← The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Trump Visits China, Trade Wars, and What’s at Stake for America
00:22:09
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- [00:00]
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- [00:31]
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Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comDisclosures welcome to
- [01:32]
Steve Yates
Nation States with Yates. I'm Steve Yates, here to serve as your personal National Security Advisor to sort through the headlines and the talking points to get to some mainstream common sense about what's happening out there in that wild and woolly world. The world comes at you fast, whether you're sitting in the White House or in your house, and I want to try to help you have all that you need to think about some of the biggest issues that weigh on the President, but also weigh on your home and your neighborhood. Today we're going to take a dive into things China and talk a little bit about the President's trip to China to sit down with the Chinese Chairman of the Communist Party. Xi Jinping. Awful lot at stake there in that relationship. And we're going to, through the course of nation states with Yates, walk through some of the best conversations we've had, some, some of the best research that we can find. And today we're going to try to feature a background paper that was done by the Heritage foundation that gives you plenty to think about when trying to frame things China. Now I ask you, in what ways has development in China affected you and your family? My hunch is you've got a lot of goods that are in your pantry, in the kitchen that, that may have been processed by Chinese companies that are owned by Chinese companies. You probably are wearing goods that have been manufactured and marketed from China. You might have had your livelihoods affected by factories that changed over ownership or even were hollowed out and offshored as a result of economic investment and trade flows with China. You might have been affected like my family was by Covid or fentanyl or other kinds of public health issues that come to us courtesy of this big country called China. You might have friends or family that go to university and see that there's an awful lot of foreign exchange students from one particular country more than all others. Well, that's another area where China is touching onto our way of life. With all of that, I want to try to bring you the head, not, not just the headlines, not just the talking points, but get to some of the big issues that are going to be at stake in the president's agenda for this massive meeting that will occur on Thursday and Friday of this week. So after this brief break, we'll jump into the meat of our conversation and I welcome you to stay tuned over the break. Thank you.
- [04:08]
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- [04:39]
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Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI, it all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. This then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comDisclosures
- [05:40]
Steve Yates
welcome back to Nation States with Yates. Today we're going to take a deep dive into a topic and a country that has probably crossed all of your minds. It is a country that is affecting things around the world, says it's a peer competitor with the United States. And of course I'm talking about that country, the two syllables that President Trump pronounced sometimes China. So with China, we have President Trump going to Beijing later this week on the 14th and 15th, Thursday and Friday. Now that'll be Beijing time, so they'll be ahead of us in the US and there's an awful lot on the plate for the President to cover. Before we jump into this, since I want to try to help serve as your personal national Security advisor in this, we'll first talk about what's coming at the White House. Then we'll talk a little bit about what's coming at your house in this kind of a meeting. First, what's coming at the White House? Well, they have outstanding business from when the President met with Chairman Xi Jinping of China before. He's of course had phone calls along the way. But the leaders met face to face last in Korea on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. At that time, President Trump laid down some priorities of getting China to buy more products from the United States, especially agricultural products. He laid down a marker on fentanyl. Of course there had been tariffs in place to penalize China for being the by far leading manufacturer of the illicit precursor chemicals that have fed this angel of death that's taken too many from us over the last 10 years. We with a particular spike during the 2020-2025 range, which sadly also included my dear daughter in that mix. So I appreciate the President laying down a marker on fentanyl. He also covered other issues, like China's constant expansionist claims of maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea, approaching some of our allies like the Philippines, maybe even challenging things that risk conflict. And that, of course, matters to a President of the United States in managing allies. Expansive claims against Japan as a new leader that the President quite likes and is a reformist leader, wants Japan to be a more normal nation. Well, Beijing doesn't want to have all of that. And it's been pushing the envelope somewhat, pushing around our allies. And they have said that they want to make sure that we have freedom of navigation on the high seas. And of course, more than half of all global container trade goes through waterways that are around the island nation of Taiwan, a nation that China claims as its own, although it's not unified with that group of 23 million people that live under democracy and also is the mother lode of the most advanced chips that make smart life go round in the whole world, including inside China. So an awful lot on the President's plate from security of our own homeland, immigration problems that have to be addressed, fentanyl issues, trade issues. And then of course, there's no small matter of China having fueled the Russian war machine for the last several years, and the dalliance with Iran, where China has fueled everything from sanctions busting with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. Of course, you've learned in recent times of the amount of oil that China gets from the Persian Gulf. But there's also been efforts to provide technology and material assistance to Iran to surveil their citizens, to be able to attack their neighbors and get around financial and other measures to try to fight proliferation and the expansion of terrorism in their near abroad. Sometimes their near abroad includes coming across our borders and threatening the lives of foreign diplomats and also live threats against the President of the United States and his past cabinet members. That's a pretty full plate for a President walking in. You might think, well, goodness gracious, we've got a President going in to tackle all those things. Sounds pretty distant to my family's Main street interests, but, you know, I bet that a lot of you have friends and family who've been affected by all of these things. China's unfair trade practices have hollowed out a lot of Middle America and flyover America in recent decades. The President's priority to safe shore manufacturing probably matters to a lot of you and if you're tilling the ground and you're trying to sell agricultural product out into the world, you probably care about him getting big consuming nations like China to buy more of these products, to keep your farms chugging along that American traditional way of life moving forward in your neck of the woods. And of course, if you have blessed members of your family that are serving in the military, you care about where they might be deployed and are they safe and are they being put in a position of strength to avoid conflict? Well, all that's front and center for the President and it's front and center for you, too. But in reality, we've got a lot that matters to mainstream America. Where China needs to get, I think, reset understanding of where America's going. The President can go a long way to getting that right. So first, let's talk about how the President talks about China. He talks about the personal relationship with Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping is, I think, China's toughest leader since Mao Zedong. That was at the establishment of the Communist Party's dominance of the Chinese mainland and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. But in the Modern Times, from 2012 forward, Xi Jinping has done an awful lot to put the teeth back into that smile that the Chinese have put out to the world to say, hey, send us your investment, make your supply chains dependent upon us, and we promise, pretty please promise that we're going to be a good partner to you because all we want is peace. But sometimes that peace is less forthcoming and it comes at great cost. So hitting that reset, China has tried to sell the idea that the United States is on a terminal decline and China is on an inevitable rise and we better make a deal with the rising new superpower. They've talked about de dollarization, a fancy term that says they want the world to start trading in their currency or a different currency and get out of the American financial system. They've talked about groupings like brics, which really involves Russia, Iran and a few other countries to try to have an alternative dominant bloc to America and its allies, who have set the terms of trade and security for the world through a tremendously prosperous series of decades after World War II. Well, President steps into this exchange, I would argue, from the greatest position of strength of any president, at least since Ronald Reagan, in dealing with the People's Republic of China. And he's done so by resetting the American economy toward growth and deregulation, a serious policy towards energy that redirects those flows, and we are controlling choke points from the Panama Canal to the Straits of Hormuz that you've heard about lately. But we have a lot of capability surging into the Indo Pacific region that will also affect the choke points like the Straits of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait in ways that maybe make China less adventurous. Well, breaking that down a bit, we have some friends at the Heritage foundation who put out a very helpful backgrounder that I encourage everyone to check out to dig into what's really at stake in this summit. It is produced by Andrew Harding and Jeff Smith of the Asian Study center at the Heritage foundation. And the backgrounder is titled the the Trump Xi Summit Defining Favorable and Unfavorable Outcomes. Well, in the Thursday Friday gatherings that the president will have, obviously rational people would think that we want them to negotiate on the things that are fair to negotiate on, but also have some red lines of what needs to be non negotiable for the United States. Well, things that have to do with tariff rates or taxes that are put onto goods. Those are the kinds of things that ought to be fair game to go ahead and engage in negotiations with a country like China. I'm talking about buying agricultural goods. Well, there's no real harm done in selling some of our agricultural product to a country like that to keep normal commerce going forward, maybe make some rationality spread in a country like China beyond the reaches of its leadership. And then there's, of course, the things that might be public goods. If there's anything that we might be able to do to persuade China to change course on aiding and abetting turmoil and conflict in other parts of the world, it's perfectly fair game for the president to try to push and negotiate in those areas. What's non negotiable, though, are going to be things that have to do with national security priorities for the United States of America. It can't be negotiable for us to insist upon controls over the most sensitive technologies that are vital to our national security supply chains. We have to make sure that we are on track to win a space race, an AI race, and really in many ways a race toward less dependent supply chains and stronger allies that are working together with us. Well, Jeff Smith and Andrew Harding have broken down a series of things that I think will set some of the terms of that trade that will identify what would be good outcomes. Well, the first favorable outcome is that China maintains a pause on export controls. What that means is that China has threatened to withhold certain vital things from the United States to exercise leverage and change the way we're dealing with them. You may have heard of these things called rare earths that come into play that are vital to the high end chip making and other vital supply chains for us. Well, President Trump has changed the tables on that negotiating approach in the sense that he's made clear that China's dependent on access to our market and dependent on energy. And if they want to play fair with us, maybe they should play fair on keeping this pause on that rare earth leverage and keep the flow of those critical goods coming into the United States. So a favorable outcome, number one would be President Trump maintaining that pause on the Chinese side. A second favorable outcome would be China is granting greater market access for US Goods going in, as mentioned, leads with agriculture, but should go other areas. Core principle is reciprocity. If we give China huge access to our market, we have got to insist upon fair access to theirs. They're not as much of a consumer economy. They depend on exports to us. But the President would be right to get a good outcome by more access for American goods into China. Number three would be China reducing its material support for Iran. This is vital. We're in a war with Iran and China has helped the security apparatus and other elements of Iran along the way, including during this conflict. Totally appropriate for President Trump to throw down the red flag on that and, and get some kind of an agreement with China that we, of course, would have to not trust, just verify in seeing that that go forward. Another positive outcome would be getting the release of some political prisoners and religious prisoners. Pastor Ezra Jin has been held for practicing his Christian faith. It'd be completely within the realm of past practice for the Chinese to agree to release someone that the President has made a priority for Jimmy Lai, a longtime friend of mine who, who is in Hong Kong, probably the world's most famous imprisoned Catholic at this point, imprisoned for practicing journalism and calling out some of the aggression of the Chinese Communist Party and squashing freedom and political and free speech movements in Hong Kong. The President's mentioned that he's raised this case with Xi Jinping before and will again on this visit. It would be wonderful progress to show that there's fruits in this bilateral dialogue. If we see real moves like this with real humans on real issues that matter to Americans getting released. A fifth favorable outcome would be getting serious cooperation from China on immigration controls. We have too many Chinese migrants that are coming through and are not as well documented who've been caught bringing things from dangerous pathogens to going into programs they shouldn't be trying to gather sensitive technologies and send back to China where we need a little bit better. Right. Sizing on what our immigration approach is with China, the unfavorable outcomes. Well, there's a few that I want to try to highlight. Number one, we shouldn't be backtracking anything that comes to allowing Taiwan to have an ability to defend itself. One of the key elements of President Trump's rebalancing of alliances and partnerships is we're going to honor the old axiom of helping those who help themselves. And, and the people of Taiwan have stepped up to pay more for their own self defense and they want to buy more from us. And that I think is an appropriate way to keep deterrence in check and continue to have that outstanding trade relationship that the people of Taiwan have with the United States and the world where per capita they buy far more from us and send much more to us than China does. And so we want to make sure that we're allowing them to defend themselves. We shouldn't backtrack on that commitment and listen to China, who's basically the aggressor in that. We want to make sure that we don't have any kind of backtracking on protecting the most advanced and vital technologies. This comes really down to chips. First and foremost about all communications technology. We want to make sure that we have clean networks and clean technologies and, and that the highest end don't get leaked out because we just want to try to pursue a quick buck in selling to the Chinese market. Another area that we want to make sure that we don't have a bad outcome is on automobiles. This is an area where President Trump's made a priority, have pretty high confidence he'll hold the line. But we want to make sure that when it comes to China's electric vehicles or the role they play in our supply chains, that they can't really hollow out our industry and manufacturing capabilities and that we don't end up having a lot of below market cost vehicles dumped into our market to damage a vital industry vital to American consumers, vital to key geographies in the United States for their economic well being. But also this manufacturing capability is vital to our military industrial complex too, because if we don't have civilian manufacturing at scale, then we can't upscale in a time of crisis to help our military, which we've unfortunately had to do a time or two in world wars. So these are, I think, some of the key elements that our friends at the Heritage foundation have outlined as favorable outcomes to watch for and unfavorable outcomes to avoid. But it comes down to a real bottom line. We want to make sure that the President goes in from his position of strength, which he's earned on our behalf, and that we don't make any kind of concessions on areas that should be non negotiable and we stay focused on those areas that make good common sense, good mainstream American sense to move the ball forward in rebalancing to a stable place the economic relationship the United States has with this challenging country called China. With that, thank you for the meat of our conversation. We're going to take a quick break break and we'll come back with a quick sum up and let you know what we're going to do with episode number two.
- [22:30]
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- [23:31]
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- [24:00]
Steve Yates
That's innerbalance.com welcome back to Nation States with Yates. Thank you for sticking along through our meaty conversation about the Heritage foundation backgrounder on the Trump Shell Summit. I hope that you find it useful to look at what some of the positive outcomes might be and what some of the watch out for outcomes might be to do a quick recap of hopefully some of the lessons learned in thinking about this kind of an exchange. What is an appropriate summit? We've got this principle of reciprocity that should be guiding everything that the president engages with China about, but especially on the economics and trade that really is a fancy word for what they are allowed to do in our country we should be allowed to do in theirs and what we are not allowed to do in their country they shouldn't be allowed to do in ours. So seems like pretty good mainstream common sense to me. Security red lines of course the president is going to have some. We need them to stop making trouble in our country in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Iranians ability to resist the will the president has imposed upon them to try to change the behavior that has unsettled that regime and upset global energy markets. Warnings against trying to reach grand bargains. When sometimes you reach for a bargain you end up with a deal that doesn't get fulfilled. So really important for the businessman President Trump to show up and make sure that his counterpart is held accountable for promises made last time and promises made this time. And we might not trust just verify that they're doing what they said stand up for for some human rights and democracy religious freedom advocates that have risked a lot to try to bring God's truth into China and to try to serve their fellow man. And they've met with what the communist parties all around the world do repression. And so we hope that a couple of those top leaders might get out to live with their families and continue to go about their work. And everything, everything and everything. It comes back to verification over trust. We trust that the president knows this. He can talk about his friend Xi Jinping. We can talk about a great relationship there. I hope it becomes great. But it'll become great when we do the right things together, when we are strong and they are coming along with us with that. We're going to talk next episode about the challenges the president and our country are facing in Iran. Going to go from one great challenge to the next. In the next episode of Nation States with Yates. Look forward to catching you next time and thank you as always for walking with us in this journey.
- [26:43]
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- [28:20]
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