Is the US at Risk of Losing the Long-Game to China? | Rush Doshi

In Episode 405 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/us-at-risk-of-losing-the-long-game-to-china-rush-doshi of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Rush Doshi, former Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan on the National Security Council about the state of the U. S.-China competition, the Trump administration's China policy, and how the United States can compete successfully with China without risking imperial overreach or bankrupting the nation. Foreign policy in the first two months of the Trump administration has focused predominantly on ending America's war in Ukraine, resetting U. S. commitments to Europe through NATO, reasserting dominance over the Western Hemisphere, and rebalancing trade relationships with both allies and competitors. What has not been clearly articulated in the Trump administration's public communications is how America's grand strategic vision—and any potential "Trump doctrine"—will look over the next four years, how China fits into that vision, and how success should be measured. Demetri and Rush begin their conversation by reviewing Chinese party documents, materials, and analyses of China's communications, conduct, and behavior over the last three decades to understand Beijing's intentions and how they should shape U. S. policy during a time of waning relative American power amid a geopolitical rebalancing. They examine the new bipartisan consensus on China, discuss the Trump administration's strategic foreign policy tactics and objectives—including the use of tariffs and incentives to rebuild American industrial capacity—and explore how the United States can successfully compete with China without risking imperial overreach or bankrupting the nation. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 03/11/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Rush Doshi, former Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan on the National Security Council and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also the author of The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, which is one of, if not the, most influential books in the US-China policymaking community.

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Foreign policy in the first two months of the Trump administration has been focused predominantly on ending America's war in Ukraine, resetting the country's commitments to Europe through NATO, reasserting its dominance over the Western Hemisphere, and rebalancing its trade relationships with allies and competitors alike. What has not come up much in the Trump administration's public communications is a clear outline of what America's grand strategic vision, as well as the Trump doctrine, if there is one, will look like over the next four years, where China fits into that vision, and how success should be measured in that context. In today's conversation, Rush and I begin by asking the question, what is it that China wants?

• 1:26Demetri Kofinas?

  What do the party documents, materials, and analyses of Chinese communications, conduct, and behavior over the last three decades tell us about the intentions of China's leadership, and how those intentions should shape US policy in an era of waning relative American power and geopolitical rebalancing? We examine and critique the new bipartisan consensus on China, study the outlines of the new Trump administration's strategic foreign policy tactics and objectives, including the use of tariffs and other incentives to help rebuild American industrial power, and explore ways in which the United States can compete efficiently with China that doesn't result in imperial overreach or risk bankrupting the nation.

• 2:08Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want access to all of today's conversation and you're not already subscribed to Hidden Forces, you can join our premium feed and listen to the second hour of today's episode by going to hiddenforces.io/subscribe. All of our content tiers give you access to our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still

• 2:49Demetri Kofinas?

  have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly important and enlightening conversation with my guest, Rush Doshi. Rush Doshi, welcome to Hidden Forces. Thanks. It's great to be with you. It's great having you on, Rush. So you, we're going to get into your background right at the top, but I want to say you're the author of The Long Game. The title of the book is The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. My sense

• 3:28Demetri Kofinas?

  is that this is one of, if not the most influential books that has been circulating within the US-China policymaking community for the last several years. That is my sense, having spoken with a lot of people on this podcast about China. It seems that a lot of people either explicitly acknowledge the importance of the book, reference you, or reference things that when you read the book, you realize, oh, this is something that either came from Rush or came from the primary source material that he relied on. Obviously, I'm not asking you to toot your own horn here a little bit, but to what extent can you objectively measure the influence that your book has had on the tippy-tippy top, the most influential people that make policy across administrations?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Well, thanks. You know, I wrote the book. It was my dissertation in graduate school, and then I refined it during the pandemic and wanted it to be published. And when it came out, I was unable to promote it at all. I was in government at the time, so I couldn't do anything. I think I did one event at the Brookings Institution, which I had to submit for ethics approval, and then did nothing else about it ever again, until I left government last year. And so I was pretty surprised to see that people found it interesting and worthwhile. It was sort of an academic book that had policy implication. And, you know, I can't quantify the impact or anything. I'm grateful that people read it. Anytime someone tells me they read it, I thank them, then I apologize, because it's very long and it's very dense at times, although I tried to make it as entertaining as possible. I think there are elements and themes of the book that, five years ago,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  when I was working on it, were far more controversial than they are now. You know, at the time, I was saying that China had a grand strategy to displace American order. I believe that's true. I'm even more confident of that now. But back then, people didn't necessarily subscribe to that view. That was a sort of renegade view. People would say, okay, maybe that's true within Asia, but that may not be true globally. And I thought it was true globally. I think the second thing is that, you know, areas of the book as well, that talk a little bit about the stakes of the competition, that talked about China's pursuit of technology dominance, that talked about its PLA going global, talked about how it wanted to dominate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where they didn't want to make the world dependent on its supply chains and us less dependent,

• 5:39Speaker 01

  or rather, it wanted to make us dependent on their supply chains and them less dependent on ours. Those are all themes now that are part of the discourse. People talk about China's ambitions in those terms. And I think the final thing I'd say is that there was a frame that the Biden administration had, and I think this was a book that I wrote, but many of the ideas were shared more widely within a broader democratic reconsideration of foreign policy, which was that China, you know, was the only state with the intent and the capability to sort of change the international system, change the international order. And that phraseology made it into the high-level strategic documents of the Biden administration on China, because that was something that people believed, and it's the verdict of the intelligence community as well. And so, again, I think the debate now has caught up to where the book was.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  And therefore, you know, I feel quite happy with the impact that it's had.

• 6:26Demetri Kofinas?

  First of all, I just want to validate that. That was my experience reading the book back in either 2021 or 2022, around there. And I felt like it illuminated so much for me and answered a lot of questions more concretely about Chinese intentions and the question, you know, what does China want? Which so many people seem to be willing to make assumptions about, but getting to first principles is rare. And I felt like it did that or tried to do that. I also just want to say how excited I am to have this conversation. Besides the fact that it's one that I've wanted to have with you for a long time. It's such an important topic. And as we're going to get into, it hasn't featured quite prominently in the early months of the second Trump administration.

• 7:07Demetri Kofinas?

  The focus has, in some sense, understandably been on ending the Ukraine war, rebalancing NATO commitments, et cetera. But obviously, this is very important. It's important because it has a bipartisan consensus attached to it, which I think speaks to its importance. But it's also important because it's been an important issue that Trump has really, really made a lot of headway in terms of getting public support behind the issue in his first administration. So we're going to have a chance to delve deep into that. And I just wanted to reassure the audience of this. Before we do, just a couple of quick questions about your bio. First of all, I feel like you fall in the category of policy wonk. Is that why you would describe yourself?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I've made a series of mistakes that brought me to this point. That is, that is what I am.

• 7:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, you're like, who were the people that populated McNamara's Defense Department? What were their names?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I don't know about that.

• 7:56Demetri Kofinas?

  There was something about those people that, there was some, some name that was associated with them that had to do with like, being like, kind of the best of the best in terms of education and breed.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but remember, I think, I think that term, when it was applied to them, ended up being a kind of way of saying, actually, these guys had a lot of book learning. A lot of book learning and no street learning. They didn't know anything was the way that that ended up being. I think it was best in the brightest or something. But I would never want to be considered in that camp because the truth is, you know, Effectiveness in government, let's just say, is a lot more than just the ability to write a book or read a book. It's about a whole variety of skills, including management, people skills, judgment, that not necessarily come from academia. So, you know, there's more complexity to a successful career in policy than being able to write well and think creatively.

• 8:37Demetri Kofinas?

  Absolutely. So, and I don't mean it, obviously, in a derogatory sense. I understand your reticence in accepting the compliment.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I meant it in a derogatory sense.

• 8:46Demetri Kofinas?

  So you got a BA in East Asia Studies from Princeton, a PhD in Political Science in Government for Harvard. I think most importantly, and most relevant for this conversation, you served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan in the Biden Administration. You're also fluent in Mandarin, which actually is very important. So walk me through that progression for you, and I absolutely want to understand

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:06Demetri Kofinas?

  how well you understand Chinese society, Chinese culture, or maybe a less intimidating way of answering that question is, what are the experiences that you've had in China that you feel have given you the insights that you've used to write your books and write your policy papers and analyses?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, look, I, you know, took Chinese language on a whim in college. I thought it was a cool language to study. I was interested in the comparison between China and India back then. People were talking a lot about that back then. Remember, the gap between India and China wasn't as big. And so it was kind of a hot topic in that era. And so I went to China and lived there for a bit, did language study in an immersion program, and I really fell in love with the country and with working on the set of issues. And so, you know, gradually, my career took me in this direction as I had a chance to develop, you know, more policy knowledge, work on international relations, work on questions related to defense, or economics, or technology. You know, I was very involved earlier in my career in actually New Jersey politics. It was kind of a fork in the road that I had to take. Do I want to keep doing that, or do I want to get more involved in

• 10:07Speaker 01

  foreign policy? I made the choice to do some work with the Department of Defense and, you know, to do some stuff in DC. Later, I went to China again, you know, I went to get my PhD. One thing that I'll note, though, is, you know, after I graduated, I spent a year in China on the Fulbright Program, which no longer exists in China for a variety of reasons. But I lived there for, you know, a little over a year and got a chance to To really explore the country and to really do a lot of research. I was based at a university, a non-university. And when I was there, I got to meet a lot of academics and took graduate level courses. My Chinese is OK. I wouldn't say I'm fluent. I would say I'm proficient. And it takes a lot of work to be able to do a graduate level class in Chinese. And I probably didn't understand everything. But it gave me greater enthusiasm for the work and it gave me greater familiarity,

• 10:52Speaker 01

  by the way, with the kind of material that might matter. So later, when I went to do my PhD, I kind of knew, all right, well, if I want to understand how China thinks about its foreign policy, here are the ways in which I can make that successful. Here are the books that I should read. Here are the sources I should gather. So that's sort of one of the things I took away. There's so much more I took away, but maybe I'll just stop there for now.

• 11:11Demetri Kofinas?

  All right. So let me ask you something before we get to the long game, which I want to begin talking about first, because I think it'll lay a good foundation for this conversation. Famously, George Kennan wrote his Long Telegram on the Sources of Soviet Conduct in 1946. And that was an important moment in US foreign policy history and the history of the Cold War, because it was the beginning of an attempt to sort of understand the new dynamics that existed between what were previously allies now turning it to be competitors. I don't know what our knowledge was of the Soviet Union at that time, what kind of embedded knowledge there was in the United States. This is obviously right, the beginning of the Cold War. The dynamic with China is different in that we've had decades now of relationships with

• 11:55Demetri Kofinas?

  China going arguably back 50 years, where we've had an opportunity to get to know them and certainly in the last 30, as they got integrated into the global economy. So we're not starting off at the same place. But is it possible to make that comparison and say, sort of, to assess how well we understood the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, the intentions of its leadership in the late 1940s with where we are today with China?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'll put it this way, that assessments of an adversary are always some of the hardest things that you have to do in foreign policy. And it never, you never sort of get it completely right, because at any given moment, an adversary is changing, and so your assessments have to change as well. Certain things stay the same, certain things evolve. And there's a tactical question, too. We can get the strategic level assessment right. Okay, China wants to displace American order. Maybe that's the strategic level assessment. But the tactical assessment might be, how is it going to do that in any given time? So I guess my broad point is that the challenge of understanding another country is never something that's solved. It's a process, it's a lifelong undertaking, it's an institutional undertaking for the US government. And when you think about the Soviet period, you know, Kennan wrote his telegram, he made

• 13:07Speaker 01

  an argument, and maybe a lot of the argument was true, but there was a continual debate, a continual reassessment that had to occur over time, given the complexity of the situation. And the same thing will be true of China. I've made an argument that I think is right about what China's ambitions are. I'm even more confident of it now than I was when I wrote the book four years ago. But I also think that this will be a continual process of reassessment, debate, and rethinking, and that in no way will we ever have a final word, essentially. There's going to be more consensus on certain points, for sure, including on the strategic level assessment, but plenty of stuff is still going to have to be determined and debated over time.

• 13:44Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I mean, this sits at the heart of the subsequent analysis, because the extent to which we're perceiving reality correctly will determine whether or not the further assumptions that we make prove to be useful or not. So let's talk about the long game. So this book draws from a rich and deep base of Chinese primary source material, including decades' worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War.

• 14:17Demetri Kofinas?

  What is the story that you tell in The Long Game? Walk us through what that is for people that haven't read the book.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and let me just start, we can start with the sources. Because the key to this book, this undertaking, was to get as close to proving the case as possible. Knowing that, of course, we're not in Xi Jinping's head and we're not in the Chinese Communist Party's central decision-making apparatus ourselves. So what do we have to go off? We have three things. We can look at the texts that China puts out, the party texts that are pretty authoritative. We can look at the memoirs, we can look at the compendiums. We can look at how the party communicates to itself. And it does so quite openly, because it's got to mobilize cadres to follow the party's approach. So we can look at grand strategic texts. We can look at the capabilities. We know that in order to run a grand strategy, you have to have institutions that can coordinate

• 15:05Speaker 01

  multiple instruments of statecraft and that can overcome parochial interests. So we look at those institutions to see, how do they work? And then we look at the behavior. It's not enough to read what the Chinese are saying. That gets us in their head. We have to look at what they're doing and see if those match up. And so this book was an attempt to take all three under consideration. To look at the texts, to look at the institutions, and to look at the behavior. So that was the kind of approach. And I will say, you know, you look at the footnotes, gosh, it's 60 pages. We created a 5 million-word database of material, I created it, to basically explore the evolution of concepts and thinking over time. You know, we have the memoirs of a ton of different people, also the compendiums of every senior leader. You know, memoirs of random diplomats, for example, who were involved in APEC or are a part of it. All of that helps paint a picture.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And that's how I get to the story that I tell in the book.

• 15:52Demetri Kofinas?

  So did you read these documents? Or what percentage of these documents did you read in Mandarin?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  I read everything. So I had to go, I mean, this is a course of many years. I used digitization of that material to be able to process it faster, to be able to go through different sections, to be able to find things that I was most interested in. But everything that I cite in the book, I fully read in its context. You know, I read the entirety of most of these books. I would say, you know, there's some compendiums, right? Compendiums have maybe 100 to 200 essays in them. Some of the essays are on agricultural reforms. So maybe I skip those essays so I could focus on issues related to foreign policy. But anything relevant, I read personally and then studied closely because it's not enough to read it. You know, you can read it and understand it because Chinese Communist Party doctrine, the language that they use, isn't like normal language. Everything has a meaning and a context.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  So when you see a particular phrase, you've got to interpret it like a literary exercise. What does it mean within the web of meaning that the party has spun? And so that's the nature of the of the business of going through this material. There's a famous quote by a Chinese senologist from Australia. I think originally of Belgian descent. His name is, his pen name was Simon Leys. And he basically said that going through these materials is like munching rhinoceros sausage and drinking sawdust by the bucket full. It's extremely dry stuff and you're looking for marginal changes and tweaks that help paint a picture of meaning. And that's how the party works.

• 17:18Demetri Kofinas?

  It sounds like going through Fed meetings.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, actually, that's a very interesting analogy. Back in the Bernanke era, everybody was looking at where the comma was placed on the FOMC documents. There's an element of that. You're right.

• 17:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, and in fact, it was even worse under Greenspan. And it wasn't just the FOMC meetings under Greenspan. You also had his congressional testimonies where he was purposefully occlusive.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:39Demetri Kofinas?

  It's very interesting because I was reaching for, again, I'm always interested in trying to hold my own perceptions accountable and compare my preconceptions based on the world that I live in to what I'm dealing with on the other side. In this case, Chinese leadership and the Chinese political system. You know, the policymaking community, and it really is a community in the United States. You have think tanks, you have people working on policy positions, lobbying the government to try to adopt these positions. And over time, sort of organic consensus tends to emerge. That's a big part of trying to understand how the direction of US policy, looking at who gets hired into the administration is important. Public communication by the president and his team is important.

• 18:21Demetri Kofinas?

  And I feel like if an administration, some have been better at this than others. I think the current administration, maybe as part of its policy, its tactical strategy, strategic approach, tries to create uncertainty. But I can recall administrations where it was pretty obvious what they wanted to accomplish, what their goals were. The thing that seems to be the case with China is that it's much more difficult to determine what Chinese Party leadership is after if we're comparing it to the Fed. Is that an accurate interpretation, or do you think actually it's pretty clear when looking at the documents and looking at the commentary?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I think it's a little more complicated, you know? I mean, it's a great question, and actually, it gives me some food for thought. And so let's go through this together. My view is that the Chinese Communist Party is actually surprisingly transparent, that actually, even though you must interpret, you know, particular things and let Communist Party speak, once you know how to do that, the actual texts speak for themselves. There's not a lot of deliberate ambiguity. A lot of it is, like I said, explicit. And I'm happy we could go in more detail, and I could give you examples in a moment. But I think that America, you know, we're so transparent that it's often hard to know what the signal and the noise is, right?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  So what is the statement of the Trump administration? Is it when they released their national security strategy? Is it what the president says on a Monday, what the secretary of state says on a Tuesday? There's a lack of coordination sometimes in messaging that can make it a little bit harder to decipher American intent. We can quote people, but we don't always know who's authoritative. In China, the Communist Party Central Committee is authoritative. The leader of the Politburo Standing Committee is authoritative. Xi Jinping is authoritative, and he says a lot of things to help the system work. You know, they don't have the process in the same way of statute and, you know, internal, they don't have like the judicial system that's developed, they don't have the statutory system, they don't have executive orders per se. For the communication to work within China, the party is not just talking to the state,

• 20:19Speaker 01

  the party is talking to all party members wherever they sit, which could be in a business, it could be in a university, it could be in a company. And the way to communicate with party members is really through party guidances and documents. And so when I say we look through this material, what we're doing is archaeology. We're looking through the past to understand how the party talked to itself, told itself what it needed to do, what the direction everybody needed to move in was going to be, and then using that to understand what China's ambitions really are. And that, to me, is actually quite transparent. I think they tell us what they're going to do, and our problem, the American problem, over the last 30 years, has been that we didn't listen.

• 20:56Demetri Kofinas?

  So is a good analogy that the CCP is something analogous to the brain of China and the organs of government of the body that animates the logic of the mind and the logic of party doctrine?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. There's a lot of ways that we could create metaphors for the party. But here's how we could describe how it actually works, too. You know, grand strategy is a hard thing to do, right? Grand strategy is this big thing. And what makes it grand is not just that you have these weighty goals like the achievement of security, but that you're able to coordinate multiple instruments of statecraft to achieve that aim. And so what makes it grand is frankly, coordination. I think of the Chinese Communist Party as both a place where decisions are made, judgments are made about the international system, decisions are made about policy, but also, critically, the vehicle for coordination. Remember, the party emerges from Leninism. So we could go much more into the Chinese Communist Party. There's a lot to say here. But it's a Leninist institution.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  What is Leninism fundamentally? Leninism is focused on the centralization of power. Now Lenin has this quote about how essentially the party is the conductor and Leninism is about making sure every member of the orchestra is playing the right note. And so it is about the centralization of power. And the theory of Leninism in the communist era was that Leninist vanguard, a small group of elites, would sort of steer the party and steer everybody else, every part of society, to accomplish this huge goal of communist revolution. Well, for China, the goal isn't communist revolution. The goal is nationalist rejuvenation. So the Chinese Communist Party is a Leninist political party focused on centralization. But this time, the goal isn't the freedom of the proletariat.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  It is, in fact, the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It is a nationalist end goal. So the party is simultaneously the brain, but it also penetrates every level of society. It penetrates the body, if you will. It's the nervous system to make sure that everything is moving properly. Maybe that's the human metaphor we could use here. It's the nervous system, which includes the brain, but it includes the transmission of the brain's impulses to the body as well.

• 22:59Demetri Kofinas?

  I love that. And I should have actually thrown in corporations as well, because that's the thing. It's not just the government. And that's what makes it so unique and hard for Americans to wrap their head around. So I love that. Thank you for providing that clarity. So maybe the next question I'd like to ask in terms of that could help with building a foundation is to understand how far back China's strategic focus on the United States goes.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, here again, it's useful to think about why the Chinese Communist Party exists, which is a question we don't often ask. Why did this thing come into existence? And the reason it came into existence is because China had gone through a century of humiliation. It had been humiliated by European great powers, it had lost two opium wars, it had lost wars to Japan, the Qing Dynasty was collapsing, and it was in that moment of Chinese depredation and humiliation, again, it's called the century of humiliation, think of the psychology of that term, that you see nationalism surge in China. And you see, you know, people like Mao Zedong, they hang posters in their house, in their room, when they're young, of prominent Chinese nationalist intellectuals who want to reform

• 24:10Speaker 01

  the dying Qing Dynasty. You also see a number of the people who ended up joining the Communist Party, trying to find ways to be involved in making China, as they put it, quote, wealthy and strong. Deng Xiaoping, Mao's successor, at the age of 14, goes to France, and the reason he goes to France, he says, is because he's looking for a way to make China wealthy again, and make it strong again. Many of the senior members of the Chinese Communist Party went to the Huangpu Military Academy, and the reason they went there was because that military academy was dedicated to the mission of reviving the Chinese nation. But remember this, back then, the vanguard of rejuvenation was the Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by a guy named Sun Yat-sen, who, by the way, spent a lot of his life in

• 24:53Speaker 01

  America. Sun Yat-sen is the hero to the Chinese communists, and their enemy, the Chinese nationalists. And those two factions worked together for a time, until it all comes apart. But the reason I mention to you, Dmitry, Sun Yat-sen, is because he himself, back in the day, had a benchmark for what rejuvenation meant. And his benchmark really was the West, it was the United States. And he doesn't say, I want to catch up, he says, we want China to be number one. Because we were number one for 18 of 20 centuries and we want to be number one again. So here's two things I want to say about this. First, the idea that China wants to be number one is not that unusual in Chinese nationalist history. But number two, it's not that unusual in the history of all revolutionary, post-colonial societies that have scale.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  India wanted to be number one, too. It just didn't get there. But Indian nationalists, they write in ways similar to Chinese nationalists. They think that the West is an aberration. So what I'm trying to say is that when people say, "Oh, no, Rush, your conclusion is too crazy," I think that their imagination, contextualization of the party is too contemporary and it's too focused on just the US and China. Nationalists think this way. Chinese nationalists definitely thought this way and they continue to think this way to this day. And today, the benchmark is very much, and has been, what they call the world's leading, you know, status essentially, or the world's leading level, and that's America.

• 26:15Demetri Kofinas?

  So I think one of the important questions we should answer, not right now, but soon, is why do we care? You know, this is a question I like to always ask people because it doesn't really get answered often and different people might have different answers. And I think it's useful for people to think about it because the American people are being told that they should care beyond, you know, some of the obvious sort of economic ramifications of globalization and China's role in the world as a manufacturing power. The question of why should America care about rising Chinese military power isn't necessarily obvious to most people. So that's something I would like to address at some point. But let's at least tie off the basic framework that you put forward in the long game because there are three, as I recall, phases to China's sort of longstanding strategic goal of national

• 27:00Demetri Kofinas?

  rejuvenation. The first one, I think, falls in the category of blunting, a blunting strategy, which I think also aligns very closely with the phrase hide and abide, and that's most closely associated with Deng Xiaoping. Then there's a building phase and then there's an expansion phase or expansion strategy. So walk me through these strategies and where are we today in your estimation?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Happy to talk through this. So I've given you a sense of why grand strategy matters. We talked a little bit about the party and its history. So, you know, grand strategy is a thing that's hard to change. And the book is studying when China's grand strategy changed. It's hard to change because people's perceptions are sticky. Organizations get locked in. It usually takes big, unexpected shocks to change a grand strategy. And so, think back now to the Cold War. In the 1980s, the US and China were aligned against the Soviet Union. We even had shared military installations that we were operating out of on China's border with the Soviet Union. Imagine that, we were giving them cutting-edge military technology. But then, there was this big shock that adjusted grand strategy. We had this trifecta. We had the Tiananmen Square massacre,

• 28:07Speaker 01

  which led China to think of the United States essentially as an ideological threat. We had the Gulf War in 1990, which demonstrated America's military capability was just truly exceptional. America demolished the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi army looked like the Chinese military. That was scary for China as well, because the Taiwan issue hadn't really been resolved. There was still the risk, in their mind, of potential conflict. And then, finally, the Soviet Union collapsed. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, it removed the glue between the US and China. And that meant that the world had changed. And China now had its estimation of the threat posed by America through the roof. And its estimation of the power America wielded also through the roof. So what do you do? You know that to get rich,

• 28:49Speaker 01

  you're going to need American markets, expertise, capital, and technology. So you can't turn away from America. So we see them pursue a strategy of blunting under Deng Xiaoping, and then to his successor, Jiang Zemin, under the phrase "hide capabilities and buy time," or "tao guang yang hui." And "hide capabilities and buy time" is fundamentally about quietly undermining the ways in which America can wield power over China. So militarily, that means investing not in aircraft carriers, but in asymmetric systems that can take out American vessels. You know, anti-ship cruise missiles, anti-ship ballistic missiles, mines, submarines. And of course, shortly after the Gulf War, China's senior leader, Jiang Zemin, convenes the entire Central Military Commission, the people who run the military.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  They sit in a room for a whole two days to revise their military approach. And it's all documented in the book. We have the triangulation of those meetings across multiple sources. And take economics. Now, China was terrified that the US would use sanctions and trade tools against China, the way that actually the US is using them now. They didn't want to tie America's hands, so it pushed for WTO accession, most favored nation status, so America couldn't wield economic statecraft as easily against China. And then there's politics, diplomacy. You know, back then, America was seeding Asia with regional organizations and helping build them up as part of the post-Cold War moment. China was afraid these organizations, APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, would become platforms against China, maybe even one day in Asian NATO.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  They knew they couldn't sit out, so they joined them and tried to sabotage them. And the thing is, for each of these instruments, the goal was asymmetric. It was to undermine American power, but to do it in a way that would not provoke a backlash. And that continues until 2008. And then again, we have a big shock that changes perception. In 08, we have the global financial crisis. Now, all of a sudden, China is thinking, maybe America's power is not as great as we thought. Maybe the power gap is shrinking. And that question, what is the power gap, is the decisive variable that affects how China thinks about the world. And so we see China change its strategy, commensurate with the change in its perception of American power. Again, a decision, by the way, these assessments are made by the Central Committee of the PRC.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  They have phrases like multipolarity, the international balance of forces, 多极化, 国际力量对比, which are stand-ins for this idea. And they say this has changed, and therefore China's on the upswing. On the military side, they go from asymmetrically undermining American power to now wanting to project power themselves. Forget anti-ship cruise missiles, we're going to build aircraft carriers, lots of ocean-going vessels, blue-water navy, et cetera. We're going to push out. Economically, we see them go from trying to undermine America's economic coercive capacity to building that coercive capacity of their own. They start levying trade sanctions against their neighbors. They also start launching the Belt and Road, all about building order within Asia. And then on the political level, we see them go from joining institutions and sabotaging them to building their own.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Again, order building. You take the construction of China's military capability in Asia, the economic stuff like the Belt and Road, and the construction of new institutions, and what you're seeing is China build order. They go from blunting American order to building Chinese order. That's a huge change in the way that China sees the world. And I'll end with this, Dmitry, that continues until 2016, when there's another big shock in the way that China looks at America. And that's because of the surge of populism, Brexit, the election of President Trump, later the handling of COVID, the alienation of our allies, and you see the inauguration of a, what is, I think, the most important phrase right now, today in China, which is "白年未有之大变局", or "Great Changes Unseen in a Century".

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And I think, if I may, I've gone on for a long time, but let me just tie it off with this. That phrase has a crazy history. You know, the phrase comes out of the Qing Dynasty's decline. Back then, a reformist general issued the phrase "China was experiencing great changes unseen in 3,000 years", and that was a reference to the fact that in 3,000 years, China had never been, in their mind, colonized by foreign barbarian Western imperialist powers. But now that was happening. And Xi's phrase, "Great Change is Unseen in a Century", is the reappropriation of that language and the flip of it to something that used to mean weakness but now means opportunity. And so China's Great Changes era is about going global. It's about not just having a military that's big in Asia, but a global military that can

• 33:12Speaker 01

  go all around the world with military bases in Latin America. Economically, it's about dominating supply chains globally so that the world is dependent on China and China is less dependent on the world. Technologically, it means winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And politically, it means resetting the default settings of the international system to be favorable towards authoritarianism. That is the global strategy that China now has. And you ask the question, how does this matter to Americans? I'm happy to get into that, but I think clearly China's ambitions are quite extensive. And that's not me guessing it. It's President Xi saying it and saying it for a long time.

• 33:45Demetri Kofinas?

  So I do want to get into that. Let's just cover a few more questions first.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 33:49Demetri Kofinas?

  Before we do, I want to recommend to listeners, one episode in particular where I'm pretty sure we covered Tiananmen, the Gulf War, and the use of networked warfare, and how really traumatizing it seems that that was to China's top military brass and leadership. Because exactly as you said, the Iraqi army was commensurate to what the PLA would consider it would be able to field at the time. So it was a kind of live demonstration of what could happen in the event of a war between the US and the People's Republic. Also, the bombing of the embassy in Belgrade. But the USSR and Perestroika, and it seems that one of the lessons that the Chinese Communist Party took from that was that the mistake that Gorbachev made was liberalizing the political system far too quickly. And that

• 34:32Demetri Kofinas?

  was obviously a lesson that they implemented in their crackdown at Tiananmen. Oh, and the episode that I was going to recommend is my episode with Chris Bros, who's Chief Business Officer at Autoril, the defense company. We talked about all of that. So, and Chris was also, I believe, Chief of Staff for the Senate Armed Services Committee and/or, who was the Senator again? Why am I blanking?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  He was Staff Director. He worked for John McCain.

• 34:54Demetri Kofinas?

  Right.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And by the way, in his excellent book about this period of history, he actually cites some of the work that I had done on this, too. I mean, it's this idea that China's military had to change, given the Gulf War demonstration of power. That motivated everything that we're seeing today.

• 35:09Demetri Kofinas?

  Dude, literally, everybody has cited your book that I've had on the show, Chris.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  It's a crazy moment in history. I mean, think about this. The Chinese literally had their entire Central Military Commission and Jiang Zemin sit together for days thinking about this. That doesn't happen in the United States.

• 35:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, actually, it reminds me of a famous memo that Bill Gates sent when he had an epiphany that the internet was going to destroy Microsoft, and it became an all-hands-on-deck thing. It's amazing how there are parallels. We drew a parallel with the Federal Reserve, and now we're drawing a parallel with...

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Actually, I didn't know about that. So it was like a memo. He got everybody together.

• 35:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, yeah. He freaked out. He was basically like, we're going to die. Because Microsoft had reached this point with Windows 94 or 95, where they had, they basically won. You know, they had like 95% of the operating systems.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Anomaly.

• 35:50Demetri Kofinas?

  And here comes the internet, right? And it's going to destroy everything.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  You know, what's interesting about this, Dimitri, is that there's a fundamental lesson here, which is how do larger organizations adapt to major changes in their assumptions? How do larger organizations reinvent themselves when they face what they think are existential threats? And the lessons probably of corporate America and Microsoft are maybe not that dissimilar from the lessons of a nation-state like China.

• 36:11Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. So here are a couple more questions. Now, I'm not sufficiently versed in the history of turn-of-the-century America, turn-of-the-20th-century America, but my recollection of the little I know is that there wasn't a consensus at that time in elite circles as to whether or not America should try to wear the mantle of empire. A lot of the internationalists wanted that, certainly the folks that supported the Federal Reserve Act did. But there was also a contingent of folks that were much more interested in focusing domestically, isolationists, et cetera. So there was a process through which America, in some sense, reluctantly adopted the crown of empire.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:53Demetri Kofinas?

  Is there any kind of similar disagreement or historical disagreement among elites in China? Or has there always been a strong consensus and a desire to become the top dog in the world, to displace American power?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting question. By the way, on the ascent of America, there's a book by Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power, which chronicles sort of how America took its massive economic heft and then converted that into military and political, you know, power, in part through an organized federal bureaucracy. And so you kind of had to build the capacity to compete. You know, in the Chinese case, I don't think that, I would put it this way, that their ambitions initially were a bit more modest. I mean, they had the long game in mind. They wanted to eventually be preeminent again, but it wasn't a, they weren't waking up every day and saying, how do I dethrone America? They were waking up and saying, America has these advantages against me, and I need to make sure I can manage them while I get rich and powerful again. And so you look at the post-Cold War era.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I don't think Jiang Zemin was waking up every day and saying, I've got to defeat the Americans. He did call America the strong adversary of China in his speeches to the, they're called the ambassadorial forums. These are major foreign policy addresses Chinese leaders used to give every six or seven years. They don't give that particular speech the same way anymore. But he would, you know, address the entire foreign policy apparatus and say America was the top adversary. But I think what he was focused on was blunting. It was to undermine America's ability to tell China essentially what to do and coerce China. And then in the Hu Jintao era, they're focused on basically building order within Asia. Yes, at America's expense, but Hu Jintao is not focused on building order at that time in Latin America. He's engaging Latin America, but he's not trying to build order there. Xi Jinping is taking it global.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  So I call the book, The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, because the displacement of American order is a process that begins sort of bilaterally, extends regionally, and then eventually becomes global. So those ambitions kind of expanded as China's power grew, but always there was a nationalist impulse, a nationalist quest for rejuvenation, which was designed, Dimitri, fundamentally in positional terms. Where am I relative to them? Now, I think China today is in the reckoning, and it has been actually for, I'd say, since the financial crisis, with how do we build the capacity to, you know, in our own lifetimes, essentially, create Chinese order, our own version of order?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  And that is sort of analogous, I think, to America at the turn of the century.

• 39:20Demetri Kofinas?

  So here comes the what does China want question, but I'm going to ask it a little differently and feel free to answer it however you like. The question, one of the questions that comes to mind as I'm breaking this down is, why do Chinese leaders want power? It might seem obvious, but some element of a latent desire for power stems from fear, right? Both in the international system and anywhere else, people are afraid, they want power, it's a source of security. Another one is opportunity. Power provides opportunities. Oftentimes, we think about those as economic opportunities to enrich the country. And then there's a third one that's much more difficult to calculate. We've seen it in the United States, which is this messianic vision, this transformative, transcendent vision, to have an impact on the world, to take your values because you

• 40:03Demetri Kofinas?

  think so highly of your particular system, and you want to export that to the rest of the world.

• 40:09Demetri Kofinas?

  In my reading of China, it seems that that plays less of a role in Chinese thinking. But I am curious, besides getting an answer to that question of how important is that? I am curious to understand what that vision is. What is China's vision of a Chinese-dominated world? What is China's visions of a Chinese-dominated Asia? I mean, what is the vision of what a society would look like? I'm very curious to know.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  You know, I think that, to put it very simply, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years has been simple: make China great again. That's the goal. And why would you want to make China great again? It's actually all of the reasons you mentioned. It's good for you. You're afraid if you don't, you'll once again be subject to the depredations of others. But it's also this internal sense that it's what you deserve, that it's what's right. Why do nationalists exist? Why is nationalism a force? Because people associate themselves with a cause bigger than themselves, and that is the nation. And they want the nation to succeed. And the Chinese Communist Party is nationalist.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  It's fundamentally focused on the success of the Chinese nation, and it's born in a complex of humiliation and victimization. And we know from psychology that one response to those kinds of powerful emotional stimuli is to propel yourself forward. You know, I'm always reminded, if you read the biographies by Robert Carroll of Lyndon Johnson, he talks about how Lyndon Johnson, his father was poor, Lyndon Johnson felt humiliated by the failure of his father. He grew up, you know, with patched clothing in the hill country of Texas. And somehow, that experience forged within him an iron will to advance, so that this poor kid from the nowhere corner of Texas, with no connection to the WASP establishment

• 42:00Speaker 01

  that ran the country, no connection to East Coast money, somehow rose to become one of the most consequential presidents in American history. You know, there's something psychological about the way in which humiliation and expansion are tied together. And you look even at the "Make America Great Again" phrase, there's a sense of humiliation and depredation and that suffering that also is propelling the idea that we have to re-achieve greatness. So, you know, the answer is Chinese Communist Party is a nationalist political party, and these are the goals of nationalism: greatness, power, relative position, strength. And it's not a Chinese phenomenon. You know, you have nationalists in every country and every walk of life. Talk to an Arab nationalist in the era of decolonization. Talk to an Indian nationalist in the era of decolonization.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And you'll hear similarities. Nationalism is certainly post-colonial nationalism. It kind of rhymes. People were really upset about being colonized by the West and they wanted to be great. They wanted respect and status. And that drives a lot of this.

• 42:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Amazing how closely Johnson's story, at least on a superficial level, parallels Xi Jinping's own biographical history. I thought that was where you were going to go with it. So let's talk a little bit about the new China consensus in the United States. Because the old consensus, if I had to describe it, was something like this. We won the Cold War. Capitalism won. It's obvious to everybody. All we need to do is expose countries to that sweet, sweet capitalism, free markets, democracy, liberalism. They're just going to get hooked on it and they're going to transform from the inside out. And the entire world will come to resemble the American form of government.

• 43:39Demetri Kofinas?

  And America will lead a unipolar order of free states as the first among equals. And China will fold into that. We just need to integrate them and just trust the process. Do you believe that there is a similarly contained, structured consensus on China that is as strong as that one? Are we at that point yet?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  It's a provocative question. You know, I think the engagement era, and we call engagement that period where US policy on China was focused on deepening economic and diplomatic and people-to-people interaction with the hope that this will benefit the world, but also perhaps induce China to be more like us. So engagement was based on a bet, a bet of convergence. And ultimately, that bet didn't really pay off. China didn't become like the United States in the fashion that Americans had hoped. And maybe Americans didn't hope that China would become a liberal democracy. But they kind of might have hoped that it could become something like Singapore, quasi-authoritarian, partly democratic, you know, somewhat more responsive to the will of the people and westernized in the ways that Americans wanted. Again, that didn't happen.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And what we saw instead was that China fused authoritarianism and state capitalism to create this juggernaut that now dominates multiple industries and is bringing to bear unrivaled military power in Asia. So the question then is, all right, we got the engagement era wrong. But the fact pattern has changed as that led to a new consensus that's durable. I think the answer is yes and no, and I think we should talk about President Trump here as well. The irony of the current moment is that President Trump was partly responsible for inaugurating a new bipartisan consensus on China when he began running for president in 2015. I think we were heading there anyway. I think Hillary Clinton was also moving in that direction, but Trump was there louder.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  And the irony is that that consensus then began to congeal, that Americans across political party had to come together to rise to this challenge. And Democrats and Republicans, you can look at the issues in which they disagree, there are a million of them, but the area of greatest bipartisan work has been on China, which is really surprising and really unusual at a time of sharp partisan division. And the elements of that consensus, it's not a perfect consensus, are basically that China, you know, we need to be more competitive in our approach vis a vis China. We have to remember that, you know, we may not be able to change China, or we may not be able to make China like us, though we have to deal with China as it is. We have interests that are implicated by its rise, and we have got to attend to those interests.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Now, the reason I say irony about President Trump is because although he helped create that bipartisan consensus, he in some way stands outside of it with his focus on deals and transactionalism and opportunistic engagement of President Xi. That's not where Republican congressmen are. It's not where foreign policy officials in the Republican Party are. It's certainly not where Democrats are. And so there is a consensus. And Trump ironically helped create it and is also the biggest threat to it in some ways right now because he may pursue his own transactional approach.

• 46:42Demetri Kofinas?

  All right. So we're going to get deep into the Trump administration in the second hour because I really want to try my best to understand as best as possible what we think the strategic vision is in this administration. Before we do, just two more questions. One, let's go back to China's vision. I mean, you sort of answered it, but I want to drill down a little bit more and see if we can get a bit more concrete here because it does seem like what's important about this moment is that China's ascendancy comes at the same time as we are at a technological threshold.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:14Demetri Kofinas?

  Where there are a new set of dominant technologies that are refashioning and reshaping the social contract, the nature and distribution of power, the distribution of elites in society.

• 47:27Demetri Kofinas?

  And we haven't quite figured out in our own country, and this is going to get to something that we're going to talk about in the second hour, which is about getting our own house in order. We haven't quite figured out, not only have we not figured out how to navigate this, we're not even asking the questions. We're not even asking the most basic questions to begin to try and wrap our arms around this new challenge, a challenge that I don't think we faced since the turn of the last century with industrialization and the rise of large monopolies, concentrated power in the form of baronial interests that captured the government and undermined the spirit of the Constitution. And so we had to come to a new social contract in America. We haven't begun to even do the work in this country. It seems that China has done that work and they have come to some sort of vision of

• 48:11Demetri Kofinas?

  what that future will look like. I can try to dance around what I think that is, but I'm actually much more curious to hear what your interpretation is of China's vision of the future of the social contract between the CCP, between the leadership and the rest of humanity.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot on the table there. Let's start with technology, because I think you began with something very insightful and profound, which is that the world is undergoing major technological change. And when you look at Xi Jinping's concept of the great changes unseen in a century, the idea is that the world is going through a geopolitical transition and a technological transition. That means everything is up for grabs in a way that it hasn't been for a century. Everything is up for grabs. So let's take a look at technology more narrowly. You know, Xi Jinping has this concept that he imported ironically from the high church of capitalism, the World Economic Forum and Davos. And the concept is of the four industrial revolutions, right? And the sort of Chinese account of it, the first industrial revolution was steam power and Great Britain dominated that and became a world leader.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  The second was electrification, so thank Thomas Edison. The third was mass manufacturing, so thank Henry Ford. America dominated those two revolutions and became a global superpower. And now we're in the fourth industrial revolution. And again, great changes unseen in a century. Everything is up for grabs. And you look at the technologies of this revolution, what are they? Artificial intelligence, but also increasingly embodied artificial intelligence, perhaps in humanoid robotics, smart manufacturing, quantum science, quantum computing, new advances in biotechnology.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  All of these technologies individually are revolutionary. Collectively, they're transformative. And so there's a belief in China, a kind of materialist view, that I think comes from being a good communist and Marxist, but also comes from being a victim of having missed out on the last few industrial revolutions. This time is different. That if you lead a revolution, you don't just get rich, you don't just get prosperous, you actually get powerful. And the goal of dominating these revolutions, the goal of Chinese economic policy is not just prosperity, but power. You know, I'm getting a little bit of a digression here. Allow me that and I'll come back to your question directly. People talk about, oh, Chinese companies aren't that competitive. Look, they don't make profits. America is 55% of all high-technology profits.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  China's only 6% in its companies. And then they say, oh, look, American companies are eight or nine out of 10 of the most valuable companies on earth by market capitalization. The Chinese companies aren't there. Look how great Western capitalism is. And I think, talk about using the wrong metric. Talk about being biased. They're not optimizing for profit and market value. They're operationalizing market share and dominance. They want to lead these industries and dominate technologically their rivals. They have a different set of metrics. They're mercantilists, not pure capitalists. So that brings me to the social contract question. What is China's vision? Not of victory per se, but of the future of a Chinese order. And I think that we can put some of the pieces together because we've seen China experiment with order building already. Remember, four years ago,

• 51:12Speaker 01

  China issued a list of 14 demands to Australia that unless it met those 14, was going to face much more economic punishment from China. And that gives you a sense of what order looks like. Because what is order in the end? You actually got at this earlier, Dimitri. I think order, from political science anyway, is a product of coercion, the ability to make people do what you want them to do, consent to incentivize them to do what you want them to do, and legitimacy to rightfully command them to do what you want them to do, and they think you've got the right to do it. Coercion, consent and legitimacy. China is building all three. And you see in Australia, they attempted to deploy those, particularly the first one and the second one. And they, I think a Chinese order is one where China's military is truly global.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Economically, the world is dependent on China. Technologically, China leads every key industry. The world basically supplies commodities to China. China exports manufactured goods to the world. That essentially free speech, which is tolerable and abstract, but has always sort of been a threat to China because it can cross borders. Free speech is better policed. The world itself looks less liberal and more illiberal. That if you look at the world today, in the 1970s, the majority of countries were autocracies. Then there was this third wave of democratization, perhaps undergirded by American democracy and American power. That is, the fact that the leading state was a democracy. Well, if the leading state is an authoritarian country like China, you know, you'll probably see a democratic winter across the world and a form of Chinese partial hegemony over

• 52:40Speaker 01

  much of the global south, which is going to be dependent on China. That's sort of what it looks like. It's not a social contract per se, but I think what China will want is essentially acquiescence, deference to its political, economic, social, technological preferences in exchange for, you know, some modest prosperity to others, as well as, you know, some refraining of using military force against certain neighbors. That's kind of what the bargain looks like, but we don't know because they're still building it. They're building it as they go, just like we built it as we go. Last point here, Dimitri. International orders throughout history have often been reflections of domestic order. The way in which you govern yourself, the way in which you combine coercion, consent, legitimacy, your ontology, your theory of the world at home tends to go global once you've got the power.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  That's why when America had the power, we built a liberal system of rules and norms and institutions, which looks very lawyerly, but China's will look even more different.

• 53:35Demetri Kofinas?

  Excellent. Also, this specific thing we just talked about, I just feel like is just not spoken about enough. And when I say spoken about, I don't mean that particular views or particular answers that are clear are not expressed, but that conversations to try and figure it out and sort of wrap our arms around this challenge is something that I think is dramatically underdone. I'm going to move us to the second hour. I want to let people know kind of where I want to take this conversation. So I mentioned that I want to understand really the Trump administration's approach here, the Trump doctrine, to the extent there is one, to the extent that it's coming together. How do we understand it? And this isn't just going to focus on China. It's going to also focus on what the administration

• 54:18Demetri Kofinas?

  has been doing thus far in the first few months of its time in office. It's done a lot, or it's said a lot. I don't know how much of it is actually put into action. Certainly done some things that are going to have a huge impact, tariffs being one of those things. But our relationship to Europe, rebalancing the nature of the transatlantic alliance, the US relationship to NATO, its commitment to NATO, ending the Ukraine war, the trade wars, I think is a fair way to describe it, currently underway between the United States and Canada, the United States and Mexico. I mean, in some sense, I hate to do this because it's such a cliche and it makes you sound kind of like either you don't know much or you're being provocative. But man, does this not feel a lot like what I have

• 54:58Demetri Kofinas?

  read the 1930s were like. We're dealing with trade wars. We're dealing with national repatriation of savings. We're dealing with a move, a sort of a rebalancing of geopolitical power. You know, it feels like we're going through something profound. It feels like the most consequential period in American history. So that is also something that we're going to talk about in the second hour, Rush. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Rush, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up

• 55:39Demetri Kofinas?

  to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Rush, stick around. We'll move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed.

• 55:59Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas, and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.