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- [00:00]
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- [01:02]
Chelsea Clinton
do you ever find yourself scrolling through headlines and thinking, possibly screaming, at least on the inside, that can't be true. There's rising rates of vaccine preventable diseases and someone on the Internet saying that watermelon juice is a natural alternative to sunscreen. Just no. I'm Chelsea Clinton and that Can't Be True is back for season three. My guests and I cut through a lot of chaos to help all of us understand what is true, what is overblown, and what's false.
- [01:36]
Ben Wittes
Hey, Lawfare listeners, Ben Whittes here. I want to tell you about a new podcast that I think you might want to check out. It's called Stateside, and it's from the good folks at the Guardian. It's launching soon, and like the Lawfare podcast, it's an effort to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's happening in the world. Word on the street is that it's going to run three times a week. It's going to be hosted by journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, and it's going to take advantage of all the reporting resources the Guardian has in the United States and its reporters around the world. Which is to say, it's going to feature the Guardian's breadth of global content across news, international coverage, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. You probably know something about the Guardian, but just in case you don't, as one of the fastest growing newsrooms in the United States, the Guardian, like Lawfare, isn't owned by a billionaire, meaning that its reporters are free to report the facts as they see them. Stateside is their first audio offering aimed at the US News Market. I'm excited about it. It launches May 13, and you can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on YouTube. Check it out.
- [03:08]
Scott R. Anderson
Hey everyone, Scott R. Andersen here as a senior editor with Lawfare, you might know me as the guy always rambling about treaties and war powers we or perhaps as the host of Rational Security. What you might not know is that Lawfare has been a part of my life a lot longer than I've been contributing to it. Before I came to Lawfare, I was a national security lawyer, an occasional diplomat working for the government, both here in Washington, D.C. and overseas. They were the sorts of jobs that wrestled with hard national security choices of the type Lawfare specializes in. Which is why Lawfare is one of the first things I opened when I got to my desk each morning. From Iran to Venezuela to back here at home, I those questions haven't gotten any easier. Policymakers, journalists and citizens all need the sort of deep, non partisan expertise Lawfare specializes in now more than ever. Lawfare is also a nonprofit, meaning we're committed to keeping all of our core content from getting put behind a paywall. We can't do it without help from the people who read and listen to us. People like you. So if you can visit lawfairmedia.org support and join our community of supporters, just $10 a month will make a world of difference in helping us keep Lawfare free to everyone for a long time to come. So, Ben, I understand you have been up to some of your old tricks. Once again newly liberated from captivity. What did you get up to last night?
- [04:28]
Ben Wittes
Well, I may have projected on the Trump banner at the Justice Department last night. I mean, I wouldn't confirm or deny that, but you know, somebody seems to have projected the John Adams quotation a government of laws, not of men right across the face of the scowling Donald Trump image hanging on the main justice building. And there is a news story in NBC that it was done by a group of former Justice Department officials called Justice Connection to protest the $1.8 billion slush fund. But if you were to allege that I was a consultant on the project and may have been operating the projectors in question, I wouldn't be able to sue you for libel.
- [05:21]
Scott R. Anderson
Wouldn't? This is not a very covert operation, but that's fine. What? What would wouldn't you the appropriate target, given the recent attention of Lord and Lazy Laser, be the Parks Department? Don't you have your jurisdiction wrong on this one? Or is this not the revenge mission?
- [05:35]
Ben Wittes
One might this was not a revenge mission. It it's just a sense that if you hang Dear Leader banners in Washington, D.C. on federal buildings, particularly federal buildings involving the administration of justice, that I might have something to say about it. And I just feel like the President should be aware that no banner is safe from photons from me. And I also think this is a group of former Justice Department officials whose work I admire very much and they wanted to have they had something to say about this particular banner at this particular time. And so it was a honor and pleasure to help them with it.
- [06:25]
Scott R. Anderson
Ben, you're sure you're cool with us working, running that we're free B roll?
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Ben Wittes
Oh yeah. I mean I live streamed the thing. It's this is all over my social media. So if I'm going to get arrested today, it won't be because of Rational Security.
- [06:46]
Scott R. Anderson
Hello everyone and welcome back to Rational Security, the podcast. We invite you to join friends and members of the Lawfare team as we try to puzzle through the week's biggest national security news stories, whether they are in our lane or not. I'm thrilled to be joined by none other than Rational Security host emeritus and Editor in chief of Lawfare, Ben Benwood. Us Back on the podcast after a while. Ben, it's been like I think, a solid couple months since we've had you on, so it's good to have you back on the cast.
- [07:11]
Ben Wittes
It's good to be back.
- [07:13]
Scott R. Anderson
I think this may be the longest reprieve you've ever been granted from Rational Security, which is, you know, a sin not to be repeated.
- [07:19]
Ben Wittes
It hasn't been that long. I don't know, it'll be interesting to go back and figure out when the last time was.
- [07:26]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, we'll crunch the numbers on this. I think it's been, I think it's been a little while, but we're thrilled to have you joining us as well as our colleague, a first time guest from the Brookings Institution, senior fellow Kari Heerman. Kari, thank you for coming on the podcast.
- [07:39]
Kari Heuserman
I'm thrilled to be here with you, Scott. It's been, we've tried to make this happen a few times and I'm glad it worked out this time because there's plenty of great news that is in my lane for sure. Even if I know nothing about the law. I will leave that to you.
- [07:51]
Scott R. Anderson
There we go. Well, we might have found a few topics that are in your lane as the maven of economic statecraft for with us here at the Brookings Institution. So let's dig into it. Our first topic for this week with friends like Xi this past week, top U.S. officials and business CEOs traveled with President Trump to Beijing for his summit with President Xi Jinping. The summit had a warm air to it, with Trump going so far as to call Xi his friend, far cry from the hawkish stance towards China he adopted during the campaign and his prior administration. But but Trump left having made relatively few concrete deals on the host of issues dividing the two countries. Whether a missed opportunity here or is the seeming thaw in relations itself a positive sign for the future of the relationship? Topic 2 Dirty Dancing Havana Fights Cuba ran out of oil last week, but the Trump administration's pressure campaign against the island nation 90 miles off the coast of Florida has only intensified. On Monday, the United States announced new sanctions on three Cuban government agencies and 11 top officials amidst reports that the Department of Justice may seek an indictment against Raul Castro, the 94 year old brother of Fidel Castro and former president, among other senior and current and former officials. Meanwhile, surveillance flights over the island nation have reportedly increased substantially in recent weeks in advance of an expected military buildup in the next few weeks from now. How seriously should we take Trump's repeated threats to pursue regime change in yet another country after Iran and Venezuela? And how long can Cuma hang on with its economic situation becoming more dire? Topic 3 I've got 122 problems and a tariff is one On May 7, the US Court of International Trade struck down yet another round of Trump tariffs, this time the across the board 10% section 122 tariffs that President Trump imposed after the Supreme Court invalidated the earlier tariffs that he had issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Specifically, the Court of International Trade ruled that the administration cannot meet the statutory requirements for using section 122. Those ruling has since been stayed by the Federal Circuit pending appeal. And is this decision likely to stick? And with another legal defeat, what options does the administration have left to follow through on the Trump administration's trade policy agenda? So for our first topic last week we had our guests on kind of laying the stage for this big Trump XI summit that has been really in the works for better part of a year at this point. I think this is the third official date that finally stuck to hosting this summit. What we talked about is that the two parties seemed to be coming with slightly different agendas. The Trump administration had kind of five Bs. They wanted to get soybean trade issues, Boeing planes, and a third B that I'm escaping exactly what it was, but kind of specific trade deliverables in specific industries. And then they had two boards they wanted to set up as kind of institutions to help manage the bilateral relationship in the economic domain. And one focused on trade and one focused on investment. Meanwhile, China was reported as kind of coming with a broader agenda of kind of broader, more foundational issues, which essentially was tech, Taiwan and tariffs. So we have now a sense of the deliverables that come out of this. We've seen agreements by China to lift barriers for certain agricultural imports, commit to buying a certain number of Boeing planes. We have these two boards in process, or there's a commitment to get them in process. So to some extent we, you can see the Trump administration saying, well, this is a victory. We got, you know, most of our deliverables in one form or another that we came in going in with. But the fundamental relationship isn't that different. And that list of deliverables they kind of set for themselves was an extraordinarily high bar given the centrality of the US China relationship to a lot of the Trump administration policies, to a lot of what people see as broader US interests kind of moving forward. So, Kai, I want to come to you first on this, particularly because so much of this is trade based. How big a difference does it make that we have come out of this summit with this soft list of deliverables and with a generally warmer tone towards China? Not a close alliance or friendship by any stretch of the imagination, but a sense that, hey, there's not sharp rhetoric going back and forth. There seems to be a mutual desire to kind of deescalate, is that itself a victory? Can we see this as a successful summit or at least a good thing generally for the United States? And how sustainable does that seem likely to be between now and the fall where as one of the deliverals, President Trump invited Xi Jinping back to Washington D.C. for a US based summit which is expected to take place sometime in September, October, I believe.
- [12:13]
Kari Heuserman
Yeah, thanks, Scott. I mean, I think it certainly was not a summit where the fundamental disagreements were addressed, but I don't think the leaders were really teed up to do that. I mean, there's plenty of other things going on, including Iran. And so I don't think it was forecasted that it would do much other than sort of stabilize things and prevent further escalation. And so one can say that one of the deliverables was, quote, a constructed relationship of strategic stability that is what we're after now. I think what's really interesting here is sort of the emergence of this like shift from the first Trump administration era through Biden to now where sort of in the first Trump administration and even in the Biden administration a bit, the economic statecraft toward China, our economic policy, trade and others was really more designed to be an effort to discipline China for the practices that they do that are undermining the global economic system. Forced tech transfer, IP issues, non market policies and practices, the preferred language of the G7 discussions on this. So it's moved kind of away from like we need to discipline China from the way that it's undermining our ability to sustain our system, to really, in this Trump administration, kind of more accepting that China's system is not something that the US can change. And so the focus seems to be moving from discipline to management, where the idea is to sort of preserve areas of mutual economic benefit and separately manage the rivalry and vulnerability part. If they can manage to separate those two things, that would be possibly what we have to do in this era. But the devil's really in the details there. So I think, you know, the most relevant part of this summit is not sort of the immediate deliverables, the beans and the Boeings and beef is the third one, but actually the sort of normalization of a more managed economic relationship between the US and China. And I think those boards are potentially important in that respect. Although we don't know a lot, we don't have a lot of detail of what they look like. But it does sound like something different than the usual economic dialogue.
- [14:26]
Scott R. Anderson
Ben, I want to come to you on this and let me throw in an added perspective of kind of like the diplomat perspective on this, which is we seem to be have setting up a cycle of kind of summit diplomacy in this, at least for between now and the next cycle. And frankly, we've been working in that zone for the last couple of months as they've been leading up to the originally scheduled. Some of that got delayed because of the Iran war and there was another date before that. So we've kind of been using these anticipated meetups as a big driver of the relationship. And to some extent, I think a lot of diplomats would look at that and say that's a good thing. Like one of your big objectives in diplomacy is keeping lines of communication open, particularly between the actual decision makers that matter, giving them a forum to voice concerns and opportunities to try and address them before you escalate a relationship or escalate to something that could arrive at hostilities or other sort of escalatory measures, and that this sets up a framework for doing that, highly personalized framework. But notably, because you do have these two boards, at least on the investment, on trade front, you have bureaucratic mechanisms where you will have lower level, more technocratic engagement if they're set up adequately. There's also talk, I think, in the couple of weeks before the summit that there had been a reconnection of a Chinese, US China, military lines of communication that have been relatively dormant for a couple of years. There have been an effort to reinvigorate those. So those things are all good. So I come out of this and I have my former State Department hat on. I look at this and I say, actually, this is kind of a successful summit. If we've gotten to the point where we can keep these lines of communication and dialogue open, even if we didn't reach any immediate resolution on them, because the process itself is an objective. If what we want to avoid is either, you know, capitulating or escalating, and I do think that's kind of where we are, or at least that's the kindest light I can shed on this. Does that make sense to you, or you a little more skeptical about what the Trump administration has done here and how it aligns with its kind of broader positioning around China and related national security issues?
- [16:31]
Ben Wittes
So I am largely in sympathy with that view. I think my view of major Trump administration events, multilateral or bilateral, is very Hippocratic in quality, that, you know, if you look at something and you say, first the first question is, what catastrophic harm have they done? And here the answer appears to be none. And then you ask, did we get anything little that may be valuable? And here the answer, for all the reasons that both of you have said, there seems to be some good structures or things that are at least teased or contemplated here. And so then you allow yourself to breathe a big sigh of relief and you contrast it with going to the Munich security summit and blowing up NATO, Right. Or, you know, should we invade Greenland? And you say, this is pretty harmless and, you know, may have some good stuff in it and so few. Now, if that sounds like I'm, you know, not willing to dish out a lot of praise for it, that's correct. I. I don't think that's the. The ideal way to frame our evaluation of major administration initiatives, but that is the way I'm conditioned to think about these things. I will say there are some real danger issues in the US China relationship, right? Now, and I didn't see this summit as doing much to deal with either of them. One is Taiwan, where I do think the administration is communicating over time to China that we will not do anything to protect Taiwan. And just as the Biden administration may have been erring in the other direction by articulating a little bit too loudly and clearly that we would go to war to defend Taiwan, this administration is, in a thousand little ways communicating we won't do shit. And that is the kind of message that Xi Jinping cares a great deal about and will alleviate other things in order to facilitate that environment. The second issue is, you know, there is this US China AI competition thing going on. And, you know, we still don't really have a US Posture with respect to that. The administration has a very accelerationist attitude toward AI that is mostly couched in the language of China. Competition, on the other hand, it frees up Nvidia to sell, you know, high value chips in China. And so it has this kind of weird Janus faced policy toward competition with China in the AI space. I want to lay out there, I don't know what the right policy is on that question, and I'm not pretending that I do. I do think there is something to be said for having a policy that you can clearly articulate and that actually has some content. And I don't think we have that. So I don't want to give them too much praise for having a summit that, you know, we're not all talking about what a disaster it is, and we are talking about the incremental gains, but I don't deny that that's where we are.
- [20:38]
Kari Heuserman
Yeah, I think I agree, Ben, that a lot of this is sort of incremental adjustments to some things that are arguably needing to be addressed. And I think what makes me a little bit uncomfortable is that we're sort of setting up mechanisms that might be hard to walk away from. And we're doing this in this sort of unilateral and transactional way that might leave us in the long run not in a good strategic position relative to China, that China might be getting some wins out of this in the, in the long sweep if we're not doing this very carefully.
- [21:13]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, Carmen, let me dig into that a little deeper with you. I want to talk about tech and Taiwan, but before I do that, let's dig into the two Bs that are kind of like the big outstanding operative parts of whatever this arrangement that came out of this summer. That's the trade board and the investment board, two separate bodies that are supposed to be establishing what I take to be fairly technocratic, although I suspect there will be a strong involvement of the private sector as well, just because that's Trump administration's usual approach to these things, that's going to try and manage and resolve trade investment issues between the two countries. So they're going to be standing that up between now and the fall. My guess is there's not going to be a lot of urgency to have really hard results from either of those processes, given that the next summit's only a few months away and they're going to be standing these things up and it takes time and they'll probably only have one or two of these board meetings once they actually figure out who they're going to put on them, et cetera, before this next summit. That's just the way these things tend to go. That's my prediction. Totally uninformed, totally speculative, but I would put money on it. Like that's as good as we're going to get. But it is creating these forums where they're trying to segment out these two universes of issues where how big is the divide on those two issues between this administration and the Chinese government? And how much space is there for being able to reach accommodation within those domains without being able to bring in the other big parts of the bilateral relationship like tech and Taiwan? Is there a lot of space that we can expect these boards to make more progress on addressing bilateral concerns, or is it more that they're going to sharpen what the real divide is? And that's going to have to be something that enters into the political mix along with the bigger agenda items outside of the trade and investment spaces.
- [22:50]
Kari Heuserman
I certainly don't know the answer to any of the questions you just asked. I would say two things are flowing through my mind. One is that when I'm reading both the Chinese readout and the US Fact sheet that they describe what these boards of trade do a little bit differently, the US Says we're going to manage trade in non strategic sectors. I think those are non sensitive or non strategic. I can't remember which one. And China's readout is that we're going to talk about lowering tariffs. So it's a little bit of a different thing and it could overlap. I mean, we certainly have talked about in the sweep of the tariff escalation with China from the first China 301 in the Biden administration, thinking maybe there are some things in here that aren't strategic that we don't need to have tariffs on where pulling down the tariffs could help consumers, you know, work on affordability. It could be that there is a way to kind of. You know, when I was advising in the Council of Economic Advisors in the Biden administration, I sure sort of tried to identify some categories where you might not think that you would be opening up a vulnerability. You could use some variables about, you know, downstream use, how concentrated production is in China. Does this feed into some of the ways that they use coercive leverage? There are some sort of objective parameters one could use to divide that up, but it really is a continuum. So finding exactly where those boundaries are is a challenge. And you'd want to have really, really clear objectives. You'd want to have really serious discipline, and you'd want to have consistency over time to do this very, very well. All those things are difficult in any administration. I think in particular in this one. The second thing I will say is that it is interesting to me that Ambassador Greer announced that there would be a public notice and comment on what the board should do. And I'm really looking forward to engaging process and getting some more information on what they're thinking, what they're asking the public about. And I think that if they're going to have that period that usually I think they have to have something like a period of a few weeks and then resolving what to do and then getting everything together by the fall. I think the timeline is a little bit longer and steady progress is what we should expect.
- [25:05]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And I agree. I think that's a good step to do that sorts of things. But it also underscores this is a very preliminary agreement. We don't know what the scope of representation, duties, jurisdiction of these bodies is going to be. So it's hard to know what we can expect them to accomplish down the road. So, Ben, let's go to the other two T's, Tech and Taiwan. Maybe we start with Taiwan. So we had a kerfuffle in the lead up to the summit where the Trump administration, and pretty specifically President Trump himself, I should say, said at one point, arms sales to Taiwan may be on the table. People in terms of negotiations with China. And that is a big traditional. No, no. For the United States. They're always kind of passively on the table. But the official line is that the United States has adopted since, through a series of communiques and assurances that have been on the table since the 1980s and have always been referenced as pillars of the US policy towards China and Taiwan has centered on the idea that, look, the United States is not going to directly consult with China on arms sales. We're going to provide arms sales, and there's going to be a relationship between the arms sales we provide to Taiwan and the sense that China, mainland China is working towards a peaceful resolution of bilateral issues as opposed to a forceful resolution of the status of Taiwan. And so if there's increased threats of a forceful resolution, arms sales are supposed to increase. And if it looks like there's peaceful process and China generally backs off, then the United States may well lower arms sales. I'm highly simplifying what is actually fairly complexly worded sets of assurances, but that's the basic contours of it. That's basically been the trajectory of US Policy, and notably the Taiwan Relations act, the foundational statute that kind of defines in so many ways US Relationship with Taiwan. Focus on arms sales. That's the bulk of it. It doesn't make assurances about security coming to military assistance in the event of an attack. That's actually just not something United States has done in regard to Taiwan, although, as you said, several administrations have implied it, but it is very concrete on arms sales.
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Ben Wittes
Well, and Joe Biden stated it baldly at one point, several times.
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Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, Joe Biden repeatedly did things that was a step in an interesting direction. What we saw them do is that the official US Policy has always been strategic ambiguity. We don't take a position one way or the other of what we would do if China were to attempt to take Taiwan by force. Military intervention. That's been the position for a long time. The Biden administration leaned one way, as you said. Joe Biden repeatedly said, oh, yeah, we'd come to the defense of them. And then every time his National Security Council would come back and say, no, no, no, he was just simplifying and saying something that was a little bit frank. In reality, our position hasn't changed. We basically saw the same thing here happened the other direction, where President Trump said, maybe arms sales are on the table. And then we saw various US Officials say, this isn't a change in US Policy. US Policy is the same. This is just a rhetorical slip or a statement by the president. I think the Biden administration described some of it as aspirational. Maybe that's what the they would say about President Trump's statements as well. So we came out of the summit with really not much happening on the Taiwan file. No sign that arms sales were actually discussed, although there is a period of direct discussion between Xi and Trump that we don't know what was on the agenda there. So that it could have come up there. The strongest statement came from Xi basically saying, look, Taiwan is a really sensitive issue. He called it like the biggest common denominator in a way that I don't think translated quite right because it's a weird phrase to describe it as. Basically was saying like this is the issue that touches everything else. It's foundational. The United States has to walk very carefully around this issue set, which I took as a sign that there wasn't a sign of any sort of change or break or concession to the part of the Trump administration, because it was the strongest, harshest thing that I saw Xi say out of this sort of engagement. I thought of the different statements I've seen. So what should we keep our eye on for Taiwan in this leading up to this next cycle and this sort of diplomacy? I mean, is it the arms sales and seeing the level of commitment there, which we should note are cyclical, always have been. It's not as much a constant flow. You see spikes and ebbs and flows. Is it about Chinese posturing around Taiwan exercises they're pursuing? They do a lot of these naval militia exercises that use nominally civilian ships to do a variety of harassment things around Taiwan. All these gray zone warfare measures, is it seeing where they spike those up and whether that is an issue the Trump administration is willing to raise? What are the lines we should be monitoring to know what this summit actually may have meant for Taiwan, given that we can't really tell right now?
- [29:35]
Ben Wittes
Well, there are a few things. So one is rhetoric. And Chinese rhetoric on this subject is generally pretty consistent. So US Rhetoric is actually the huge variable here. And in a way that you don't take any single statement seriously about Ukraine, but you do take the overall tone over time about Ukraine very seriously. I think there's something similar to do with respect to Taiwan. Right. That there's a, you know, Trump can say anything at any given time. And so the fact that he says once that weapon sales are on the table doesn't particularly concern me. It concerns me because it can sends the Chinese the wrong message, but it's not in the broad scheme of things, it gets triaged out. What doesn't get triaged out is a longer term pattern of suggesting that this really isn't our problem and that this is China's sphere of influence. And, you know, we care. As long as they leave us alone about Latin America, we're not going to fight with them. About, you know, fights with the Philippines, about fisheries or the South China Sea. Right. And you do want to see a kind of a continuity in, in that regard. And that's the area that I'm most concerned about. You know, and it's not just Taiwan. It's, it's South Korea, it's Japan. It's, you know, it's our basic commitments in that region. Do we see that as something that is, you know, permanent? Do we see it as something that we would trade away for enough soy bean and you and Boeing purchases, Do we see it as something that we say is permanent until the day we traded away for more soybean purchases? Right. Like, and I do think the aggregate statements over time, the aggregate tone that we're setting really is the major indicator of our behavior. The major indicator of China's behavior involves you cannot invade Taiwan without a very significant military buildup. Invading Taiwan is very hard because it's quite mountainous. So, you know, there are visible signs that you would see long before anything happened that there's no way to do a surprise attack. Right. And so, you know, you are at some level looking for forced behavior changes, overt preparations to do all kinds of things. Right. And then finally, I don't think the question is severable from a certain set of text questions. And the reason for that is that Taiwan is still the world's producer of chips. And Taiwan does have this insurance policy which is that the world operates off of its, off of technology that is physically made there and that is very difficult to replicate anywhere else because building chip fabs is a super complicated and not a short term endeavor. And so you're looking for evidence that the Chinese are actually doing that. So those are the things that I kind of loosely keep an eye on. But I, this is not, I'm sure I'm not the person who has the best answer to that question.
- [33:40]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, before we break on this topic, I do want to circle back to the other t the technology point. And Kari, I want to come to you on this because this intersects a lot with this trade and investment questions. We saw a kind of panel of leading tech CEOs go with President Trump on the summit. Tim Cook of Apple, elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla and a bunch of other stuff. Jensen Wang of Nvidia, I can't remember there. I think there may be one or two other ones as well. They didn't appear to come back with anything concrete, although they all came with a couple of big agenda items, mostly seeking greater access to markets In China, to some extent, there are some supply chain issues, production issues that I think they're aiming to secure. And we've been, particularly in the AI space and the Nvidia space. We're in this kind of unique position where the Trump administration, I think just days before the summit, gave final approval to a specific list of 10 Chinese companies to be recipients and be able to sell the H200 chip, a very high end chipset that Nvidia has developed that was being criticized. Trump administration been criticized for authorizing this to sail to China because people worry it will kind of help jumpstart and accelerate their AI development. But now we're in this awkward position where Nvidia, I think, wants to sell these things. The United States has authorized it, but China actually is the barrier because China is saying, well, we have our own supply chain concerns like the United States does. We don't want to cultivate too much reliance upon US Chipsets. And they're worried about opening the floodgates here. All this is very tied in with the broader economic relationship to some extent and the political relationship in a way. The AI issue in my mind, kind of bridges them to a large extent. So I'm just kind of curious from your perspective, what should we take away from the fact that we saw these major CEOs come on the summit and don't appear to have gotten a big opening here and is there drive for it and the fact the administration is kind of catering to it, a sign of more of a sea change posture towards China, where in the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, a big concern is that we had too much US Investment in China, too much business operations, too much IP that was being capitalized upon and illegally transferred to China, too much investment, other things that were inadvertently benefiting China and accelerating their rise. I don't think either of those administrations urged for a cutoff of those relationships, but they did want to put some guardrails on them. And here the administration, at least the posture seems to be much friendlier toward trying to push it. It's actually China that's pushing back, particularly in this chip space that's been one of the most hotly contested. So what should we make of this? Is there a big change in how the US Is posturing towards economic engagement with China? And is this summit a big sign that the Trump administration is actually wanting to go back to the older days where there was much more open investment and participation in China by US Companies? Despite these concerns that other administrations, including the first Trump administration, have had in recent years.
- [36:32]
Kari Heuserman
I don't really know. I'm sort of thinking about it in a couple of ways, one of which is this is sort of this shift to not thinking about how to discipline China to act more like us, but how to manage the fact that they aren't. And one of the aspects of this is just that competition with a very large non market economy isn't going to look like open market competition. And so you have to think about ways to manage it. And one of the things both strategically and competitively that you want to be thinking about is it isn't bad for us if China gets hooked on our chips and doesn't make their own and isn't the source of innovation. And likewise for China thinking it would be bad to get hooked on US chips and not be able to indigenize this industry because maybe there are going to be more barriers to being able to do tech transfer and some of the other ways and IP theft and some of the other ways that sort of were more of a concern several years ago. I don't really know the answer to that, but those are the sort of two pulling ends of all of these discussions is how much do you allow China to buy because it makes them more dependent on you and you have a strategic advantage there that you can then use as leverage versus being concerned that it will help advance their process. I mean, potentially what they're thinking is that the, the innovations are close enough where they are. Perhaps they're just thinking we need to capture what we can while we can because we won't be able to in five years. I, I don't really know what the calculus is here, but there are a few different ways to look at it. And I, what I really suspect is that there is a mishmash of different opinions on this and that is why we're not ending up on with a real outcome. There's three people who think, oh, we gotta get China hooked on our chips. There's three people who think, oh, we're just gonna grab millions of dollars now. And then there's three people who think there be dragons. And so we just sort of end up with a mishmash. And that's the process of governing that we're all very familiar with.
- [38:37]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, ideally you would have a process that tries to reconcile these and comes up with something more cohesive. But that is the challenge in this case as opposed to when you maybe that can explain a little bit of this ricocheting back and forth depending on who's kind of got the ear at this particular moment. Well, regardless, we have a lot to watch on these various fronts as we look forward to the next summit in the fall, the next step of the summit, diplomacy. But for today, let's go on to our second topic and look to things a little closer to home, and that is the Eastern Caribbean, which may not Eastern Caribbean, just the Caribbean generally, which may be the site of another substantial military buildup in the weeks to come. That's what a number of sources have reported to different media reports that have already reporting a spike in surveillance flights that has been a kind of growing crescendo that in the recent weeks have been particularly notable over Cuba. This is action that could obviously predate some sort of military action. It also may simply be an intimidation tactic, although particularly because, as a number of sources and some of the media reports on this have noted, the way that they're pursuing surveillance in these cases is not particularly covert. And there might be quieter ways to get information if you really needed to do it. Instead, this appears to be kind of overt, showy ways of preparing and doing things in regards to Cuba. So there's a little question about how much is substance, how much is signaling in regards to a potential military action on Cuba. We have statements by Marco Rubio, who in Cuban Independence Day released today Spanish language video, basically said the United States wants a new relationship with Cuba, but talked about how we need fundamental political change. We saw a similar message delivered by CIA Director Ratcliffe about two weeks ago when he took a trip to Cuba, Cuba to deliver sort of engagement with the government there. And this is all happening at the backdrop of pretty extreme economic measures being posed against Cuba, basically on par of what is done against Iran and North Korea and Russia involving substantial secondary. Actually, I'm not sure North Korea has secondary sanctions, but involving substantial secondary sanctions that are putting a lot more pressure on global engagement with Cuba. And this was already an economy suffering severely, particularly after losing its primary oil exporter, Venezuela, a few months ago. The economy's never been on strong footing and now appears to be quite as a result of deliberate US Policy being weakened perhaps to the breaking point. But what exactly that looks like if and when it comes, I think is a bit of an open question. That's a very long preface to turn to you on, Ben, and ask you about what do you make of all of this? I mean, what is the Trump administration's objective in regard to Cuba? I think we can take on their face with their objectives, what they would happen if they want, but what is their willingness to what steps are they willing to do to follow it through? Is military action really likely to be on the table in your view? Is it that we're going to continue the economic sanctions until something breaks? And something may or may not break at a certain point. I'm kind of curious about how you're reading the tea leaves about what the administration may or may not be intending here.
- [41:41]
Ben Wittes
Well, I'm going to interpret your question as actually coming to two different Benjamin Wittises. There is the Benjamin Wittes who lived 56 years of his life until the Venezuela operation followed by the Iran operation. And then there is the Benjamin Wittes who is very young, he's only a few months old, but who has the experience of those two, as the president calls them excursions. And I would say if you're asking the 56 year old Benjamin Wittes this question, the answer is I assume this is all just intimidation and is a effort to thump chests and be demonstrative in a fashion that will cause people in Havana to maybe turn over Raul Castro for trial, though he is 94 and will maybe cause concessions on frankly long overdue political reforms. But if you ask the I would say both older and wiser Benjamin Wittes. But really what I mean is the baby Benjamin Wittes who was born a the day that we I woke up and found out we had invaded Venezuela and who matured when we attacked Iran over two successive periods, I would say we're preparing for a military operation against Cuba and the pretext for it is going to be effectuating a warrant involving Raul Castro. And even if you don't think that that is correct as a predictive matter of the greatest likelihood, you kind of have to act like it is because it's certainly the pattern. And well, they don't seem to be bluffing about attacking countries with insufficient planning. And they do seem to love blowing things up. And so I just take it at face value at this point that that, you know, Venezuela from their point of view worked very well and produced a some good press. Iran didn't work well and produced a lot of bad press that they're still dealing with. But there's a shiny new object that they think that, you know, it's hard to lower gas prices or effectuate domestic policy objectives, particularly if you can't pass any legislation. But blowing things up is always in foreign jurisdictions, is always an available option because Congress doesn't enforce war powers principles anymore at all. And so you can just do it. And the attraction of that as the pointy head of a spear in order to be able to claim short term gains is always there. And, and you know, bringing down the Cuban regime is a long term policy objective of many conservatives and some non conservatives as well. And so this is an opportunity to do it. And I just assume that this is the next picture of uncongressionally authorized regime change wars and mini wars that the administration plans and fights for domestic political reasons of its own.
- [45:37]
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Ben Wittes
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- [48:26]
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- [49:58]
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- [50:31]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, it is interesting. I will say. One thing I think is worth disaggregating is the Iran and the Venezuela operations, which, because they're both regime change proximate military action, there's clearly a relationship psychologically between the two in how President Trump and other people around him seem to conceive of it. They're really very different operations in their strategic goals and scope and the lead up to them. The Iran operation, while there's lots to criticize about it, was something that's been in the works in a way for decades and went in with a much more ambitious agenda. I mean, the Israeli government was very clear. Our objective is set aside the regime change part of it, which is part of it is to just decimate Iran's military capability. It's to remove a regional actor from being able to directly threaten us. Here in Cuba and in Venezuela, you have a case where it's much more discrete objectives. It appears to be primarily a concern with the regime. What we forget, I think easily is that up until the Maduro operation actually happened, the Trump administration had been very solicitous to Maduro and other people in the administration basically saying, we're going to give you a golden retirement. This was an offer he'd made just a week before the operation started. We will give you a golden retirement if you step out from power and hand it over to somebody else and start enacting some of these reforms we want to see in your economy and in your political system. Maduro ultimately didn't and he kind of flaunted it in front of Trump's face. And that supposedly, at least according to reporting, is what led President Trump to authorize this military operation that had been developed as one option, but always one of several options that they could execute on. So if I were to fit this into a pattern, it seems to fit into that Venezuela pattern, which does ultimately lead to a military action, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's military action with the strategic goals of what Iran. I don't think actually the Trump administration wants to and it probably at this point hopefully would recognize it'd be very hard for it to actually occupy Cuba in a meaningful way because that requires funds, support from Congress and a lot long term commitment. Then they're clearly going to have support for and that they're already running into those barriers against Iran a much more where they had a better political situation. But that doesn't mean. I don't think you're right, Ben, that they won't necessarily maybe try the Maduro move again for their time, a much more limited thing. Hopefully you get a different regime in there, especially because there's a sense that opposition to the Cuban regime has been an issue and that there's always been the sense that there are opposition figures that would be willing to work with the United States out there and about. Although I don't think we have a real concrete sense of that. My sense is in regard to Cuba like we might have 20 years ago.
- [53:00]
Ben Wittes
Pardon me for interrupting, but I think your brief monologue here contains more strategic thinking about the problem than the entire administration above the career level has engaged in about this enterprise. I want to translate Scott's version of this thought into the way that it is actually being thought about within the administration, which is Marco Rubio wants to take out the Cuban regime, and Pete Hegseth loves blowing things up. And by the way, Marco Rubio is also the national security advisor, so there's kind of no adult supervision in that infrastructure. And the president wants an out from Iran that makes him look like he's a decisive. And so you've just engaged in a level of like, I don't believe that anybody at the political level is having any conversation at the level of sophistication that your description just gave.
- [54:17]
Scott R. Anderson
We'll have to see. Hopefully somebody is. We'll have to see. Kari, I want to come to you on another aspect of this, and that is the economic toolkit that we're seeing the Trump administration lean on most directly here. We haven't seen direct military action against Cuba other than, you know, we have this blockade that has maritime elements, we have surveillance flights, stuff like that. We haven't seen direct military action. Talk to us about what we know about these sorts of very aggressive sanctions campaigns and their ability to achieve this sort of regime change. I mean, we've seen the Trump administration do something very similar in regard to Iran. Iran, in some way, though, is a much more complicated target than Cuba is during the first Trump administration. That's the maximum pressure campaign. Obviously, it didn't work because we are now back during the second Trump administration at war with Iran. That's the same regime. That regime was in place until president killed it or killed the supreme leader in March. And so what should we expect if the Trump administration is limited to this economic toolkit? Should they reasonably be able to expect it to actually deliver the sort of results they want, like regime change or reform or what does that depend on? What are the circumstances where that might work or might not work in your sense?
- [55:26]
Kari Heuserman
Yeah, Scott, you and I have talked about this a lot, so I'm glad you asked. But, yeah, I think what we're doing now, I wouldn't call that straight economic sanctions. I think there is we have long used sanctions and lots of them, and assumed that more sanctions would be more pressure and be more difficult. And I don't think that's borne out in terms of if your objective is the same thing that a military invasion could accomplish. I think economic sanctions can put a lot of pressure on a regime. It can be very costly. It can be a real penalty. It can really prevent a regime from carrying out things it might have otherwise done. But we haven't seen a lot of circumstances where economic sanctions alone take down a regime. So I think, though, that what you're talking about with a blockade and with harassment is more like hybrid warfare, which is what we're seeing a lot emerge with Russia and Europe. But this is kind of a different way of operating with this sort of economic and quasi grade kind of military esque tools. And then there's the sort of real kinetic operations that are the third level and there's sort of a threat between them. And I think what we're seeing is a lot of sanctions paired with this sort of hybrid approach with a stronger, stronger threat of kinetic activity. And I think that's, that is pretty different. I don't know if that will work, but it will, sure, you know, cause increased economic pain. What I think is really kind of interesting with the, if the new carry post Venezuela thinks is really interesting is it also seems like we're kind of departing from the sort of you break it, you bought it theory. We are going to have, we are doing this for regime change and then we're going to ensure the regime change is there and we're going to do reconstruction and all this stuff. So even if we do have this, you know, we take down the Cuban regime, then what comes next, I'm not sure how stabilizing and how quickly that improves the material, economic and political conditions that are currently in Cuba, which are different from how Venezuela was, which was dire, but not to this level. And I'm, I'm kind of interested in how that would go ahead without allies and without Congress providing the kind of resources. What the next step is, is, is also really interesting to me.
- [57:51]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah, I mean it's, it's a really big question and it is worth bearing in mind this administration is in such a dramatically weaker posture domestically politically now than it was in March or than especially it was in January. We have to bear in mind this administration now, as we've seen just the last few weeks, it's post Republican primary season. Now in a lot of cases that means that there are a lot of Republican legislators that are looking to the general or in the case of people like John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy and other folks, people who might have a beef with the Trump administration, not feel a lot of desire to act loyally with them now that they've been defeated by usually Trump backed rivals in primaries. And so the congressional situation was really narrow margin. Republicans controlled Congress in the first place. The odds of them getting anything more out of this Congress is extremely low. And the next Congress is not looking a lot friendlier unless they really pull a rabbit out of the hat at the election. So long term costly efforts. If there is a strategic reasoning happening, which maybe Ben's right, that there isn't. But if there's any sort of that calculation happening, that gets really, really expensive, really hard and you really can't do it that easily without Congress. You can do a lot of damage and a lot of physical harm to another country. But the sort of long term presence you would need, and particularly if it involves ground troops, that you would need to steer and recreate a political system if you completely annihilate it just is a type of mission that I think even this administration has to be getting to wrestling with the terms of the fact that it might be beyond its reach to do without Congress because that's the limit it's running up to against Iran right now. And that's not to happen. Say that like two wars happening at the same time. It's also something that I think will raise a lot of concerns on Congress. So I actually think there's like reasons to think the administration may not have that card to play. But maybe that's a reason why it's willing to take terms that it might not have taken in the Venezuela case. And there is a space for negotiation here. I think that's a real possibility. Now I also thought that was the case in Maduro and Iran. I always think there's a possibility of negotiation and maybe they're not willing to go that far.
- [59:48]
Ben Wittes
I'm just waiting for the new Scott to emerge like the way the new Benjamin emerged. That just doesn't believe the things I used to believe anymore.
- [59:57]
Scott R. Anderson
I told, I mean I totally get. I would not rule at all the possibly them doing something particularly Maduro size off the table at all. I think you have to take that seriously. I think Cubans have to as well. But I do wonder whether they may be willing to take less beneficial terms that they can actually reach on this. But we'll have to see. Well, we have a third topic I want to get to before we run out of time today and that is some interesting litigation happening here at the home front, but litigation that has implications for the whole rest of the world and that is yet another round of tariff litigation of which there's a couple of actual matters happening. But one main one, we're going to talk about the Court of International Trade which is essentially the court of first instance for trade disputes. It's a three judge panel. Don't get confused. It's still basically a trial court. It just works a little differently. In the Court of International Trade has issued a ruling against the Section 122 tariffs that President Trump installed. These are 10% across the board tariffs that after the Learning Resources decision came down in February, which ended the Trump administration tariffs that were based on the International Emergency Economic Powers act, they quickly came with these 122 tariffs that basically said, we are going to impose these and keep these in, and then they're allowed for only a fixed period of time. I'm blanking on the exact, exact term now. Do you remember, what is it? 250 days? Is that?
- [61:09]
Kari Heuserman
I think it's 100. I don't know. July. It's done in July.
- [61:12]
Scott R. Anderson
July. Okay. Okay, good. If It's July, it's 150 days. So it's 100 sometime in July, where they would be extended to. If they're still in place, and they are still in place because this decision was put on hold by the appellate court, they'll last till July. And then the understanding, I think they said this quite openly, that the administration will be preparing 301 and 232 tariffs, the kind of more conventional, both trade related and national security related tariff measures and tariff authorities that they've just opted not to use thus far at scale, like opting, I said for ieipa, they're going to set that up and do all the procedural measure it takes to install those. Now, getting 122 struck down would be a problem for the administration, but it would be a problem of a couple of months because in theory, they're going to have these 301 and 232 tariffs. They will be able to kick back in whether or not the 122 tariffs are still in place or not with that 10% sort of threshold. But it's still a big indicator that another tool seems to be being taken out of the Trump administration's toolkit because the Court of National Trade basically said the statute doesn't apply anymore. The statute is tied specifically to balance of payments issues. And they basically said, as I understand, although car, you should correct me, that the sort of balance of payments was tied to the old gold standard that we don't have anymore, and that since we moved away from that system, it actually doesn't really make sense in this current economic environment, and said basically 122 tariffs don't exist anymore. So that brings us to the big question which I want to pose to you, Kari. Let's assume for a moment that that holds and I think we can get into why. But I think there's a good chance that actually holds on appeal. What does that mean for the toolkit that's left to the Trump administration to be able to pursue its pretty aggressive tariff policies? It presumably chose IEEPA for a reason. So what is it about 301 and 232 that might prove a hindrance, why they wouldn't have been the authorities of first instance. They turn to to try and address these broader tariff policies that it's advancing. And what does it mean in terms of what we're likely to see, how we're likely to see tariffs be used by Trump administration over the next two and a half years? It still has an office.
- [63:10]
Kari Heuserman
Yeah. I mean, I think the main thing is that they're not as flexible and they're not as immediate. The IPA authority under the original thinking of the Trump administration is you can say tomorrow we're putting tariffs on Colombia. If they don't take our migration immigrants, they can be raised, lowered, and didn't need a lot of justification for that. The thing about the Section 301 tariffs are that they require an investigation and they require public notice and comment, and they require USTR to link the tariffs to a specific unfair trading practice. And you have to talk to the countries and you got to talk to the public and you got to write up a big long report describing this unfair trade practice and the evidence that you have have that it exists. So that's 301. 232 is similar. 232. The Department of Commerce has to do a big long investigation saying imports threaten national security for this reason. And you have obligations to the public on those. So they take a while to put in place. Now, you guys will correct everything I'm about to say, because you are the legal experts. But my understanding is that once these investigations are done, and it's not by observation as well from having these in place before, once that investigation is in place, the president does regain some of that flexibility to go up, to go down, to go left, to go right. So 301, I think, is the instrument. There's two big investigations of many of our trading partners that are ongoing. They've just gone through the sort of public notice and comment period. And presumably the lawyers at USTR are busy writing their reports, deciding what the tariff remedies are. And I think, you know, most businesses and trading partners kind of think that these are really going to be the vehicles to rebuild the tariff architecture that was put in place by ieepa, which has changed in some ways because there has been some exclusions over time some products have been removed from those broad tariffs. And I think economically what matters is the expectation that, that the administration is still committed to high tariffs and has ways to pursue it. Section 232 is a little different. Those tariffs have never been struck down. We have tariffs under section 232, this National Security Authority, very broad set of investigations, much broader than has historically been the case. They have been very rare and very narrowly pursued until the first Trump administration initiated some. And the only two that really went all the way through in the first Trump administration were the steel and aluminum. Now we have, I think, 12 section 232 designations or actions on 12 different sectors. Section 232 is a little different because it doesn't go by country, which the President really wants to be able to kind of pull strings bilaterally and use tariffs as leverage in that way, which section 301 I think could allow. Section 232 goes by industry, and you have a little bit of bilateral flexibility there. And the, the Biden administration negotiated with allies some relief from the steel and aluminum tariffs, which they left in place from the first Trump administration. But, you know, covering the entire economy with section 232 tariffs is a little bit harder. But I think it's possible that, as you know, the Section 301 investigation goes forward and you start to see what's exempt and what's not, you might see them adding additional Section 232 investigations. I don't know. That just seems like a more treacherous route. You know, I think the, the bigger story, beyond sort of the instruments that the administration can use, is that, you know, tariffs are just no longer being used as trade remedies. They're sort of these general purpose tools of economic statecraft for leverage, for bargaining pressure for industrial policy. And, you know, I think the argument here that a lot of this section 232 and 301 is about, about rebuilding industrial capacity and reducing dangerous vulnerabilities and isn't just about extracting leverage. I think that's probably true, but I think the jury's really still out on whether these tools are actually building more competitive and strategically valuable industrial capacity in the United States. I think there's a pretty big risk that these sectors just come to depend on continuing protection and political management over time. And, you know, that's the thing I'm keeping my eye on.
- [67:32]
Scott R. Anderson
It's really fascinating evolution we've had here. And I want to throw one more flag in here, which I think I flagged on this podcast, and other podcasts a few times. Kari, I know you and I have talked about this, which is that I think the 122 tariffs, while this is a very important set of litigation to bear on, it actually is not the most consequential tariff litigation still ongoing. There is a case currently awaiting potential cert before the Supreme Court. This is the HMTX case that challenges the ability under the 301 tariff regime to modify the tariffs that are imposed as a result of the initial report. That's conducted as the factual predicate of the imposition of tariffs. And that's actually really huge. I mean, in this case, the plaintiffs allege essentially that the original finding for the 301 tariffs, which I think was in 2016 or 17 or 18, this was the original Trump tariffs that were imposed and then maintained by the Biden administration, that the actual tariffs being imposed on the basis of that same finding over the subsequent almost 10 years has increased sevenfold from the original measures. And they've argued in a way that I think is intuitively very persuasive. Hey, look, you are really doing things here that have no relationship to this original finding, which is not the structure intended by Congress. The Federal Circuit was very generous to them and said, no, the statute gives express authority to modify things. This is just modifying things. And that kind of makes sense from the lens through which I think courts have generally viewed trade and economic authorities and frankly foreign relations authorities more generally, highly deferential, giving a lot of oomph to the executive branch to interpret somewhat open ended statutory language. But I don't know if that still holds after Learning Resources, because Learning Resources says expressly that taxation power is a core congressional authority. If it's going to delegate it, it's going to delegate it expressly. And I do think that means you have to read statutory terms somewhat more narrowly if you're talking about taxation authority. And that's exactly what the Supreme Court did for IPA and Learning Resources. So I'm not sure. I'm really curious to see what the Supreme Court does with us. So coincidentally, just in the last, I think last week we saw the government finally file their opposition to the petition for cert. So in the next few weeks or months, we're going to get the Supreme Court weighing in on whether it'll actually take up this matter or not. I'm kind of curious whether it ends up vacating the opinion and remanding back to the Federal Circuit to say Learning Resources maybe change things here. You should reassess your decision in light of Learning resources because there's clear aspects of learning resources and how it constructs the constitutional framework around these authorities that to me seems to bear like it would bear just as much on the 301 tariffs. And that would be such a bigger problem for the Trump administration moving forward because it means that they would have to redo this six or seven month process before, if it wanted to ever modify things beyond whatever scale they deem is appropriate for this modification language. And in the 232 context, I don't believe there is an express modification provision at all. I think it's something the executive branch has been doing as basically asserting like an implied authority to do it. But if you follow learning resources, which says you should be looking for express statutory delegation, that's an argument that's hard to hold water. So I don't know, I think there may be a lot big more pain coming to the Trump administration on this particular front.
- [70:44]
Kari Heuserman
And I think it goes beyond that too, Scott, because I think you're right that the Trump administration has tried to totally reorient US Tariff architecture using very narrow delegations of congressional authority and sort of winking and nodding at yeah, yeah, you know, there's structural overcapacity over here. I mean, they don't have.
- [71:04]
Scott R. Anderson
I like that you did a gangster voice when you said that. That's good. Kari also has a long cigarette in her hand and one of those hats with the little veils in case anybody can't see the video.
- [71:13]
Kari Heuserman
In my mind, I'm a totally different person. But I mean, I think also there are some real needs to perhaps adjust our tariff architecture materially in response to China. And if we don't have the tools that we think we do, then we do have to ask Congress to do things. And that is a challenge as well.
- [71:32]
Scott R. Anderson
Yeah. And that is a lot harder sell for the Trump administration now than it would have been a year ago, which may lead them to regret some of their choices at front end. But regardless, we are going to have more time to talk about this in the weeks and months to come. These issues are going to be with us for at least the next two and a half years, if not longer. For now we are out of time. But this would not be rational security if we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come. Ben, what did you bring for us this week?
- [71:54]
Ben Wittes
So I have spent the last few weeks revolutionizing my understanding of AI. And the reason for this is that I have done my first substantial project that is or My first set of substantial projects that are AI based. And they began with an effort by one of my colleagues to identify all of the cases in the United States in which the administration was accused of violating court orders. And this project was so meaningfully effectuated by our ability to deploy CLAUDE on writing software, to collect data, to evaluate data for human, to tee up human decisions, and then ultimately to write a piece of software to present all of this data on lawfare that I dove into trying to write a piece of software that would generalize these tools and would allow anybody to search very large data sets of court dockets across jurisdiction, across subject matter, and to do that with the assistance of their large language model of choice. And this weekend I finished a working prototype of what we call Ragtime. And we call it Ragtime because RAG is an abbreviation for Retrieval Augmented Generation. And I am super pumped by it and have become an enthusiast of large language models. Going from being a. The most skeptical of skeptics of them only a very short number of weeks ago. I don't think people should be using them for their writing. But I do think that if you are somebody who is doing any work that involves data or research or large amounts of processing of stuff, and you are not experimenting with how you can do it better, more powerfully with ChatGPT or Claude, which is my favorite model, or Gemini or something else, you are probably missing something big about how you could be doing cool stuff. And my suggestion for how to get started is to sit down with the. This is literally how I started. I said to Claude, I want to find every single case in which the government has violated a court order. Can you help me do that? And this began a giant process of software development. And so what I would say is sit down in front of a large language model, you choose which one you want to use. I don't want to get into the.
- [75:22]
Scott R. Anderson
Do we got to pay for the endorsements guys you got to pay for
- [75:26]
Ben Wittes
because of the Department of Defense? Do we Love or hate ChatGPT because of Sam Altman and, you know, Ronan Farrow? Do we love or hate Google? Because Google, I'm not getting into any of that. You choose which model you want to do and then think of the most crazily ambitious project you can think of that is within your, that you have some genuine expertise with, and just tell it you want to do that and start going down a road and you're going to be surprised at what you can do with this. And instead of thinking about it as something that's threatening you and it's going to take away your job, which it might think of it as something that is going to radically empower you between now and then.
- [76:14]
Scott R. Anderson
It's a good description. Endorsement Ben the rank thing Ben has put together is genuinely amazing. People should check it out if and when it's public and particularly like use the get an API key and try it with the LLM integration. It is really, really impressive and you can do really great things. I spent three hours, maybe four hours the other day with Claude and developed a thing that let me scrape hundreds of thousands of pages of diplomatic records off of government databases and put it in one searchable thing to query very detailed technical discussions of legal issues 100 ago. Like it's pretty crazy what you can do if you just ask it to tell you how to do it. So it is kind of amazing. It is going to put us all out of work, but it'll be a fun ride till we get there and maybe it'll. Maybe it'll keep us all from having to work. Maybe we'll get there, we'll all get a UBI and we can all just retire at some point. Well for my object lessons I will go a slightly less heady route. I'm actually going to recycle an endorsement but put a different gloss on it a couple of weeks, maybe months ago at this point Shane Harris, co host emeritus of Rational Security when he was on gave an endorsement to a man on the inside in his object lesson. This is a newish I guess second season was new ish to Danson show where he is a as Ted Danson is an 80ish year old man who is I think an engineering professor who goes undercover in a retirement home to help investigate something with a PI and it's this kind of like story about being the first season's a retirement home. The second season is a similar thing about university like a small college. Shane shared it because he thought it was very clever and charming which it is and it had some good spycraft in it which I can't really testify to. So I would take Shane's word on it. What I will say though having watched it more recently both seasons is it is charming, it's interesting. It is like the perfect show for middle aged people. A club I've joined somewhat recently I will say but have felt like in my soul I've been in for most of my life because the whole show is about well it has this kind of pretext of oh we're undercover investigating this thing. It's really about the, like, these human relationships, about how somebody deals with aging and how his kids deal with the fact that they've lost their mother and he's lost his wife. And then he gets in a new relationship and starts wrestling with the ideas of aging, of kids aging and becoming adults, of all these different things that are tied in with real adulting. As a colleague of mine at Lawfare and I often take a breather to talk about and it's something really hard, challenging stuff. But the show is so incredibly empathetic about it in a way that has a light touch. Like it's not super heavy contemplation on these things, but it deals with them seriously and with a lot of empathy. And it's kind of extraordinary for that. I haven't found that many shows that strike that right balance. I think the Good Place is the last show I watched that I felt gave that balance of dealing with serious things empathetically but still being funny and clever and enjoyable to watch. And this did it. And Ted Danson's like the most charming man in the world, which is great. And he dressed like a king. So I highly recommend this show. But the different glass. If you're not entranced by the spycraft angle Shane gave you, I strongly encourage you to check it out. If you're looking for a light show with a lot of heart, I really quite enjoyed it. My wife and I have been watching the last couple nights and have really enjoyed it. With that Kari, we've given you the spectrum from very serious and useful to the opposite. Where do you choose to land? What do you have for us for an object lesson?
- [79:22]
Kari Heuserman
I choose to land back in Norway, which is where I was yesterday. Oh, goodness. Yeah, I went for fun with friends. And I would definitely, strongly suggest thinking about spending some time kayaking in fjord and hiking mountains. It was spectacular. But, you know, I think, you know, it was a great experience. Beautiful country, beautiful scenery, kind people. But I will say one of the things I'm taking away from that trip and a recent one to Canada is that, you know, I've spent a lot of years and years as an adult traveling around the world as an American. And there have been times, times in the past where our, you know, fellow global citizens are very disappointed in the United States for extraterritorial renditions or torture or tariffs or one thing or another. And it does seem, though, that there is a bit of a break. It used to be sort of that, you know, people would. You'd encounter and say you were from the United States would say, oh, I'm not fan of Ukraine government, but I don't feel differently about Americans. I'm starting to feel that we got scolded about democracy multiple times and it felt more personal than it usually does from just people you come across on a mountain. And you know, I in both, both Canada and Norway, countries that have long ties, I grew up near Canada and my ancestors came from Norway. And so I feel like close to these people. And they, I think have never felt so far apart from the United States. And I think much as the experience of the COVID 19 pandemic gave sort of a tangible sense of what it would mean to have sort of a disruption in supply of things that we need made us a little bit more willing to think about putting up barriers. In that way, I think there will be this sort of tangible legacy of the way that the United States is treating its allies and partners that changes fundamentally for a very long time the
- [81:22]
Scott R. Anderson
way that we interact, hopefully for the better. Although we'll see a record on that is not great might be part of the problem in the first place. To say the least, our learning curve is not always a steep one. Well, regardless, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Rational Security is of course a production of Lawfare, so be sure to visit lawfairmedia.org for our show page, for links to past episodes episodes for our written work and the written work of other Lawfare contributors, and for information, Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media. Wherever you socialize your media, be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast, among other special benefits. For more information, visit lawfaremedia.org support our audio engineer and producer this week was Noam Osband of Go Rodeo. Under Music as Always was performed by Sophia Yan, where once again, edited by the wonderful Jeff and Patcha. Behalf of my guests Ben and Kari, I am Scott or Anderson. We'll talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.
- [82:25]
Chelsea Clinton
Do you ever find yourself scrolling through headlines and thinking, possibly screaming, at least on the inside, that can't be true. There's rising rates of vaccine preventable diseases and someone on the Internet saying that watermelon juice is a natural alternative to sunscreen. Just no. I'm Chelsea Clinton and that can't be True is back for season three. My guests and I cut through a lot of chaos to help all of us understand what is true, what is overblown and what's false.