that? We're expecting to fight a land war without any air cover. I don't know if that's been successful since the Romans. Right.

I mean, you're pointing out two really important, but I think two separate things here, Brian. The first is that we have all this old military kit just sitting around. We bought it. We built it.

We put it in a bunch of warehouses, mostly around Europe, and it's just been sitting there for 50 years. Why did we build it? To stop Russian aggression. OK, to fight the Russians if they decided to start a war. Well, they started the war and we won't give them the stuff that we built for this purpose. Why? We're not using it.

It's going to ride away anyway. And that's crazy. That's just crazy. And I think the explanation is sort of gets to the second point that you're getting at, which is like the Biden administration has always been half pregnant on this thing. OK, this is comes back from sort of the Obama time where they're like, oh, we've got to sort of, you know, give them just enough to tie, but not to win. And that's how we got into this mess in the first place. And that actually prolongs the war rather than shortening it.

And that feeds the skepticism. So when people like Vivek Ramaswamy say, oh, well, you know, we've got to stop this. It's Ukraine. It's going to go on forever.

We're going to start a forever war. Well, that's a soup that the that the that is the Biden administration's own recipe, because if they had given them the planes a year ago, we wouldn't be in this situation. So this is what I call a Goldilocks approach.

That's not too hot, not too cold. And it's just right in the middle. And that makes them feel sort of comfortable. But actually, it's producing the worst outcome and feeding all the skeptics and aiding Putin.

And that's a damn shame. And Josh, it takes people like you, General Keane, Stavridis and others to explain this war. The administration doesn't. They don't give the American people the courtesy. Yeah, thank you. They gives you the people the courtesy of saying this is why it matters. Instead, people are out there going, do you want me to explain this to you?

At the same time, we have people running for office who are saying, I want to avoid this, which is a disaster for American foreign policy, I believe. Josh, thanks so much. Appreciate your insight. We'll keep at it. Thank you, sir.