Air Date: 6–10-2026

Today we explore how Taiwan's own people are stuck between the US and China. Fewer and fewer of them want to rejoin China but their faith in America is sinking just as fast as Trump treats them as a bargaining chip. Their own leaders are split on how to respond. And the place that makes most of the world's advanced chips has almost no seat at the table where its future is being decided.

Full Show Notes

Ninety percent of the world's advanced chips come from one island. China wants it. America is arming it. And neither side is asking what Taiwan actually wants.

Last year in the US, they graduated thirty-five thousand lawyers.

They graduated three hundred and fifty mining engineers.

For 20 years, China has been building a military force designed specifically to retake Taiwan.

In America, you can change parties, but you cannot change policy.

In China, you cannot change the party, but you can always change policy.

The United States of America, the American order, for all of its blemishes, it was sort of the organizing gravity, right?

 

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we explore how Taiwan's own people are stuck between the US and China. Fewer and fewer of them want to rejoin China but their faith in America is sinking just as fast as Trump treats them as a bargaining chip. Their own leaders are split on how to respond. And the place that makes most of the world's advanced chips has almost no seat at the table where its future is being decided.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

DW News

Vox

The China in Africa Podcast

Paul Krugman

Johnny Harris

and Maxinomics

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 5 sections;

Section A, The Making of Taiwan

Section B, The Multipolar Worldview

Section C, Taiwan in the Crosshairs

Section D, The Summit and Its Fallout

Section E, The Resource War and Africa

And now, on to the show.

One of the things that China always highlights is that we're seeing changes unseen in a century, so there's clearly a big shift in world order, and China sees it as necessary to shape the new world order that is emerging.

Now, how much of that is actual form and pictures and images and how China projects itself, and how much of that is substance, is a different question. Just like how much responsibility China actually wants to take to run a world order that is complex, that re- re- requires responsibility, that's another open question.

And overall, China does not wanna have the responsibility. It wants to look good, it wants to have more power, especially vis-a-vis the United States, which is kind of the only peer great power that China aspires to catch up with and overtake, but it doesn't necessarily wanna come with all the responsibilities that come with actually sitting on top of a world order that you've shaped.

Yeah. Uh, Bernard, let's look at the delegations that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin brought to China. Trump came with a bunch of tech CEOs. Um, r- the Russian leader was flanked by, by energy executives. Uh, what does that tell us about how power is defined nowadays, the nature of power that we're talking about here, and, and one where China really is positioning itself as the leader without having to take necessarily all the responsibility that come with world leadership?

Well, China wants to be engaged with the whole world on its own terms, obviously. Um, so the big tech companies, um, in the US, in Silicon Valley, are interesting for China as competitors, but many of them have also put large bets on the Chinese market, Elon Musk with Tesla, um, for example. For them, the question is, to what extent can they decouple from China, or is there money to be made in China?

Russia is a whole different game. Russia is exporting, um, mainly fossil fuels to, to China, and that's one of the major sources of income for Russia, um, nowadays, and they were hoping to get a major pipeline deal. That didn't happen. But, um, on the other hand, China do- um, Russia does import a lot of tech stuff, um, dual-use items from China, so it's very, very different relationships.

Yeah. Sergey, uh, uh, Putin was very adamant about the fact that his visit to Beijing has nothing to do with Trump's visit. Is that really the case?

Yeah, I think it is the case, of course, uh, China is, um, Russia's main, uh, partner in terms of imports and exports, and he had a lot to discuss with, uh, Xi Jinping. He's had very, a lot of meetings with him already, uh, about 40 they say. Uh, so Vladimir Putin's goal was, uh, very simple, of course. He had three goals, I guess.

Uh, the first one was very political, of course. He wanted to show that, uh, his country, once again, is not isolated because he's been losing partners, he's been losing... He, he just lost Hungary, he's been losing Armenia, something is happening in, in Iran. So this is a good moment to stand next to Xi Jinping and say that, uh, o- once again, we have a very strong and reliable, uh, partner.

Of course, uh, not everything went well as, um, well, that, that he has just mentioned, um, uh, that they really wanted to sign an agreement on this pipeline, uh, it's called Power of Siberia, and this would, uh, connect, um, uh, Russia's, um, extraction sites, uh, in Siberia, uh, to the China's, uh, territory. It didn't, um, happen now, and I guess this was a failure.

But yeah, the, the, the third point, of course, it's the, the war in Ukraine is still ongoing and it's important for Putin to get some, um, uh, strategical reassurance, so to say, um, that to make it clear that China wouldn't abandon, um, Russia as a par- uh, as a, um, uh, wouldn't abandon Russia in the case if this war were, uh, were to protract.

Mm-hmm. I, I wanna talk about the war in Ukraine a little later, but Mareike, first I wanna talk about the optics here because these back to back visits, coincidental or not, uh, they're a gift in terms of, of optics for Xi, aren't they? Um, I mean, they're a gift for Xi Jinping in that he can first show that he can, you know, he can, uh, have this meeting with Donald Trump, and then right after that, of course, he can still, because he can make those decisions, he can still meet with Vladimir Putin and show that, no, Russia is not that isolated.

No, you know, we can still work with Russia. Nobody can tell us not to do that. I mean, obviously Europe has been trying to get China to distance itself from Russia. That is clearly not happening and never was going to happen. Um, that said, I also don't wanna over interpret, um, any of the, you know, the sequencing here or the, or the fact that they, they, they met ri- right after another.

Um, I mean, Donald Trump's visit was postponed several times, and that could very well be part of why that worked out. Absolutely. But the fact that they are coming to Beijing, right? That's a, that's a coup in and of itself, right? He is there basically holding court, and the world's biggest leaders are coming to him.

Yes, but it's about much more than optics. Um, basically, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have a very big joint agenda that they're driving, which is basically to replace the Western world order. And what connects these visits is, of course, that Xi, Putin, and Trump, I guess all three of them see themselves as the three people driving world affairs.

But Russia and China are in a deep rivalry with the US and in different stages of stabilizing that. Xi has been very successful in deescalating that and showing his strength and getting respect, um, from the US. Um, Putin and Trump, I guess, let's not go too deep into, into, um, kitchen psychology. They, they match psychologically, um, but, but of course, they have a deep rivalry, um, going on, and the whole question of how they position themselves is, is up in the air.

Come the 80s and '90s, the concept of China evolved again as a new Taiwanese identity began to emerge, especially as their government started to democratize.

Taiwan was under martial law for 38 years, and so by the, uh, early 1990s, Taiwan had moved from what was effectively a police state to a, a full-fledged democracy.

A pivotal moment took place in 1995. The president of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, who had been appointed by his predecessors, so not yet democratically elected, spoke at his alma mater, Cornell University.

His visit to the United States is the first by a Taiwan leader since the United States severed diplomatic relations with that country in 1979.

The administration of then US President Bill Clinton initially blocked Lee's visa.

At that point in time, the US, you know, was trying to still improve its ties with the PRC. It was very wary of, uh, a potential upsetting of the, uh, relationship.

But the Republican-led Senate pushed for his visit to be approved.

They went around President Clinton, who was in office at that time, and approved a unofficial visit by Lee Teng-hui to Cornell University.

The institutions of democracy are in place in the Republic of China. Human rights are respected and protected to a very high degree. Democracy is thriving in my country

And, uh, that visit was seen as important because it raised the visibility of, uh, the ROC as Taiwan. So people in Taiwan, uh, saw that they had a degree of international recognition, that Lee Teng-hui was, uh, well received in the United States.

It also marked a shift in the way the leaders of Taiwan viewed their claim on China, as one China, but open to multiple interpretations.

We, in the Republic of China on Taiwan, have found that peaceful transformation must take place gradually and with careful planning

Essentially, the Taiwan side, even though they kept the ROC name, accepted that, you know, their jurisdiction is limited to Taiwan, uh, island Penghu, Matsu, Kinmen, and, uh, other outlying islands.

They essentially accept, right, the PRC as being the, uh, government, um, on, on the mainland.

But Beijing saw Lee's visit as a violation of their one China principle. The one in which reunification was the goal, and Taiwan was part of the People's Republic of China.

The PRC became very uncomfortable with Lee Teng-hui's, uh, increasingly, you know, pro-Taiwan independence rhetoric.

He followed Taiwan public opinion, which generally was not supportive of eventual unification with the PRC.

The PRC, uh, clearly didn't like that very much. Uh, and so what they decided to do was to launch a series of, uh, missile exercises in '95 and '96. Now, uh, some of that was to show opposition, but a lot of it was also to, uh, scare Taiwanese voters from, uh, supporting Lee Teng-hui.

But the missile exercises had the opposite effect.

Uh, the specter of China launching, uh, missiles, uh, near Taiwan's major ports led to a sort of rally around the flag effect, where Lee Teng-hui became more popular than he was before. And in 1996, of course, there was the first direct presidential election.

Lee Teng-hui ran in and won that election.

From there, Taiwan's position veered further from the one China that the PRC envisioned. By 2000, the people of Taiwan elected Chen Shui-bian, their first president from the Democratic Progressive Party, a new party whose charter included aspirations for independence.

It's not necessarily a, uh, you know, declaration of independence. But it was, it was there because of the sort of coalition that they had to build.

This marked a significant change since Lee's Cornell speech that still identified his country as the Republic of China on Taiwan.

We've now got a Taiwan today where the large majority of people in Taiwan identify as just Taiwanese.

And so that then shifts the incentives of, uh, politicians running for elected office.

In 2002, President Chen pushed forward legislation to add the English word Taiwan to their passport. By 2003, the first passports with Taiwan on the cover were issued. Since then, the word Taiwan has remained on the Republic of China passport, and the text itself has gotten larger.

A reflection of how design mirrors identity.

Uh, and there's a, a pragmatic reason for this as well. It clarified that this was not the People's Republic of China. And as a, a practical matter, uh- The Taiwan ROC passport today is actually relatively powerful.

But as the word Taiwan became more prominent alongside Taiwanese identity, so has Beijing's calls for nationalism and its one China reunification goals.

What happens is, uh, the PRC, it becomes the world's second largest economy. Uh, it has a lot more capabilities, uh, that it can bring to bear. So it really wants to further isolate Taiwan and bring it under its fold if possible. And so it starts, um, trying to ins- be more insistent on, uh, its one China principle.

So many other countries which could safely ignore Chinese objections, uh, 25 or 30 years ago, are now in a much more vulnerable position. Uh, the PRC has much more leverage economically over a lot of countries.

As recently as May 2026, China removed tariffs on all African nations, except for one, Eswatini, a country that still has diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

As for the US, one of the largest trading partners of the PRC...

President Xi stressed to President Trump that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations. Talk to me about that moment when that was discussed. Well, they

certainly feel that way, and, and they always raise that issue, and we understand they raise that issue.

From our perspective, any forced change in the status quo and the situation that's there now would be bad for both countries.

They do see value in the continued, um, you know, uh, self-governance of Taiwan, uh, although they, you know, they are reluctant to do anything about, uh, Taiwan independence because they know that that's, uh, provocative.

Though Taiwan does have its own economic bargaining chip. It's home to the company TSMC, which manufactured over 90% of the world's semiconductor chips in 2024.

So Taiwan, in other words, is economically just as important to the United States as the economic relationship with the PRC.

Despite the US's reluctance to recognize Taiwan as its own country, it still hedges defensively against Beijing in the Asia Pacific region.

And the US remains Taiwan's biggest weapons dealer, supplying more than 70% of its conventional arms imports. But the people caught in the middle of this geopolitical crossfire are the residents of Taiwan itself, especially those who were born and raised there, and have no connection to the revolutionary past of the Chinese Civil War.

They, uh, felt that, that their futures were just given away, uh, without their consent.

Now, the PRC is not a democracy. There's no signs that it's going to become a democracy any time soon. The idea of an independent Taiwan is still anathema to the CCP in Beijing, and, uh, is probably a cause for war.

The majority of people on Taiwan just want the status quo.

They are willing to live with this sort of, um, very vague international status that they have because they don't, essentially don't want war, um, even though they don't, also don't want, uh, PRC or CCP control over them. Now, this gets us back to the question of what is China? Should it be, uh, some political entity, or can it be something that's more vague?

Today, uh, as these claims about unity and control become more important, that vagueness, uh, becomes more challenging.

So as the People's Republic of China becomes more powerful, how it enforces its version of the One China principle and where the US chooses to stand will have major impacts on global alliances, especially for Taiwan.

earlier this week, we published an infographic that served as a very sobering reminder of the current state of the global competition for critical minerals. The problem is when you listen to the news and hear what politicians have to say in the US, and even to some extent in Europe and Japan, it's easy to feel like there's actually a competition, a race.

But this graphic that we published tells a very different story. And the fact is, at this point in time in twenty twenty-six, there really isn't much of a competition. Let me read you a few things. And, and Jeroen, I'm not telling you anything here that you don't already know. But for the refined critical minerals that go into AI data centers and, and various high tech, China controls ninety-nine percent of the processed gallium market, eighty-five percent of the processed silicon market.

We get down to antimony, seventy-four percent, and then you go down all of these other minerals that I can't even pronounce, to be honest with you, but they are in the high seventy percents. In the aerospace industry and defense, molybdenum eighty-one percent, titanium sixty-nine percent, tungsten, and this is an interesting one.

Uh, the Chinese control forty-four percent of the tungsten market for refined tungsten, and that's a key issue right now in the United States because tungsten goes into Tomahawk missiles, and the supply of Tomahawk missiles has run low because of the Iran war. So where they need to turn to for refined tungsten?

China, which is kind of an odd thing there. And then let's turn to battery metals, grids, and renewables. Ninety-six percent of the refined processed graphite comes out of China, ninety-five percent of manganese, ninety-one percent of rare earths, seventy-eight percent of cobalt, seventy percent of lithium, forty-four percent of the refined copper market.

So this gives you a sense of just how dominant China is today. And we've heard a lot about the Trump administration moving very quickly to try and catch up. And it seems like every week, there's word of a new critical mineral deal that's been signed somewhere around the world. And of course, there's been a lot of movement, Jeroen, in your country in the DRC, and it's a huge focus of US engagement also in Latin America and even out here in Asia.

But the US only seems to be focusing on one part of the critical mineral equation right now, with deals primarily focused on extraction. But if you're going to catch up to the Chinese for control of these resources and bring down those numbers that I went through, there's a lot more to it than just pulling stuff out of the ground and putting it on a boat.

It needs massive investments in supply chain infrastructure. That's ports, rail, all of that that the Chinese have spent the past thirty, forty years building. It needs the refineries and the processing plants, and maybe in some ways this is most important, it needs a skilled workforce that can run all of this.

And on that last front, the US is also very far behind. Bloomberg recently produced a short twelve-minute documentary on what the US is doing to catch up with the Chinese in critical minerals, and they interviewed the CEO of Australian mining firm Lynas, and her name is Amanda Lacaze, who's running the US' only refining facility for rare earths that's based in Malaysia.

And in the documentary, in which you'll hear from the host and then Amanda, she lays out the challenge that's facing the US in terms of human resources.

Rebuilding a supply chain this specialized also means rebuilding skills, experience, and industrial muscle.

Last year in the US, they graduated thirty-five thousand lawyers.

They graduated three hundred and fifty mining engineers.

Meanwhile, China has a dedicated mining and engineering university with twenty-five thousand undergraduate students.

China has invested in developing competence in the rare earths market and getting better and being more efficient every day

Well, that's actually understating the situation.

Let me just give you a few numbers on this part. China has fifteen to twenty-five major universities with strong specialization in mining, mineral processing, metallurgy, rare earths, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and battery metal engineering. In all, there are about forty-five mining engineering programs that produce about three thousand graduates a year.

And as you heard in the show, that's about ten times more than what the US is producing. So the point here is that if Donald Trump said that he was going to not only secure new sources of raw materials and critical minerals, but also fund a massive investment in US infrastructure and provide billions of dollars to American universities to develop the engineers that it needs to run that infrastructure, I'd take the US a lot more seriously.

Of course, they're not doing any of that, as they've cut infrastructure spending and they've slashed federally funded research universities. They're going in the opposite direction. So, Géraud, that is the state of union as I see it in this supposed competition. Tell me a little bit about what you think particularly about this competition between the US and China in places like Africa for these critical minerals.

It's not really surprising what we see right now on the continent, but on the overall context and the things that you've mentioned. The reality is to catch up with China, you're gonna need to build a whole ecosystem, ecosystem that goes far beyond the simple extraction, as you mentioned, far beyond the simple logistic hub that you need to get minerals from one countries and to get them to your country.

You also have to build refining and processing your own country. You need to have the political, the environmental regulation, and the political will to get those costs of, the environmental costs of processing, refining your own country, which many US state do not have, and that's why the US are also lagging on those kind of issue.

And, um, you also have to have the other part of it, the human skills of it, the expertise of it. And, um, the numbers that she was mentioning was really interesting because it's revealing how pri-priority was set for long time ago. For China, priority was set into technological development because that was the way forward to development, to stability, to get people out of poverty.

The US already reached a level of development to where they felt that we could leave the hard sciences side and focus on lawyers, focus on social. I have nothing against lawyer. I myself a IR person, an ID person. Just to say that it's about, uh, the economic stage where countries say, you know, we reached a level where we think that hard science, all of that are not needed anymore.

But Green transition came and they realized that, wow, we are really far behind in that debate, and we don't know where to exist. And they realized that we did not build the whole infrastru-- I won't even say infrastructure, the whole required ecosystem to be able to be competitive against China. But now what we see, we are seeing now they're trying to catch up.

The US trying to catch up with different bilateral deals that's being signed here and there. How is it looking like in Africa? In Africa, it's look like having the US signing a bilat- bilateral deals with the DRC, where we try, where they try as much as possible to leverage their political support for Tshisekedi against privileged access to critical minerals.

We are seeing that in Guinea, where a US, a US American company is trying to leverage its access to the Trump administration to prove itself that, you know, I'm close to Trump, that's why you need to allow me to move forward with my liberty corridor in Guinea and Liberia. We're seeing that in Mozambique, where we saw small project here and there, where you have investment taking place in rare earth project.

We are seeing that in Lobito, where they're also trying to invest in lo- in logistic project. Those are the small signs where we are s- we cannot deny there is a political will now in Washington, where they say, "We want to get things done. We want to move forward." But the thing is, when you look at the overall project, you see that you have a short kind of, a short-term kind of goal they want to reach right now and do not think on the longer term.

The longer term requires what you've mentioned, the whole ecosystem. And I think there is a kind of sense of like, a, a sense of fear that have we lost the game so much that if we try to think of it the long term, we won't be able to attain our short terms right now? That's why they ca- let's have access right now.

Let's accumulate right now, and later on, we're gonna, we're not gonna start thinking on, like, how we build the long term. And I think that's now the difficulty they have to deal with because when you have election coming up, when you have internal politics coming up, you don't always have the political will and the ability to juggle between short-term goals and long-term strategy that you do not control.

Hi, Paul Krugman, from a cafe, a little noisy behind me, but I hope it'll be tolerable. Um, so Donald Trump has gone to Beijing.

Uh, I wrote something about it earlier today, um, about the economics and about the generally pathetic state of the United States and geopolitics right now. But I wanna focus for this video on the remarkable decision of Trump to bring a bunch of wealthy executives, in the case of some of them, like Musk, extremely wealthy executives, um, with him on a trip that is supposed to be something about serving the interests of the United States.

Um America's corporations are not America. Uh, they are really-- have very distinct differences in interest from those of, of the general public. Um, you may have heard the old line, you know, "What's good for General Motors is good for America." That's not exactly what the CEO of General Motors said. What he said is that what's good for America is good for General Motors and vice versa.

But in any case, he said that a very, very long time ago when corporations were not... Their role in American life was not what it is now. General Motors at the time was a stakeholder corporation. That is, it did not see itself as solely serving the interests of stockholders. It viewed itself as having multiple groups that had a stake in the company.

There was the workers who were represented by a powerful union. There were customers who were considered to be part of the story. There was a kind of community responsibility. Don't wanna romanticize it too much, but General Motors was in fact not just the stock of GM, not back then. These days, we live in a world in which corporations more or less ruthlessly maximize value for the stockholders except when they ruthlessly maximize value for the, the, the, the founder who is considered to be the owner.

So not entirely clear that Tesla is run in the interest of Tesla stockholders. To a large extent, it's run just in Elon Musk's interests. But, uh, it's certainly not run in the interest of US workers or US national security or anything like that. Um, why then should we care? It's probably worth knowing that, um, uh, to the extent that corporations are run in the interest of their stockholders, um, the stockholders of an American, in quotes, corporation are by no means necessarily American.

We think that something like forty percent of US equities are owned by foreigners. Uh, so anything that enhances the profits of corporations, we should think of forty cents on the dollar of that gain actually going to other countries anyway. And Uh, among Americans who, you know, stock ownership in the United States is extremely concentrated in, uh, the hands of the top 10% of the population.

Uh, uh, a large fraction just in the hands of the 1% or less, and, um, most Americans have very little stake in stock prices. They may have some stake in the success of business in the United States, but that doesn't have to be what we consider American corporations. And it's not really, it's not even really right to think of Tesla or, uh, Nvidia, which is Jensen Huang also went to China, as being, you know, somehow America going to, to China.

This is corporations that serve stockholders around the world, serve, uh, some tech bros who have a special control over them. That's kind of the story. Um, what they want is profits. Uh, what they want is, that includes access to the Chinese market, being able to sell China stuff that from the U.S. national point of view, maybe we shouldn't be allowing them to sell.

You know, high, highly sophisticated equipment that on national security grounds, we should actually try to restrict the access of fundamentally unfriendly powers to. But, you know, that's what, what, what's good for Nvidia is definitely not good for America. What's good for Elon Musk is more problematic, but it, there's very least, little reason to think that any business advantages that Tesla might gain out of this or, or, uh, XAI or whatever, whatever enterprise is gonna, he's hoping will realize some gain, that this is going to redound significantly to the benefit of U.S.

workers. To the extent that it benefit, redounds to the benefit of these guys, the people who are on the plane, why should we care? An extra billion dollars in the hands of Elon Musk or Jensen Huang doesn't do anything for the great majority of Americans. And yeah, it does something for them, but not very much, right?

When you have that much money, uh, a billion here, a billion there, and what's the difference? So this is a really peculiar group to be taking, uh, unless you try to think about what does Donald Trump want? Well, from Trump's point of view, I mean, some of it is, you know, his son Eric, uh, who runs the family business was on the plane.

Now, you know, they claim it's just, it's just a family thing. Uh, yeah, right. Um, and, you know, he might as well have been, uh, uh, walking around, uh, Beijing with a sign that says in, in block capitals, of course, this being Trump, uh, "Bribe Me." That's very clearly what that's about. And as for the rest, well, you know, these corporations are, um- Trump's-- in a way, Trump's base, or at least they gave him a lot of money, both in campaign funds and, uh, you know, directly, um, in one way or another.

Uh, still wondering, you know, why do we need a billion dollars for that ballroom? I thought the corporations were, were paying for the ballroom by bribing Trump. Uh, but maybe... I don't know where that money's going. Anyway, whatever the story, these are not-- this is not US national interests being, uh, represented here.

Uh, the whole visit, aside from the fact that it's humiliating, that's really a pathetic display of US weakness and Chinese strength. The whole visit is also yet another spectacular example of the corruption that now pervades everything about US governance. Um, and we should be angry, we should be outraged, um, and we certainly shouldn't allow Trump and company to spin whatever comes out of this as a victory.

It's, uh, um, we mostly defeated ourselves here, but we certainly aren't getting anything for, for us. Maybe something for, for Elon Musk comes out of this, but there's nothing for the rest of us coming out of this essentially tributary visit to China.

Richard Nixon becomes president in 1969, and he's intent on playing the China card against the Soviets, and he does so by sending his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to secretly start communicating with the Chinese. The US had no formal relations with China. They were enemies. They didn't talk to each other.

So Kissinger had to talk to the Chinese using Pakistan as a middleman. They send messages, they arrange a meeting, and soon Kissinger flies to Pakistan, says that he needs some rest, but secretly he sneaks onto a plane that takes him to Beijing, breaking into this place that has been cut off for two decades.

Now, why is Mao entertaining this cozying up to his enemy, the Americans? Well, he's concluded that the Soviet Union, who has weapons pointed at China at this point, is a more immediate danger, and that the Americans are maybe willing to bargain. Bargain about this, but not if they still have troops and nukes on Taiwan, their giant military base right off his coast.

So here's Kissinger in this huge moment in the story. He's in Beijing talking to Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, Mao's right-hand man, and the conversation almost immediately goes to Taiwan. The prime minister is sharp on his historical details, and he starts off by telling Kissinger basically the story that I've told you so far.

He reminds Kissinger that after World War II, Truman was okay with Taiwan being a part of China. That is, until he suddenly changed his mind when the Korean War broke out, and starts calling Taiwan's status undetermined, a stance China deeply rejects. And then suddenly, the US takes over Taiwan, a Chinese island, and turns it into basically a huge military base with nuclear weapons 130 kilometers off the Chinese mainland, and the center of a military effort to contain China and its neighbors.

Kissinger agrees with this. He says blatantly in this private conversation that if the Korean War didn't happen, Taiwan would probably belong to the PRC. But he says previous administrations made Taiwan a key part of the Korean War, so here we are. But then he says, "We're different now. We're no longer going after communism for communism's sake."

The new President Nixon, quote, "Operates on a different philosophy.

We can be friends even if you're

communist." Now, Kissinger's main goal is to befriend the PRC to divide it from the Soviet Union. But even with that in mind, Prime Minister Zhou says that he trusts Kissinger. He believes him. But then he says that the key question is if the US is ready to recognize that Taiwan's status is not undetermined, that it is a part of China, and that there is only one China.

He says, quote, "This is the crux. Nothing can happen unless you agree to that." And Kissinger says, "Yes, we're not advocating for two Chinas or one China and one Taiwan." But look at the language in this transcript. He vaguely remarks that, quote, "As a student of history, one's prediction would have it be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction that the PRC wants."

This is a tactfully vague way of saying that Taiwan will probably be reunited with the PRC, but we'll see. Kissinger is kind of throwing Taiwan under the bus here, at least in the words of one expert I talked to. But again, his goal is to get leverage over the Soviets, so he's willing to give something up to the Chinese.

He promises to not support any independence movements in Taiwan, and he even says that the US will take out all their troops. But in return, he needs the PRC to tell the communist fighters that they're supporting in Vietnam to negotiate a peace deal to release American prisoners of war so that the US can leave Vietnam.

And Zhou's like, "We'll try." And soon there's a sense of agreement in the room. The prime minister says he's hopeful. It sounds like these enemies are taking the first steps towards friendship, and soon everything changes once again really quick.

I think we're at like fall of 1971. The People's Republic of China is adopted into the UN. Taiwan gets kicked out. President Nixon then goes to China, totally publicly, and announces that they're starting to talk to each other, that friendship is in the near future. They aren't officially recognizing the PRC as a real country, but they're warming up.

During this visit, Nixon has some secret talks with Zhou Enlai, Mao's right-hand man who Kissinger had negotiated with. The declassified transcript of these private conversations contains a moment where Nixon straight up, in his own words, acknowledges that, quote, "There is one China. Taiwan is a part of China."

And then he says that if he could control the American bureaucracy back home, he would tell them to do away with referring to Taiwan's status as undetermined. That was not American policy towards Taiwan, but you can almost feel how eager Nixon is to make this friendship work, to divide the Soviets from their big ally.

But he's kind of getting ahead of his skis. So it's 1972, and Nixon and Kissinger have successfully pulled off this rebalancing. They've gained a ton of leverage over the Soviets by dividing them from the Chinese and then starting to befriend them. And then the Vietnam War ends, not quite with the support from China that Kissinger had envisioned, but the troops are gone, which lowers tensions even more.

In 1974, the US takes its nukes off the island, another down payment towards full friendship. Soon after, Mao, the revolutionary who started this country, dies, and the leaders who take his place come in much more open to trade in the global markets. The US sees huge potential here. So in the late '70s, President Jimmy Carter finishes what Kissinger and Nixon had started a few years earlier.

The US officially recognizes the People's Republic of China as the only China, no longer recognizing Taiwan. They move their China embassy from Taipei to Beijing. More countries are flipping as well.

At this same time, the US erases the treaty that says that they would protect Taiwan. They remove all troops from the island, and that shooting match that had been going on for years every day, that finally stops. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics is taking off, and these two are trading, reshaping the global economy.

It's a monumental shift in just a few years. And just as Kissinger and Nixon wanted, it weakened and isolated the Soviet Union, and it started a new era for Chinese-American relations But notice that in all of this, even during all the friendship, all the visits, the US never publicly acknowledges what Nixon said in private, that Taiwan is a part of China.

They recognize that Beijing thinks this, but they continue to operate with the ambiguous policy that Truman laid out in the '50s that Taiwan's status is undetermined. In a short time, Taiwan went from core ally to diplomatic orphan on the world stage, and many Americans and members of Congress didn't feel right about abandoning an ally that, by the way, is changing into a more open and developed economy and society.

We're abandoning them all to embrace a communist, authoritarian former enemy? What message does this send to our other allies? So while Carter is normalizing relations, Congress is passing a law to reassure Taiwan. The law says, yes, the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as a country, but we will still support it as a partner.

And crucially, the law says that even though the troops are leaving, the US is required to sell weapons to Taiwan so that they can defend themselves. And finally, if that wasn't enough, the US will maintain capabilities to come to Taiwan's rescue if they're ever to be invaded. But they stop short of saying that they actually would come to their rescue.

It was intentionally crafted to be ambiguous, to give reassurance to Taiwan so that they didn't go declare independence, cause a conflict, but not to make promises that would anger China, who, by the way, sees this law as cheating the spirit of their agreement, seeing the US as an insincere friend. Because remember, China's position here is that they are officially the government of China, which includes Taiwan, which was to be given back to China after World War II.

The allies said they would, and that Taiwan would be like any other part of China today if the US hadn't stepped in in the 1950s. That's their position. And they begin a campaign to try to convince Taiwan to come back into China peacefully, but it's becoming too late. This whole time, Taiwan has been transforming, its economy looking like one of those miracles, and by now it's replaced its decades of military dictatorship with a democracy It's the 1990s and they're holding elections for the first time on the island.

The US is loving this. They wanna support it. They give one of the candidates in the election a visa to come visit the United States, and for China, this has gone too far. They immediately recall their ambassador from Washington, DC. They amass 100,000 troops across the Strait of Taiwan, right here at this strait.

They launch missiles, including ballistic missiles that land 20 miles northwest of the island. There's warships and aircraft. They're threatening the island, warning them against embracing democracy and the United States. But here comes the response. It's March 1996, and the US sends two aircraft carrier battle groups to the waters near Taiwan.

It's the largest show of force in this region since Vietnam. The standoff dies down, and while all of this is happening, on the island, this first democratic election goes forward peacefully. Taiwanese voters turn out in huge numbers, 76%. They're defying this attempt to be bullied by their big neighbor, who they identify less and less with, and the world watches as a symbol of democracy flourishes in the shadow of the intimidation of their huge neighbor, a neighbor who becomes infamous for massacring peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

What do these six areas all have in common?

Each mark represents a small piece of land that you could drive top to bottom or across in under one hour. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Antwerp, Jura Valley, Hsinchu. These relatively tiny sections of land have all the parts, companies, and people of a single industry so tightly clustered together that at least 50% of all the value created for the global industry comes just from that area.

Semiconductors for Hsinchu, watches for Jura Valley, diamonds for Antwerp, film for Los Angeles, software for Silicon Valley, the auto industry in Detroit. Well, 50% of the value used to come from there.

Step inside the thundering iron heart of the Motor City, where a symphony of screaming whistles and clashing steel births the very future of the American road.

Watch as a skeleton of cold Michigan ore marches down the line, cloaked in chrome and scorched by fire, transformed in a mere 90 minutes into a gleaming chariot of freedom. It's a mechanical miracle of the common man, a tick-tock triumph where the ticking clock is king. Ticking clock is king. The ticking tick tock-

From the famous brands like Ford to the suppliers of transmissions, tires, metal stamping fasteners, all the parts needed to make a car were within a 40-minute drive.

Everything about Detroit was about time. It was truly the primary raw material, so much so that to Detroit's efficiency experts, the 62nd minute was a mathematical nightmare. It didn't fit neatly into an accounting column. So They dropped it and adopted stopwatches that divided minutes in 100 segments instead of 60 seconds.

Spot a defect? Keep the line going. Put a rivet in the wrong place? Keep the line going. Made a mistake? Doesn't matter. Keep the line going. The steadier the clock, the more cars that came off the line, the lower the price of a car. That was the heartbeat of Detroit, and that is exactly what Japan had to exploit to begin overtaking American car companies starting in the 1980s, creating an entirely new way of building complex things that Taiwan would copy and make the foundation of how it built semiconductors.

Detroit would push cars out of factories with the intention of lowering prices. Lowering prices would increase demand for cars. Japan did the opposite. They only built a car when someone had bought a car, letting demand pull cars out of factories. Spot a defect? Stop the line. Put a rivet in the wrong place?

Stop the line. Made a mistake? Stop the line. Cars didn't pile up in huge lots outside the factory. Defects were stamped out early, less rework. An employee could absolutely not hit a button to halt the production line in Ford's plant because they noticed a little bit of stitching was off. Toyota had a cord running straight down the line that stopped the production line.

Any employee could and was encouraged to pull it. Put yourself in the two minds of employees in these plants. At Ford, do my job. Do it well. Good. Keep the line moving. Oh, what's that? It's fine. They'll catch it at the end and we'll figure it out when they have a solution. At Toyota, do my job. Do it well. Oh, that doesn't look right.

Hey, John, this weld is already cracking. Pull the cord. Fix the problem. Fix it just in time to prevent it from becoming a major problem. Everything was done just in time. That's what the system is called and what almost every industry uses now. Don't order a year's worth of tires for how many cars you think you're going to build.

Take delivery of tires every week or even every day for the exact number of cars that have been sold that need to be built just in time to hand over to the customer Taiwan is small enough that clustering would've naturally happened, but they took it to an extreme degree intentionally. The father of Taiwan's chip industry, Morris Chang, talked at great length with the father of Silicon Valley, Frederick Terman.

"How do we do what you did there? You cluster," he said. "Take your top two universities, like Silicon Valley's Berkeley and Stanford. Every piece of your industry wraps around them." So that's what Taiwan did. All located minutes from one another in this purpose-built science park, Tsing Hua University, Chao Tung University, number one and number two in Taiwan, the companies that create the materials needed to make semiconductors, and then 20 chip factories called fabs, ranging from the absolute bleeding edge of the technology to mature workforces.

If you count every chip in the world from your toaster to your car, roughly one in five was born here. Add in the chips from all the fabs in Taiwan, it's three of five. But if you count only the most advanced chips, the market share of Hsinchu Science Park is essentially 100%. It was a very intentional design, definitely not organic.

The people that the government forced to move off their land in this area and the surrounding area were not thrilled. 150,000 people in an area dramatically smaller than Silicon Valley work across 530 different companies, equipment and materials, fabrication, testing and quality control, R&D. This campus even has its own power and water system, data network, and rail yard.

They then married the campus to the just in time system pioneered by their geographic cousins and once rulers from the North. Chips made only when purchased. Inventory never builds up. Every chip shuttles around these massive factories in a little box going through 1,500 steps. One flick of a switch, every box stops moving.

There's a problem? Let's solve it. Materials don't pile up. Much of what is needed for that day's work, especially gases and chemicals, often arrives the same day, not just in a box or a tank or container, but through a whole specialized pipe system that lets each factory buy the amount of nitrogen, helium, chlorine, whatever they need right now.

All of this, coupled with that extreme focus on controlling the environment, is what gives them more than eight working chips for every batch of 10. One or two more working chips might not seem like a massive advantage, but over hundreds of millions of chips per year, it is decisive. But there is one more absolutely critical reason why Taiwan pulled way ahead of everybody else.

Intel and Samsung are not incompetent, but there is a fundamental way that Taiwan Semiconductor arranges business with its customers that these other companies do not, that makes it the only chip maker companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, and Amazon will work with. Steve Jobs was pissed. He says, "I'm going to make this a nuclear war if they don't back down."

No, he says, "Thermonuclear war." There's even a speech he gave right around this time, and he never mentioned other brands or anything that would distract from the Apple show. But he puts this slide on the screen that says, "Year of the copycat," and on that slide are a bunch of logos. It was the one right at the top, right in the middle, Samsung.

That's who he was really pissed at. And this is something all companies worry about. You have a thing you need to make, right? But you don't make that thing. You just design it. You pay someone else to make it, kind of like how IKEA gets you to build all of its furniture. No, no, I'm kidding. That's a different kind of terrible partnership.

Jobs was, and I quote, "Genuinely shocked, infuriated," because Apple was paying Samsung for chips. Of course, that meant Apple had to tell Samsung everything about the iPhone. Why do you need chips like this or that? So it was June 2010, yes, Jobs wakes up one morning, goes to work, turns on the TV to watch Samsung present its brand new Galaxy phone to the world, and it looked just like an iPhone.

Remember, this was the start of the iPhone days. There was nothing like it until that day. All of it, down to the box it came in, and Jobs was obsessed with the unboxing experience. All of it looked like a direct copy, the software, the rounded edges, the rubber band effect of menus when they were pulled down When you have to give all the intimate details of your product to another company, it's always in the back of your head, "What if they copy this?"

This is why Apple and all the other major tech companies only buy their most important chips from Taiwan Semiconductor. Intel and Samsung, the only other companies that can make cutting edge chips, they also design their own chips. Taiwan explicitly does not, will not, started out from the beginning not to compete with its own customers.

This is a strategy of neutrality, like Switzerland during World War II.

It is the final and critical third piece of the silicon shield. Before TSMC, if you wanted to make a

chip but didn't own a factory, a fab, you had to go to a company like Texas Instruments, Samsung, Intel, and ask to use their leftover machine time.

You were paying your competitor to make your product. If their own chip suddenly became more popular, it would kick you off the line to prioritize their own production. You had to hand over your designs to a company that might decide to borrow your best ideas. No one had done this before. Taiwan Semiconductor was the very first in history to say, "We will be the world's best at manufacturing chips so you can be the best at design.

We will not design a single chip. We will only make what designs you bring to us." If they never designed a chip, they would never sell a chip, which meant Apple could pour billions into chip design, hand the design to Taiwan, and never worry Taiwan was going to borrow it. It is the quintessential division of labor, just like Adam Smith hints at in the very first sentence of Wealth of Nations, and boy did it work.

There are now thousands of companies that want to design chips but are not gonna build a $20 billion factory that needs to be upgraded every two years just to stay relevant. Fast-forward a few years and Apple moves all its chip production to Taiwan. You know what happens when you provide 25% of the annual revenue of a company like Taiwan Semiconductor?

Any time they advance their capabilities, Apple gets the full first year of their factory capacity. Everybody else has to wait in line. The chips are a little bit more expensive that first year as TSMC works out the kinks, but worth it for Apple. They love the arrangement. And of course, because Apple gets first crack, TSMC and Apple basically co-develop each new generation so it can hit what Apple wants for its power and temperature requirements.

The example of all examples of an anchor tenant, just like this Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York. What does this thing remind you of? What an attraction. There's 12,000 square feet of space down those stairs. Why on earth the original designers decided to put a basement on what could otherwise be expensive retail storefront is still debated.

Decade after decade, this plaza attached to this very prestigious office building, it lost money. Your average person just was not gonna walk down the stairs to see what was down there. So if you couldn't get a tenant in here, the whole value of the building would just stagnate. New owner takes over the building in 2003, goes and has dinner with Jobs.

They get a deal done at a fraction of the cost of normal retail space in New York, on the corner of Central Park. This is prime New York. This glass cube goes up, crowds form, the value of the GM building triples in 12 years, all because Apple became the anchor tenant, the gravity that would pull other tenants, customers, and businesses right towards it.

If you took this store out of here, this building would fall in value by 20, 25% instantly, at least a billion dollars. Apple, as the anchor, pushes Taiwan's technology further. Those leaps attract more designs from other companies. Taiwan invests that money back into the factories. Apple guarantees the new factories will be fully used.

It's a flywheel that's moved Taiwan semi years ahead of its two closest rivals. So today, Taiwan is now Switzerland, not for its mountains, and guns, and secrecy. Companies all over the world from every country, United States, China, Japan, UK, India, Brazil, Norway, Russia, they all rely on this little area on this tiny little island.

Countries may wish production would stop so their enemies wouldn't get chips, but then they wouldn't get chips. You work together and that makes the situation better, positive sum. One side loses, one side wins, zero sum. Both sides could lose everything in a conflict that wipes out Taiwan's factories, negative sum.

These dynamics, this complex game around it, how embedded it is in our everyday life, I'm not sure there's a more complex, interesting situation that has ever developed on this planet. This island really should not be this important.

We've just heard clips starting with

DW News exploring how Xi Jinping's back-to-back meetings with Trump and Putin revealed China's strategy of seeking global power and influence without accepting the full responsibilities of world leadership.

Vox traced how Taiwan's identity shifted from the 1990s through 2026, as Beijing's growing economic power made its one China reunification demands harder for the world to ignore.

The China in Africa Podcast detailed how China controls upwards of 70% of nearly every processed critical mineral market while the U.S. cuts research funding and graduates ten times fewer mining engineers than China each year.

Paul Krugman broke down why corporations like Tesla and NVIDIA are not "America going to China," since roughly 40% of U.S. equities are foreign-owned and stock gains skip most Americans entirely.

Johnny Harris traced how Nixon and Kissinger secretly opened relations with China in 1971 by quietly conceding Taiwan's status, setting up decades of deliberate U.S. ambiguity that left Taiwan a diplomatic orphan.

And Maxinomics traced Taiwan's semiconductor indispensability to three interlocking advantages: just-in-time manufacturing, intentional geographic clustering, and the founding pledge never to compete with its own customers.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of being pushed around by global forces, I’m just reminding you of our current financial instability and the sad news that our new show, SOLVED! had to put on indefinite hiatus due to our ad dollars drying up, cutting our total budget by about 1/3.

Right now, I’m in a bit of a panic mode, looking to boost the show in every way I can think of, basically asking the question, if I were to invent Best of the Left today, what would it look like? The answer is that it would be quite a bit different from 20 years ago, and so I’m taking time to do some building.

But, starting with low-hanging fruit, I’m looking to relaunch our listener feedback voice message segment that people frequently said was their favorite part of the show.

I think this particular moment is the right time to relaunch the voice messages because we’re looking to rebuild the audience and boost revenue for the long term and making this show once again be a bi-directional relationship is exactly the type of thing that helps spark interest in new listeners and keeps them coming back.

So, in addition to telling everyone you know that they should be subscribed to this show, you can also help make the show itself better by using our voice message system to leave comments.

To that end, I’ve begun asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off.

Today, I have a few questions: Number 1, if you have a personal connection to the history between China and Taiwan, I’ve love to hear any insights you have. Maybe just how the whole story feels to witness.

Number 2. I feel like this story highlights a big problem the U.S. frequently has, which is that we don't know much about things that happen outside our own country, particularly the histories of other countries. I certainly don't feel confident that we covered every potential blind spot, so if you feel like anything is missing from the coverage, we'd love if you could help fill the gaps.

And third, the multipolar worldview is getting a real hearing in this episode, the argument that China's model represents a genuine alternative to U.S. hegemony and that the Global South has good reasons to prefer it. I'm curious, where do you land on that? You can be skeptical, persuaded, or somewhere complicated in between, but tell us specifically what moved you there and what you think the left should actually do with that argument.

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes.

One last thing, thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations recently while we’ve been going through our financial troubles.

And if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners.

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Now for my thoughts,

I'm not an expert in the history of China or its relationship with Taiwan. But I do know a thing or two about how the stories a country tells about itself can either push it toward the future or handcuff it to the past. Reunification with Taiwan is one of those handcuffs. Underneath all the talk of geography and history, it's really a story, one China has repeated so long that it stopped being an aspiration and hardened into a trap with the potential to pull the whole world into war.

That Taiwan story sits inside a bigger one for China: their century of humiliation, the hundred years or so before the People's Republic was founded. It looms large in the Chinese imagination, reinforced through schools and state media. Think of it as the permanent foil for a kind of "make China great again" movement. The Chinese Communist Party rests a good chunk of its legitimacy on the claim that it's leading the country through a redemption story, recovering what was lost during that century. There are geopolitical motivations behind the story, of course, but without the romanticized redemption arc, those realities would never rise to the level of being a legitimate reason for annexation.

Taiwan is swept up in that story that hasn't changed much in decades, even though we're now generations past its origins. And what gets lost in it is the self-determination of the people who live there now.

A country like China could just as easily tell a different story about itself, one about being a good neighbor, respecting the will of its own people and the will of people abroad, being a decent member of the international community. For China, respecting self-determination runs straight into their story about what redemption requires. The story can't survive Taiwan deciding for itself.

As Americans, we've got our own stories doing the same kind of work, for better and worse. We told the story of Manifest Destiny loudly and proudly to justify settling and seizing the continent coast to coast. Then the story changed. We started describing ourselves as not an empire, even as we kept picking up territory; Guam, Puerto Rico, the Guano Islands, the Philippines, and on down the list. We kept building the empire but just stopped saying it out loud.

There's a story in the book, "How to Hide an Empire" about a GI in the Philippines during World War II. He runs into a Filipino man and he's startled when the man answers him in fluent English. The soldier had no idea the United States had colonized the Philippines and put English in its schools. That's the power of the stories we tell, and the ones we decide not to.

Trump is working from a very different history than China and the degree of his threats is different but he's also reaching back to old stories to justify what he wants to do now. The push to take Greenland, Panama, even Canada gets dressed up as military or economic security necessities, a throwback to the exact rationale we used over a century ago to grow the empire. And again, what gets sacrificed is self-determination, along with the idea that being a good neighbor on the world stage is a real source of strength.

Ask an American what defines this country and its people, and there's a decent chance you'll hear something about individualism and self-reliance, a lot of it traceable back to the era of westward expansion. And there's some truth to it but there's a lot more going on underneath than we usually admit.

Self-reliance on the frontier was always more myth than reality. It ran on enormous government help, the land grants that handed out the territory, the railroads that made it reachable, and the cavalry that took the land from Native peoples by force. And it ran on neighbors, epitomized by the image of a whole community coming together to raise a barn. Even out on the frontier, self-reliance always meant relying on each other.

Scale that myth up to a whole country and you get the story nationalists like Trump tell, make America great again by leaning on no one and helping no one. That's just as shaky a foundation for a nation in a globalized world as it is for a homesteader. No country actually stands alone. A healthy community of nations working together is just barn-raising at a bigger scale, and being a good neighbor turns out to serve everyone's self-interest. Keeping up good relations and helping out through programs like USAID isn't pure charity, whatever the nationalists assume as they target it for destruction.

In fact, the leftist critique of USAID identifies it as a decidedly mixed bag of genuine help and a source of soft power that often gets wielded in unethical ways. That's a legitimate criticism of misuse of power, but it doesn't undercut the value of lifesaving aid, including the benefits that rebound on the US such as fighting epidemic disease wherever it pops up around the world to contain the spread which keeps everyone safer.

China's story about humiliation and redemption has hardened into handcuffs it will struggle to ever get out of. We're wearing some very old handcuffs of our own but there's leverage in a story's early days. When someone like Trump tries to create a new story or revive a very old one, like the notion that being a good neighbor is weakness, or that helping other people isn't worth the effort, that's the moment we can still refuse it, before it grows roots.

China pushing itself toward the brink of war over a small island it has convinced itself it owns should be a warning to all of us about what the wrong story can do. The good news is there are plenty of better stories available to us and there's always the option to help choose which story we hand to the next generation.

It can be a story about a country still working to become a more perfect union, one that finally understands its own security and freedom are bound up with everyone else's.

A country focused on providing for its own people and being a good neighbor has no reason to go take anyone else's land or run anyone else's life, and that approach is where real strength comes from.

Plenty of rich powers have gone the other way and gone out conquering. But look how those stories tend to end. Britain ran the largest empire on earth and then spent the next century shrinking back into a midsize island with plenty of blood on its hands. Belgium got rich off the Congo and earned a permanent stain on its name for how it did it. That's where this road points, decline and disgrace, and there's no good reason to think we'd be the ones to dodge it if we followed Trump's instincts.

Stories are going to run this country, and every country, no matter what because humanity runs on stories. The challenge of every generation is to help determine which of those stories we let take root, and which we work to pull up.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 5 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Making of Taiwan

Followed by Section B, The Multipolar Worldview

Section C, Taiwan in the Crosshairs

Section D, The Summit and Its Fallout

And Section E, The Resource War and Africa

Taiwan is an island around 240 miles long and 98 miles wide. Despite its small size, it's highly populated with around 24 million people. Taiwan also holds a strategic position off the coast of Southeast Asia, with only 100 miles of water separating it from mainland China. Taiwan's native population, typically called Aborigines, dominated the island in tribal societies for thousands of years.

Once overseas trade developed in the 1600s and the strategic location of Taiwan was discovered, a power struggle ensued over the island. That power struggle began in the early 1600s and is still, to some extent, going on today. Here's a short version of what happened. The Dutch and the Spanish established the first colonies in the 1620s.

The Dutch then kicked out the Spanish. Meanwhile, on mainland China, the Ming dynasty was collapsing. In an act of desperation, they made a pirate warlord into a Ming official. The warlord's army tried to defeat the Qing dynasty. They lost and retreated to Taiwan. They kicked out the Dutch and established themselves as the governing authority on the island.

Within a couple generations, the warlord's family ceded power to the Qing dynasty, and the Qing declared themselves the new governing authority. The Qing ruled until 1895 when Japan defeated China in the first Sino-Japanese war. Upon losing, China gave Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

Imperial Japan then governed Taiwan for 50 years until they lost World War II. Towards the end of the war, the leaders of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Republic of China met and issued a declaration of their intentions with Japan at the war's end, called the Cairo Declaration. One sentence referred to Taiwan, which at the time was commonly called Formosa.

It read, "Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War. And all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." To understand this part, you have to understand what the Republic of China is.

The Republic of China was the name of China in the early to mid 1900s, when it was divided and mostly governed by a nationalist political party called the Kuomintang. During World War II, the leader of the Kuomintang was Chiang Kai-shek. Using the Cairo Declaration from 1943 and the Potsdam Declaration that basically reiterated it in 1945, Chiang Kai-shek in 1945 declared Taiwan part of the Republic of China, making the Republic of China the new governing authority on Taiwan.

That name, the Republic of China, is still the official name for Taiwan today. Around the same time, there was a civil war starting back up in China between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang. By 1949, the communists won the civil war. Mao Zedong declared the new name of China the People's Republic of China.

Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan that led to a decades long standoff between the two parties, the People's Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan both plotted to conquer each other's territories and establish themselves as the governing authority on both mainland China and Taiwan when mainland China modernized in the eighties the plot to recapture it was finally abandoned by the Kuomintang.

They loosened their single party rule and allowed Taiwan to democratize. We'll get back to that democratization in a bit. I think this is a good time to reflect on the history that I just described. For all of that time, the people living on Taiwan did not experience consensual relationships between governors and governed.

For hundreds of years, the people living on Taiwan experienced a rotating cast of outside authorities that wanted Taiwan and had the power to impose their will on the place. So for all that history, the people living on Taiwan could be meaningfully understood as powerless players in a larger geopolitical game.

With that, as you might expect, came a history of resistance in Taiwan, specifically resistance against unwanted authority. The Aborigines fought off all incursions of power into eastern Taiwan. For a surprisingly long time, they fought off the early colonists, the Ming, the Qing, and even the Japanese throughout most of their rule.

Even as late as the 1930s, eastern Taiwan was a place that most people simply couldn't go. When the Japanese tried to venture into the east in the '30s and establish control of the whole island, they suffered unbearable casualties and even assassinations in response. Things were especially turbulent when the Qing ruled Taiwan.

The Qing annexed Taiwan in 1684 and made it part of Fujian province, but they ultimately didn't see much value in Taiwan. They sent low-quality officials there who practiced institutionalized corruption, which led to a notoriously turbulent 200 years marked by almost 40 anti-Qing uprisings. Things only calmed down once the Japanese took control of Taiwan, who ran it as a police state, although it was a police state that somewhat modernized the place.

The Republic of China claiming Taiwan in 1945 didn't change that historical pattern. Cultural and historical ties to mainland China led the Taiwanese to be initially hopeful that Chinese governance would be a political improvement. So the Taiwanese initially warmly welcomed their mainland brethren.

But disillusionment quickly set in as they began to realize that new foreign rulers had merely replaced old ones. The new governor refused to speak Taiwanese. Tens of thousands of Taiwanese officials lost their jobs, and the new administration refused to appoint any qualified Taiwanese to top-level positions.

Combined with mounting economic problems, the Taiwanese quickly turned against the Guomindang. Widespread protests broke out in February of 1947. The government effectively lost control of Taiwan. The army was called in. Widespread and indiscriminate killing followed, which has since been called the Two-Two-Eight Incident or the Two-Two-Eight Massacre.

It's disputed how many were killed in the Two-Two-Eight Incident, but what's not in dispute is that it led to a mental shift on Taiwan. It ended the sort of precarious honeymoon between the Taiwanese and the mainland Chinese and led to the beginning of modern independence movements in Taiwan. The Kuomintang went on to grow the economy and modernize Taiwan, but still for a long time, Taiwanese didn't experience political freedom.

For about the next 40 years, Taiwan was governed by martial law, which included restrictions on speech and a tightly controlled media. The Kaohsiung incident in 1979 also furthered antagonisms between the public and the Kuomintang when the government cracked down on human rights activists working on the popular Formosa magazine.

The thing that finally broke the cycle and gave people in Taiwan a sense of control over their political lives was their democratization. Democracy was the goal from early on in Kuomintang rule, but it wasn't achieved in the full sense until 1996 when Taiwan successfully held its first open and fair presidential election.

There were two main parties, the newly legalized Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang. In Taiwan, it's important for politicians to have a stance on independence. They can basically either be for, one, maintaining the status quo, which is typically seen as the safest option in terms of geopolitical strategy.

Or two, they can be pro-independence, which means taking steps to get Taiwan recognized as a sovereign country. Or three, they can be pro-unification with China. In 1996, the DPP candidate was openly pro-independence, and the Kuomintang candidate also signaled support for independence by making statements like this one in 1994, which he made while he was president of Taiwan as a single-party state.

"Until now, those who held power in Taiwan were always from outside Taiwan, but now I can bluntly say the following. Even the Kuomintang was an outside force. It was the only party that could govern the Taiwanese. We must make the Kuomintang into a party for the Taiwanese people." The Kuomintang candidate won in 1996, and the DPP candidate won the next election four years later.

With that, the Kuomintang rotated out of office and the Democratic Progressive Party rotated in. The Taiwanese people had themselves chosen their first leaders in history and rotated the ruling party out of office, and both candidates were more or less pro-independence. With that democratization came, as one Taiwanese historian put it, "An emerging sense of national self-determination."

With that, there's been an emerging consensus in Taiwan that Taiwan is its own country with its own culture, its own history, and now its own government.

over the last two decades, Taiwanese support for reunification with the mainland has collapsed to 6%.

That's not to say that most people want independence. Most people seem to just want things to stay the way they are, neither part of China nor not part of China, like if Schrodinger's cat was a country. But despite the majority of the Taiwanese population being happy with the status quo, over on the mainland, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly said that peaceful reunification is coming.

He says reunification through a peaceful manner is the most in line with the overall interest of the Chinese nation, including Taiwanese compatriots. Those who forget their heritage, betray the motherland, and seek to split the country will come to no good end, and they will be spurned by the people and condemned by history.

So how do you peacefully absorb an island that doesn't want to be absorbed at all? Well, remember the so-called peaceful liberation of Beiping?

This idea kept coming up in my conversation. People kept saying, "Just look at the Beiping model. Beiping model, that's what China wants to do."

If you could achieve something like Beijing in '49 where you have, you know, what would be tantamount to a turnover-

Parading a military around, building a network of collaborators, and dialing up the propaganda. It all worked to seize Beiping without violence, so why couldn't it work again? Well, let's start with the parading your massive military around part.

For 20 years, China has been building a military force designed specifically to retake Taiwan.

Nowadays, China's military spending is 20 times larger than Taiwan's, and they wanna make sure that Taiwan knows about it.

China is staging military exercises off Taiwan's north, south, and east coasts.

If you count the fact that the mainland is off the west coast, that's all of Taiwan's coasts. Taiwan is literally girt by Xi.

Beijing's Eastern Theater Command says it's deployed ships, aircraft, and artillery to practice blockading the island

And China's been doing this pretty much constantly over the last few years.

Dozens of Chinese fighter aircraft have flown sorties into what Taiwan claims as its Air Defense Identification Zone, prompting the tiny democratic island to scramble its own military and plead for international support.

The frequency of Chinese aircraft buzzing past and missiles flying over is high enough that it's almost always in the news there.

China's military fired missiles over and near the island and has since normalized its jets and warships passing closer than ever before.

On top of that, there are frequent air raid drills.

The air raid sirens are going off and I'm getting emergency alerts on my phone.

When that happens, citizens have to head to bomb shelters or face a fine.

The fines start at the equivalent of about 1,500 Australian dollars.

We are seeing the Taiwanese population, certainly in the polling, become more concerned about China's actions.

All these military provocations by China are basically the equivalent of marching the troops around the walls of Beijing. So that's the way the military behavior is similar, but what about the way China uses propaganda? Well, the PLA certainly has no shortage of slick video footage of their troops, ships, jets, and rockets in action.

They also have no hesitation resorting to intimidation and threats.

In a video accompanying its announcement, it called Taiwan's president a parasite and depicted him as a green bug held by chopsticks over a burning Taiwan.

Some of this propaganda that China's releasing shows pictures of, sorry, cartoons of missile strikes- Mm

in downtown Taiwan and things like that. It is incredibly aggressive.

Now, this propaganda feels pretty obvious, but there are more subtle efforts to win over Taiwanese hearts and minds as well. If you have a look at the map of the region, you'll see that the mainland province directly across the strait from Taiwan is Fujian Province.

For several years, the Fujian government has been funding a number of media outlets aimed at highlighting the cultural connections between Taiwan and the mainland. There's a film and TV awards night every year that celebrates cross-strait production.

The film and television talent on both sides of the Taiwan Straits can work together.

I

am happy that our TV drama is so popular in Taiwan. We're jointly working in many aspects.

There are also efforts to spread fake news, with websites set up that look like American news outlets, but post disinformation about Taiwanese politicians. There are allegations that some Taiwanese social media influencers are being paid by Chinese backers to spread disinformation even further.

In 2024, Taiwan says they detected more than two million pieces of mainland-backed disinformation, a 60% increase from the previous year. So that's the military and propaganda elements of the Beiping method covered, which leaves one final element, mass infiltration by spies. Well, we heard earlier about Diablo 07 who was passing military secrets to Beijing, and that's pretty standard espionage apart from the Diablo coach bit.

But the Chinese government is also pursuing more original methods of infiltration.

Prosecutors are seeking a 12-year sentence for an army officer who promised to surrender to Beijing in the event of a Chinese invasion.

Taiwanese army officers have been paid to film themselves promising to surrender if there's an invasion.

Hsiang had photographed himself in uniform holding a written pledge of surrender. By the time he was exposed, he had served in the army for 35 years.

A 35-year career thrown away for, well, how much?

By January of this year, he had received nearly 18,000 US dollars.

Right, so enough for a new Toyota hatchback.

But they're not just targeting the army.

Recently, there have been reports of webpages and apps that allow Taiwanese people to pledge their loyalty to China. Screenshots and videos of two in particular have turned up on different social media platforms. One app called Return Home allegedly claims to allow Taiwanese people to surrender to China with one click.

Well, that's convenient. A surrender button.

Taiwan is particularly sensitive to this kind of news at a time when its government says China has been increasing its intimidation and influence tactics against Taiwan.

The aim of all this is obviously to demoralize people, to get them so terrified about the inevitability of a Chinese invasion that they just give up.

Like Fu Zuoyi, the nationalist commander in Beiping with the communist daughter. But is it working?

Reading the news in Australia, you might think there's a constant sense of panic here in Taiwan, but really, everyday life is very normal.

Well, polling indicates that so far, no, it does not appear to be working.

The Democratic Progressive Party, the DPP, which opposes being absorbed by Communist China, continues to perform very well in elections. The guy Beijing calls a parasite in their propaganda videos won last year's presidential election with a big margin. The prospects of a majority of Taiwanese people deciding to press that surrender button seem pretty remote.

It's just unimaginable that the people of Taiwan would ever accept the kinds of policies that Beijing would try and implement.

So what happens if they don't? Well, obviously, it's very difficult to say. A lot of people would argue that China would easily beat Taiwan if it came to a full-scale war. But then again, a lot of people, including me, thought that Russia would easily beat Ukraine in a full-scale war, and it turns out that all of us were wrong.

Other experts argue that invading Taiwan would contradict Beijing's own propaganda line.

They're kind of ideologically trapped. There is this idea that if unification represents the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, then you shouldn't need to fight the people who you're trying to unify with in order to achieve that.

There is this idea that the Taiwanese should want to b- to come back to the motherland, uh, and, uh, China just needs to wait, and they will.

They've been telling the Chinese people for years that the true desire of the Taiwanese people is to reunify with the mainland. What's certain is that if the Taiwanese people do put up a fight, it would be a very unpleasant experience for Beijing.

Taiwan is an extremely well-armed and very mountainous island, which has been preparing for invasion for nearly 80 years. On top of that, it seems increasingly likely that Taiwan would be supported by several larger and more powerful allies.

A lot of people think about this rhetoric towards Taiwan of, you know, if an invasion happens, it really only is an issue for Taiwan, China, uh, a- and maybe the US.

But that isn't true. An invasion of Taiwan, if China was to make that decision, would involve a much wider Indo-Pacific conflict, which Australia would inevitably involved in.

The new Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, said in her first official address that she may deploy her military to support Taiwan if China was to attack.

The US President Donald Trump told 60 Minutes that Xi Jinping won't dare invade Taiwan while he's in the Oval Office.

Uh, he has openly said, and his people have openly said at meetings, "We would never do anything while President Trump is president." Because they know the consequences

He did not outline what those consequences would be, but he best come up with some soon because official US intelligence briefings have suggested that Xi wants the Chinese military to be ready to force reunification by 2027, peacefully or otherwise.

He's promised the reunification of China is inevitable, and he's not someone who likes backing down on his promises.

Making such a big deal about how important Taiwan is means anything short of full unification would be seen as a catastrophic failure.

Nobody in any country wants there to be a war in Taiwan.

The question is whether someone will decide that it's necessary

Next up, Section B, The Multipolar Worldview

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I can't remember who said this best. It is not necessarily something I have 100% bought into yet, but it's something that I think about very regularly. And someone said it best, um, "In America, you can change parties, but you cannot change policy.

In China, you cannot change the party, but you can always change policy." And I thought that was such a profound way of explaining, um, the kind of transformations, um, you know, that you see in, let's say, a place like China and you don't see in a place like the US re- despite, you know, some cycles of elections with different parties winning.

You know, a, a one party state- Mm ... which is found in China is not a dictatorship. Mm. I think if you look into the Chinese system of governance, uh, you will find a great deal of participation. You know, there is, uh, tremendous, uh, uh, emphasis placed on accountability. You know, during my book launch, uh, I told the, uh, reporters there, I said, uh, "If you guys are gonna quote me at this book launch, quote me just on one, one point that I want to make," which is that, you know, those who have these negative views of China politically, economically, socially, the news media people, the political leaders Members of the US Congress, the Conservative Party, and so on, you know.

China's, uh, private sector, perhaps not China's government, China's private sectors like Huawei and so on that have been sanctioned by the West, they should set up a fund in which the funds are used to bring over those that are demonizing and denigrating and running down China. Give them and their families, you know, f- first class air tickets to travel to wherever they like in China, and to check out the, uh, democracy lack of democracy, the repression and so on.

And for them, you know, to, uh, write on this, uh, when they come back, and, uh, what they write about can be shared with, uh, readers from all over the world to expose China. But in China, there are starting to have some conversations, uh, within the CCP, um, as well if, um, you know, President Xi Jinping is pushing the party in certain undemocratic ways, such as, you know, um, extending his, his leadership over the party more than two terms.

I think there are robust debates, um, within the CCP about, um, the direction of the party under President Xi Jinping. The West has made, made a lot about that. Uh, I think it's up to the Chinese, uh, uh, leadership and the people to make the decision on, uh, whether to allow, uh, you know, Xi Jinping to, uh, continue or, you know, to curtail his leadership.

Uh, and that was done. You know? There was a majority that favored giving him, uh, another term beyond the, the s- the second one. And I think that's important for China perhaps. Uh, uh, they, they, they, um, may not be able to afford a, a rupture so early, uh, when, especially when they're being challenged by the West.

So when we think about, you know, this changing world order, one thing that I, I wonder, right? Because for the past several decades, we haven't just been living in a unipolar world led by the US, we've also been living in what is known as the neoliberal global system, right? I mean, there's just so much we can unpack about neoliberalism and its various tenets.

But in a nutshell, the way I look at it is that governments over the past four to five decades in most parts of the world, they have become infantilized. They have essentially outsourced everything to the private sector, including things like healthcare and housing and water, um, and so on and so forth, right?

Do you think that China's rise and China's model challenges that, or are we moving towards a multipolar neoliberal world in which the financial systems, the philosophies that anchor this multipolar world will be the same, very private sector-led, um, you know, very about the financialization, about the market, of the markets rather than development, or do you think that we will move away from neoliberalism, um, you know, as overall because of, you know, the rise of China?

Th- that's a really, uh, good observation, uh, that, that you've provided, uh, Darshan. Um, you know, the Chinese model is one where although Deng Xiaoping says it doesn't matter whether, you know, the cat is black or white, uh, so long as it catches the mouse. I think at the, at the heart, at the core of the Chinese system, both in governance and economy, is, is the state And, uh, it's, it's, it's a state that, uh, tries to, uh, take care, you know, of the, uh, most important needs of the people, whether this is on poverty, where it's been outstanding success, whether it's on air pollution.

I mean, uh, it's unbelievable the way in which, uh, the Chinese have been able to, uh, push, you know, for a clean environment, air and water, uh, in just 20, 30 years. That's 1.5 billion people. And, you know, if you look, for example, at what's happening in India, where the state has not been so consolidated, uh, where there is, uh, uh, in some ways a Westminster system of governance and, uh, the, uh, inability, you know, to, uh, despite, uh, its growth in the economy by the private sector, you know, in terms of the social goods that, uh, are very important to people in terms of health, in terms of utilities, uh, in terms of housing, in terms of transport and so on, uh, there's a need for the state court to be there and, uh, for the state, uh, to bring in the innovators, uh, those that, uh, have the ability from the private sector, uh, to work together with the, uh, private sector.

So I think this, this hybrid, uh- But, you know, perhaps, uh, for want of a better term, uh, hybrid socialist plus, uh, liberal system, uh, is what, uh, the world is, is moving into. But it's one clearly which, uh, means the, the death of the unipolar system. It's, uh, it's one that means, uh, the, uh, end of, uh, of American hegemony.

Uh, we're seeing it dying throes now in, in Venezuela, uh, in other parts of the world. Uh, it won't go away without a struggle because there are very, very powerful forces that will, uh, want, uh, more than a continuation of the old world order. It's, it's, it's very clear that, uh, Trump, despite all his talk about, uh, being the, the man who can, uh, bring, uh, chief, uh, peace to the rest of the world, you know, uh, uh, in his ideological, uh, pursuit, uh, of making America great again, uh, he, he's, he's attempting to, to, uh, bring about, uh, uh, a, a continuation of American hegemony, uh, and a continuation of the, uh, the old world order.

So it's, it's good that, you know, you brought up for a start, uh, uh, the Canadian, uh, prime minister's, uh, declaration at Davos. Right. That, uh, yeah, the, the w- old world order has ended. And, uh, I think, uh, you know, Malaysia, uh, as, as a member of BRICS, I think is, is, is out there to push for a multipolar world system.

Do you think that, that one China policy is, um, fading though? And, and what I mean by that, um, because we are still talking about the West, uh, Western perspective here. Do you think it's fading because, um, you're starting to see, um, instances, for example, um, Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan on an official visit, despite the official policy being Beijing should be the capital for, you know, big picture foreign policy discussions and so on and so forth.

Um, of course there is an argument that Nancy Pelosi's visit is just kind of a diplomatic gamesmanship to kind of show that, you know, US has the strength. But do you get a sense that even at a policy level, they are looking to shift away from one China policy? No, I don't think, uh, they, they are looking, the US or the West, are looking to shift away from the one China policy.

Uh, I think that they, they acknowledge the PRC p- position that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of it. And, uh, that's not been, been, been challenged or changed in any way. Uh, and the Chinese position is that there's only one sovereign state, and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of it, and, uh, that, uh, uh, it will take time, but, uh, it will return to China.

And incidentally, you know, Taiwan has also for, I think it was until the 1990s, main- maintained that there is only one China. Uh, it hasn't talked of the two Chinas. It's, it's important to, uh, also draw attention to the fact that, um, for the West, the posi- their position in Taiwan is governed by two, uh, key, uh, factors.

It's not governed by human rights or, you know, wanting to see, uh, democracy and, uh, uh, rule of law and, uh, so on. The US sees Taiwan in terms of the, uh, present, uh, importance of Taiwan in producing the world's leading, uh, chips. Taiwan is, is the world's... I think it produces 60% of the world's, uh- desired, uh, semiconductor chips that go into, uh, you know, vehicles, uh, industry, everyday life and so on.

So that's, that's the one factor. The second factor is, is that, uh, Taiwan is a, is a cash cow for, for American, uh, defense, uh, manufacturers. And, um, so long as they can keep, uh, Taiwan separate, so long as they work with s- Taiwanese politicians and business interests in the military, uh, contracts, uh, they, they will push for Taiwanese, uh, separatism.

Now, uh, there is one, one, uh, concern that, you know, what we're getting in the media on Taiwan is not only one-sided, but it's not balanced. It tries to pass itself off as, uh, neutral and, uh, unbiased. I think if you did a, a poll of the Taiwanese, uh, population, and one which is, uh, free and fair, in which you offered the Taiwanese population or electorate a choice between a peaceful reunification with China or Taiwan to be as it is right now, tied to the, uh, apron strings and the military strings of the West, and being used as a potential staging point For war against China, I'm quite sure that, uh, a great majority of the, uh, Taiwanese population will opt for the first option, which is peaceful reunification, but, you know, with a great deal of autonomy for Taiwan, with Taiwanese, uh, representation in, uh, the, uh, political process, and so on and so forth.

Uh, I think this needs to be worked out between China and Taiwan. I wanna add another dimension to the question of Taiwan, because I've also read, you know, accounts by Taiwanese themselves, right? And because this is such a hot debate within Taiwan as well, um, where of course there is the Western perspective that frames this topic in so many different ways, including using human rights language.

But fundamentally, it's about their imperial interests, right? And we've seen the West, um, themselves change their tune on, on Taiwan, um, depending on the strength of China. At, at one point, they were incredibly pro-China when China was poor, but now when China is, um, you know, much, much, uh, is such an economic powerhouse, suddenly they are pro-Taiwan, right?

So we've seen them change their stance for their own interests. But within Taiwan, there are groups of people who say, "I am anti-imperialist. I'm anti-colonial. I don't support the West, um, the military interests of, and, and the economic interests of the West. Neither do I support the KMT, the bourgeoisie that, you know, you can say established Taiwan, you know, in 1949.

But I have been living in this land called Taiwan for, you know, since I was born, and, and s- you know, I was born decades, six, seven decades, uh, you know, after the 1949 revolution." And they question from that perspective, why can't we be our own thing? Why can't we have independence? How would you respond to this group of people?

Yeah, I would be, um, sympathetic, but, uh, I would say that, uh, it's, uh, the fact that Taiwan is part of China is non-negotiable I think that, you know, they can enjoy and express their independence in as many ways as they want, which is what is happening with, uh, with, uh, the population in Tibet and Xinjiang and so on.

You want to practice your music, your culture, your, you know, uh, lifestyle, uh, you want to, to express yourselves, uh, and, and, and, and so on, you know, you can do so in a one China. I don't think you're gonna be pulled up, you know, uh, and, uh, and thrown away into a concentration camp. I think the young generation need to, uh, to, to, uh, recognize that, as I said, the one China policy, uh, is more than a policy.

You know, it's, it's, it's part of the history. It's, it's, it's like, you know, a part of the US which wants to declare itself, uh, independent, you know, Texas or what- whatever it is, you know. Uh, that's, that's, that, you know, you, you can be concerned about the, uh, the sentiments, but realistically it's not gonna happen.

And if you're trying to push for it, you, you're really, uh, pushing for something that hurts, uh, your people and yourself. So I would, as I said, uh, try to reassure them that, uh, that reunification with, with China, you know, perhaps can bring even, uh, more positive things to their life, better jobs, a bigger market.

Uh, there won't be the, uh, dominance by, uh, by Western military interests. They won't be in the front line if a war breaks out. I think that's, that's, that's very important to point out to the younger generation.

Humanity has come to a new crossroads for the cause of peace and development.

And China emphasized that this is why President Xi Jinping created the Global Governance Initiative in order to reform global governance institutions based on five principles: sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, a people-centered approach, and real tangible action in order to build a more just and equitable global governance system And in order to do this, China emphasizes that we must revitalize the United Nations system, which it noted is rooted in the history of the fight against fascism and imperialism.

China refers to World War II as the World Anti-Fascist War, and after it ended in nineteen forty-five, the UN was created. China acknowledged the UN is not perfect. There are many problems with the UN, especially the fact that it is dominated by the US and the Western powers. However, China emphasized that the UN is important because it remains the most universal intergovernmental organization.

In the UN, each country, regardless of its size or wealth, has a voice and a sacred vote, as well as obligations and equal rights. Without the UN, the world would revert to the law of the jungle, where the strong prey on the weak.

The priority is to revitalize the UN system. The founding of the UN is an important outcome of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War.

The UN is not perfect in its current form, but it remains the most universal and authoritative international and intergovernmental organization in the world. On the UN platform, every country, regardless of its size or wealth, has a voice and a sacred vote, as well as its due obligations and equal rights.

Without the UN, the world would revert to the law of the jungle, where the strong prey on the weak, and many medium and small-sized countries would lose the multilateral foundation critical to their survival and development.

And this is very important. China emphasized multiple times in this speech that even though China is a massive country with one point four billion people and the largest economy in the world measured at purchasing power parity, despite that, China wants to respect small and medium-sized countries and ensure that the Global South also has equal representation in the United Nations.

And Wang Yi emphasized, the problem is not the international system itself. The problem is not the United Nations, but rather a certain country, he said. And we all know what that certain country is. It's the United States. He noted the United States is destroying the United Nations. The US is seeking to magnify differences and disagreements, putting itself above everyone else, stoking bloc confrontation, and reviving the Cold War mentality.

Now, China uses this phrase often. What they're saying is the US is trying to drag the world back into a new Cold War. And I would say we already are in a new Cold War But China opposes that, and China says that instead of having unilateralism and imperialism and a new Cold War, China proposes win-win cooperation, and China says multilateralism should always be upheld.

The key lies in the collaboration and cooperation of all countries. The reason why the international system is not functioning well enough lies not with the UN its- itself, but rather with certain countries seeking to magnify differences and disagreements, put itself above everyone else, stoke block confrontation, and even revive the Cold War mentality.

So all these have eroded the foundation of trust, worsened the atmosphere c- for cooperation, and impeded the functioning of international institutions. To safeguard international collaboration and cooperation, it is important to seek common ground while shelving differences and pursue win cooperation.

There is no reason why countries cannot respect each other and contribute to each other's success.

And this is very important. China defends the UN Charter because the principles of the UN Charter are respect for sovereign equality and independence and non-interference. Every country is sovereign over its own territory and controls its own internal affairs, and other countries cannot carry out acts of aggression, which the US empire is constantly doing.

China has not fought a war since 1979, whereas the US is waging war every single day somewhere around the world, usually multiple wars at the same time So China is instead proposing another kind of foreign relations based on cooperation, not conflict and confrontation, based on equality, saying countries should not impose their will on others.

And then Wang Yi emphasized that, quote, "The Global South is rising collectively."

The Global South is rising collectively. The global governance system should also stay up to date to give more prominence to their voices and representation. Time will prove that the more democratic international relations are, the more peaceful the world is.

The stronger multilateralism gets, the more effective global governance becomes.

So China's message is very clear. We should oppose imperialism. We should respect the sovereignty of the Global South. We should democratize international institutions so the world is not a global dictatorship run by the US empire, which is what Washington wants.

The US only joins organizations if it has veto power. The US has veto power in the UN Security Council. The US is the only country on Earth with veto power in the IMF and the World Bank, which are based in Washington. The US has been basically destroying the World Trade Organization because it can't completely control it.

Any organization the US empire can't control, it either withdraws or it tries to destroy that organization. So it is not in any way an exaggeration to say that the proposals that the US and China are making to the world are absolute opposites. They are the contrary of each other. The US empire wants to revive Western colonialism and unite the US and Europe by exploiting the rest of the world, the majority of the population that lives in the Global South, that is, the global majority, eighty-six percent of the world population.

China, a Global South country that was colonized for a hundred years by the Western powers and Japan, China wants a new global order based on opposition to imperialism, based on multipolarity, true multilateralism, respect for sovereignty, and noninterference. And this is why it's obvious why so many countries in the Global South are supporting China's vision and opposing the US empire's vision.

And this is why the US empire has been resorting to extreme violence and wars and regime change and illegal sanctions to try to crush any country that stands up to US hegemony, like Venezuela and Cuba and Iran. This is the central contradiction in global politics today. If you understand that, you can understand most of what's happening in geopolitics today.

now, Section C, Taiwan in the Crosshairs

this is a big top line figure, 11, more than $11 billion worth of arms.

Do we have any idea what's behind this decision, and why is it happening right now?

I think this latest arms sale is consistent with the US National Security strategy, which stated that deterring a conflict over Taiwan is a priority for the US in Asia. So I think this arms sale has been, uh, kind of in the works, and this also echoes Taiwan's own efforts to try to boost its own defense.

The ruling party has recently unveiled a seven-year arms package, uh, that is, uh, over $40 billion in US dollars that is intended to boost its own defense.

At the same time, Washington has sent mixed signals in general on its readiness to uphold alliances and commitments, something that Taiwan has also noticed.

Does this alleviate those concerns for Taipei?

This latest arms sale is definitely a good news for Taipei. Uh, I think it definitely will help alleviate some anxieties in Taiwan about whether or not, uh, Trump will uphold the, uh, One China policy and, uh, continuing US defense assistance to Taiwan. Uh, I think, uh, Trump so far has upheld strategic ambi- uh, ambiguity, and he has not, um, succumbed to Chinese demands of trying to erode US existing, uh, commitments to Taiwan.

We saw in the piece there, uh, some of the material that could end up in Taiwan, HIMARS, um, I think howitzers. Is there anything in this package that really makes a significant difference in Taiwan's ability to defend themselves? What stands out when you look at this?

I think a lot of the, uh, things that are specified in the arms sale will, uh, ultimately help, um, ch- uh, Taiwan to build its T-Dome initiative, which is, uh, inspired by the Israel's Iron Dome, uh, which is basically a multi-layered defense system to try to deter Chinese missiles.

Um, so I think this, uh, defense package will, uh, work toward that, that goal as well.

Tai- uh, rather, China and the US, of course, still negotiating on a tariffs agreement. Xi Jinping scheduled to come to the US in April. What role is Taiwan playing in these negotiations, if any?

I think Taiwan is a top issue for China, but China at the same time wants to maintain the overall stability and momentum of the US-China trade negotiations.

Um, so we think that, um, China will be careful in terms of calibra- uh, ca- in terms of calibrating its response to this latest arm sale. We have so far seen, uh, condemnations coming out of the foreign ministry and the Taiwan Affairs Office, and Beijing will likely intensify its gray zone military coercion against Taiwan in terms of, uh, air identification zone incursions, as well as median line crossings.

Briefly, Ava, we've seen some good reporting lately about Chinese amphibious drills around Taiwan. How seriously should we take that? Briefly, if you can.

So, um, China every month has been conducting these combat readiness, uh, joint, joint patrols. I think they are further away from, uh, Taiwan. Uh, I think at this time an announced, uh, Chinese military exercise is unlikely because that will risk further escalation with the US.

All right. That's Ava Shen in Washington, DC. Ava, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Let's get some analysis now from Philip Shelfer Jones. He's a senior research fellow on the international security team at RUSI, a British think tank focused on defense and security. Thanks for being with us. Uh, Philip, the US and Taiwan have announced an $11 billion arms deal.

If finalized and carried through, would it... It would be one of Washington's biggest ever s- military sales to the island. How will this help Taiwan?

Well, good morning. I think it helps Taiwan in a couple of ways. In the short term, it sends a very positive signal that despite any rumors about the US changing its position on support to Taiwan, uh, it underlines that the US is willing to continue with providing Taiwan the means for its defense as laid out in US domestic law, uh, and in the rhetoric of President Trump on peace through strength.

It's, it's part of the overall strategy towards China that's emerged in this administration, uh, which has two parts. On one side, there's peace through strength of providing Taiwan with the means for its defense and expecting it to spend more and do more for that. But on the other hand, also reassuring China by saying that, uh, the United States will not challenge the legitimacy of the Communist Party or try to restrict its economic growth.

Let's talk about more concrete things. The, the deal, the deal aims to strengthen Taiwan's defense capabilities, as you pointed out. Uh, part of that is the T, so-called T dome air defense shield. Tell us how that system would work with this US backing.

The T-Dome seems to be modeled in part on the system the Israeli government have established, the Iron Dome. So it's an area defense concept that would, in principle, cover all of the territory of Taiwan from missiles and air attack. It's a very demanding model to adopt because Israel's taken a long time to build that up with access to excellent technology and very large defense budgets, much larger proportionally than what Taiwan currently spends on defense.

So it's reaching for a very high standard. It would take a very long time to put into operation. But I think, again, part of the s- the importance of this is symbolic. First of all, it is a defensive system, and so it underlines that Taiwan is not seeking to change the status quo but just maintain it. But also it indicates to the United States audience, which is quite familiar with Israeli, uh, defense strategies and, and political posture, that Taiwan is really serious about spending more and providing for its own defense, thereby alleviating some of the burden that would otherwise fall on Americans.

What's behind Washington's decision, Philip, to go through with this sale now?

Well, I think it's a continuity really of the longstanding US policy to provide Taiwan with the means for its defense. I don't know, uh, whether there is any linkage with the recent diplomacy with China, uh, because President Trump and, uh, Chairman Xi had an excellent meeting it seems when they, uh, came together in South Korea for the APEC meeting, and agreed a kind of ceasefire on trade.

So there seems to be a priority in both capitals, Beijing and Washington, to put their economies first. And perhaps that gives a little bit of leeway for the United States to pursue the other side of its policy, which is, as I say, matching the Chinese military buildup with a corresponding buildup in defensive capability among US allies and partners, including Taiwan.

Philip, thank you very much for talking with us. That was Philip Shutler-Jones from the RUSI think tank.

Thank you.

Well, in the face of China's military threats, Taiwan is now turning to private companies to boost its defenses. Drone makers that once supplied farmers are now developing aircraft for the battlefield.

It's part of a major defense drive which has more and more Taiwanese preparing for possible conflict. DW's Rick Glauber reports.

Designed to fly low over fields and spray fertilizer onto crops like rice and vegetables. Engineering machines like this one to help Taiwan's farmers was the original mission of Kun Wei, a small drone maker in central Taiwan.

Now the company is beginning to use its technology in a far more volatile landscape. Kun Wei is developing combat-capable drones to help Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack.

We're

not trying to attack anyone. This is about self-protection and

self-defense.

By doing this, we hope to reduce the chances of war.

When you

have these technologies and they can be widely used,

an

enemy may think twice about attacking. What we want most is to prevent war from happening.

Drones like

these could be key for Taiwan to defend itself by patrolling contested airspace or guiding and delivering strikes on hostile forces. We're not able to film everything that's happening here. Some of Kun Wei's new defense technologies are already too sensitive to show. For a company that used to make agricultural equipment, that's a major shift, but it's a transformation happening all over Taiwan.

Small private enterprises are being asked to support the military as it faces up to a much larger foe.

​

Trump's return to office has complicated things for US allies across the globe, and this is particularly true for Taiwan. While facing demands from Trump to spend more on its own self-defense and shift crucial semiconductor manufacturing to the US, as well as Trump's desire for deal-making with China, Taiwanese trust in the US as a partner is waning.

At the same time, an intense political crisis on the island has jeopardized the government's spending plans and seen the opposition leader visit China for the first time in a decade. So amid all of this turmoil, we're gonna explain Trump's approach to Taiwan, Taiwan's shifting views of the US, its political crisis, and China's position in all of this

Some important context. In 1949, having been defeated in the civil war by the Chinese Communist Party, the losing Kuomintang, a nationalist party that led the rival Republic of China government, retreated to Taiwan, where it continued claiming to be the sole legitimate government of all of China, i.e. the mainland and Taiwan.

Similarly, the Communist People's Republic of China does not view Taiwan as a separate country, but rather a breakaway province led by an illegitimate rival Chinese government. In 1979, the US recognized the PRC as the sole legal government of China, acknowledging the One China policy. However, this hasn't stopped the US from maintaining strong unofficial ties with Taiwan, grounded in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which enables the US to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons.

Since then, successive US administrations have pursued a strategic ambiguity policy, which essentially means that the US refrains from committing to or ruling out coming to Taiwan's defense in the event of Chinese aggression. This ambiguity aims to maintain the status quo by deterring both a Chinese invasion and a unilateral declaration of independence by Taiwan.

Most presidents stuck to this position, though George W. Bush and Joe Biden notably broke the mold by saying that they would defend Taiwan. Rhetorically speaking, since returning to office, Trump has returned the US to a policy of strategic ambiguity, responding to questions about his position with, quote, "I never comment on that," and, quote, "I can't give away my secrets."

Trump's ambiguity on Taiwan is far from abnormal. In fact, it sort of represents a return to the norm, but it's all of Trump's other comments and actions that are causing anxiety in Taiwan. In 2024, Trump accused Taiwan of having stolen the US's semiconductor manufacturing business, a refrain he continues to repeat in office.

Trump's push to bring more manufacturing of these crucial chips onto US shores has involved tariffs and trade threats and helped bring about a $100 billion investment into US expansion by the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company. The concern for Taiwan is that any drawing away of its chip-building capabilities not only undermines the island's economic backbone, but also its so-called silicon shield, the idea that Taiwan's central role in global chip supply both deters Chinese aggression and gives the US greater impetus to come to Taiwan's defense if an attack does happen.

Furthermore, like other US Asian partners, Taiwan is cautiously watching as Trump's war in Iran diverts attention and resources that would otherwise be used for countering China. Even without the war in Iran, Trump has made clear that he sees the Americas as his priority. His new national defense strategy, for instance, downgraded China as a threat.

On the other hand, some of Trump's actions do signal support for Taiwan. His administration last year announced a record $11 billion arms sale to Taiwan, sparking anger in China. Though it's worth noting that this is in line with his goal to get allies to take greater financial responsibility for their own defense, as well as boosting the US defense industry.

More contentiously, Trump said that he mentioned the US's arms sales to Taiwan in a call with China's Xi Jinping, which would mark a break from the longstanding US policy to not do so This and Trump's penchant for unilateral deal focused diplomacy has therefore heightened nerves ahead of his upcoming visit to China, and raised the specter of him seeking some kind of grand deal with Xi Jinping in which the US's support for Taiwan might be used as a bargaining chip.

Even before some of these events occurred, though, the Taiwanese public were doubting the reliability of the US under Trump. A survey in mid-2024 found that 24% of Taiwanese public considered the US an untrustworthy or very untrustworthy ally. But in 2025, with Trump back in office, this rose to 37.9%. At the same time, the proportion of Taiwanese doubting that the US would come to Taiwan's defense in the event of a war rose from 35.4% to 46.7%, and their negative perception of the US rose from 24.2% to 40.5%.

Meanwhile, Taiwan itself is in the midst of an intense political crisis, pitting the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, against the opposition KMT in a feud that impacts the island's relationship with the US and China. The political deadlock stems from the 2024 election, which saw the DPP's Lai Ching-te elected president.

But the party lost its legislative majority, as the KMT won a slim plurality. Lai and his DPP, the more independence minded and US aligned of the two main parties, have put forward a record-breaking $40 billion special defense budget spread over eight years that aims to strengthen Taiwan's defense resilience and asymmetric capabilities in the face of China's increasing testing of Taiwan with military drills around the island, and failure to rule out taking the island by force.

Much of this money is earmarked to buy US weapons, a move that aligns with Trump's push for Taiwan, and indeed other allies, to take on more responsibility for their own defense with purchases that fortify the American arms industry. Since late 2025, however, the opposition led by the KMT, which argues that engagement and dialogue with China will safeguard Taiwan by reducing cross-strait tensions, has been blocking the DPP's proposed 2026 government budget and the special defense budget, arguing that it risks provoking China and is too expensive and not transparent enough.

The KMT's proposed counter budget is a much smaller $12 billion, only enough to fund the weapons included in the $11 billion arms deal announced by the US late last year. This gridlock has jeopardized President Lai's bid to boost defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2030, an effort to keep Trump on side by bolstering more of its own defense spending.

At the same time, Taiwan's opposition leader, the KMT's Chiang Lai-quan, has returned from China, where she met with Xi Jinping in the KMT leader's first visit in a decade. Chiang's open pursuit of warm ties with China has been welcomed in Beijing, which subsequently announced the resumption of some cross-strait ties, including direct flights.

China's willingness to cooperate with the opposition KMT contrasts with its approach to the Taiwanese government. Beijing cut off high-level communication after the DPP came to power in 2016. The turbulence of Trump's relationship with Taiwan, the island's political crisis, and polarization has therefore presented an opportunity for China to pursue a deal strategy.

On the one hand, military pressure and hostility towards the government, and on the other hand, dialogue and economic incentives with more friendly actors.

we don't even know where all the alliances are right now. We have had such a weird breakup and patchwork situation, again, going back to OPEC

and going back to, uh, the, the very, very perilous, uh, alliance system that has been destroyed over there. We don't even know where that will go. Like even during the ceasefire, we were having reports that Saudi Arabia was doing this, UAE was doing this, Kuwait was over here. Like we have no idea if this thing continues to deteriorate, what new the Global Center for Democratic Resilience, uh, one of these sort of think tanks and groups that studies this shit, have released a report that US and Russian actors and influencers are influencing the separatist debate in Alberta, Canada, where possibly in the fall there will be a referendum on whether or not, uh, Alberta would secede from Canada.

This is something that, again, I'll get into the his- historical aspect of this, America has tinkered with these things before. Like, we have definitely put our hand in it. But it is extremely interesting, I think, that not only is the United States doing this to an ally, but they're also now doing it in seeming conjunction with Russian misinformation and disinformation and intelligence operations, which, uh, going back to the fall of America and all of the chaos that will ensue, I think this is a pretty interesting little, uh, report to pop up at this time.

Uh, yeah, of, of course, uh, th- this makes sense, you know? It's like, um, geez, Russia, you did really, really well in the, in our elections meddling and really coordinating- Sure did ... different things. So, you know, why, why, why fight that? You know, let's just partner up, and let's, we'll exchange ideas here in how, how we can make Canada...

Again, this is all part of this global, uh, dividing up of, uh- Yeah ... the regions. And so Russia is gonna get Ukraine, and then they're gonna be able to continue to expand in that area and dismantle NATO. Uh, we're gonna be able to get Cuba and Venezuela, and then I, I, Canada has to be in our sights, Greenland.

And then, you know, s- you know, Taiwan goes to China, and then lots of other places they're gonna take. And this is what's gonna happen. It's gonna be like when we go back to having, like, the three major, you know, channels on the TV, and that's all you have to watch. Like, that's what they wanna do across the globe.

Um, and so all these things. So I, I have to imagine if we start to see Taiwan is attacked by China or taken over by China, like, that would, that's the next trigger too. Like, okay, we are gonna, uh, we're gonna attack Canada. I, I don't know what else to make of it because let me ask you this. Is this one of those things where, like, you know, in Iran we kept trying to do propaganda to get the uprising from, you know, the people?

Is this what this really is trying to do and get some of the radicals in Canada to sort of create a movement that will ultimately, you know, upend Canada?

Ding, ding, ding

Okay.

And quite frankly, this-

People in

Canada ... this isn't the, this isn't the first time that we've seen it. I appreciate it coming into glaring focus.

You might remember the, uh, the trucker protest- Yeah ... in Canada, uh, in which they were circling the capital and sort of doing their own little, uh, you know, quiet motor insurrection. Uh, the, the, the US had a hand in that, and some right-wing actors, both in the US and around the world, uh, had a hand in that.

This is... W- what we're starting to see, Nick, and you're exactly right in terms of, like, the spheres of influence, which I've been talking about for a few years, beginning with the Alexander Dugin sort of breaking of the, the American order and into this new thing. That's exactly right. And what happens in these moments where, uh, political gravity starts to splinter and weaken, again The United States of America, the American order, for all of its blemishes, it was sort of the organizing gravity, right?

It was the thing everybody had to admit that America was the superpower. It had control over the economic levers, freedom of navigation and trade. You know, they, they were committing all kinds of crimes all over the place. Like, God knows that the CIA and other, uh, US deep state apparatus had, have been doing this type of shit for a while.

And undoubtedly, they did stuff in Canada even before the trucker protest. But what we're watching now as the American order starts to splinter, that right-wing international conspiracy that I've been talking about for a while, it's starting to flex its muscle. Instead of it just being online posts that are doing this, spreading disinformation and misinformation, we've got the greatest hits.

We've got American and Russian influencers pretending to be Canadians pushing this thing. And by the way, now we have AI, so they're able to do that more and more. But what, what's occurring is, Nick, these separatists, the people who are trying to get Alberta to leave Canada, they've already actually met and communicated with the Trump administration without even these manipulations that are taking place.

So as that right-wing international, uh, conspiracy has started to take over all of these sort of organs of power, it's becoming institutionalized. So now we're starting to use not just our money and not just our influence, but certainly we're going to use the, the, the power of the state in order to go after fucking Canada.

Fucking Canada. And what you just said about the possibility of them attacking, man, I'll tell you, as somebody who has studied world wars and moments like this, Nick, uh, if you're in Canada or you're in Mexico, we've already seen... We didn't talk enough about what happened in Cana- or in Mexico, but we had the conversation about the cartel leader who got killed, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And we said, "Oh, that's a really interesting thing," and certainly the United States had nothing to do with it. And then a week and a half, two weeks later, lo and behold, a few CIA guys die in a car wreck down there. I assume it was just a car wreck, and I assume they were sightseeing, you know? If you are in Canada, Mexico, Greenland, or Cuba, or even South America at this point, you have to understand that that disintegration and splintering of the gravity of American order, you are in danger Period.

You’ve reached Section D, The Summit and Its Fallout

in the United States, uh, on the, uh, uh, you know, issue of national security, there's a lot of people opposed the exports of Nvidia chips, even though it's sort of watered down version of those chips sold to China.

Within China, there's also very strong, uh, advocacy for using domestic ship- chips instead of using Americans because they suspect there is backdoor of those chips. So the last minute of, uh, Jin Zhipeng on the airplane means that finally both sides find some kind of pragmatic solutions, uh, that China will import some, uh, of those chips.

At the same time, the US will open up doors for those exports.

So let's go to Jake Werner, uh, joining us from Quincy Institute. Uh, Jake, can you talk about the significance of this meeting in the midst of the US Israeli war on Iran? You'd hardly know that that was happening if you just watched the toasts at the state dinner.

Um, we understand that China's most concerned about what they call the three Ts, um, trade, technology, Taiwan is major. And, uh, Xi Jinping at this point, um, Trump needs him. Uh, you had the Iranian foreign minister just going to China last week. Um, what does President Trump need from China around the US Iran war?

Um, he put off that first meeting because it was happening. It's still happening

Yeah. Uh, it's a big question what, uh, what he can get. Uh, and I think it, it might be different what he needs from what he wants. Uh, Trump has asked publicly that, uh, China join other countries in helping him open the strait in the past, uh, has sort of stepped back, uh, off of that request. A- and I don't think China has any interest in involving itself, uh, deeply in security matters in the region.

But what China has done is it has backed up some of the negotiations that have been happening, uh, has supported, Pakistan has had the prime mediating role. And China can give Iran a sense that its interests might be respected through the negotiation process because, uh, China has a relationship with all actors in the region.

So, uh, as much as the China-Iran relationship is highlighted, uh, in the US foreign policy establishment, China's relationships with other regional countries like Saudi Arabia or United Arab Emirates are at least a- as important. In terms of the economic relationship, they're significantly more important than those with Iran.

Uh, so China has ties to all the countries in the region. It has acted in the past to help broker, uh, the normalizations of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Uh, so it has some experience in this realm, uh, sort of acting as a broker towards peace. Uh, and, uh, and we, I think we can, we can hope for China to bolster that role.

Uh, what we're not going to get, I think, from China is a sort of one-sided backing of the US position that asks for complete capitulation on the Iranian side. Uh, so I think what we need the US to understand is that it needs to come up with a way to, to achieve stability in the region, and China can be a part of that if the US can, uh, can get to that kind of a settlement.

And Jake, what about the fact, I mean, according to the White House, uh, the two sides, that is to say, uh, China and the US, agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy. And at the same time, China said that it's interested in increasing its, uh, oil imports from the US.

Yeah, uh, China, China's, uh, energy policy has been to diver- diversify, uh, its, its import sources, uh, for security reasons. Uh, so it still relies significantly on exports through the Strait of Hormuz, and so it does have a very real interest in maintaining the openness of the strait. Uh, at the same time, it has sourced oil and other energy imports, uh, from a, an inc- increasing range of places, uh, from Africa, Latin America, increasingly from Russia, uh, as Russia's markets have closed after it invaded Ukraine.

Uh, and so China is looking to diversify, and if there is a stable relationship with the United States, then it feels like it can draw on American energy. Uh, and that would give a s- a stake on the part of the United States in maintaining that stability in the relationship. Let's- Uh, a- ultimately, the overriding concern on the Chinese side is whether there can be a stability in the, in the US-China bilateral relationship.

And if the United States is economically invested in that relationship, it becomes more likely.

Let's talk more about Taiwan. This is Guo Jiankun, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, speaking today.

In his talks with US President Donald Trump, President Xi Jinping pointed out that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations. If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.

Taiwan independence and cross-strait peace are as irreconcilable as fire and water. Maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait represents the greatest common ground between China and the US. The US side must handle the Taiwan issue with the utmost prudence.

So Jake Warner, your perspective now on Taiwan.

Um, that's the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson. You have Republicans and Democrats, uh, calling on President Trump again, uh, to move forward with the multi-billion dollar, $14 billion and more, uh, trade deal with Taiwan. Uh, you have the US, though, wanting Iran to, in a sense, mediate between the US and, uh, Iran, um, wanting Xi Jinping to do that.

Talk about what happens with Taiwan right now.

Uh, the question is whether the, the status quo can be maintained in a stable fashion and in recent years as the US-China relationship has deteriorated, uh, both sides have started to doubt whether they can trust the other side on this question, whether the other side respects the status quo and basically wants to maintain this kind of, uh, ambiguity over the status of Taiwan.

Uh, the question is whether, as we stabilize the bilateral relationship, can we get back to a sense that both sides are invested in maintaining that form of stability or not? Uh, and so the big question for Trump really is how to manage that. Uh, I, I don't expect the Trump administration to, uh, to kind of push towards increasing, uh, independence on the part of Taiwan.

Uh, it seems like the China-Taiwan relationship, uh, is going in a more stable direction in, in, uh, over the course of recent months as the opposition lawmaker, ah, Chen Ni-huan, uh, uh, the, the Taiwan opposition, uh, leader, came to Beijing and visited with Xi Jinping. So I think, I think Beijing has some confidence that things, uh, are moving in a s- a stabilizing direction.

Uh, and so then the question is, uh, can the, the improving relationship between the US and China bolster that and give a sense that the, the, the ambiguous status quo is not further eroding?

And, uh, Zhou Hai, to, to go back to you, uh, just earlier today, a few hours ago, uh, the Kremlin announced, uh, that Putin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, w- would be visiting, uh, China very soon.

If you could comment on the timing of that announcement and when this, uh, summit is expected to take place.

Well, uh, first of all, um, President Putin is a regular visitor to China. Uh, uh, he visit China every, uh, uh, every year once or twice, uh, or even more, and he has, uh, much more, um, uh, face-to-face, uh, uh, talking, um, with President Xi than, uh, President Xi with President Trump.

Uh, it's been, uh, 30-some times. Um, so there is a close tie between the two sides, and, uh, I think this time around, uh, President, uh, Putin is coming right after President Trump's visit. Uh, there is some, uh, strategic intentions here. Uh, I think other than what we've been talking about, the Iran issue, the Ukraine issue will also be in focus, uh, because I think right now, um, both sides re- needs to come back to the negotiation table and try to find more common ground.

Uh, and for that particular matter, I think, uh, President Putin needs to talk with, uh, President Xi and also get a picture of, uh, how China-US relationship is moving forward. And I think in this triangle you can see that, um, uh, uh, uh, previously some, uh, of the American, uh, thinkers thinking that they can drive a wedge between China and Russia, and so far that hasn't been realized.

Uh, China has stand, has stand firm, uh, with Russia on its normal economic relationship and strategic cooperations. So I think, uh, for both sides that's still very much important bilateral relationship. I want to add one something to what, uh, uh, Jake just said about, uh, energy. I think China has a policy of, uh, diversifying its energy, uh, needs, and also, uh, accelerating its transition toward green energy.

Uh, and, uh, from phase one trade deal, China has already agreed to purchase more energy from the United States, uh, starting from the Strait of Hormuz incident. Uh, and China will continue to, uh, purchase American, um, uh, uh, energy if the energy is at a normal price and without the d- you know, the, uh, the barrier of more and more, uh, uh, you know, trade disputes and added tariff.

So I think that's an area in the future, uh, should be pro- so promising, uh, for both sides.

here are some examples of how Trump has described the US commitment to, uh, defend Taiwan since his visit. Let's listen.

Mr. President, on Taiwan again, you said you were gonna check with the president of Taiwan. Uh, but the 1982, uh, assurances that President Reagan gave said you could not, said the United States would not consult with China on arms sales to Taiwan.

Well, I think 1982's a long way.

It was. Has a,

has a big, far distance. So what am I gonna do, say I don't wanna talk to you about it 'cause I have an agreement that was signed in 1982? Uh, no. Would the US defend Taiwan if it came

to

it? I don't wanna say. I'm not gonna say that. Uh, there's only one person that knows that.

You know who it is? Me. I'm the only person. That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said, "I don't

talk about those." Should the people of Taiwan feel more or less secure after your meetings with President Xi?

Uh, neutral. Neutral. This has been going on for years.

Has the policy changed at all?

No, nothing's changed. US

policy.

No, nothing's changed. I will say this, I'm not looking to have somebody go independent and, you know, we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I'm not looking for that. Uh, I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down.

But you're waiting on approving billions of dollars of weapons for Taiwan.

That's right. I'm holding it. Is that moving forward? Well, I haven't approved it yet. We're gonna see what happens. Uh- What are you looking for? I may do it, I may not do it.

Yeah, what's your, your hinge

point? Well, I'm not gonna say that, but I may do it, I may not do it. I'm holding that in abeyance, and it depends on China.

It depends, it's a, it's a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly.

Back to the point earlier about how he doesn't know English. You don't feel neutral. It's, it's like, it doesn't make sense. Well,

and then in the next breath, change the policy.

Yeah. Yeah, so like, also, he's really hunchbacked. He's not looking good there.

And also, can I just say, like, because we know Bret Baier I- watching a guy like that that's been on the, like the Taiwan hawk-

Mm-hmm ...

uh, cocktail circuit in DC, um, uh, have to like choose his Trump master over his own personal politics on Taiwan.

Not just his Trump master, Brett Baier was doing like straight up pro-CCP propaganda while he was there.

Yeah. He, he like went into some convenience store and ordered a sausage from a robot.

It's like Tucker with the, uh, Moscow- Exactly ... uh, metro. Yeah.

Brett, what are you doing? You don't, like you don't have to do this. Yeah. Anyway, Ben, um, I feel pretty confident that the answer to Brett Baier's question about whether, you know, the Taiwanese people feel less secure after this visit is, uh, yeah, they feel pretty freaked out.

But I, uh, what did you make of, you know, all the Taiwan elements here?

First of all, it just goes to saying like we got nothing out of this summit. I mean, no trade deal. Like, I was gonna watch the AI stuff, and there's giant nothing. We agreed to talk about it, and then Scott Bessent went out and like dunked on the Chinese about how we have better AI.

But like, uh, it just, th- there's nothing of substance. I mean- Nothing ... the idea that you have like a, a, a, a carefully planned multi-day summit with the president of China and literally like have nothing to announce except some Boeing planes got sold and, you know-

They pretend they're gonna

buy some Ag products

Jensen Huang probably, you know, did some side deals on some chips that helps the Chinese, you know? Well,

that, that was the other thing. Like they, they, they re-upped the offer to provide or sell the Chinese the H200 NVIDIA chip, which is not the top of the line, but it's like the pretty good. And the Chinese said no, I think because they're probably just getting all the best chips they want through like carve-outs in Vietnam and other places, and then developing their own indigenous chips.

And they were, yeah, like the, the whole thing is so upside down that they were like kind of preparing to frame the Chinese buying high-end chips as like a Chinese concession, when in fact it, it's what is gonna help- Just help 'em, yeah ... the Chinese pass us on AI. Yeah. On Tai- so if you go into this as an Amer- the reason I say that too is if you go into this summit as an American president, the last thing that you want dominating the conversation is Taiwan.

Right. You want that under the radar. You want to not touch that. You wanna talk about the things you wanna talk about. Like Xi Jinping wants to talk about Taiwan and how we have to not sell them arms and let them basically do whatever the fuck they want, and you wanna talk about trade and all these things.

Trump like just kept tripping over himself talking about Taiwan. And, and look, it, it, what-

And Xi was like, "This is our top issue." And he t- was like referencing like the Thucydides Trap, like suggesting there would be war over Taiwan.

He, he, the language that the Chinese put out, which is always like very carefully calibrated.

First of all, there's some hilarious things where like they, we were reading out, like Xi Jinping said he would be helpful on the Strait of Hormuz. He's like, "No, I won't." Nothing, crickets in the Chinese readout, right? Yeah, man. They're just like making shit up in the readouts. Yeah,

yeah.

And then the Chinese put out this like bloodthirsty statement about Taiwan.

Yes. Like, "There will be like conflict," uh, like- Yeah ... and, and for them it was bloodthirsty. And, and look, the, the, the thing you want is you want there to not be a war or a Chinese invasion. And so you're just trying to kick this can. The arm sales are actually part of kicking the can because you're trying to show the Chinese, "Hey, look, this might be a tough operation.

You know, like, just full on amphibious invasion of this island would not be simple, especially if they have arms." Yeah. And, and so again, this is one of those weird situations where you're trying to deter conflict by not cutting the cord on the Taiwanese. 'Cause if you cut the cord on them, then they are vulnerable and the Chinese do a blockade and they squeeze and squeeze.

And, and he just kinda kept stepping on rakes, you know? 'Cause he would say something that made it seem like he wouldn't care at all about Taiwan, and then he would say, like, "Nothing has changed in the policy, and yet now I'm gonna say a word salad that is totally different than what the policy was."

But then he'd be like, "Hey, but I'm gonna call the president of Taiwan-" Yeah, yeah

which is something that would upend 50 years of US government policy 'cause we don't have leader to leader contacts with them.

Yeah, because and, and- It's a piss

off sheet ...

and, and in fact, the last guy who did that was Trump-

In

the- ... after he won in 2016 ... the president-elect. Yeah ... like, some lobbyist talked him into calling Tsai Ing-wen, the president at the time.

So look, if I'm in Taiwan right now I'm just thinking, like, I gotta get through the next two and a half years of that being invaded. Um, and I'm not saying that because I want the next president to go to war over Taiwan. I want the next president to have a more effective strategy over avoiding a war, uh, uh, in Taiwan.

A- and so I'd be trying to kinda keep my head down a bit here. You know, keep your relations with Congress and both parties, and kinda just don't even really try to play the Trump game, because he has no interest in Taiwan. Yeah. And the more he gets dragged into it, the more he's gonna signal how little he cares, and the more that might make Xi Jinping think, "You know what would be a really good time to invade Taiwan?

Like, the last year of the Trump administration."

Right. And, but, and if you're listening and thinking, like, "Look, I just don't want any conflict. I don't want y- the US telling the Chinese what to do," like, okay, well, if you don't like the, uh, economic disruption that's coming from a two-month long Strait of Hormuz closure-

wait until there's no chips for any of the computers and phones and other things- Everything. Everything ... that come out of Taiwan, right? Like, that would be a big problem. And Ben, just, you know, so Trump, there had been a $14 billion arm sale that had been approved and was pending from the administration that they held off to try to, like, make Xi happy in advance of this trip.

It's not at all clear that Trump is gonna go through with it. But on top of that, there is $32 billion worth of aid to Taiwan that has been promised as part of foreign military sales that is still being held up. Drones, air defenses, like anti-ship missiles, like big-ticket stuff, and it just feels... L- like, people always point to those, uh, Trump administration arms packages to Taiwan and be like, "See?

Look, the hardliners, they're in there. They're committed. Like, Rubio's doing the right thing." But they're not delivering this

stuff. They're not delivering anything. Look, this is yet another issue where Trump is the one who kind of led this move towards, like, getting tougher on China and being against engagement with China.

Right. Remember that? Remember the campaign?

And by the way, all the Democratic blob types followed that, like, h- herd, 'cause it's like, "Oh, now we're gonna be super tough." He's now swerving in the other direction. He's talking up leader to leader f- you know, he's friends with Xi and what a great man. He's gonna come to the ballroom.

And, a- and I'm, you know, canceling the trade war 'cause the Chinese have more leverage with rare earth materials, um, just like the Iranians have the Strait of Hormuz. He's taco-ing left and right. And i- so all these things he p- he promised to get tough on the Chinese. He promised no foreign wars. He pro- you know, all these things he just keeps going back on that were, like, pretty core to MAGA.

Like, what does Steve Bannon think about this visit, where basically you had Trump sucking up to Xi Jinping like a supplicant, like it's the Middle Kingdom and we are, we're going to, like, pay tribute to the Chinese emperor? A- and, and look, on, on, on... And I'm not even... I'm saying that as someone who wants engagement with the Chinese, but engagement for some purpose.

Right. What's our goal?

Like, Trump's goal is just protocol. It's just so that he's, like, received well and has nice dinners with Xi. Like, I wanna negotiate, like, AI safeguards. You know? Like, I, I want real things. A- and again, i- if you're the Taiwanese Like, you also don't want... He, he started describing arms sales to Taiwan as a negotiating chip.

Chip,

yeah.

Well, that means that you also are entertaining negotiating away-

Exactly ...

Taiwan as if, by the way, it's yours to negotiate. A- and again, well, what you do- you... I'm not suggesting you wanna go to war. I am suggesting you don't want to implicitly green-light China going to war. Because to your point, even if you don't care about the Taiwanese people, and I do, 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors come out of Taiwan, TSMC.

That's your car computer. That's-

It's all of it ...

ev- it's everything. That's the, the entire economy, you know? And that would be bad.

Right on the heels of President Trump's state visit to China last week, Russia's Vladimir Putin stopped in Beijing for a meeting today with his chief ally, Xi Jinping. As Nick Schifrin tells us, they focused on economic issues and criticizing US foreign policy

Today in Beijing, fanfare and red carpets for two authoritarian leaders to trumpet their alliance. At the Great Hall of the People, the ceremonial center of communist China, Xi Jinping met his closest ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin. For a synchronized show of power And celebration by China's youngest.

It was the exact same spot that Xi welcomed President Trump just six days ago. Seemingly identical in its pomp and circumstance, although apparently not to President Trump.

I think it's good. I don't know if the ceremony is quite as brilliant as mine, I watched. I think we topped him.

But even if the US and China pledge strategic stability, they remain rivals.

And China and Russia are strategically aligned, and today jointly criticized the US.

Golden dome for America.

For President Trump's proposed golden dome missile defense, which Russia and China today called a, quote, "obvious threat to strategic stability," for the expiration of the last US-Russia arms control treaty, New START, and for the US-Israel war on Iran.

The

world today is far from peaceful, with unilateralism and hegemonism posing profound dangers. The world faces the risk of regressing to the law of the jungle.

Russian-Chinese relations have reached a truly unprecedented level.

The split screen image of chumminess between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and, on the other hand, Donald Trump's recent visit could not be more stark.

Andrew Weiss is a former State Department official who's now with the Carnegie Endowment.

The Russians and the Chinese are absolutely essential partners to each other in the political sphere and in the economic sphere. They are demonstrating in their rhetoric and in the imagery of today's visit deep apprehension about Donald Trump.

The day-to-day implications of that play out in Ukraine. China provides what the US has said is 90% of Russia's microelectronic imports for weapons used in Ukraine, and 70% of Russia's machine tool imports to make weapons for Ukraine.

Russia sees China as the key partner for what it's going to need to keep the war going as well as for when it turns to rebuilding its military whenever the war ends.

But there are limits to what China and Russia have called their no limits partnership. Not announced today, a deal for a major pipeline that would take Russian natural gas to China.

China has tremendous negotiating leverage, and it's working to get the sweetest possible deal from the Russians. And China, given the fact that this is a, a complex agreement that could last upwards of 30 years, is gonna be extremely careful not to make impulsive, last-minute gestures just to score political points or to make Vladimir Putin feel good.

But Putin and Xi feel good about their alliance, which Putin called truly unprecedented and Xi called the highest level in history. And so these two leaders, who maintain an axis of authoritarianism alongside Iran and North Korea, continue to confront the US, and Putin left China with a standing ovation.

And finally, Section E, The Resource War and Africa

you mentioned the trade tools, the trade policy tools that the Trump administration is using to leverage its access to US consumer market for it to have access to critical minerals.

Can you tell us how those tools are deployed across the globe or across the Global South, and how the US is approaching that?

Yes. Great. So that's good because then I can answer the main part of Eric's question. Well, the critical minerals sector, if I can call it that, or critical minerals industries are increasingly the domain in which when you think of this resurgence of industrial policy, this is the domain in which the kind of deployment and the experimentation in the use of these industrial policy tools has gone the furthest.

Perhaps it's that, and they're like semiconductors and maybe even pharmaceuticals, but I think critical minerals specifically is that's where we're seeing these policy tools being deployed, being really fine-tuned and in very specific ways. And this is coming from the realization that, of course, these minerals as, um, are important, as Eric mentioned earlier, but also that there's a...

I suppose the US has a dependence on imports for 32 of the 60 minerals identified by the US Geological Survey as critical. So that's like more than 50% for which the US is between 50% to 100% import reliant. It doesn't have the endowments, uh, geologically here at home, and then where it has them, just it cannot mine or process them.

It needs to import them. So out of those 13 minerals for which the US is import dependent, it relies heavily on China for 14 of them. All right. It's the rare earths. It's also like graphite, nickel, et cetera. And specifically, it relies on China for the import of not the raw ores, but the processed derivatives.

And these are a whole range of things. They could be oxides, they could be like a precursor, all kinds of derivatives along the value chain for which the US is relied on imports from China. So it's based on this realization that there's a need to use public policy tools. The state needs to intervene in commodities markets.

Basically, it cannot just rely on a market orientation to address this gap or this challenge And this is the crux of the industrial policies that are being deployed. So what are the policy tools? I would divide them in three. The first set of tools are regulatory in nature, and in fact, some of them predate the Trump administration.

Even right from the Biden administration, we've heard constantly of government officials talk about how it's very difficult to get a mining project up and running. From anything from the licensing process to actually getting the project underway, it's extremely difficult, and there are a whole range of reasons.

There's, uh, this fantastic book written by, I think it's Ernest Schreider, uh, the Reuters journalist who, who goes into detail, does, like, very interesting case studies about how and why mining is difficult domestically in the US. You know, there are places in, whether it's, like, Nevada or South Carolina, Arizona, where, you know, there are rare plant species, there's native tribal land, there are people who have farmlands, water supplies that could be impacted.

There's a whole range of reasons why it's very difficult to get a mine up and running. It could take up to thirty years, actually, from when you get your license to when you can start actual production. So trying to fast-track that permitting process to get projects up and running is one, so that's a regulatory aspect of the industrial policy.

But, but just on that, there's a problem, though- Yeah ... because the federal government only controls part of that regulatory process. States also have a role in this, and coordinating among states is very difficult. So you can have the Trump administration say, "We're gonna cut all the regulatory kind of red tape," and yet the states may come up and say, "Whoa, whoa, nope.

We're gonna keep this," and we're, and there's gonna be court cases and whatnot. So it's very difficult to actually get this done in, in the US system.

Absolutely, I agree. But as you know, Eric, the way sometimes the narratives and the discourse surrounding policy decision-making happen in the US, particularly in DC, can be very interesting because there are narratives in DC that may not be aligned with realities on the ground domestically here in the US, but also in other parts of the world.

So that tends to be my experience. But there's a sense that there's an effort to cut red tape to basically reduce regulations to fast-track the process of getting projects underway, right? So there's that. The second aspect of the industrial policies is financial in nature, and we have seen the deployment of public finance, federal public finance specifically to support US mining companies in particular.

So perhaps this is the difference between this current administration and the Biden administration, for example, where in the previous administration, the use of public finance was broadly to support companies that are domiciled in countries that can be considered as allies. It might be G7 countries, countries as part of the NATO alliance, or companies in countries in the European Union.

This time around, the emphasis is on US companies trying to get US mining companies To be more competitive. So we've seen the deployment of, uh, federal loans, grants by the Departments of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, well, it's now called Department of War, and the DFC specifically to take equity, actually.

So the fact that this time around there's such an America first sentiment and orientation, then these industrial policy tools are meant to, in theory, support American investors. Like, if I... let's use the word investors here because not every company is a mining company.

Exactly. This is where I wanted to kind of get to you on that because when I look in the list of those m- those American companies, we see the emergence of kind of new, some would say startups, junior company in the mining industry.

We don't see the Newmont in the list. We don't see the Albemarle. We don't see the Freeport-McMoRan. We don't see those who remaining of US mining companies being out there. We don't see them in those recipient of DFC kind of funding and support and all of that. Some would argue that the risk assessment of those markets is still too high.

They're not willing to follow the administration doing that. That's why we see new startup junior companies say, "You know what? We are willing to go to take the risk," the Cobalt, the Sierra Via, the, the Virtus, the Orion, as you've mentioned. Not all of them are mining companies. Some of them are investors in the mining industry, not w- without being mining companies.

So this is kind of the thing where people, when they hear that, they say, "Okay, uh, do we see the big names or we see just the new players coming into the conversation?" And that's why I wanted to have your take. Why don't we see those big names into the list? Are not they part of the conversations?

Well, you know, for now I can only speculate, and honestly, I try not to speculate publicly because, you know, you don't want to say something that turns out not to be correct.

Maybe the immediate answer to you directly is I don't know. However, what I suspect might be happening is, you know, typically the way it works in the mining industry is the smaller companies, whether they are juniors, right, that actually do maybe mining or even if they don't mine, like they, they prospect.

Yeah, exploration and all of that. They open the markets, they open the way for the big names.

Yeah. They tend to be more risk tolerant. They're ready to go into like risky jurisdictions and plunge into uncertainty, and then when they find something, they sell the asset or even the company itself to a bigger player, the major.

So there- I think there's an element of that. There's also the reality that at the end of the day, what the US is dominant in is basically the deep and liquid capital market, so there's just a lot of money in this country, and you have now venture capitalists, you have a whole range of private investors and actors that are getting into the space.

So they may not have necessarily the technology, but they have the money, so they deploy the money and they create some kind of, you know, vehicle, and then at some point they acquire the technology, right? So there's also an element of that that we're seeing. So there's more research that I'm doing in this space, but I suspect there are elements of these different dynamics at play.

You know, the risk tolerance and, you know, just the way the US private sector operates.

But that may be part of the problem though, because going back to the first part of our discussion, the money for investors is in the extraction side. The money for investors is not in the refining side because as you've talked about, it can take thirty years to get a permit.

Also, the infrastructure side, it's very difficult to make money off of infrastructure, ports, rail, things like that. That's usually done by the government, the public sector. So I come back to the original question that I have, which is if the United States wants to reduce its dependency and wants to introduce all these new industrial and trade policies, but doesn't do the human resource side and the infrastructure side and the refining side, are they really going to close the gap?

For those people who are not familiar with the controversy among the British The Chinese, the Mauritians, and the Americans over the Chagos Islands.

Can you just kind of set us up very quickly? Basically, Chagos Island is that island, that small body of island that we do have on the Indian Oceans that belong to Mauritius, Mauritius government. In Chagos Island, we have the American base, Diego Garcia, is both UK and the US military base there, so very strategically.

It was even used recently in the Iran operation by US, uh, US Army. So two years back, UK and Mauritian fi- Mauritius found an agreement where the UK is going to send to, to give back Chagos Island to Mauritius sovereignty. And that decision really spark a debate within the UK government, also from the, in, in the US, where many were saying that they're sending, they, they're giving Chagos Island to a China-leaning government, and it became a whole story.

So basically that- And the China-leaning government was Mauritius, right? It was Mauritius, and, uh, that far from the case, but that was the narrative coming out of the opposition in the UK and also coming from Washington about the Chagos Island agreement between the UK and Mauritius. Yeah, and even Trump was saying it was stupid for the British to give back the territory.

Now, it's very important to note that Diego Garcia was not part of the deal, so Diego Garcia would remain under US control even if the UK was handing back the islands or handing the islands to Mauritius. Is that correct? No, no, no. The thing is the UK would hand back the island to Mauritius, but the UK would remain on the island using Diego Garcia for ninety-nine years.

So it means that though the sovereignty goes back to Mauritius, but the use of d- the Diego Garcia base would not be in danger by Mauritius. Mauritius will ne- will not come in. That was the agreement. But then during the next ninety-nine years, UK will now starting to pay a fee to Mauritius based on that.

But there was no ever an idea that they will remove Diego Garcia base for the next ninety-nine years. We should also note that the International Court of Justice has found that the UK's control over the Chagos Islands is illegal and that the rightful owners of the Chagos Islands is, is Mauritius. And last point on that, Mauritius kind of cut all relationship with Maldives because Maldives last month contested Mauritius sovereignty over Chagos Island.

So yeah. Okay. So all of that, let's have that context now, and let's head back to Washington and the thumbs of Ted Cruz, Texas Republican senator, who is notoriously critical of China. His thumbs went to work on X, and he says, quote, "First, Mauritius tried to push the UK out of Chagos in favor of China. Now they're interfering with Taiwan's ability to fly to Africa.

Mauritius seems determined to ally with the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of US interests. They say that's their sovereign decision. The sovereign decision for the US should be to counter their campaigns and hold their officials accountable." Let's move on, and there was a bunch of them, so I'm just gonna give you two because you'll get the taste of it after this.

Nebraska Republican Senator Pete Ricketts: Taiwan's President Lai was forced to suspend travel to Eswatini after Beijing coerced countries to revoke overflight status. Mauritius and other countries happily complied with Communist China's requests. This outrageous incident reinforces that the UK can't hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, home to naval support facility Diego Garcia.

It is further proof they are susceptible to Communist China's pressure. Giraud, when you hear those, what do Mauritians think? I mean, you're there in Mauritius. This is something they've been saying for a long time. It got mixed up in this whole Taiwan-Eswatini thing. What's the reaction? The reaction Mauritians are just tired at this point.

They're tired of trying to convince the UK and the US that the government has never been China-leaning government. And every time people say that, if you are here in Mauritius, you're like, "What country are they talking about?" If the UK and the US have to be worried about a country taking over Chagos Island after the UK give it back to Mauritius, it's going to be India, not China.

Definitely not China at all. It's going to be India that's going to be, "You know what? I wanna take over Chagos Island." But the narrative here in Mauritius is like, at some point the government's like, "We don't know what to say anymore. We don't even know how to comment on it." And the public opinion, the debate is like, "Ah, Americans think that we are, we are, we are leaning toward China.

That's not the case. And we try to, to counter the narrative, but there's no point of saying anything because the idea, the narrative has, has already been set, settled that, you know, Mauritius is leaning toward China." But when you are here, when you see on everyday government relationship, you realize that it's not the case.

It's really not the case. Not even close to what people are saying. So at some point when you listen and when you hear what Ted Cruz is saying, when you read what he's saying, you're like, you feel just so tired to counter that. You don't even... There's not even a point to try to counter a fake news. Like, what am I going to say about that?

What am I going to comment about that? There's nothing much to say about that comment. Yeah, I mean, c- it was what we see continually out of stakeholders like senior lawmakers f- on Capitol Hill, obviously the White House, and this has gotten worse under the Trump administration, but it was certainly the case in Biden and even in Obama that, you know, the narratives and the memes were more important than any of the facts.

And again, there's a lot to criticize China about, full stop. We know that. But when they kind of go down these paths, which are just factually just devoid of any substance, as Giraud said, it's easy to dismiss, and it's showing this increasing disconnect between what comes out of Washington and the reality elsewhere around the world.

And I think this case this week really proved that. Yeah, I, I think the vibe in Africa looking at it from this side, there's this, it, it feels like some very angry uncle that lives, like, two blocks away, and you can kind of hear him shouting from his house, right? Kind of it's like the US is giving Yosemite Sam.

Like, th- this is, this is the vibe, you know? Kind of like, just, like, angry, angry, shouting somewhere. The funny thing about the kind of yanking of USAID and all of, all of this cooperation is that now there really is no leverage, right? 'Cause very little leverage. US is kind of outraged, just be- kind of have fallen down on the le- the ladder of priorities because, you know, what you gonna do?

I mean, they're gonna be angry anyway, so. You know, what are you gonna do? I mean, first of all, most of you are travel banned into the US Mauritius already now has a $15,000 bond if you wanna travel to the US, so- Which doesn't make sense at all. One of the richest countries in Africa, you know? I, I mean, yeah.

And when you look at Mauritius, is actually- It doesn't make sense. It's, e- exactly. I mean, it's just surreal. And so, but again, every one of these initiatives that they're doing to, against African states reduces their leverage. So what are they gonna do next, right? So, Giraud, your neighbors can't fly to the United States.

Okay. Okay. Okay. They still have 100, I don't know, 35 other countries they can go visa-free. They go to Europe, they go to China, they go... I mean, say, okay, we cannot go to the US anyway, but yeah, okay, we'll go elsewhere. This is the kind of situation where you find yourself that the narrative, you, as Okobwe say, you have that angry uncle, but that angry uncle will just want to pick a fight with you.

There's, there's nothing that you can do right. Everything that you'll do, they, they just want to be mad at you. So at some point, it's like, there's no point of commenting, there's no point of reacting, because you already made up your mind that I'm the bad kid, I'm the bad boy in the, on the continent. So just go with it.

Run with it. It's interesting because the reactions that came out of Washington, particularly from lawmakers, all came from the Republican side. I could not find a Democratic senator or congressperson to comment on this. You know, and that's just odd, because usually China does generate some bipartisan consensus in Washington.

But we have not heard anything from, uh, from the Democratic side of the aisle. But one last point that I wanna get onto before we move on to our last topic. This is coming from Idaho Senator Jim Risch, who, again, is frequently on the record in his criticisms of China, but this is a funny one. China reportedly pressured Mauritius, Seychelles, and Madagascar to deny airspace access to Taiwan's President Lai, blah, blah, blah.

We've been talking about that. Escalating Beijing's campaign to isolate Taiwan. Okay, here's the fun part. That is not just coercion. It's a disturbing breach of civil aviation norms Really? And I'm just like- Come on ... wait a minute. We're talking about- I mean, come on ... norms and, like Come on, really? Oh, please.

That one I thought- Please ... was really rich Come on Like, the United States talking about norms right now. The US should not let China normalize this and should be clear-eyed about our relations with countries that so quickly bend to its pressure. And I just think after the year that we've been through- I mean, come on

of tariffs and in- Cuba, Venezuela, Iran ... interventions, I mean- Tariffs. Come on, please. Yeah, it's really- Come on. Come on. What frustrates me, Rick, is the fact that we are talking about US lawmakers from a powerful country, US being a powerful countries. We are talking about lawmakers who have influence over decision-making in many African countries, where you have head of states when traveling to DC, because meeting US lawmakers, because hearing them talk, they believe that this is US position.

And those head of states take policy in their country based on what a US lawmaker said, said to them in a private meeting or in a public meeting. And we can see here, those lawmakers have no knowledge, no expertise, no fact about things they are talking about. And this what frustrates me, because as much as we are talking like this, our leaders on the continent will go to DC, will hear Jim Risch talk, will hear Ted Cruz talk, and will go back and say, "You know what?

The US has said that, and I'm gonna shift my whole policy, my whole country policy based on what those US lawmakers have said." And this is really frustrating for me. And that speaks to the low levels of US literacy that many African policymakers have, not understanding that the Congress does not speak for the US government.

That's only what comes out of the executive branch. So that, you're right, though. That happens quite a bit, where you'll see even in African news coverage, they'll say, you know, "The US is gonna do X, Y, Z," when it's just some congressperson saying, "We wanna do this," and that's not the US government. Yeah, I think what it also kind of reveals in the end, and I think that becomes very galling, I think for, uh, in for, for Africans, it's just a complete like disregard for African realities, right?

Kind of like just complete, like not, not caring about what's even going on on the continent, not caring about what the continent is, you know, kind of is worried about what its priorities are. Zero interest, zero concern for that, right? So in a way, you know, kind of if, if one knows that the US doesn't care about Africa at all and doesn't know anything about Africa at all, then that, you know, like what, what, what are these countries supposed to be doing with that knowledge?

That's going to be it for today.

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