China is the first time we face a competitor with true size and scale advantages against the United States. We do have two oceans, abundant resources, 70% of the world's capital markets. All of these things are huge advantages for us, and they're not gonna disappear overnight.

Scale. It's all you need, not just for AI, but geopolitics too. We are talking grand strategy today with Rush Doshi, the author of The Long Game, Biden's deputy senior director for China and Taiwan on the NSC, and now at CFR. He wrote with Kurt Campbell what I sincerely hope turns into a seminal document for American grand strategy in the 21st century entitled Underestimating China, Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale to Offset Beijing's Enduring Advantages.

At long last, Raj, welcome to China Talk. Thanks, Jordan. Really excited about this. Net assessment. Understanding where the U.S. is relative to China. Why is this the important step that you got to do before you start taking big swings on the international stage?

Well, it's a great question. There used to be something called the DoD Office of Net Assessment. It's since been eliminated. But I think the idea is basically that you have to compare yourself relative to your adversary or your competitor.

in order to understand exactly what your strategy should be. Without good net assessment, you can't really form a strategy. And actually, if you look at our assessment of China, it's really swung widely in the last few years. Back in 2020, I think there was this perception that the U.S. was in hurtling decline. We had January 6th. We weren't handling the pandemic particularly well. And there was a sense we alienated our allies and partners, too.

And at the same time, China, by contrast, was its economy was booming. It seemed to be handling COVID well. And in that moment, there was a perception, okay, America is on its way out. Just two years later, though, the zeitgeist changed completely.

Two years later, in 2022, Russia was invading Ukraine, but unsuccessfully initially, which suggested maybe authoritarian militaries don't have what it takes. Then on top of that, there was this desire to remove zero COVID in China, but it didn't bring with it huge prosperity, didn't reignite the economy.

And then America, in the latter part of the year, pulled out Chachi PT, debuted it to the world. It seemed like we had a rabbit that we could pull out of our hat again. We could always rely on American innovation to sustain our lead. And you take those factors and all of a sudden, a new zeitgeist takes hold. America ascended. America's got this. China can't possibly keep up. And I think the fact that the assessment of China swung so wildly within two years tells you that it's difficult to plan a strategy around such values.

vastly differing conclusions about where you are relative to your competitor. And that's why I think accurate net assessment is important. And what Kurt and I tried to do in the piece is essentially offer a set of nuanced takes on where we are relative to China. Yeah. So I think it's a fascinating case study that

the past four years. Cause it almost felt to me that like you had these swings over the course of the cold war, but they kind of took longer. And the things that were happening were like bigger than like COVID policy. It was like the Vietnam war.

like America losing a conflict is something that would get you to reassess relative trajectory or a sort of long sort of like decades long understanding that actually the Soviet system was not delivering this sort of technological and economic growth that people thought it might have been doing in the 30s, 40s and 50s. The big lesson is that

It's not necessarily a flows question. It is a stocks question. And we basically have two countries that have roughly a quarter of the world's GDP and are likely going to continue having roughly a quarter of the world's GDP each.

in the decades to come. I think it's important to note that it's possible for two things to be true, right? China could be slowing economically. It could have really serious economic problems. But it's also possible that it has strategic advantages and technological advantages in the timeframe that matters most for geopolitical competition. And I think on the question of assessment, poor assessment is simply to say, okay, they have a tough economic time. Therefore, strategically, they're going to be on their way out. It never ends up being that neat.

And so that's the other fundamental point of the piece, that you have to really start thinking about how particular advantages and disadvantages in one sector translate strategically to a great power competition. And that's not intuitive. It takes, I think, some degree of guesswork, but also analysis to get it.

So there are like cones of expectation for how well the U S will do and how well China will do from a national power perspective. And if you are basing your assessment on the sort of third standard deviation performance of one country over another, then you're probably not like picking the right strategy for the vast majority of the futures. And it feels like the way China,

the U.S. and China are discussed, you often kind of default either to this one country's got it, this other country's cooked or like vice versa. Yeah, that's a really good way to put it, actually, about thinking about it probabilistically. I think that's exactly right. Do you have a guess of the psychology of like the American public or commentariat that kind of like wants to swing in one direction or another and not kind of take the middle nuance stance? Yeah.

Well, you know, I think there's this fundamental sense that things are changing, that China is formidable, but also has a number of fragilities, too. And there's a belief at the stakes of this, of getting this question right, are very high. And I think

You know, it leads people to kind of put forward stories that they want to believe that are true. So that might mean that sometimes you'll hear that there's a market essentially for saying, hey, everything's fine. Don't worry. American advantages are enduring, stable, real and decisive. And then on the other side, people might want to suggest that things are in really tough shape because they might have a particular domestic policy agenda they want to advance. And we see that a little bit with the trade war.

So ultimately, these kinds of assessments have political valence as well. They have salience in politics. And that might be why some people put spin on the ball one way or the other. But I think in general,

This isn't even a top priority for most American strategic thinkers, right? Right now, the focus continues to be on Russia, Ukraine, or the Middle East, or other issues. And China is there, always there, lurking in the background, but not always in the foreground where it deserves to be. And that's part of the reason why I think there's not always much attention on these assessments and getting them right. Again, it was important to have an office that did this kind of work.

in the U.S. government. And it would be important to restore its function in the Trump administration. Hopefully they make that decision soon so we can continue to do this kind of work. I will say from a government perspective, you almost never have anybody doing true net assessment because usually the intelligence community isn't authorized to really consider American strengths and weaknesses relative to an adversary. And so they can talk about, as we would call it, red, but they won't necessarily talk about blue, which is us. And that actually does cause complications analytically.

You were saying net assessment is important. I agree. I think it is striking that like, you know, 95% of the commentary and discourse setting about the U.S. relative to China is done by people who are not necessarily China experts, which is fine. But the kind of domestic valence of China

China as like rhetorical talking point to make a case for your side, either on the left or the right seems to be far more important than like what actually is the truth and what is the net assessment of these two of these two countries, which is a frustrating thing. I think for both of us, Rush, as people who've spent a lot of our lives, you know, a decent percentage of our lives trying to understand this thing, which is China relative to the U.S. But.

I don't know. It's the world we live in. It's probably not going to change anytime soon. I'm sure it was the same in the cold war on that. Like let's do our best to show everyone why real net assessment is important. Um, rush you point to scale as the key metric that we should be thinking about when evaluating the U S and China on a decadal or multi-decadal horizon. Um,

I love the US versus UK analogy. Let's start with that as a bit of a frame here. Not all large countries achieve great power status, right? There's size and there's scale. Scale is sort of the ability to take size and translate it into something meaningful in terms of outcomes. And so scaling up is sort of that process, right? So Asian tigers had a lot of

incredible ability to scale on a small foundation. But when you take those techniques and apply it to a larger foundation, let's say a foundation as large as China's, the consequences are world-shaking. And the UK found this out the hard way, right? The UK had a first mover advantage in the industrial revolution. And a small island in the northwest corner of Europe essentially dominated the entire world for a long time, which is, if you think about it geographically, pretty crazy as a fact.

And that first mover advantage wasn't forever. British industrial methods eventually transferred to Germany, to the US, and eventually to Russia as well. And they knew this was happening. And there's this particular British lord named Lord John Seeley. In 1883, he wrote this book about kind of the history of the rise of Great Britain. But it ended with a big warning. He worried that essentially just as Florence was surpassed by the great country states of Europe,

he feared that Great Britain would be surpassed by the larger countries, the US, Germany, which had a much larger population than the UK, and Russia. And what he thought was essentially that the British methods for industrializing and creating wealth could be transferred to others,

And then when that occurred, he used the word scale as well. They would have scale. They'd have unimaginable scale relative to Great Britain and Great Britain would decline. Now, in that period, you saw that these countries were leveraging scale to push Britain out of key markets. They were able to leverage a larger domestic economy to be able to drive down marginal costs and then outcompete in third country markets. Today, that dynamic resembles the U.S. and China. But I'll say one other thing. As the U.S. side grew in scale,

As we became more efficient and more competitive, our industrial base exploded. And it got to the point where we were manufacturing four or five times as much steel as Great Britain by 1910, before World War I even happened. And by World War II, our size was even greater. Our scale was even greater, so much so that

that Hitler warned that the US was an unimaginable productive power and that the Japanese Yamamoto thought they could run the table in the first six months of a war, but eventually American scale would defeat them. And even the Italians feared a contest of stamina would favor the United States. So that fundamental scale advantage that we had shaped some of the thinking of our adversaries

in the run-up to World War II and during the conflict itself. It wasn't a hidden fact of politics. It was one well understood by our rivals. And now that sense of daunting scale probably belongs to China.

You make the point that like even at the, you know, as Nazi Germany was running at its hottest and like, you know, 1938 through 1941, 42, like the relative industrial weight of the world was nothing close. Like the axis. I mean, it's it like holds a candle to what China can bring relative to the US today. Yeah. And again, Hitler's called the US a, quote, giant state with unimaginable productive capacities.

And in many ways, he was hoping to create that kind of productive scale for Germany. And obviously, that led to disastrous consequences. But you're right, that fact of American manufacturing prowess was well-established and well-understood around the world.

So we've got a couple decades in the middle of the 20th century where our sole democracy, America's building everything for everyone. Then we have globalization. Pretty cool. A lot of more people get rich. And we pulled it out over Great Britain, Nazi Germany and Japan, pulled it out over the Soviet Union, too. But we're in a very different kind of like relative industrial race today. So, all right, Rush, let's let's let's get the China tale of the tape.

Yeah. I mean, you said it really well. I mean, every great power competitor the US has faced did not have the sense of size and scale that China has. Even the Soviet economy was much smaller than the US economy. It was also less productive and its absolute manufacturing capability was less than the American equivalent. The US was better than Germany and Japan combined in World War II. But China is the first time we faced a competitor with true size and scale advantages against the United States.

And just look at the share of manufacturing. You know, about 20, 25 years ago, the U.S. share might have been 30 percent, China's share 6 percent. Within those two decades, China's share has quintupled to close to 30, maybe 32 percent. And the U.S. share has fallen by half to 15 percent. And according to the U.N., by 2030, China's manufacturing share will be four times that of the United States or about 40 percent to our 11 percent.

That is a pretty surprising turnaround in the course of just three decades, really 30 years. And the last time you've seen a shift that fast is actually to go back to the question we discussed a moment ago. It really is the U.S. and the U.K. I mean, from 1870 to 1910, the British share of global manufacturing fell by 50 percent. That's the same share that we've seen fall, except for us, it took like 20 years, not 40 years.

And in addition, you know, you look at what China is able to put up in terms of power generation. It's two times American power generation, three times American car production, 13 times American steel production, 20 times American cement production and famously, you know, about 200 times, give or take U.S. shipbuilding capacity, although only maybe three times our shipbuilding capacity when it comes to warships, but 200 times writ large.

That's pretty significant numbers relative to us. But what I think is most interesting, Jordan, is also the fact that they have a pretty high share of global markets, too, when it comes to manufacturing. It's not just about us.

They're about half the world's chemicals. They make half the world's ships. They make 67, 70 percent of the world's electric vehicles, more than three quarters of the world's batteries, 80 percent of the world's consumer drones, 90 percent of the world's solar panels, 90 percent of the world's refined rare earths. And we're not done because they're betting on the next industrial revolution. Right. And one stat that I think is particularly important for your listeners is this question of industrial robots.

The U.S. is installing a lot of them, but China is installing seven times more, and half of all the robot installations that occurred in 2023 happened in China. You take nuclear, right? We're all talking about how we need power to fuel the AI revolution. Well, China leads in the commercialization of a technology we invented, fourth-generation nuclear technology, and it's planning 100 nuclear reactors in the next 20 years. And then you look at science and technology, folks say, well, they can't innovate. You know, we're always going to have that.

We do have an innovation edge, but they do exceed us in active patents and in top-sided publications. Now, you can quibble with the numbers. You can say they juke the stats. All that's true. We don't accept that slander on China Talk here, Rush. We're past this. Don't worry. And there's some truth to that. But the trend line is also incredible. And they probably are about even with us in those categories. And in 10 years, they'll be well ahead of us, even accounting for statistical manipulation. Yeah.

And you look at the military balance, Jordan, because all this manufacturing power translates into two forms of advantage. One is military advantage, and we've talked about that in the context of World War II.

But the second is technological advantage as well. Innovation coming from the factory floor, tacit knowledge, process knowledge, special production capabilities that you innovate on over time and iterate on. That also creates enduring advantage for China too. And we should know that because that's where American innovation came from also. It came from our ability to dominate manufacturing. It's forgotten now, but when we were becoming a manufacturing power, we were behind Europe in science and technology. We didn't have the Nobel Prize numbers that we have today.

So manufacturing was the leading edge and the rest came later. I think we're seeing the same story with China. OK, so let's not underestimate China. I'm with you this far, Rush. What's the answer? So one answer that you're hearing out of the administration is like we need to industrialize. And the problem with that is.

is that even if you hit every policy right, like you're getting a percent a year, half a percent a year, 2% a year, maybe on a good year when it comes to sort of like global manufacturing production. So kind of even setting that aside of like putting, you know, re-industrialization and like growing manufacturing again as a long-term goal, you know, you...

These are not the sorts of trends, like the sort of the laundry list that you just laid out, Rush, is not something that is going to go anywhere anytime soon.

I think that's right. I mean, these advantages that have been built are very sticky. You know, poured concrete is poured concrete. It exists. And so a lot of China's supply chains, they're not going to pick up and move immediately. They're also more resilient than people think. You know, some folks say, look, China has a number of macroeconomic problems. Rush, you know, you've given us this laundry list of manufacturing statistics. Why does that matter?

They've got problems economically. They've got problems demographically. But I think if you walk through those, you see those problems are probably a little overstated too. Look at their economy, right? It's smaller than ours in nominal terms, dollar terms. And a lot of people are taking comfort in the fact that it's shrinking relative to the U.S. economy, again, in dollar terms. But Jordan, a lot of that work is being done by a strong dollar. If you take away that financial advantage, and you look at things adjusted for purchasing power, then

then China's economy probably surpassed the US economy in size 10 years ago and is 30% larger today. Now, there's a lot of problems with adjusting for purchasing power. You can't just do it willy-nilly. The indices are not perfect, but it's a good heuristic, a good attempt at capturing the price, the local price of key strategic inputs, right? Things like infrastructure, things like weapons, things like government personnel, those are priced in local terms. And while nominal GDP might be really important for capturing quality of life,

It's purchasing power adjusted GDP that might capture some of the things that matter for generating strategic advantage. But then some people say, OK, well, fine. But the demographics are a problem, right? China is aging. And that's true. But the question is, when will that matter? You know, by 2100, their population will fall by half. There'll be literally half as many people in China as there are today on current trends.

That's a big deal. But the strategic harm of aging doesn't really take place for another maybe 20 or so years. And that's largely because if you look at China's demographics, the under 14 share of the population increased between 2010 and 2020 in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population. The population still aged. Don't get me wrong.

But that younger share grew. And the reason it grew is there was a Mao era baby boom. And these are the grandchildren, right? Demographics are lumpy. And that can help you buy time. In addition, China's dependency ratio won't even be as bad as Japan's dependency ratio today until 2050.

So again, that gives them a sense of time. And we talked a little bit about industrial robots. All the investments in industrial robotics, as well as embodied AI, could help them with some of the productivity problems they might have from falling... I'm sorry, not productivity problems, some of the labor problems they'll have from a falling population. And you just look at the investments that they're making, they're clearly betting that their factories are not going to have a lot of people. You look at a Chinese BYD plant, they don't have a lot of people working the assembly line.

And then people say, okay, well, that's all well and good, but what about their debt level? And they do have really serious debt, right? 300% of GDP if you combine government, household, and the corporate sector. But that number is the same number as the United States. We're also 300% if you combine government, corporate, and the household sector. So no, it matters the composition of that debt. It matters who's holding it. But let's just take that aggregate statistic for a second, because you can move some of that around. That

That gives you a sense of the country's overall indebtedness. And if it's comparable, maybe they're able to weather that too if they take proper steps to recapitalize local governments.

And finally, folks talk about how American companies are just killing it because they have high market caps, right? The most valuable companies on the earth are American, and they have the highest share of profits in fields like technology. But you and I both know that that market cap number is partially a reflection of people wanting to buy dollar assets, right? It's partially a reflection of, again, a strong dollar or people investing in a strong dollar. And that profit number matters, but that's because American companies max out on profits

Chinese companies max out on market share. They're willing to run losses to get there. They're optimizing for something different, something that might matter strategically, because if they can stay solvent longer than our companies can stay solvent, then they can put them out of business and deindustrialize us. So you take all of that. And I think what it shows you is, yes, China has really significant weaknesses. They're aging, they're

They're slowing. They may have deflation in their economy. They're high youth unemployment. All of that is really important. But again, it may not matter as much in the timeframes that are determinative for great power competition. That's the question we have to ask ourselves. When does it matter and how does it matter? And that's what we're trying to talk about here with the question of scale.

So, Rush, you ran through a lot of the arguments that people make to make the bear case of the 20-year China net assessment. But political instability is not one you address. So why don't you take that one on? No, I mean, I think this is actually the critical point, Jordan. You're totally right. My assessments are really focused on sort of the macro indicators, demographics, financial indicators, because those are the ones that in many ways people are talking about when they say China might never catch up to the U.S. But political leadership is a tough one.

I think if there's a path to Chinese failure, right, if there's a path to Chinese sort of inability to succeed in the 21st century, that path runs through a failed political transition from President Xi to his successor. It's very interesting that China was able to essentially set under Deng Xiaoping, you know, 20 years, 20 plus years of successors, right? Deng picked Jiang and he picked Hu Jintao as well.

But he did not pick Xi. And so we don't have that same longitudinal planning. We're all living or China is living in the house that in many ways Deng Xiaoping built. Now, Xi Jinping is changing the architecture. And we don't know if the changes he's going to make are going to cause the house to collapse on itself or going to strengthen it against the wind and the rain, to use the terminology that he often applies, right? Got to strengthen the house against the elements. So this is the most important question in many ways. I think that China's ability to remain politically stable is

is a thing that's extremely hard to price, right? I mean, on the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party has endured the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, globalization. I mean, it's endured a lot and remained pretty powerful.

At the same time, if there's one thing that can threaten to bring the entire party down, it's elite instability at the top. And we kind of saw that at various times in China's history, right? When Deng Xiaoping was put in prison again and again in the really messed up transition from Mao to his successor. And so this is the path to Chinese problems.

And we just don't know whether Xi Jinping will have the ability to pick a successor or he's going to be too nervous about doing that, given that he's alienated some of the vested interests in China, some of the families in China, some of the parochial groups in China that historically exercised power more freely and don't do that as much now in the Xi moment. So you're right. That is exactly one way that China could have problems. But I'll end with this. You can't count on that, right? You can't bet.

on systemic failure or institutional collapse, especially when China has studied so intently the Soviet collapse and tried to avoid those same mistakes. I think you have to kind of give them some credit for being able to think about all the pads to decay and trying to close off as many of them as they can. Now, they won't get it totally right, but that effort is something we can't ignore.

Yeah. And like, even if you give the like you give Kyle Bass as much credit as you can, you say 50 percent chance. Right. It's like, OK, that's still a 50 percent chance that you have this incredibly legit superpower breathing down your neck.

And so we might as well might as well sort of like buy the insurance plan of all the policies you need to live in the world in which she actually does figure it out. That's actually it's a really great way of putting it. I mean, what we talk about in this piece is allied scale, right, as the alternative grand strategy for the United States. And you're right. It is an insurance plan. I mean, you can hope you can pray that maybe that China finds a way to get in its own way. That wouldn't be great, by the way, for one point four billion Chinese people. Right.

But geopolitically, you could hope for that. But I think it's not sensible to do that. I don't think people should bet that China will collapse or that its system of government will change or that Xi Jinping will botch the transition. You do need to buy the insurance, which means you need to invest in an American path to scale. And that is a historical challenge. Very few great powers are able to find a way to achieve scale when they are confronted with a bigger rival. But there is a way the U.S. can do it, and that's its allies and partners.

All right. Capacity centric statecraft. What must Washington do, Rush?

Well, look, I think it's worth taking a second and just asking, you know, is what does it even mean to kind of work more closely with allies and partners? What is capacity centric statecraft? The idea that we should do more with allies is kind of a cliche. I think what Kurt and I are arguing is we need to revolutionize the way we think about working with allies and we need to put capacity building in both directions from the U.S. to its allies and from its allies to the U.S. at the center of it. And I'll go into great detail about what that means in practice. But

If you get it right, just think about the benefit, right? If you quantify allied scale, the U.S. is with its allies, maybe three times China's nominal GDP, probably twice China's purchasing power adjusted GDP.

Way more than twice China's defense spending, even if you believe the high Chinese estimates. They're not public, right? These are the estimates we make about how much China actually spends. Probably one and a half to two times China's share of manufacturing. Vastly. I mean, we just it's not even a contest on patents.

and top-sided publications. And remember, China is probably the top trading partner of about 120 to 140 countries around the world, almost everybody. But this allied consortium would be the top trading partner of everyone, you know, with the exception of maybe North Korea. It's an unbelievable kind of scale advantage. And it's right there.

The central task, I think, of American foreign policy in this era is taking that theoretical advantage and making it real. It's realizing that kind of sense of scale. And too often we think of our allies in terms of hierarchy. We think of them in terms of post-World War II and Cold War era habit. We're too focused on military issues in the alliances. And we think of alliances fundamentally. It's always talked about whether they're tripwires, whether they're protectorates, maybe they're vassals.

Maybe there are status markers. But our contention is they have to be platforms fundamentally for building capacity. And there's a lot of ways in which you could imagine that, Jordan. You could imagine, like take defense. You could imagine

Japanese and Korean investment in American shipbuilding, right? Something we haven't gotten right, but they have three to five times more productivity per worker in that industry. And then you could imagine us putting out more technology to our allies. You know, AUKUS was an example. Kurt and I worked very closely on AUKUS, on launching AUKUS.

It was about making sure that the U.S. and the U.K. helped Australia acquire a nuclear submarine capability. That's our crown jewel, most sensitive military technology. But it's going to build meaningful Australian capacity in the Indo-Pacific. That kind of capacity building is critical. You could imagine, by the way, in the military dimension, new efforts at capacity building that we haven't considered.

Think about novel joint military formations. The British and the French had a brigade that they kind of created together. You could imagine the U.S. and Japan or the U.S. and Korea creating

anti-ship cruise missile battalions, where we can train each other on the best tactics for shooting and scooting when it comes to that kind of warfare, learning the best practices from the Marine Corps under General Berger. You could think about a variety of different efforts too that don't involve the US, right? Part of allied scale is allies help each other and the role of the US in that transaction might be facilitating collective action or facilitating these kinds of linkages.

Imagine, for example, if the ROK helps Europe rearm, right? The ROK has an incredible defense industrial base. It has the weapons. It's making the weapons that Europe needs. The Scandinavians have some of the best anti-ship cruise missiles in the business. They could sell them to Southeast Asia. France is one of the best at operating LEU nuclear-powered submarines.

They could help India with that technology too. India has the same nuclear powered LEU submarine program. That is what allied scale looks like where the US isn't always at the center, but maybe is providing a gravitational role in facilitating collective action. And that's just the security side. I mean, there's a lot more we could say about the economic and tech side too. So let's stay on the security side for a little while.

You know, you guys were just in government for the past four years and you were trying, right? Like these ideas didn't come out of nowhere. And, you know, the fact that the U.S. plus its friends is, you know, going to be two to three X, whatever China and its friends will be over the next few decades, assuming the balance of friends stays the same, is insane.

is not a new fact. So, um, you know, as you and Kurt were pushing for this stuff, um, you know, what was, what was, and, and you had a president who was as sort of like ally forward as you could ever hope for, um, you know, what were some of the roadblocks, um, in the way, both from the, from a U S as well as a partner perspective?

Yeah. Let me just start really quickly with this question of whether the allied scale stuff is intuitive. I think it is intuitive. I think we all know collectively that if we don't hang together, we'll hang separately. But what I think has been missing from most diagnoses is the sense of urgency. People say you have to work with allies because it's good. It's sort of like American apple pie. It's like apple pie in motherhood. It's like a good thing. But why is it essential?

That's the different argument, right? And the reason it's essential is because we're underestimating China's sense of scale. The reason it's essential is because Great Britain failed as a great power because it couldn't get scale, right? It looked, Lord Seely looked to uniting with British colonies to create a sense of scale that could rival the other great powers of that age. And he failed. They all failed at that effort, right? They were too little, too late, and everyone drifted apart. The question for the U.S. is essentially, will we face that same fate? We have an advantage. We

We don't have an empire. We have allies who are very capable on their own. That is a huge advantage relative to the UK. But what I'm trying to say to you and in that piece with Kurt is essentially that this is urgent, that we have to get this right or we lose the century to China. That is not the usual frame that I think people think about with allies. I think allies, great, not allies, you know, four alarm fire, you need this, five alarm fire, you need this right now.

The reason that this is hard to do is partly because people don't see it as urgent, right? They see it as conventional common sense. Okay. To be clear, the U.S. and China independently are roughly going to be running neck and neck or far too neck and neck for comfort.

in the vast majority of futures over the next few decades. So like the most important thing America can do is leverage the rest of the world who is much more likely to want to partner up with us than partner up with a CCP controlled PRC. And that is the way that you change the balance of power. That is the most straightforward way to dramatically change the balance of power over the coming decades. Yeah. I'll just add one thing to that, which is that

I'm not sure we'll be neck and neck in all metrics that matter for a strategic value, right? We're not neck and neck in manufacturing. We're going to be one quarter of them, right? If you take the US versus China on a lot of these metrics, we're behind. We don't have scale. We have a great number of advantages, capital markets, immigration, innovation, talent, general political stability, but we don't have scale. And so

I think what my concern is, is that there's a world in which the U.S. is not running neck and neck with China. And the only way we can run neck and neck on some of the metrics that matter for great power competition is with allies. That's why this is urgent. Without them, we will be smaller. We'll be like the U.K. to the U.S. and Russia or like Florence to the U.K. We're one quarter their size. And as productivity equalizes around the world, which is partly a factor of institutions and technology, China will be productive.

And they are productive, right? They outmanufacture us. They are at the leading edge in a lot of industries. And so there is a urgent need for the U.S. to find its own path to scale, and that is allies, right? And as I said a moment ago, the British could not get scale because they didn't find a way to unite with their colonies. They didn't find a way to pull them in together to build scale. They thought that was the path. They didn't get there. And what the U.S. has that's different is not

Colonies, not subjects, but truly capable, independent, sovereign allies who share our values. And if you are able to join together with them, it's not even a contest with China. We completely outscale them. So I think this is a really important point. Like modern day Japan and modern day Germany is not India circa 1890, right?

Right. We are talking about very different allies in the you know, from the perspective of their like latent ability to contribute to the Metropole's national power.

Yeah. And actually, you know, even in the case of Lord Seely, he was saying exclude India. He thought it was a resource pit. He was totally obviously wrong about that, about India's potential. He was saying Canada, you know, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, sort of the white settler colonies. But take Japan versus any of them. Right. Or take Korea versus any of them. The American alliance system has within it.

incredible performers, right? Really powerful, technologically advanced, economically impressive performers who also, by the way, make really great military equipment and are committed, broadly speaking, to the values that we also care about. That is a home run. That is unbelievable. In world politics, almost nobody has this advantage. And don't take my word for it. Take China's.

China believes that our single greatest advantage, asymmetric advantage is allies. Back in 2017 and 2018, their glee at this idea of populism eroding the Western position emerged from really one thing, Jordan. And that was the sense that populism was breaking American alliances apart. They have always seen alliances as our critical advantage.

And they know what we don't know, which is that alliances also have economic and technological power that they can bring to bear, too, in competition. That's why right now, you know, I'm talking about scale. And the Biden administration had a theory of how to get there. That theory had good parts and bad parts. The Trump administration has a theory, too. It also has good parts and bad parts. I don't think the piece we're writing is partisan. We're not saying you've got to do it.

our way. What we're saying is the destination has to be scale. There are a number of ways there. There is a path to allied scale with, quote, Trumpian characteristics. Great. Figure it out. Let's get that done. If it has to be that way, then let's get that scale together. But my concern is unilateralism that focuses on resolving bilateral issues without thinking about the larger strategic context vis-a-vis China. And right now, the Trump administration has a chance to land

bilateral deals around the world, my hope is that they do so in a way that focuses on the question of pooling our shared capacity and building scale against the PRC. There's like the sort of J.D. Vance, like let's promote the AFD in Germany. And if they don't, and if like the German right doesn't win an election, then like they're not our allies anymore is like a very insidious moment.

mindset right because like we as you said rush we don't know like we forget like it's been so long we forget how good we have it in terms of all these countries like basically being on the same wavelength as we have been but two world wars against germany and one against japan right

And these were the preeminent industrial powers of their regions in the 20th century and in part of the 19th century as well. And they are stalwart American allies. We're not always happy with each other. We have disagreements, but they're on our side. They share our values. That is an incredible accomplishment and success story. And the idea that culture war issues should dictate how far we go with these allies on the greatest geopolitical challenge America's

America has ever faced is sort of cutting your nose to spite your face, right? It doesn't make a lot of sense. Now, that being said, the Trump administration could still get scale. One critique of our piece is that, well, Kurt, gosh, it's a beautiful dream. It's very idealistic. It probably made sense five years ago, but it doesn't make sense anymore. I really don't accept that. I think that there is a Trump path to scale too. I mean, it probably is less focused on persuasion the way that President Biden was and more focused on coercion

And, you know, you could critique the Biden administration for being not sufficiently coercive. My own point is this. You probably have to mix and match different tools depending on who you're dealing with. But at the end of the day, we all know the place we have to go. It can't be the U.S. versus China one on one. A unilateral America that retreats to its own sphere is an America that is poor, that is less powerful, that's quality of life deteriorates and that does not have global influence, including on the things that make us prosperous. And that's just I mean, that's obviously not a good idea.

What are the sort of type errors you get from being too conciliatory versus being too coercive with respect to trying to get allies on board with scaling up together? Yeah, I mean, you know, one critique that the Trump administration makes of the Biden administration is that the focus on allies was too is too much on persuasion and not enough on pushing allies or what you could call coercion. And the result was you did have free riding. I think that

There's a good counter to that, which is there was a lot of progress with AUKUS and QUAD and European involvement in Asia and Asian involvement in Europe that sort of began to take a step in the direction of allied scale. But I think the Trump administration's critique is more needed to be done. And they're not wrong, because we also think, Kurt and I, that more scale is necessary immediately, that AUKUS in many ways was a down payment on the kind of approach with allies that we have to start

institutionalizing across the board. And I say that as somebody who was deeply involved in AUKUS in 2021, worked on the negotiations for the White House under Kurt Campbell. And, you know, it was novel at the time. We have to get to a point where that is less novel. And I think the Trump administration's error, conversely, would be being too coercive, thinking you can bully every

everybody into doing what you want. Or there's another error, which is to think that fundamentally allies don't matter, that America can go it alone, and that all that matters with Japan or Korea is the size of the bilateral trade deficit and whether or not they buy U.S. treasuries. And we actually have other equities here. Let's think for a second about the economic picture, Jordan. If we want to be able to make sure that we have scale for our industries when China is more competitive on a marginal cost basis,

You know, we can protect the American market just fine. But if we don't also have access to allied markets and if allies don't have access to our market, then none of our companies can achieve scale relative to China. Right. We have to be able to have pooled market share. So the Trump administration has talked about putting up a kind of tariff wall. If you ask me, a regulatory wall might be even better against certain Chinese exports.

I think that's right. I think that in addition to doing that, you also want to reduce trade barriers among allies so you can facilitate greater scaling up within the protected mode. Now, to get there, you're going to have to have a mix of coercion and persuasion. You have to have a mix of the Biden and Trump approaches. Right now, we've seen President Trump

With Liberation Day, take the coercive route. Now there's negotiations happening and deals to be made. Let's hope that those deals are in the persuasive category. And you could imagine, Jordan, what those deals should look like, right? You could imagine a deal in which allies invest more here. We reduce trade barriers. Maybe we go to zero zero, as some on the Trump team have talked about.

Allies spend more on their own defense as part of the deal, or we work with them to improve their military capability and capacity. And, you know, maybe there's additional steps taken to prevent China from dominating allied markets, including coordinated and shared tariffs and regulatory policies to build a kind of boat behind which we can all live.

That kind of deal is achievable. And my hope is that as the Trump administration rushes to push these deals, that's the model that they have in mind. And I'll end with this. Folks are saying they've got to negotiate 75 deals and that's too many. I don't think that's right, Jordan. I think they've got to negotiate maybe eight to 10. And if they can get those eight to 10 right, they can start building that allied scale a very different way from how President Biden might have done it. And, you know, they can declare victory and say we did what they couldn't. And that's fine. They can say whatever they want. The point is to get success.

scale. And if they get it, I'll applaud them. So let's stay on the Germany example for a second, because that was my whiny, you know, Libs owned, Lib owned case study that I referenced earlier. Like, you know, you guys were not able to get Germany to break its debt covenants and spend a trillion dollars on defense, right? So on the other hand, it basically took

administration officials saying stuff so intense that Germany and Poland decided that extended deterrence is like not something that we can really trust anymore. So, I mean, we're in a very different world state than we were in September of 2024. And so,

I don't know. Let's talk a little bit about the tradeoffs of, you know, I don't think the wake up moment has necessarily come for Taiwan and Japan and South Korea, but we do seem to be in a very different timeline in the European context.

Yeah, you know, it's an interesting point. The risk of the current approach, though, is that it's so intense that it pushes Germany out of being a core U.S. ally on the things that we care about. You know, there's a lot of flirtation in Europe right now with different forms of strategic autonomy, which could on their own be interesting, but taken fundamentally out of a

dissatisfaction with the US that might mean they're not on our team when we need them to be. And I'll give you some concrete examples. Back in 2020, remember, the Europeans and the Chinese negotiated what was called CAI, right? The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. That was fundamentally negotiated because there was a concern in Europe that they couldn't rely on the US. And we in the Biden administration were very upset. We thought, "This is ridiculous. We've just come into office. How could you do this?

That agreement eventually blew up, right? But there's a world in which it doesn't. And right now, what I worry about is you're seeing Europe make these signals that they want to hedge with China. That's obviously not a sensible policy. They shouldn't do that. But great powers can commit suicide for fear of death. They can commit suicide, again, for fear of death. That's a political science phrase I'm applying to this context. And what it means is when you push an ally, you know, so aggressively, you

You can change their domestic politics to make it more anti-American. You can activate questions of face and respect that lead them to make bad decisions. Countries don't always do what's in their rational self-interest, especially at times like this. So as I say, you know, you can critique the Biden administration on some reasonable grounds as not having pushed allies hard enough. And you can critique the Trump administration for perhaps pushing too hard in ways that can undermine democracy.

transatlantic unity on China, which is, by the way, extremely important to preserving the American position. And the truth is, Jordan, as you and I both know, you kind of have to do a little bit of both. You've got to have a nuanced approach. And we probably could get there in either administration if folks are thinking about how scale is urgently needed and how there needs to be a bit more humility and urgency in American statecraft. What we're talking about, capacity-centric statecraft, is humble, right?

We're saying there are capacities America has that its allies need. Great. We can provide them. But we're also saying there are capacities America has lost that only our allies have, and we need to get them back.

How easy will it be to get Germany or Japan to manufacture in America if their domestic politics turns anti-American and the country's governments feel like any kind of accommodation of the United States is contrary to their political self-interest? That's the thing that we have to keep in mind. And so that's the risk, right? This approach, you know, we'll see how much Germany follows through, but we might also lose the transatlantic relationship that we need if we're not careful.

Yeah. So dark timelines. How does Trump 2.0 turn into America's Gorbachev moment? Yeah. I mean, that was a provocative line into peace. And I want to say that, uh,

Personally, I'm cheering for that not to happen. I think Kurt and I, our hope was that this piece provides a strategic theory of how America should conduct itself with alliances. It's different from how it's done it in the past. And by the way, also has value for the Trump administration. It's not meant to be a partisan piece. It's not meant to be a partisan hit. And the Gorbachev moment line is really about two things. There is a risk that we neglect, as I said a moment ago,

That our allies have agency, that they have respect, that they have face, that they have autonomy, and that they move in their own direction away from us if we push them too hard. That's sort of what I mean by Gorbachev moment. I don't think Mikhail Gorbachev assumed that every Soviet republic was going to push the eject button on his experiment. But essentially, that's what happened.

And that could happen to the American system. You know, you start renegotiating the foundational elements of it. You start becoming more unpredictable. You try to interfere in the domestic politics of your allies by backing particular political parties. You are dismantling some of the tacit bargains that make up the American alliance system, right? That make up the American order.

And if that all comes apart at the seams, you could have fragmentation. And that Gorbachev moment has a different element as well, which is that everything I've talked about, being able to compete successfully with China,

It requires state capacity. And Gorbachev's reforms, and especially Yeltsin's shock therapy, destroyed the state capacity of the Soviet Union and then Russia in many respects. And it made it harder for it to accomplish its geopolitical and domestic aims. And I do worry that we are taking apart our institutions. I'm not saying they shouldn't be reformed or renewed. There's a different way that Doge could have been done, just like there was a different way the trade war could have been waged. What I worry about is in both cases,

These are extremely important things, and they were done in not the most strategic way. Take for a second the trade war. Let's do a thought experiment, Jordan, just the two of us. Let's imagine for a minute that before the trade war, like the day before Liberation Day,

that the Trump administration had basically given everybody a theory of the case. They'd come out with policy papers saying, "We're only going to raise tariffs on China, but everybody else is on notice. See this chart? That chart will happen to you if in 90 days you don't strike a grand bargain with us." And that grand bargain has to include not just economics, trade, and finance, but also security and your relationship with China. And

Let's imagine that before they announced all this, they had talked to a few countries and worked out the rudiments of a powerful dealer too. And then they put out the press conference and that same day, they have a few wins on the board already. The Chinese didn't see this kind of collective approach coming. And the markets think that there is a logic, a grand design behind this approach.

Would we be in the same place? Would the yields be spiking? Part of what's happening is the market doesn't think we have a plan. It doesn't know what we're trying to do. What I'm saying is this rationalization that the Trump administration has created ex post about his trade war. Imagine, Jordan, if it had been ex ante. Imagine if it had come first.

I think we'd be looking at a very different strategic circumstance right now. You don't go to war without preparation. Look at Russia and Ukraine. You don't wage global trade war without preparation. And what I worry about is there is no piece of paper anywhere that says exactly what we hope to achieve globally, bilaterally and multilaterally in the global trading system. And without that piece of paper, we're just making it up. And that's that's frightening.

Well, the problem is there were pieces of paper, but the president chose the dumbest piece of paper because he thinks that tariffs are a great revenue raising tool and he doesn't like trade. So, I mean, it's tough, but this is the timeline we're living in. And as much as I want the Rush Doshi version of the Trump administration, I'm pessimistic we're going to end up getting it. Imagine we had done this differently.

This could be a moment of strategic advantage for the United States where we finally change the global trading system in a way to better reflect what it needs to with respect to China's participation. And instead of that, what we have is a kind of unilateral, smaller American position with the world in its entirety angry at us. And I don't know that that was the best way. You're right. There are other people with other pieces of paper. And I guess my argument is that

They should have they should have basically made a different case. And I don't know that anybody made this case. Right. This is the case they're making now, Jordan. This is what they're saying now. Right. This is the ex post facto rationalization. All I'm saying is rewind the clock two months. There was a transition. Make this the case then and tell the press. Right. Do all the same things if you have to.

put the tariffs on the allies if you have to. I don't think it's a good idea. But have a story of what you're doing before you do it. And that story didn't even make it out. We have a number of potential futures. One is all these democratic allies realize that maybe they can't count on the US, but they got to band together and get their houses in order and start spending on defense and do some good deals between South Korea and Germany and whatever. Well, first,

Let's explore that path. Like, what does the what does the alliance what is the global order with China, a checked out America and a rest of the developed world, which is not comfortable with Chinese ascendancy, end up looking like? We're seeing China right now. Pretty excited. Right. You're seeing President Xi traverse different countries and strike deals. I mean, they see an opportunity.

I met with some Chinese academics recently who basically said that the propaganda department in China is in heaven right now because they feel they have tons of ways to point out how China is a better partner than the United States. Now, nobody should really believe that. People should be skeptical of that. But the Chinese are certainly trying to wedge the U.S. from its allies and wedge the U.S. from its partners using trade as the way of getting there.

And what I worry about is, let's say we run the bear case play. Let's say we don't reconstitute our alliances. We see greater transatlantic ruptures. We're not able to strike a great deal with our East Asian partners. And America retreats more to the Western Hemisphere and tries to make its stand in the West. That approach is not going to work.

You cannot cede the whole world to China's world-beating industrial power and expect that an America that retreats to the West can somehow defeat the Mackinder trap, right? Mackinder talked about how you don't want anybody to control essentially the world island of Eurasia. And essentially, us pulling back to the Western Hemisphere is exactly that. That's why it was dismissed as a grand strategy in World War II. It's why it doesn't make sense now, but it especially doesn't make sense in a globalized world where, quite frankly, even if you fragment the trading system,

The reality is that it's going to recreate itself with somebody else at the core and that somebody else could end up being China. And then we're frozen out globally. And all the innovation and all the technological progress and all the efficiencies built in that part of the world don't make it to us. America as the Galapagos Islands is not a good future for America. So we have to be global and we have to fight for a globe in a world order that reflects America's interests.

And by the way, that is an America first. If you have to be an America first person, that is an America first approach too, because you're talking about American prosperity, not just American geopolitical leadership. You're talking about the quality of life Americans have. And that rests on the fact that we are 5% of the world's population and yet extraordinarily wealthy because a system has been built to sustain that quality of life. And we can't just blow it up, hoping that everything will work out. That's a very Yeltsin shock therapy kind of approach.

And that didn't really work great for the Soviet Union and Russia. So, you know, that's where that's the world I worry about. An America that pulls back as a world where the world is China's to lose. And we don't we obviously don't want that.

All right. So China's to lose. We had a Trump administration before this and we had, you know, we had the same we had the same leadership in China. And you can argue they kind of blew it from a sort of global diplomatic like alliance making perspective. I don't know. Do you think they learned their lesson winning?

came to how to engage with these countries? What are the different likelihoods of potential playbooks that China may be running with this moment right now? I think you can never discount the fact that China will find a way in diplomacy with others to get in its own way, right? To basically...

trip itself up. And so that's true. What you said is right, Jordan. There's a lot of confidence, right? So in my past work on Chinese grand strategy, I talk about how the biggest variable that shapes it is in many ways a perception of American power. And beginning in 2016, their perception changed. They thought the world was undergoing great changes unseen in a century. And it led to a more aggressive and assertive Chinese policy, including with the very countries that they should have been courting. I mean, one of the greatest strategic puzzles of all time

Why is China always going out of its way to alienate India? You know, China pushes India towards the United States and India might prefer on its own to be more of a swing player, but China makes it impossible. There's all kinds of ways they could blow it again. But there's also the reality, Jordan, that the approach that we're taking now is fundamentally in order of magnitude different from anything attempted in the first Trump term, right? That was a trade war with China, which you could argue was overdue in a sense.

It was also a kind of effort to renegotiate the terms of certain security agreements with allies and partners, but it wasn't essentially hitting control alt elite on the entire global trading system.

which is basically what has happened now. And we've got a 90-day pause, but also a 10% blanket tariff. I mean, the 10% tariff is itself a revolutionary act. And if you were to just have that on its own and not consider the chart that the president unveiled, we would still be shocked by it. And now, because the comparison point is that chart, we're sort of giving the 10% a pass. But all of this stuff is different, right? So let me answer your question directly.

American policy is much more revolutionary than it was in the first Trump term. And that means China's opportunity is much greater as well. And the question is, if they don't do a great job pursuing it, but do a marginally better job than in the past, there's a lot of points on the board they can still win. And that's what I worry about.

Yeah. And it comes back to our point earlier about political instability is like, they might screw it up. They might not, but fine. Give them a 50% chance of screwing it up. That is still like a, like a large number of futures that you don't want to be living in, um, where, you know, then you're betting on like all these, uh,

small countries in the world to figure out all the coordination problems that they're going to need to figure out without the U.S. kind of like providing the glue and lubricant, which is kind of scary. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And a world which is essentially divided

where the U.S. does not play the role of collective, you know, in political science, right? Collective action is one of these puzzles. It's one of these hard things to imagine. What allows people to come together and act in common, right? When there are incentives to just go your own way.

America is an anchor for collective action. We can make collective action possible. But if we withdraw, then, you know, maybe everything fragments. Right. Maybe allies are divided and conquered. Right. And so we might be in this divide phase of divide and conquer for China right now. We're helping them with the divide. And then the conquer comes later.

Every once in a while, people ask me, Jordan, why don't you turn into the Matt Levine for China policy? And my answer is like, fundamentally, Matt Levine, like, thinks securities fraud is funny. And I think this stuff is deadly serious. And, you know, you as well are someone who...

like, cannot, like, like, stare at the stakes of the conversation that we've had for the past hour and sort of, like, shrug your shoulders and laugh about it and, like, go on with your life. So, do you have any advice, Rush? Like, if

it feels very helpless when the sort of Overton window of errors from a sort of like lasting geopolitical perspective seem as large as they have ever been in either of our lifetimes. So like, I don't know, give me the pep talk. How do I like just keep putting one podcast in front of another? Let me try. Look, I think there's a few things to keep in mind. First of all,

The Trump administration can negotiate these agreements with allies and partners in ways that actually achieve scale. It's conceivable. And there are signs that some folks that are running the negotiations are thinking in these terms. We know many of the people staffing the Trump administration at the level of, you know, mid-level staff that the key principles, et cetera. I'm not talking about the cabinet specifically, but many of the people below that believe in allied scale. They may not have called it that, but they understand its logic.

So there is that group of people and there is the possibility of landing the ship in that spot. I can't say what the odds are. I do worry about that. But I don't think we should be despondent. Right. I think part of what has to happen is we have to talk about this. One reason Kurt and I wrote the piece is because we wanted to make the argument for why allied scale matters. And I hope that as that argument gets, as others reinforce that argument, that it helps shape some of the Trump administration's thinking. The piece is not meant to be a partisan hit piece. It's meant to be a strategic piece that any administration could adopt.

And I guess the last thing I'd say is that this administration won't be forever. Congress might flip in two years. America is always changing. And so for allies and partners out there, they will find ways to work with the United States, whether it's the legislative branch or pockets in the executive or a suddenly enlightened executive that negotiates better deals. It's not over. And I guess the final thing is that

You know, great power competitions can be lost in short periods of time, but China does have a lot of challenges too. They can't get out of their own way at consolidating and pressing their advantages. And America has real advantages as well that we shouldn't neglect. We do have two oceans, abundant resources, 70% of the world's capital markets. We have the ability to attract the best from all over the planet. We have general political stability.

All of these things are huge advantages, huge advantages for us. And they're not going to disappear overnight. They'll be damaged, perhaps. Some of them might be tarnished, but some of them might even be strengthened. And I think we have to keep in mind that this competition will not resolve itself in two years or four years. We have to make investments for the long haul. And again, Congress can do a lot. Everything that the Biden administration did to build allied scale was supported, funded,

endorsed and praised bipartisan on bipartisan terms by Congress. So, again, we have to remember that Congress does have power over this as well. All right. One last one, Rush. I remember DMing you during the administration being like, they're not going to let you talk about this book. Right. And you're like, yeah, sorry. But here we are now. You know, we'll have you back on

to do a deeper dive and I think like an updated dive into it. But I'm curious, like assuming that like pretty much everyone in this audience has read the book, what did your experience of being on the inside, reading intelligence and interacting with the Chinese government due to some of the conclusions that you took towards the end of your research for that project?

Yeah, well, so thanks, Jordan. I'm really proud of the long game. It was unfortunate I couldn't really talk about it when I was in government, and I'm glad people thought it was useful. You know, the book was based on a kind of assessment of five million words of Chinese Communist Party material, as well as a really what we would call a social scientific approach to their behavior. And the conclusion was that China had, since the end of the Cold War, a grand strategy to displace American order first at the regional level and then at the global level.

And I'd say that my time in government basically reinforced my view that those conclusions were right. In the book, I argue that, you know, you go back to the 80s, the U.S. and China were basically quasi-allies against the Soviet Union. But then everything changes, right? We have the Gulf War, the Soviet collapse, the Tiananmen Square massacre. And all of a sudden, China thinks America is the biggest threat.

And they inaugurate a new policy, right? Hiding capabilities and biding time, what I call blunting American power quietly, not assertively, while benefiting from America's system. So in military terms, they pursue the anti-accessory denial approach to keep us out. In economic terms, they want MFN and PNTR to tie our hands. And in political terms, they want to basically stall American-led institutions in Asia, lest they become platforms for attacking China.

And that approach works pretty well until the global financial crisis. And there again, you know, you see in Central Committee materials, China changes its perception of American power. And with that comes a new strategy made by the Central Committee, right? It's essentially that China should actively accomplish something, or jiziyo suosuo, right?

And that approach, again, had military, economic and political components. It was about building order within Asia, not just blunting American order. And we see militarily China invest in power projection capabilities to basically tell its neighbors what to do. In economic terms, we see the Belt and Road and efforts to use economic statecraft against others. And in political terms, we see China build international institutions meant to serve as the foundation for order building within Asia. And then I write in the book that that worked until 2016.

And then China's assessment changed again. They had a new phrase, a new tifa to kind of guide Chinese policy, which was 百年未有之大变局 or great changes unseen in a century.

And the idea there was that the kind of opportunity that China has now and sort of the risks as well are unlike anything they've had in 100 years. And we see the inauguration of a global Chinese grand strategy, one focused on global military bases and winning in Taiwan, one focused on dominating economically supply chains and making the world more dependent on China, what President Xi calls dual circulation. And technologically, it was about leading and winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution, making sure that China

Essentially, it doesn't just win those technologies for the sake of prosperity, but also for the sake of power. And politically, it's about changing global institutions to make the default more conducive to autocracy. All of this is motivated by a desire to rejuvenate China, which is a 100-year goal.

And the Chinese Communist Party, yes, they're a nationalist party, right? They want to see rejuvenation. They've always been that way. They're a Leninist party, right? They also want to centralize power in pursuit of that goal. And that's why I say China has a grand strategy. It has the concepts, the capability, and the conduct to pursue that vision. It doesn't always get it right. It makes a ton of mistakes. But there is a strategic intention here. And the goal is essentially to create a kind of partial hegemony over part of the world

reflected in those military, economic, and technological indices that I mentioned. And I'll end with this. I mean, I think that this was a conclusion that the intelligence community had put out in previous threat assessments, but had not substantiated in open source. And I am more confident of this set of conclusions now

than I was even when I wrote the book. And I think if you look at President Xi's behavior over the last five years, if you look at what China's Communist Party has done over the last five years, I think it sustains the argument that they are pursuing a global grand strategy. Not always well, not always brilliantly executed, but nonetheless deadly serious.

All right. Let's take us into the future, Rush. What's the broader open source project that you're launching at CFR? Sure. Well, let me just say for me, I'm continuing my research at Georgetown as a professor there. I run the China program at the Council on Foreign Relations. I think one of the things we're most excited about is when I wrote the book, The Long Game, I was relying on Chinese texts and material.

to basically make my arguments. And now what we're going to do is we're going to mass acquire, digitize and translate those kinds of texts at scale and make them more available to the public so that people can basically read China in their own voice. And I think that if you do that, China kind of tells you where it wants to go. The Chinese Communist Party has to communicate to itself and its cadres. And we want to do is basically make those communications available to others. That's something, by the way,

that the US government used to do from FDR in 1941 to 2013, Barack Obama, when we had what was called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service that translated all this foreign material. That stopped really in 2013 being available to scholars. And our hope is to rebuild it at scale with a far greater source base and with the help of artificial intelligence. And we've made major investments in this effort. We have access to a large cache of material and we'll have more for you on this very soon.

Yeah, I mean, I think like it has been sort of uniquely frustrating, I think, over the past few months to have China be so important rhetorically to like every policy and decision that is happening. But the kind of curiosity of understanding the country seems to be at a real relative low ebb.

in terms of people actually wanting to like understand, you know, the net assessment piece as well as the sort of strategic intention piece. And look, it's on us to make this stuff accessible and interesting. So we can't just whine about it. We got to do the work and really make the case strongly that this is both important and fun. So I for one am very excited to watch you do

manifest, you know, look, the long game sold. There is an appetite for this. So I fully believe in the mission and have more faith in you than like pretty much anyone else on this planet to make Chinese strategic discussion something that the world cares about and takes seriously. So Godspeed, Rush. Let's end on that then. Thanks so much for all your work. This has been great. A lot of fun. Thank you, Jordan, for the opportunity.

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Yo.

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I can't do it without work.

Hey, what's poppin'?

Just fucking.