Trump Edition: US president unleashed on Gaza, tariffs and China
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To claim your double the roses offer, go to 1-800-Flowers.com slash ACAST. That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash ACAST. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. Right now, all eyes are on Washington. But who's actually watching Europe now?

I'm Venetia Rainey and this is Battlelines, Trump edition.

It's Friday, 7th February 2025. If you've been struggling to keep up with the news out of America this week, don't worry, we've got you covered. Today we'll be speaking to our woman in Washington to understand why Trump wants to take over Gaza, the thinking behind his trade war, and what's really going on at USAID. We'll be diving into exactly how American boots on the ground in the Strip might work, and asking, what are the other options?

Plus, we examine Trump's allegations against China, from fentanyl to the Panama Canal to intellectual property theft, and how there is a kernel of truce to all of them. Let's start by running through what we know and getting the view from Washington. I'm very relieved to be joined by Katie O'Neill, who's our deputy foreign editor in the US and has gamely agreed to be Battlelines' Trump whisperer and help us get inside his head a bit.

Katie, let's start with Trump's comments this week on Gaza. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply

unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. How did these comments land in Washington, Katie? Were people expecting this?

So when Trump introduced this in a press conference during the week, it took us all by surprise. Up to that point, tariffs was the biggest story of the day. And, you know, both domestically and abroad, it was sending news cycles into overdrive. And it appeared sort of out of nowhere and off the cuff. He made this suggestion that the US was going to take over Gaza in some sort of permanent arrangement and turn it into the riverbank.

Riviera of the Middle East, as he declared. So it did sort of take us by surprise and it appears also to have taken people in his own administration by surprise. But there were seeds of this plan that appeared to have been planted prior to him ever even returning to office for his second term. Just last year, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during an interview with Harvard University, suggested that Gaza was a desirable real estate project

on the waterfront, possessing the beauty that it does have. So Trump is very influenced by Jared Kushner, particularly when it comes to Middle Eastern policy. His Middle Eastern envoy also recently visited Gaza and surveyed the level of destruction that has taken place there and was said to have reported back to Trump that the damage was too vast, too extensive, or to be rebuilt in any sort of timeline that has been proposed today.

thus far. Also, it's been reported this week that Trump actually has a lot of sympathy with the Palestinian cause, a lot more so than people would assume. And some of the reporting that we have been reading gets to that theme of there being a sense of justice within him when he's suggesting that people in Gaza are relocated or resettled from the destruction of their hometown and moved elsewhere.

How literally should we take him? I mean, there's been so much analysis of his words and whether, you know, obviously some people have criticised it as ethnic cleansing. Others have said, no, he's just trying to think of a way to reconstruct Gaza and move people out of the way temporarily. I know his press secretary has since clarified that it would only be temporary and that it doesn't mean boots on the ground.

I'm really wondering how literally should we take Trump's words when he says things like this? I think this version of Donald Trump in his second term in the White House, I think we need to take him more seriously at his word than maybe in previous times in his career.

most of what he promised to achieve or to pursue before he got into office. He's already started enacting in his first 17 or 18 days. He's moving very swiftly and he is sort of

following the timeline of the things that he's told us that he is going to do. This development has taken people in his administration by surprise. You mentioned there his press secretary suggesting that it wasn't going to be a permanent resettlement, but rather something that's more temporary. However, Trump is doubling down on the comments again, suggesting that no, he meant what he said earlier.

um the interesting thing that we're starting to see is is some divisiveness in his own cabinet and among his own uh party some people in the republican party are suggesting that it's too far for them which is rare in this administration to see any sort of dissent but there are a handful of senators who are expressing concerns at the plan including north carolina senator tom tillis who uh

had a good quote during the week saying there's a few kinks in that slinky talking about the Gaza resettlement. That's really interesting. And that gets into the final thing that I wanted to ask about his Gaza comments. Just how much support does this have within his administration and within America at large?

Yeah, I mean, it is the first assemblies of any sort of dissent from the Republicans. While it is very muted, it is very rare for anyone in his own party to criticise him, which has been the case from the election campaign right through to his inauguration. You have some members of his party, such as Nancy Mace, saying that this is fabulous and that there could be a transformation of Gaza into the Mar-a-Lago of the Middle East.

But you do have a number of senators starting to express some concerns, starting to express some dissent, which is something that we haven't seen really towards any of his other bombastic policies that he's announced or began to roll out in his first couple of weeks in office. Now, you mentioned earlier that the initial big story of the week before he made these comments on Gaza was the trade war and all his tariffs. He announced last Friday that he was going to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and 10% tariffs on China.

They were all supposed to come in just after midnight on Tuesday, American time, but Mexico and Canada both struck a deal with the US before that could happen. It was a big early foreign policy win for Trump. Can you explain what they offered up that made Trump postpone those tariffs for 30 days?

Yeah, so this is sort of the great global trade war that wasn't. Trump has been threatening since before he even entered the Oval Office to slap both Mexico and Canada with tariffs. He says he accuses both of those countries of allowing trade.

fentanyl drugs and migrants to pour over the US border. So these were retaliatory tariffs for that. But he managed to speak with the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada, and both offered up some rather cosmetic measures to

to address the security on the border. A lot of these things were sort of already being done in terms of policing of the border, but they've been repackaged and sold to Trump. And he has agreed that goes far enough for him to implement a pause on the tariffs

which gives Trump an opportunity to declare this as a major foreign policy win to his MAGA base. He also had a win earlier on in his term in which he convinced the Colombians to take

deportation flights of migrants when they disagreed with military aircraft being used for those flights. So this is a real win for him. He loves to posture. He loves to present himself as a strong man on the world stage and being able to package up and present to the American public that he has forced Canada and Mexico into making concessions

And, you know, basically defeated them in this, you know, would be trade war is a win for him domestically, for sure. Obviously, China didn't follow Canada and Mexico's playbooks and instead retaliated with its own tariffs. We'll be getting into that more later in this episode. I'm curious, you mentioned Trump being able to project this very strong man image. Do you think that's his main aim behind this trade war? Or is it really about immigration and fentanyl? Or is it something else entirely? Yeah.

Well, the immigration argument serves incredibly well with his base. It's something that he campaigned on and it is something that his voters that got him elected are keen to see him clamp down on during his time in office. He's carrying out these very well-publicised raids in which ICE agents are going into communities and rounding up migrants, sometimes quite performatively. Those migrants will be seen wearing shackles around their wrists

But yeah, it is something that plays incredibly well to his base. So proposing tariffs based on his perceived notion that Mexico and Canada are allowing migrants to pour into America is something that plays well to his base. And it's something that's popular indeed with the MAGA faithful. Now, the final story I want to talk about, and it's

really almost been lost with everything else that's been going on, is what on earth is happening at USAID? We've read these stories about Elon Musk's Doge team going into their offices and taking hold of their systems and firing people. Can you just walk us through what is happening and why?

So Elon Musk heads up the Department of Government Efficiency and basically his role in this newly formed department is to cut costs and to do what it says on the tin to make sure that the federal government runs more efficiently. USAID being the branch of the government that distributes foreign aid to around 100 countries is an easy target for him because all of its spending is international. So he's able to

the way that he views it is that he's able to take this organization and to drastically cut its international spending without harming domestic interests or the pockets of ordinary Americans and thereby slashing billions from the government's budget while also not having it be felt in the pockets of people in Kansas and Missouri. So this is one of the departments that doge

team has targeted this week. A number of workers who were abroad on various projects working with USAID have had their channels of communication with their employers cut. People have been locked out of their email accounts and both Trump and Musk have signalled this week that their intention is to completely dissolve the agency as a standalone operation and to absorb it into the State Department.

So obviously among the international development community this seems completely bonkers. But does this move have quite a lot of support in America?

To be honest, there isn't much dissent for Trump's general plans and policies thus far. The Democrats have been receiving a lot of slack for being quite weakened at the moment and not being able to land any blows on Trump, just by virtue of them being sort of a ship without a sail and not having a strong leader who can unite the party at the moment.

Finally, just in summary, was this a good week for Trump? A chaotic week for America and probably a good week for Trump. You know, looking at the news cycle over the past week, you know, it was just a week ago that you had a plane fall out of the sky in Washington, D.C. after colliding with a military jet and

The pace of the news cycle is such that that feels like such old news. It's all part of this flooding the zone tactic that Trump is taking, whereby his administration is announcing and doing so much every day so as to, frankly, confuse the American public and the media. I think broadly, he has...

verged into some tricky territory with the Gaza resettlement plan. But he certainly hasn't lost any meaningful amounts of support with that policy or indeed any of the others that he has voted this week. Thank you so much for helping us get a slightly better understanding of it all. That's Katie O'Neill, our Deputy Foreign Editor in the US.

To unpack all of this a bit more, we're going to delve deeper into how crazy the idea of an American occupation of Gaza really is and what it could look like. What would the benefits be and what about the risks and potential pitfalls? To walk us through all, I'm joined by Linda Robinson. She's a senior fellow for women and foreign policies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously a senior international researcher and director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation.

and she's a former foreign correspondent and senior editor. So Linda, as I've just mentioned, you have decades of experience reporting and writing about the Middle East. What do you think of Trump's plan? What's his aim here? Well, I have to say this was a most shocking announcement that he made among many shocking things we've heard from President Trump in the last two weeks.

the catastrophic political fallout that would occur internationally as well as within the Middle East, I think has to make this a non-starter. But I also have to say it's something that is on its face so infeasible. And I know we're going to talk about that, but I think first and foremost, it's really a shocking, and I think it was Chris Van Hollen, the director,

U.S. Senator, he said this is akin to ethnic cleansing because really he's talking about moving out a population that considers this part of their homeland.

Do you think there is a possibility that the U.S. could send troops in some form into Gaza to help with reconstruction, security and prevent Hamas from regrouping? What could that look like? Yes. So I do want to say that plans have been discussed under the Biden administration, very highly developed plans.

that envisioned having the Palestinian security forces, the duly constituted forces of the Palestinian Authority, serving in some kind of peacekeeping and stabilizing role. And as part of that, there's a longstanding position in the U.S. embassy in Israel called the U.S. Security Coordinator, and that's actually a multinational group

of senior military personnel that have provided advice and support under the Oslo Accords and the presumption that the security forces will become security forces of a duly constituted Palestinian state.

So in that respect, and I know very well General Mike Fenzel is the U.S. head of that. He has, speaking of Iraq, lots of experience in the wars that the U.S. has fought over the last 20 years.

very professional officer and very committed to trying to provide the support to the Palestinian security forces to help them professionalize and do a lot of things to create the infrastructure they need to produce good forces. So they would be playing a role if that were to come to pass. But clearly in a support, this would not be the so-called boots on the ground. They would be there in advisory and support role.

I don't know, given the Trump administration's, you know, we don't really know what is in the mind of President Trump and what kind of day after plan that's more aligned with what the Biden administration was talking about, which was really trying to stabilize Biden.

make sure that Hamas does not come back into a position of power, and then move toward some future where you could get negotiations back on track. So I think that that is the one scenario that was real until the Biden administration left office. Now, I think I would be hesitant to say that plan is on anyone's table, because I frankly don't know that the Netanyahu government bought into that plan either.

So there is a sort of kernel of something that could be realistic many, many months, probably years down the line. It's hard to tell with Trump's bombastic language when he says the U.S. will take over Gaza and that it will own it, what that would actually look like. If we do take him at face value and assume that there would be a full U.S. military presence, as you say, boots on the ground in Gaza...

And we look at other US wars in the region. Iraq is where you have a huge amount of experience in. What sort of lessons can we learn from the US presence in Iraq? They invaded March 20th, 2003. You were in a boat off the tiny Iraqi coastline, I believe. You've been back more than 30 times to Iraq and you've written two books about it.

What have we learned? What are the potential pitfalls and the potential upsides to such a huge military presence in another country in the Middle East? The Iraq war was, of course, fought originally with the U.S. in the frontline combat mode. But in the latter war that was really fought to defeat ISIS, the Islamic State,

the U.S. and its coalition partners were very much in a support role. Now, they were in support on the ground, so they were forward with frontline troops. And as the intense final phases occurred, they were allowed to do things like call-in strikes and so forth. So they were in, I would say, a semi-combat role, a combat advisory role.

But the big picture lesson here from those wars is if you go in there, as Colin Powell said, if you break it, you own it. It is a long-term endeavor. We never really succeeded. I mean, ISIS is making a comeback. I think we did succeed in destroying the caliphate, the sort of land-holding organization of ISIS.

as the military achievement. But it is very difficult to change countries and build their institutions capable of fully supplying that security. And so this is why we call these wars the forever wars, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did not really achieve the objective sought. And I think what you're looking at from a military perspective,

if there were anything like an occupation of Gaza that the U.S. was involved in, you would be immediately getting involved in a high-intensity counterinsurgency effort in a densely populated urban area full of tunnels. The terrain there would be more difficult, frankly, and they were difficult terrain in Baghdad and Mosul. This would be extremely hard terrain with a

highly experienced fighting force, more experienced and more organized, frankly, than ISIS or the original post-Iraq invasion opponents. And we would be in, I think, deep trouble. I cannot do...

sort of the back envelope calculation to see what kind of manpower it would be involved. But the other thing about the Hamas structure is it's not just a fighting force. It's a fully developed kind of quasi-state organization, a superstructure of civilian support and so forth. We would be there for years. We would suffer massive casualties, and I don't think we could ever win. So I want to say I think everyone should be very clear that this is not...

a military operation that has any good prospects of success. We also have, I think, in this country, a very bipartisan agreement that this is not what we should be doing anymore. The entire U.S. military has pivoted now to the so-called great power competition and trying to prepare

to do the types of activities that would need to if there were a war with China or Russia or another major conventional conflict. So we've turned the page really on fighting guerrilla wars. And there's a very strong political consensus in this country that that is not where we should be spending our time. And if you don't mind, I'd like to just say, and we can talk about the political blowback

There would be a popular uprising, I think, throughout the Middle East, but certainly in the West Bank, in Gaza. And the political fallout from the UN and international community in the Arab world would be tremendous. A giant self-inflicted strategic, not even wound. This could be catastrophic for the administration. You're very clear on all of the pitfalls. And I wonder if I can just play devil's advocate for a second about some of the potential pitfalls

to it, if we can call them that. There is no other option on the table at the moment for what happens to Gaza. Israel does not want to work with the Palestinian Authority. It's been very clear that Hamas is not an option. There is no other country in the Arab world, really, that can or would step in to take care of the enormous security, reconstruction, economic, humanitarian needs of Gaza post-war.

America is probably the only one who would be actually palatable to Israel who, realistically speaking, have a veto over whatever happens and could start bombing again tomorrow if they're not happy with the situation.

Isn't that the best bad option on the table? Well, let's go back then to the scenarios that were previously under discussion. What I think that I am trying to emphasize is a unilateral U.S. operation in there to clear and occupy and remove the population. I mean, when you hear what President Trump said, it sounded like a real estate developer talking.

So I just want to be extremely clear that that kind of presentation and mode of operation will not fly with anyone. Now, you are quite right.

there is a completely destroyed infrastructure in Gaza. And we saw it as it was happening. This was a televised war. And we got to see the footage and something must be done there. And what was under discussion before was a combination of

entities supporting that effort to rebuild because of course the territory has to be rebuilt in some fashion and there was discussion of having some Arab partners as part of a security force. I mentioned before at some length the Palestinian security forces were foreseen as a part of it to have a Palestinian component to it and the Palestinian Authority

is much discredited, but it certainly is favorable to Hamas. And I think what everyone agrees is you can't, after all of this destruction, simply turn your back and let Hamas rule.

come back in and rule the Rus. So there will have to be something. And I think that that is the dilemma. And Arab countries need to be involved in helping to finance as well what comes next. The question I have is really a political one, because if Netanyahu and President Trump, I should say Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump,

are intent upon pursuing a maximalist scheme, that is going to be very hard for Saudi Arabia to swallow. And there have been a variety of statements to that effect. And of course, what President Trump has endorsed, and he was the one that pushed the so-called Abraham Accords,

of normalizing relations, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, some other countries, Morocco, to bring recognition between Israel and some Arab countries. So the big enchilada of that deal, of course, is Saudi Arabia. And under the scheme that Trump is talking about, I just cannot foresee the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia agreeing

to that. And Egypt, of course, has been very clear, as has Jordan, that they are not willing to take these populations and it would cause havoc in their countries, especially Jordan, which is already not that stable. It would completely upend Jordan.

So I think what we have to get back to is talking about a combined effort and a way ahead that gives the Palestinians a place to live that has to be in that territory. I think that's really the red line. I think this idea of moving people out and giving them another homeland is ahistorical. It just flies in the face of what Palestinians, my God, they've stayed there through this

horrific worst episode they've been through. It's a sign of these people's amazing attachment to their homeland. And that won't change. Linda Robinson from the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Coming up after the break, we delve into Trump's trade war with China. How much truth is there to his claims about fentanyl supplies and controlling the Panama Canal? And what does President Xi Jinping think of Trump? Don't go away.

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Welcome back. So the other big U.S. story this week that we wanted to get into is Trump's trade war with China. I'm joined in the studio by Sophia Yan, our senior foreign correspondent and former China correspondent. She was living in Beijing during the first Trump presidency, and she remembers the chaos he caused with his first trade war.

Sophia, let's start by unpacking Trump's allegations against China and how much truth or not there is in these three things. And there's three specifics that I want to pull out. Is China the source of fentanyl? Do they control the Panama Canal? And what's this allegation of intellectual property theft? So let's start with fentanyl. OK, so as with a lot of what Trump spouts, there's always some truth in what he says, but often he completely glosses over the nuance.

And when you're talking about China, this is what it's really about, the nuance. On fentanyl, this one's really interesting. So China has a huge chemical manufacturing industry. And from the mid-2010s, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration did identify China as the primary source of fentanyl trafficked to the U.S. This was the case for about 10, almost 10 years or so. It was really hard to track because these are tiny pills that were coming, being sent direct. Often people would be able to buy over the Internet.

and they would get mailed from China to a home address, for instance, in the U.S. And when people are going through these packages, it looks like anything else. It looks like something you might send a friend. You know, you go on vacation, you buy a little trinket, you mail it over. So it was hard to find, to detect and stop. It wasn't like they were being bought and sold in very large quantities to users in the States. So this was an issue that law enforcement, drug enforcement had a big challenge that they faced.

Then in 2019, after a lot of pressure from the U.S., China did designate fentanyl as a controlled substance. There was an impact. There was a drop in direct shipments. But another problem started to rise to the surface, which is that China, again, back to this huge chemical manufacturing industry, they make a lot of what's called precursors, the chemicals that you need to make fentanyl.

So Chinese companies are still the main source for all these chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl. And this is where things get really hairy. It means a lot of different source materials that you have to then track and control. It's not impossible, but it requires cooperation. So the U.S., even under Biden, has criticized China for not doing enough to crack down on the companies that make these chemicals, these precursors. So this is something that Trump is likely alluding to when he starts talking about this. I mean, this has been an issue for quite a long time.

before Trump came in for a second term. There's a question of whether tariffs are going to help on this front. I mean, they're going to really upset China. They already have. This is not a good place to be. The dragon is dangerous and calculating even when it's happy.

So you have to ask if it's really going to have an impact. And what about the control of the Panama Canal? Is that accurate? So this one's not accurate. This is one where the nuance is really important, too. So China does not have direct control, as far as we know it, of the canal. But there is a lot of Chinese influence. There's a lot of Chinese operations. There are companies, for instance, that are

that are very present in the region. China is the world's largest exporter. They account for about 20% of the trade that passes through the Panama Canal. That makes China the second largest user of the canal after the U.S. China has also invested a lot in ports and terminals in that area. And this is key for China's own economic growth and development. They're so engaged in

in global trade. And the concern is that China can use its presence in the canal, around the canal, all this infrastructure and logistics support that it's got, that they can use this as a tool of economic coercion. This is something that China has done before. They could easily turn this into a choke point. You can see how if, for instance, China were to block access to the canal, that would absolutely have a knock-on effect on global trade.

So this is the worry. Would China weaponize this somehow in the future? That would definitely be a challenge for the global economy. One interesting thing to note here is that there are two ports, two of five ports adjacent to this canal.

And they sit on both the Pacific and Atlantic sides. They are operated by a Hong Kong company. They're operated by a subsidiary of that company. And that company, C.K. Hutchinson, is owned by one of Asia's richest men, Li Ka-shing.

And Li Ka-shing is very interesting because he owns a lot of global assets through his companies, including the Mobile Network 3, which primarily operates in the UK. So Li, he's made a fortune. He's got this great rags to riches story. And again, one of the richest men in the world, really. So there's some concern about whether China could exert influence over Li, over Li's companies, and where that could go. You know, Li is an interesting man. He's someone who...

has managed his fortune. He's been able to build a lot of wealth around the world. And if you're doing that, even as a Hong Kong businessman in Hong Kong's heyday, you do have to wonder how much he might be kowtowing to the Communist Party at certain points, because you don't really find success unless you're kind of somehow finding your way with the Chinese government.

So again, a sort of kernel of truth, but as you say, the nuance is kind of missing. And I believe that the neutrality of the Panama Canal is actually something that's guaranteed as part of a treaty and plenty of countries have signed up to that treaty. So the final one that he mentioned in his official statement when he launched this trade war, which also targeted Mexico and Canada, as we spoke about earlier in the episode, is intellectual property theft. What do we need to know here? Well, copycat China is a nickname for a reason.

It's 100% happening. There's a lot of economic espionage. The U.S. has, for many years, tried to investigate this. There have been some arrests over the last couple of years. It's a huge challenge. We're talking engineers, scientists at U.S. defense firms, maybe even working in the U.S. government that China tries to leverage. And they do this through blunt force. We've got...

Chinese students who graduate get a green card. Maybe they get citizenship even in the U.S. You've got kids of immigrant parents. I mean,

You have a lot of people in the U.S. with some personal family ties to China. This itself is something that China uses to its advantage. You know, they do this through, again, blunt force. They might find someone like this. You know, just for example, let's say you've got a Chinese-American engineer working at a key company with access to key technology.

But that person has relatives in China. Well, China will go find those relatives and do something like cut off the pension for a grandma or put somebody in jail or do something where you feel you have no choice but to cooperate. I mean, this is how they play. They play very dirty. This is a very big concern. Of course, you also have people who are trying to actively get this sort of information.

I mean, there's incredible stories about how there was a move many years ago to try to get key seeds for crops in the U.S. because they were growing better and China wanted this kind of expertise. So they go to extreme lengths to get this kind of information, to get access to knowledge,

to better technology. And what China does is take it and they make it better. They're not always so good at innovating themselves, but they can definitely copy and then make it 100 times better. So how has China reacted to Trump's tariffs? They've already brought in some measures, right? What were those? Well, it's become a tit for tat very quickly. China announced their own tariffs.

on select US imports, also an antitrust investigation into Google. And this is exactly how things started last time. One and one and then two and two, you know, this kind of back and forth because China will never not want to have the last word on this. To them, it's really embarrassing. You know, they don't want to be seen as like the pushover on the global stage.

So this is probably going to continue. I would definitely say expect to see more of this. Trump was supposed to have a call with President Xi Jinping. We're recording on Wednesday. It was supposed to happen on Tuesday. That was cancelled because of China's retaliatory measures. What do you think Beijing will have made of that? If they had this call scheduled, then that means they knew this was coming. Still, they decided to announce a response. This is interesting. I mean, it

China can't not respond. There's no way. And tariffs, I mean, to China, this is like the one thing, right? They are the world's largest exporter.

We all have, I mean, everybody, I'm sure if you were to look around you, you just put your arm out and you grab something. It's probably made in China. I mean, this is something that is so ingrained in our daily lives. To them, this trade war, I mean, there's no way that they're just going to lifeline take it. You know, they have to respond and they have to respond in a way that will make also Trump notice. So it's, you know, it's a big question. Like, it's a fine line because they need to have some sort of relationship with the U.S.,

But also maybe they don't care so much. I mean, this is what happened last time, really. I mean, it started and then things turned. They really soured. They really turned, fell off a cliff. Tell us a bit more about that, because you were in Beijing working for The Telegraph during Trump's last presidency. How did all of that go? What was it like being in China when all of that was going on?

The trade war was what started things. You know, Trump was talking tough on China. He was saying, you know, we in some ways he had the right take in the sense that there are things to be wary about when it comes to China. You know, he kind of went through with what he said he would do.

He had pretty good advisors on China. That was what was interesting about his first term. He had a couple of people who had actually lived and worked in China. He had this great national security advisor, this guy named Matt Pottinger. He was hawkish, for sure, but he was also very realistic.

when it came to figuring out how the U.S. should deal with China. He knew there was a reason to be wary, but he also understood the nuance, this gray area. I mean, it's not so simple. You can't say U.S. good, China bad. We don't live in this kind of black and white world. That's not how it works. This time around, Trump also has some China hawks on board, like Marco Rubio. He's the new U.S. Secretary of State. Rubio, definitely known as being tough on China too, but he seems to be this way partly because it's politically convenient.

And he does not strike me as someone who totally understands the nuance of China. He hasn't lived and worked there. So where we go from here, we'll see. I have to say it's a little bit scary to think about because I saw what happened. It started with the trade war. It took us to the lowest point of bilateral relations between the U.S. and China. Also, at the same time, China was falling out with much of the West, the U.K., with Australia, with Europe. We had COVID in this period of time.

The geopolitical pressures were so strong. There was this COVID issue. I mean, there were so many things that were happening all at once. And I'll use that phrase again. It just fell off a cliff. You know, the relations between these two countries maybe were at the worst since Nixon restarted relations between the U.S. and China back in the 70s. And this whole situation between the U.S. and China ended with people like me having to leave because...

tensions were so high. I mean, I was so worried. China uses this hostage diplomacy tactic. And I was really worried because they've done it before that I might become one of these American hostages, that they would take someone like me, an American journalist, and use that to pressure the U.S. government. And that is not...

overstatement. I mean, I've had so many people tell me after I finally left, like, thank goodness you got out. You know, like people who really would have known the kind of risks I was facing. So I look at this now and I really wonder what will happen. I mean, it was a terrible time for everyone who was working on U.S.-China, especially those who were still based in China. And I really wonder where Trump will take us now and how China is going to respond.

Sophia Yan, our senior foreign correspondent, thanks for jumping on your old beat with us here on Battlelines. That's all for today's episode. Which Trump story do you want us to get into? Let us know by email or via social media. Details in the show notes. Until Monday, goodbye. Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave us a review as it helps others find the show.

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