← The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer
Does China’s Military Purge Raise the Risk Over Taiwan? (with Evan Osnos)
01:17:06
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Close your eyes. Listen to Monday.com feel the sensation of an AI work platform, so flexible and intuitive it feels like it was built just for you. Now open your eyes, go to Monday.com, start for free, and finally breathe.
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I'm Estad Herndon and this week on Today Explained, I traveled to Minneapolis to speak with Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is suing the Trump administration over ice descending on his state. It would mean that we had federal.
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Active duty troops patrolling our streets, which.
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Is concerning because the way ice does its business is been proven over and over again to be deeply problematic. New episodes of Today Explained drop every day of the week wherever you get your podcasts and you can now watch our Saturday interviews@YouTube.com FOX One thing that really stood out to me that was totally different from what you hear from Chinese diplomats or even from Xi Jinping is when he talked about the willingness of China to actually confront the United States. He said something along the lines of, we don't want to go to war, but we're ready for war and if you want to fight us, we'll fight you. I've never heard anything like that from another Chinese leader. Welcome to the long game. I'm Jake Sullivan.
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I'm John Finer.
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So, John, it's a big day for us, a banner day. We have our first guest on the podcast today.
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Very exciting and with much fanfare, more fanfare than usual. I'd like to welcome our good friend Evan Osnos to the long game. Evan, among many other things, is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He's a co host of the Political Scene podcast. He's written a number of celebrated books, most recently a book called the have and have Dispatches on the Ultra Rich. But more importantly, for the purposes of this conversation, he wrote a book called Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. That book won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Evan was a foreign correspondent in China for a number of years for the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune. But I've kind of buried the lead because for my purposes, Evan's most important qualification for appearance on the podcast is that he and I shared a one bedroom apartment our senior year in college above a restaurant called the Hong Kong, which at that point was most of what both Evan and I knew about China. He subsequently learned a lot more and is going to share it with us today. So, Evan, welcome to the long game.
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It's great to be with you or back with you, John. And yeah, I've been a fan of the show and it's a pleasure to be joining you now at a particularly interesting time for China nerds, I can tell you that.
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Evan, welcome to the show. I don't have as deep of roots with you as going back to that one bedroom apartment above the Chinese restaurant, but your mother in law and my mother in law actually have a deep connection. They both served in the New Hampshire state legislature together. They used to carpool together to sessions. And for those of you who don't know, if you serve in the New Hampshire state legislature, you get paid annually $100 but you do get free tolls. So they got to that's cruise through the toll booths.
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It's true. And Jake, you know it really was that was sort of as some people know, the New Hampshire legislature is a vast demonstration of democracy. It's a very large entity. But it is sort of the essence of public service. And a lot of people go in, they serve. We run into a lot of people in New Hampshire who have been in the legislature, but we share this curious fact that both of our mother in laws do did it at a time when it was still a bold thing to be doing, raising kids and serving in public office at the same time.
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100% to your point. New Hampshire fun fact for our listeners is actually the fourth largest legislature in the English speaking world, the British Parliament, the Indian Parliament, the US Congress and then mighty New Hampshire with a population of 1.4 million people has 400 representatives in the state legislature. So it was like truly a citizen servant exercise. Anyway, that's not why people came today. But nonetheless we look forward to talking, going deep on major news out of China.
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So we are going to spend much of this session digging into what was an earthquake development over the last weekend, which was the announcement of an investigation into two senior Chinese generals, including the most senior Chinese general, Zhang Yuzhua. And what are the implications of this? Obviously first and foremost for developments in China, but also implications for the United States, for U.S. policy for stability and security in the region and beyond. This is as I think will provide additional context for not your typical news development out of a place that prides itself on stability, consistency, but is a development that is consistent with a long standing approach by the leader Xi Jinping to enforcing crackdown on corruption in the military and in the political establishment that Evan has written extensively about. And we're going to dig into his.
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Views and then we'll let Evan go and John and I will do a Red team, Blue team exercise on what this latest purge means for China's readiness and the likelihood of China actually taking action against Taiwan. So we'll come to that later in the episode. But before we dig into things on China, John Evan, I think it'd be worth us taking a couple minutes just to reflect on these remarkable, disturbing, but also inspiring developments in Minnesota. With the ice crackdown and the popular resistance, peaceful resistance, that rose up to push back against that, then the shootings of two people and now Minneapolis seems to stand in an inflection point. I actually grew up in southwest Minneapolis, just a few miles from where these shootings took place.
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That's interesting.
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I've been talking to people there constantly. I've been checking in on them. And one thing that has just really struck me throughout this is that the city of Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota, it really does have this deep spirit of community. It's deep in the political culture, in the civic culture of the place. People really look out for one another. They're kind, they really value fairness, they really value decency, and they really, really don't like mean spiritedness or something they see as just fundamental injustice. To me, the biggest outcome of all this so far, and we don't know where it's going to go, is that the people of Minnesota have shown the country how to stand up, how to exercise one's rights, how to build a movement where everyone has each other's backs, how to shine a light on the brutality and overreach of government agents. And I think other communities can learn from this going forward. And I think it has come as a surprise to President Trump and to his CBP and ICE henchmen that this community known from Minnesota, Nice. Has also shown that it's really got a steel backbone. And I think that is going to flow through to how this whole issue plays out in the rest of the country in the months ahead. But I'm curious how you guys are seeing things.
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I have to say, Jake, you and I, at least occasionally are known to mock each other's home states. I had to bite my tongue a little bit during the New Hampshire discussion, as someone who grew up in Vermont, to do just allow that to play out in all its positive glory. But I have to say what you described playing out in Minnesota has truly been inspiring. There's a dark side that we need to get to as well. The most poignant description of it that I've seen is by a writer named Adam Serwer, who's been, I think, one of the more compelling chroniclers of the Trump era for quite some time. He wrote a piece in the Atlantic called Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong. And what he said, basically, to your point about community, is if the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it neighborism, a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they come from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn't be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that, quote, it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don't want to live next to four families of strangers. Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors, whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. I thought it was a very powerful paragraph. And it does actually feel like an organic movement that is driven by people wanting to stand up for the people who live next to them and that they care about. That's the positive side. The downside to me and Evan, I'd actually be interested in your thoughts on this. Having spent so much time in China, which we'll talk about, is how quickly we seem to be descending into a society where every citizen, but even more so citizens with any sort of ambiguous immigration status, or I think, let's just be honest about it, people of color now feel obliged to walk around the country carrying documentation that shows that they have a right to be here and feel endangered if they don't happen to have that material on them because they might get stopped by some sort of law enforcement officer. The sort of thing that we heard about, read about, saw in visiting and studying authoritarian countries at different phases of our life.
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Yeah, that is the great pivot moment, the great challenge, the question of whether we are becoming the kind of country where somebody comes up and asks to see your papers. And I think a lot of us, a lot of listeners, have experience in their family history in whatever country where that is a very specific kind of place. And that's a place where the central axis is about who has power, who can force the weak to do what they want, and that weaker people have to do what is thrust upon them. And I think what has been so astonishing to see recently amid this really alarming demonstration of how fast and how brutal a government action can be in our country is to see that there are people who, faced with that decision about whether they want to descend down this sort of spiral of cynicism, really, frankly, say to themselves, I no longer trust my neighbor. I no longer trust my government. We know where that leads that leads to people who they vote less, they are less inclined to pay their taxes, they're less inclined to run for office. We talked earlier about people running for office being sort of citizen servants. Instead, what you've seen in Minnesota is people saying, no, no, this is our country. It's not actually the people who have come in and are pushing us around this way. And that is a really big difference. And so that question of whether we go down that spiral, whether we begin to look like a different country to ourselves and to the rest of the world, is on my mind. And I'm curious how guys think about it from a national security perspective. If you're another country and you're looking at the United States right now and you see the events in Minnesota and you're trying to interpret what that means about this country and where it's going. I mean, Jake, do you look at it and you say, oh, this is a country that is the same as we knew it? Or how is it changing? How is it different? And what does that mean for how people will relate to us?
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Well, as you well know, Evan, the Chinese look at the United States and have over the course of many years and see a country that they believe is in terminal decline. Xi Jinping likes to talk about how the east is rising and the west is declining. And that decline, from their perspective, is largely about political dysfunction. So I think they'll look at this and say, look, this looks like just more of the same mess in this screwed up democratic system. And it confirms our view. I think the rest of the world is looking at the United States and saying, we used to see a country we admired, that we wanted to emulate, and now we don't recognize that country anymore. And here they're looking both at what is happening with the deployment of US Personnel, ICE and CB personnel on the streets to terrorize American citizens and in some cases actually just shoot them when they're defenseless. And they see a connection with that and what President Trump is doing around the world basically saying, we are in the law of the jungle. We are in a might makes right world. The United States is now going to simply enforce its will through coercion and power, and no longer through moral persuasion or moral leadership. And I also think that there's a broader issue here that we have to pay attention to, which is a connection between President Trump's approach at home and his approach abroad. His national security strategy actually elevated migration and drugs as the paramount threats over everything else they've deployed and they've used Military force in the hemisphere consistent with that. And they've asserted authorities at home consistent with that. And the inevitable result of that is overreach. It's a national security state that really impinges on the rights of Americans. And, and I think it could lead to increasingly extreme measures in the name of keeping order, in the name of fighting the enemy, in the name of protecting the, quote, real Americans. The kinds of things John was talking about, folks feeling they have to walk around with their papers, so we have to see those grave risks. How the logic of Trump's foreign policy and the logic of his approach to, quote, fighting the enemy within are part of the same overall project. And it is a dark project. And I think when you see the people in Minnesota not being cowed, stepping up and pushing back and giving everyone else a model to follow, I think in the end, the US Will come through this. But the rest of the world's gonna watch with bated breath because the America that is coming across on their television screens now is not an America that they recognize.
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Look, it makes perfect sense, and I think we'll get to China. But the United States is obviously in a multifaceted competition with China across technological domains, military domains, economic domains. By the way, we waged a decades long massive competition with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. One area in which we, the United States, have always had a distinct advantage, until recently, I would argue, is in soft power. Very few people during the Cold War aspired to live like Soviets compared to the number that aspired to live like Americans. I think that has largely been true during the competition between the United States and China. But based on some of these images and some other aspects of developments here, that soft power advantage, I think you could make a very strong case, is eroding, and that will have implications for American strength and influence in the world alongside all these other dimensions in which we compete with the Chinese and others. I think there are plenty of people who look at American democracy as it's playing out in real time and see less to aspire to than they once did. And that's a dangerous thing for American influence. Before we even get to the impact on Americans, which is obviously the issue.
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Of paramount importance, I'll tell you guys, I think at the risk of falling into the ultimate foreign correspondent cliche, I want to tell you about a moment that I had with an Uber driver that is actually exactly on point here. I was racing to Dulles yesterday to go out of town, and we're talking about this because everybody is talking about what's happening in Minneapolis? The guy who was driving, who's a lovely guy from Sudan, who came here in the visa lottery 25 years ago, did, as a person often does when they've lived in a place of genuine, true turmoil and upheaval. They put it into some perspective. And as he said, he said, look, I never thought I would see this in the United States, but I think Americans, they actually don't know how bad things can get. And that is a really important piece of this, because I think one of the things you've seen recently, and this is what's the latest turn in Minneapolis, is very important, which is that at a certain point, the Trump administration, Trump himself, in his strange way of reading the political mood, sensed that they had tripped a wire in the public, that people. This was not something that the public could casually support. Even Trump supporters, Republicans, were beginning to agitate about the killings of civilians on the street. And so you saw these moves to try to distance themselves in limited ways from what happened. The reason why I think that's important is this is the second time that you've seen that the Trump administration can realize when the public is moving against them. The first time was during the Elon Musk period, when, to quote our, quote, Bill Gates, you remind us, he said, the sight of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest people is not a good look. It was right around that time Tesla sales were plummeting. And pretty, pretty soon thereafter, Elon Musk was shown the door in Washington. And I think there is a reminder here that when the public speaks with force and with clarity, with unity, that it can actually be heard, even in a country where our tools of taking up the public will are as impeded as they are.
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I think that's very well put. And we will now have to see how this plays out, not just in Minnesota, but what lessons, tactical and otherwise, President Trump and his people draw from this, because their overall project, their overall campaign to remake the country in this image, this terrible image they see is not going away. It has definitely suffered a setback here, as you just pointed out, Evan, So we'll continue to watch this.
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A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis and understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on The Vergecast. We're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age and what it means to make sense of it all. All that plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok and more on the Vergecast.
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Wherever you get Podcasts.
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Turning Point USA's last big event, America Fest, was held in December without founder Charlie Kirk.
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Had Kirk been alive, it might have.
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Gone differently, but it was a Ben Shapiro went ham on Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
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So no Tucker Carlson. It is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TP USA or to mirror her bullshit lines of questioning because you love Candace personally. The same holds true of Megyn Kelly.
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Kelly and Tucker hit back at Shapiro.
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To hear calls for like de platforming.
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And denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event. I'm like what? This is hilarious. I don't think we are friends anymore. I've been a very good friend to Ben.
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Nobody knew who the heck Ben Shapiro was when I started putting him on my shows on the Fox News Channel.
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Erica Kirk tried to keep it light.
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The enemy has thrown a lot of curveballs at us today. My iPad won't even turn on. Nicki Minaj was there.
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Why not?
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And those people are adult professionals. Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college students. It was a campus organization first. So what are the students thinking today? Explain. Drops every weekday.
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The world just keeps spinning faster and faster. Including these dramatic events in China that unfolded as all eyes in the United States were on Minneapolis. The Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Zhang Yu Shua. Evan can correct my pronunciation of that. This is the top uniform officer in the Chinese military. So think basically the equivalent of our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was purged. He was fired by Xi Jinping, a person with whom he had a decades long relationship. They were family friends. Their fathers fought together in the revolution. Xi actually waived the age requirements the last time around to keep Zhang in his job as the top uniformed military official, 75 years old. Also removed was General Liu, who was head of the Joint Staff Department. And that means now after these latest purges, which come after a string of firings over the last year or two, is that there is a single military officer on the entire Central Military Commission and it's the political guy, the political hack. Everyone else is gone and the removal of Zhang is an absolutely seismic event. I want to come Evan, to your immediate reaction to this when you heard the news and how you see it. But let me just for our listeners, quote from the People's Liberation Army Daily editorial. So this is a newspaper, the PLA Daily, who put out an editorial saying that these two generals, General Zhang and General Liu have quote, seriously trampled upon and undermined the CMC chairman responsibility system, seriously fueled political and corruption issues that have affect the party's absolute leadership over the military. They have had an extremely vile influence on the party, the state and the military. And it closes by saying that taking them out will, quote, eliminate toxins and malpractices and remove rot to promote healing. So not pulling their punches in terms of what they're saying about these guys. Evan, how big a deal is this and what do you make of it?
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Yeah, I will tell you, Jake, you know, I gravitated to that same editorial that was in the PLA Daily and I will add one little tiny addition too, which is not only did it say eliminate toxins and malpractices, it said from an ideological perspective. And that is a fascinating piece of it. So look, this is a very big deal. Just in simple historical terms. You have to go back a long way to find somebody of that rank, meaning the, as you say, the highest general in charge of a million member army, second only to Xi Jinping, who is the chair of the Central Military Commission. And then along. And Zhang Youxia, for the reasons you described, is both personally distinct because of his family pedigree. There is some debate among specialists about how personally close he was to Xi Jinping in these later years. They certainly came out of the same pedigree, which is very important because historically one of the things is that the Chinese, the Red elite as they're known, which are the sons and daughters of the revolutionary generation, are not quick to chuck each other overboard. And Xi Jinping has been sort of surgically and quite dramatically violating that principle over the last 14 years. And so the reason why this moment is so dramatic is a. It came as a huge shock. Oftentimes there are rumors that build for months before there's a senior purge. Not in this case. It was very rapid. The other thing was that Zhang Youxia, as being this person who had traveled widely, had met a lot of people overseas, including you, Jake. And I want to ask about that in a second. But the fact that he was so dramatically and summarily removed along with Liu Jianli, leaves Xi Jinping and this one other figure as the sole members of what has been a collective leadership model of the Chinese military. The Central Military Commission was Designed to, in a sense, prevent a Mao Zedong, to prevent a single person who could override the system. We're now back in the position where these two guys are doing it, essentially one. And from an organizational perspective, imagine yourself as the one guy left with Xi Jinping on this body. You've read the editorial about removing toxins. From an ideological perspective, that does not create an environment for a robust sharing of views, a vigorous debate, a red teaming of hard problems. So the question that we're facing in this country and around the world is what does this change about our understanding of A, China's warfighting capability B, its political stability at the highest levels? And is this a short term issue, media term issue, and onward? But I would be curious, I'd be curious, John, your sense of this. And then also, Jake, you are one of the only people I know who's actually spent any time with Zhang Youxia. And so, so a feel for this guy, I think is really important to understand just him as a human being, because it matters. In the political ecology at the top of the party.
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There have been a number of theories posited as to why this all went down. Some of them, frankly, quite lurid and colorful. One of them involving the alleged transfer of nuclear secrets to the United States gates by the Vice Chairman of the cmc. There's online chatter about there having been a gunfight involving security details from the office of the Presidency and the office of the Vice Chairman of the cmc. None of this is validated. None of this smacks of having tremendous credibility. The standard explanation, I guess, is what was written in the editorial that you both pointed to some ideological disloyalty, some measure of corruption. I'll offer a different theory that I'd welcome your reaction to, by the way. We live in a country in which the senior most military officer was dismissed at the beginning of the second term of the Trump administration. I'm not trying to draw too many equivalencies, but President Trump did fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CQ Brown, who Jake and I both worked with. He also dismissed or curtailed the careers of a number of other senior military officers, a number of whom we know and worked with in the early days of his administration. And the theory here largely was that he wanted people in these offices who had unquestioned loyalty, who would follow the orders that he gave them, and probably less a reason that they would acknowledge, but who would give him information that he would be happy digesting, not necessarily people who would bring a whole lot of Bad news to the Oval Office. That last piece that I wonder about when it comes to Zhang, because one thing he was known for is, again, according to the reports, and a lot of this is hard to know how accurate it is, was somebody who was an independent thinker, to the extent you can be within this system, who would give military advice, independent assessment. And maybe that's no longer what a system that is increasingly totalitarian, like the Chinese system, rewards and wants, and certainly not maybe what Xi Jinping wants. But what do you make of the different explanations before. Before we get to hear about what he's like in person?
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Yeah, there are these multiple theories, and they're not mutually exclusive. So I think you have to add one that you didn't go into, which is corruption. That has been the central public explanation for a military purge that has been going on since 2012 and has accelerated considerably since 2023. One of the reasons that I find credible for why it accelerated in recent years was that Xi Jinping is said to have seen Vladimir Putin's experience in Ukraine, saw that the Russian military was as weakened by corruption as it was, and he said, I might have the same problem here at home. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, of course, see a lot of themselves in one another. They're not identical, but you have to kind of remember that fact. So since 2023, he's gone after some really senior figures. So part of the thing is that there is so much corruption in the plaque that it is essentially an available tool you can take off the wall if you need to get rid of somebody. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the dispositive reason why he is removed, but it may end up becoming the basis in technical, political, and legal terms there. In his case, Zhang Youxia was also running the procurement department for five years, which is a bonanza of opportunity. Huge budgets, and you're in a position to be able to do a lot. His successor and his predecessor have both been taken in that job, the procurement job, so that's possible. I am actually. And by the way, just to the questions of those rumors, John, you're right to raise them. I tend to take with a grain of salt the idea of a gunfight at the Jingxi Hotel, only because in this day and age, there are so many people around with phone cameras that usually somebody gets a photo of a bunch of police cars with their sirens on or something. And it may be removed from the web, but we tend to find these ghostly traces of events like that when they happen, even in China, Evan, even in China. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, a couple years ago, there was like something close to a gunfight at a hotel in Beijing. And we were able to get, at that point, little traces of it. But I think to the theory of why this gets into who he is as a person. So there's been some reporting that perhaps he was turned and was providing nuclear secrets to the United States. I think there's been some push back on that theory within the crowd of China specialists. Because Zhang Youxia is not a low level, mid level, frustrated bureaucrat who can easily go off and meet with an American handler. He's somebody who is monitored all the time. His activities are closely watched, his communications are closely tracked. It'd be a big coup, let's say, for another country to have done that. More interestingly perhaps, is that this is a guy who was in the position to now have a big hand on the personnel who would come into the highest ranks in military. The theory I find most credible for what happened here, guys, is that when it was down to just these three people or four people on the Central Military Commission, Zhang Youxia's rival, a guy named Miao Hua, had already been purged. That meant that Zhang Youxia was in a position of tremendous power to block the promotion of other people or to ensure his own people came on to these very, very powerful bodies. So if you're Xi Jinping and you look out and you say there is one guy here who has disproportionate power and could end up shaping the whole personnel around me, I'm not sure I want that person to be there. That is a theory that it's less pyrotechnic than some of the others, but I think does fit what we understand about Chinese politics. But the piece of this we haven't really talked about is him personally. And, Jake, you're in a position to actually know what this guy is like. How is he different than Chinese officials?
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B
Yeah, and I think this tees up sort of my impressions of the guy having spent more than an hour with him in a meeting back in August of 2024. But before I get to that, I just, I wanna double tap the point you're making, Evan, because I think you can start, start with Xi Jinping waking up after the invasion of Ukraine and seeing the Russian military not deliver the way they told Putin they would deliver and say, hey, wait a sec, is my military gonna deliver for me? And then embark on this corruption campaign. Then he just starts removing people left and right. Including very senior people. He removes Zhang's main rival. You mentioned that. Then he removes the other CMC Vice Chair, He Weidong, a few months ago, after a power struggle between Zhang and He. And then at the end of the day, you've got Zhang here having essentially consolidated all of the power of the uniform military in his person with General Liu, the other guy who was fired, essentially being subordinate to and taking direction from Zhang. So now you got Zhang bestriding this Million man army as the top dog without any real competitors. And I think Xi looked at that and was like, wait a second. This guy's just got too much power. I think there's also in the back of Xi's mind, the history that if there's ever gonna be a coup in China, the threat of it is gonna emanate from the pla, from the People's Liberation Army. And so the idea, beyond the question of succession, who was gonna take over in the senior leadership positions, the idea that maybe this man Zhang could be a threat to Xi, I don't think it was a dominant element, but it had to be sitting there in the back of his mind. And that goes to Zhang, the man to the question you were asking, because I met with him at his headquarters in Beijing. He was flanked by about 20 generals from all the different branches of the PLA sitting in multiple rows around him and behind him. This guy was gruff, he was tough. He was very direct. He was very confident. And there was no sense that he was reading talking points. And even more importantly, there was no sense that he was kind of looking over his shoulder or measuring his words to make sure he was saying the approved things. He struck me as someone who felt he was empowered to say exactly what he thought and, in a sense, that he was allied with Xi. He was the vice chairman to Chairman Xi. But I don't think he presented himself or saw himself just as a total subordinate. It's almost like. Like he was the head of this important organization, and he had to report into the political leadership, but he kind of stood apart. And one thing that really stood out to me that was totally different from what you hear from Chinese diplomats or even from Xi Jinping, is when he talked about the willingness of China to actually confront the United States. He said something along the lines of, we don't want to go to war, but we're ready for war, and if you want to fight us, we'll fight you. I've never heard anything like that from another Chinese leader. They talk about win, win, cooperation, peaceful coexistence mutual respect, even if they're competing vigorously, it's all this flowery language. Not this guy. I will also note one other thing that stood out to me is the guy had seven foot tall women serving tea. I don't know that that's really relevant to who he was as a person.
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But it's good color, context.
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B
Sitting in the meeting, I was constantly like, what is going? Are these people on stilts, these very, very tall women to get you off your game, serving it kind of worked. I have to say.
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C
I think this was their objective on that day. I think, you know, John, you guys have been in a situation like this. You see a guy, as Jake said, where he's saying something that is off script, he's saying something bold, something distinctive. And you have to decide in that moment, is this guy freelancing? Is this guy delivering a message? I mean, you guys are both having to evaluate this. You go back, you leave that room, and when you've just had the senior figure in the Chinese military tell you that they're prepared to go to war with the United States, they don't want to, but they are prepared to. And let's point out, he is really the only senior combat veteran having served in the 1979 war in Vietnam. How do you interpret that moment to decide is this signal or is this noise?
- [36:31]
A
Two reactions to that question, to what Jake said, which is very striking to me. Sure, I think we've all been in meetings in which you have a very direct, very confident interlocutor willing to say whatever's on his mind. But very rarely do those meetings occur with senior Chinese officials. The typical diplomatic interaction with the Chinese official I think of as a meeting I was in with John Kerry when he was Secretary of State in which. And the way these meetings go, you have your talking points, they have their talking points. You could almost exchange them at the beginning of the meeting and save the time of actually going through the conversation. You know so much what they're likely to say. But in this case, John Kerry, because he has these pet issues that he occasionally raises, brought up something that was not on the list of the Chinese officials who he was talking to. I think it was Wang Yi, then the foreign minister, which was the oceans, which was a John Kerry special, and you saw panic on the other side of the table. The junior officials had clearly not prepared the Chinese foreign minister to respond to a question about the oceans. One of them actually pulled out in the meeting a laptop and then a printer and was furiously trying to get printed in the middle of this diplomatic conversation, what I can only imagine was like a talking point response on the ocean that he could then hand.
- [37:51]
B
We like oceans. Oceans are good.
- [37:53]
A
Which he couldn't. Which he couldn't execute in time. Maybe he didn't have the right court, something along those lines. But that is the typical encounter with a Chinese official. Not what Jake described. Sort of unvarnished, super confident, willing to take on every. Any topic. The other thing, though, and it's back to your Russia example as maybe being a lesson for Xi. The other lesson he could have drawn from the Russian experience is that you want military officers around you who will tell you the truth, who will tell you that what you're looking at taking on might be harder than you think it is. And I think one of the problems that Russia has had in Ukraine is that there were too few senior generals willing to tell Vladimir Putin that actually this might be a more difficult military undertaking than you believe. That has many ramifications for what we'll talk about with China, given the military operations it's contemplating potentially in Taiwan and elsewhere. But she could have drawn two lessons from what happened in Ukraine. And having more yes men around, to me is not the most obvious of the two. Seems to be the one he drew.
- [38:56]
C
I mean, this is something touching on you both addressed this point, which is the willingness of a very senior official to go off script. And the implication being if he's willing to do it in front of an American national security advisor, he's going to be willing to do it in private with Xi Jinping. And what you would want in your leadership structure is somebody who's willing to do that. This ties in very directly, frankly, to Taiwan, which you guys, I think we'll be talking about later. Because one of the more astute observations about Zhang Youxia's downfall comes to us from somebody named Drew Thompson, who worked in the government, was a military liaison who had a lot of face to face time with Jiang Youxia and saw him in some respects as you did Jake, as somebody who was willing to speak his mind. And I mean, he took him on a tour of Fort Benning in Georgia and they offered him the chance. Do you want to try some of these American weapons? All of this unclassified, this is sort of standard military tour stuff. And Zhang Youxia was the only one of these senior generals who had the confidence to say, yeah, sure, I'll get up on that M240 or whatever it was, a 50 cal gun, and try it out. And so there was a way he was a kind of soldier's soldier. Drew Thompson's takeaway from this, it's a piece that I think people should see on Substack, is that, as he said, I worry about the consequences of someone other than Zhang Youxia providing Xi Jinping with military advice. Without Zhang Youxia on the cmc, the risk of miscalculation goes up. And I think that's the puzzle where we find ourselves with Taiwan. Because the question has always been if in fact Xi Jinping has, as is often said, directed his military to be ready perhaps for an attack on Taiwan in 2027. Not guaranteed that they will by any means. But if that's true, there are a lot of questions that will surround the decision of whether they're ready. And if the only person left on the CMC is not somebody who actually has a lot of military experience is not a soldier's soldier, that makes that decision making a lot muddier. I wonder how you guys think about how this relates to Taiwan.
- [41:15]
B
I was gonna make the exact same point about Drew Thompson. I think everybody should read his piece. He spent, I think, a week with Zhang taking him around the US Back in many years ago, but got to take the measure of him to a much greater extent than I did in a hour, 90 minute meeting. And I think this basic insight that Zhang was prepared to speak his mind and was the kind of person who had a certain degree of practicality and perhaps even the caution that comes with having fought in war and having spent a lot of time over the decades thinking about the risks of potential military action. And you gotta see the PLA Daily editorial, as you pointed out earlier, as essentially a message to anyone who comes in behind him onto the Central Military Commission. You damn well better say something pleasing to Xi Jinping or you might end up facing the same fate. So I think you are gonna get a bunch of yes men. Now, there is also some interesting analysis from other China experts, experts who've been reporting over time about a debate within the Chinese military between senior people like Zhang and some of the next generation officers over how aggressive to be over Taiwan, and that Zhang was on the more cautious side. The young Turks are on the more risk acceptance side. So, look, all of that is a bit speculative but consistent, I think, with the picture that you're painting here. And John and I will come to the implications for Taiwan in a bit. Evan, you mentioned one other implication, significant potential implication of this, which is what does this say about Xi Jinping's place in his relationship with the military? Does it Raise any questions about whether there is more pushback against him across the Chinese Communist Party or within that system. Can we draw any lessons about what this will mean heading into to a potential fourth term for him coming up in 2027? Do you have a view on going beyond the military dimensions of this, how we should read the place and role of Xi Jinping within the Chinese system as a result of what we've just seen?
- [43:32]
C
Yeah, I think in terms of him personally, the context to consider is the sequence that has happened over this period when he's been the top guy. So this is now 14 years, because it is essentially a very clear series. One of the first things he did when he came in was that he disciplined the party, the Communist Party. That was when the beginning of this extended anti corruption campaign, purge. The next thing he did was that he disciplined the entrepreneurial class, the oligarchs, the people who could challenge him on the basis of their public profile and their personal fortunes. Xi Jinping is very wary of becoming the Boris Yeltsin of China. He never wants to see himself encircled and headed henpecked by powerful capitalists, by oligarchs. That's one of the things he's very mindful of. Then he went after, in a sense, disciplining the public and saying, we're gonna move back into your private lives. We're gonna talk about the importance of having children. We're gonna start to narrow that space that people had carved out personally. So that's when you saw many these rectification campaigns and political ideological campaigns. There's that word again, ideologies. Ideological. And now we've seen since 2023, the last stage of that, the last pillar of institutions in China, and that is the military. Xi Jinping is a child of a generation that believe that the PLA is, let's remind ourselves, it is not the national army of China. It is the armed wing of the Communist Party. That is a meaningful difference. It is designed to preserve and protect the party's power. Power. And he is, after all, now a chairman on a level we haven't seen since Mao Zedong. So you can read it as this is a man who is now systematically removing the conceivable challenges to his authority. And I think that's clearly what's been shown. But I don't think it gives us any insight yet to know whether he feels less secure today having removed Zhang Youxia than he did before. I think by removing him, it is a demonstration that he believed this was the way that he gets control of those personnel decisions. This is to your point, Jake, about how there are younger generals coming up who wanted to depart perhaps from the conservative line or the safer line. Xi Jinping now has control of these networks, and these are patronage networks. Every general in the Chinese leadership stands on top of a pyramid of people who owe their positions and their advancement to that person. So he is now seizing all of this in his grip. This question of succession in China of a fourth term, Jon, is something we talk about it casually. It is a wide open question. There is nobody now who is in the position of a likely successor. But I can tell you one thing that's on my mind right now is that one of the relevant pieces of history is, is that Mao Zedong had a designated successor named Lin Biao, who was a senior figure, provided military advice, departed with him on a big question about whether to bring troops into Korea. Lin Biao was then accused of being a traitor and died in a mysterious airplane crash. So there is history here. And the takeaway from my perspective is if you're a senior Chinese military figure, senior Chinese civilian political leader, leader, nobody is safe right now. That is the message that is reverberating across Beijing.
- [47:15]
B
Can I just quickly ask you, John, before you jump in? Evan, you mentioned these patronage networks and how senior generals kind of have their proteges and the people that they've promoted and put in positions throughout this massive military complex. Obviously, Zhang has done that. So there's gotta be ton of Xiang people up and down the ranks. Banks, does that mean we're going to see a rolling series of further removals or do all those folks just fall in line? Do you have any sense of what should we be watching for next actually within the pla?
- [47:49]
C
So I think in answer to that question, it's a very important one, is yes, you can see both of those things. Some people will get rolled up in the wake of this. That's part of eliminating the toxins that are left behind, behind. And then this will also be a moment where some will immediately profess their loyalty to Xi Jinping. But what I'm watching for, what's very important, is to see who comes into these jobs on the cmc. Who are the next generals who are promoted? Are they from this generation of more aggressive but untested PLA rising stars who are more inclined towards Xi Jinping's nationalist image of a nation with the power to, as he would put it, reclaim Taiwan, or is it somebody else? Because personnel is policy in their country and in ours, and in some ways, that is gonna be the thing to watch is who comes in and what kind of texture do we have. Based on their encounters with people like you and their years abroad, seeing people like Drew Thompson visiting bases, all of these little tiny encounters just generate enough of a sense of what they stand for in terms of their willingness and readiness to fight, which, let's be honest, is the bottom line question here.
- [49:12]
A
One of the things that just keeps coming back to me in listening to this, and really since this episode began, is how much it reveals the little that we know about this place that is of such just paramount importance to actually our future, our security to the world. We really are sometimes reduced to almost the old school stereotype of Kremlinology, where you're looking at who's standing next to whom in the photo and who's in what meeting and who's occupying what formal bureaucratic role because it is such an opaque system and increasingly an opaque society. I mean, Evan, you live there for a number of years. You know better than I do how things few foreign journalists are still allowed to operate inside China. You wrote this article that people should go back and read. That kind of prefigures a lot of this back in 2015, an article about Xi Jinping with a very good title, I think, Born Red, which talked about his pedigree, but also his ambitious project to reform the system and prioritize loyalty through these purges. This is now 11 years ago ago, but I think even then, foreign observers, diplomats, journalists, had more access to Chinese officials and the Chinese public than is currently the case. So in trying to kind of sort through this, what are you picking up? What are you able to pick up about how Chinese people are reacting to what has transpired, let alone the rest of the Chinese system? And is that something that is even available to us as outsiders?
- [50:53]
C
Well, I mean, you're absolutely right that we've had to kind of dust off some of our Kremlin illogical techniques, which can sound bizarre in this day and age. I mean, I lived in China for eight years, and now I go back and forth writing about it periodically. And we're now back to the point where people are doing things like counting up the number of very specific phrases. A seven character phrase, for instance. Did it appear in a speech by a certain leader? How many times did it appear this year versus last year versus versus the year before? It can feel a little bit like we're back to trying to divine the intentions of the leaders based on these really obscure elements, except for the fact that there are in some ways, patterns and rules that are useful, you can begin to see if somebody is departing from the party line. The fact that Zhang Youxia, for instance, did not pull out his printer and recite the lines could actually turn out to be really important. And we'll find out over the months ahead because it could mean that he is somebody who was perceived to be departing too far from the liturgical expectations of what you say as pledging your fealty. And fealty is the word. John, you asked about the mood among the public and I think this is true among the elites especially. The message right now is immensely clear. Xi Jinping is the dominant unchallenged and unchallengeable leader right, right now. And you'll have to remind me of this if he is removed in a coup abruptly. But this is the nature of this kinds of analysis.
- [52:30]
A
We'll have you back.
- [52:31]
C
Yes, exactly. But I think the public mood right now is, to be honest, the mood in China among regular people is down. A lot of people had their savings and their investments tied up in the property sector, which has been depressed. There is a lot of frustration. You run into it from the lowest ranking guy that you meet all the way up to the CEO who you encounter who is now probably living in Singapore to be safe rather than living in Beijing. So there is this feeling that people are uneasy, they're depressed. It's been 14 years of Xi Jinping. They're not sure what the future looks like. There is no announced successor. So among the public, public, this will be a reversion to the mean of Chinese history, which is really an emperor. And that's how it's I think being felt. And that is it sounds like a casual description except it's a stark change from the China that was so dynamic, ambitious, innovative. The thing that has been so important. I'm not writing it off by any means. An imperial China can be a very powerful entity, but it is not a place that is open to wild innovation and entrepreneurial mid level and junior officials. And that guys has been one of the keys to success in the last 50 years in China. It was giving lower and medium level mid level officials the chance to try things out. And if it worked you could apply it in other places. Those folks are now lying flat as the saying goes in China.
- [54:05]
B
Evan, I think that is a fantastic place, place to put a pin in this conversation. I don't want to say end it because we'd like to continue it in future podcasts, but that broader view, zooming out to the China of today and its personality is being shaped in the reflection of Xi Jinping. Really fascinating. And all of the implications of this seismic move against the Chinese military and its senior leadership will play out over the coming weeks. Amendment. So I hope, hope you'll come back and talk to us again. Certainly, if there is a coup against Xi Jinping, we'll do an emergency pod with you. But even if there's not such a dramatic move, this is something we want to keep watching because of its obvious dramatic effect on the world and frankly on the United States of America. So thank you. Bless you for coming on and safe travels.
- [54:55]
C
My pleasure.
- [54:56]
A
You will always be our first friend of the podcast. So thanks for doing this.
- [55:00]
C
Hear, hear. Can't take it, can't take it from me. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
- [55:20]
A
This episode is brought to you by Credit Karma. When it comes to your money, credit Karma keeps you ahead of the game.
- [55:27]
B
You can count on Credit Karma to.
- [55:29]
A
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- [55:48]
B
Alex Preddy by federal agents in Minneapolis. A moment that changes politics or a moment that changes what people take tolerate. Trump always chickens out when he meets a force he cannot overwhelm. You cannot overwhelm 70 to 75% of America seeing these videos, hearing blood turtling justifications for the execution of the kind of American you know would be shoveling the steps outside your house. I'm Preet Bharara, and this week Financial Times editor Ed Loos joins me to discuss the aftermath of the shooting and why it might mark an inflection. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. So, Jon, I think now we can turn to the last segment of the podcast, which is actually to go deeper on something that we talked with Evan about, which is what are the implications of this for the likelihood of a Taiwan contingency, an invasion of Taiwan, other military action against Taiwan. Taiwan in the relatively near term. Red team, blue team. The one side would say the odds the likelihood of Chinese military action against Taiwan have gone down. The other side will say, no, they have not gone down. If anything, maybe they've gone up. You're taking the they've gone down side. So why don't you kick us off and then I'll make the case for one, why they haven't gone down and maybe if anything, they've gone up.
- [57:21]
A
So I'm going to be making the argument that a near term intervention, military intervention of some kind in Taiwan is less likely in light of recent events. I would call this more the conventional wisdom argument, maybe a little less fun, but I think it's a strong case. So I would start by saying that if you're going to ask your military, which is what Xi Jinping would be doing, to undertake what might be the hardest military operation that any modern military has ever conducted, you would at least want to make sure that you have confidence in them. And if you just fired your top general, the person who had been put in charge of preparing for exactly that sort of operation, it is pretty clear that he does not currently have sufficient confidence in his military to undertake an operation that difficult. That's where I'd start, by the way. One reason, paradoxically, that he may have even less confidence in the absence of Xiang, is that Xiang was one of the only remaining military officers, and we talked about this a bit in the earlier conversation, who has any combat experience at all from China's 1979 war with Vietnam, which was the last conflict in which China fought. Another problem that this situation creates is now having fired basically the entire Central Military Commission, with the exception of, as you referred to him, the political guy. If the PRC does invade Taiwan in some way and it doesn't go well, there is no one left to blame. All of the potential scapegoats. And John was probably the best available scapegoat in the event of a bad turn of events from the perspective of the prc, have now been fired directly by the leader and will be replaced by Xi Jinping. So this is now totally on him. And as domineering and confident as he is, you don't get the sense that he is actually someone who wants to position himself as the commander of a military operation. And Drew Thompson had a. We talked about him earlier, had a line that was meant as humorous, but I think it's true. He's not Hitler sitting in the bunker during World War II, like moving troops around on a map. That is not the reputation that Xi Jinping has or the role that he seems to want to play. And yet he is now positioned himself as sort of the only figure of any stature left on the CMC. So the buck will stop 100% with him. I'd also say that the place where we just left off with Evan, that the purge is not Even over is another factor that is going to push this timeline likely to the right. There are hundreds, if not thousands of Xiang disciples and proteges scattered throughout the pla, who themselves will probably now be investigated, maybe removed. And that will take time. Replacing them will take time. So again, I think that cuts in the direction of a delay, finally, less maybe to do with Zhang, but more just to do with other related elements of the current moment. Xi Jinping is still seeking and succeeding in getting deals from Trump, including potentially some concessions related to Taiwan. And he has at least, we think, four chances this year in meetings with President Trump to try to extend extract more. So it would be a bit crazy for him, having now arguably backed Trump into a corner through some of the negotiations around the trade deals last year, where he is extracting concessions on technology, arguing for more concessions on U.S. policy toward Taiwan to launch an invasion that would make it impossible even for Donald Trump, who wants deals and stability with Xi Jinping to accept. And then even beyond Trump. We talked last week about, we did what we called a net assessment of where China stands in the world, where the United States stands in the world. One year after Trump's arrival, the world is moving in Xi Jinping's direction, and he is probably right to believe that right now, time is on his side. He's got Mark Carney and Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merckx next jetting off to Beijing to essentially try to improve their relations with China in light of what is happening with the United States. And poll after poll shows that China's standing in the world is rising, rising, and the US Is falling. Inside Taiwan, he has a new leader of the pro China KMT party, Cheng Liwen, who wants to meet with him and is urging Taiwan not to choose sides between the United States and China. Now, she is not yet the leader of Taiwan, but she is a popular person who has a chance to become the leader of Taiwan and could allow Xi Jinping to realize his goals potentially without military force. So, yes, he's going to be inclined to show that the plaque has not lost a step or missed a beat. He will probably take more provocative military acts. We saw the January 17 overflight of Taiwan's Pratas Islands by a Chinese soaring dragon drone. That was, by the way, the first time that China has overflown Chinese territory directly. It's alarming. So the gray zone stuff, I think, is going to continue. It's been accelerating, but that's posturing much more than, I think, preparation for military intervention. If he was intent on moving sooner. He would not remove the general who was tasked with those preparations. It's illogical. And even if he was unhappy with the progress, as some reporters have speculated, that only to me confirms and underscores that the PLA is not ready to do this. So I will leave it there and very interested in you proving me wrong.
- [62:42]
B
Well, I think that's a very good lay down systematically of why the risk of a major Taiwan contingency in the near term has gone down because of the removal of Zhang Yu, China Schwa and General Liu. I'm going to make the argument that it has not gone down and if anything, it may have gone up a little bit, but certainly has not gone down and we should not draw that lesson or gain any comfort from this. I agree with you that your position is probably closer to the conventional wisdom. But there are a number of analysts who have said this isn't going to have a big impact on his decision. His decision will be based on other things. So here's the case I would make. First, the Chinese military is a big, complex, resilient organism. It's not a brittle place where you take out a general and there's no way to replace him. You remove a bunch of four stars, you replace them with a bunch of other four stars, or you promote a bunch of three stars. You made the point, John, when we were talking to Evan, that President Trump removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a number of other very senior generals at the start of his term.
- [63:46]
A
Hasn'T slowed down military action.
- [63:47]
B
That's true military action from him in a number of different countries, including multiple countries the US has never attacked before in our modern history. And related to this, there is actually a not so pretty history of autocratic leaders purging their militaries and then moving pretty quickly to war. Stalin did it. Saddam did it back in the Iran Iraq war. I'm not saying that Xi Jinping is exactly Stalin or Hitler or Saddam. He's a different kind of character. But purge, then fight is actually a tried and true thing in history. So I don't think we should automatically assume the the opposite. Second, as we discussed with Evan, it's credible to think that part of the reason Xi Jinping took out Zhang was precisely because he wants to be more aggressive on Taiwan and wants military leaders who are leaning forward, not leaning backward on it. Zhang, as we know, was more likely preaching caution and prudence and practicality. This next generation of generals is preaching aggression. So you may actually get a new PLA Leadership that accelerates the timeline rather than slows it down. And connected to that, as we also discussed, younger generals have now really gotten the memo. Tell Xi Jinping what he wants to hear. So there's less of a check. If the leader said, let's go launch something on Taiwan, he's not going to get the same kind of objective advice that he would have gotten from Zhang and Liu and some of the other other guys that he's now kicked out. And frankly, Xi Jinping has been increasingly assertive in the Chinese Communist Party's statements about Taiwan, the insistence on reunification, the elevation of the urgency of that objective. So that points again in the direction of leaning forward rather than leaning back. And then there's this kind of element of surprise question. If the conventional wisdom is that this slave slows things down, maybe it makes Xi think, hey, if I act more boldly, I can catch people off guard. The third argument I would make is that these personnel things are not the real driver of whether the risk is rising or falling. It's rather the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is driving the risk up rather than down. You made the good point that he's got a number of meetings with Trump this year. Things are running in his direction with the rest of the world, so why would he disrupt that by acting on Taiwan? But I think you could make the exact opposite argument from the same data, namely that she looks at the new Trump doctrine, the emphasis on the Western Hemisphere, the implied notions of spheres of influence, the things that Trump has said in the past about Taiwan and not really caring that much about defending it. All of that adds up to greater Chinese freedom of maneuver in the Pacific, and specifically a deeper view on Xi's part that maybe America's not going to come defend Taiwan if China attacks. And then you have Mark Carney coming out of Davos, as we talked about last week, saying, the rules based order is gone, it's over, we're in a different world. And that probably has Xi thinking, all right, that's kind of less of a global check on me. And nothing about the removal of Xiang changes all of that. Two final points. One, Xi may be looking at the development of advanced technologies and saying, my window to go take Taiwan may be closing. Ukraine has made these remarkable strides on better defense, on using cheap drone technology at scale to keep Russia from being able to gobble up land. He may think Taiwan is actually going to learn and adopt lessons from that and make the island a harder target. So moving quicker rather than slower might have some merit. And then finally, it may not even be a full on invasion scenario we're talking about. Maybe it's more likely that it won't be, that it would be something more like a blockade or a quarantine, an armada meant to kind of force a political change in Taiwan. Frankly. Frankly, he could be pulling pages from the Trump playbook in Venezuela and or Iran. They have really been practicing this, including in the last several weeks, the Chinese military has. The US hasn't really lifted a finger in response to that. And I think they're probably operationally more ready to execute that kind of play, regardless of who's sitting in the big job in Beijing. And so if he decided we're gonna act on that at some point in 26 or into 27, I do think the plaque could be ready for that. So that's the case for why the risk has not gone down. If anything, it's gone up. This is the kind of analysis, the arguments you laid out, the arguments I've laid out that the folks in the US military are going to be looking at very closely and making their judgments about this risk as we go forward. This is exactly the kind of analysis and the kind of debate we would expect to be unfolding in the Situation Room, in the tank at the Pentagon and other places. Places and now we'll have to see. But any reaction to all of that, John, or to anything else you hear in this?
- [68:56]
A
Yeah, look, I will say it feels like a pretty close call, honestly. And much of the analysis that I laid out really applies to the very near term, call it the next year or two. Beyond that, I think undeniably the risk remains extremely high. And regardless, I think in some ways the most important point is the one started with. We cannot be complacent about the possibility that this could have accelerated the timeline. We need humility to our earlier conversation about how much we just don't know. And the best advice is always to prepare for the worst. So one of the things I was thinking about is if we were still in our old jobs, we would probably be pulling together groups of people for contingency planning about, call them low probability, high consequence event that could become more likely with the verge of Zhang political instability in China, which in some ways is the ultimate high consequence, even if it remains pretty low probability event, it's hard to imagine a more geopolitically significant thing that could happen than political instability at the top of the Chinese leadership. And then the argument that you made that this is actually going to lead to the acceleration of the Taiwan timeline. I hope that the current administration is thinking through that possibility and starting to bring smart people together to plan for what the United States would do in response, as opposed to taking its eye off the ball in favor of other parts of the world and other priorities, which sometimes seems to be the case.
- [70:25]
B
And let me close with the point that you made at the end of the conversation with Evan, and it goes to this theme of humility that you just registered. This firing of Xiang, which caught the world by surprise, including close China watchers by surprise, is such a reminder that we, there is a lot we just do not know about this very opaque system and that there is a constant element of unpredictability in all of it, both with respect to how they will act abroad and with respect to what the exact political configuration is at home. Just how secure is she? What does the next party congress look like? What really were the motivations for this? So in this podcast, the Long Game, this theme of having to make judgments and conditions of real uncertainty and without complete information is gonna keep coming up again and again. And it's nowhere more high stakes than when it comes to the US China relationship and what's happening in China. So we can expect to return to this theme again and again in the coming weeks and months, but for now, perhaps we should turn to wrap.
- [71:38]
A
Sounds good. You want to kick things off with a preview of things to come in the weeks ahead?
- [71:44]
B
Yeah. So we keep previewing that we are going to do a deep dive on this rift, this break between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, two close partners of the United States. We keep seeing dramatic events unfold and have to speak to them. But that event is itself quite dramatic. It is more slow moving in its unfolding, but quite real and has only become more interesting and more acute since we started raising it as an issue for people to watch a few weeks ago. So, Jon, you and I have to make a commitment to one another that we are going to get to this topic next week. We may be talking about Iran being bombed by the United States, but in the next couple episodes, let's make a pact right now that we're going to go deep on this issue because I think it does really have profound importance.
- [72:33]
A
So I share your preview and what I was going to put on the table is where you ended just now, which is in some ways the timeline for whether the United States is going to take military action against Iran just began, as opposed to us possibly being towards the end of it. I think the real starting point for the stopwatch was the US having sufficient military assets in the theater in the Middle east to be able to defend our forces, defend our allies, if we take action against Iran and they shoot back. We are now in that zone as of call it a day or two ago. And so I think we are very much paying close attention to whether that takes place. The president continues to threaten, it continues to tell Iran either make a deal with me of some kind without a lot of description or you're likely to face military action. He's got some track record of now of backing those threats up. He's also got some track record of backing down occasionally. So we'll see. But we are now in the zone of where this could happen, basically at any point.
- [73:36]
B
Absolutely. And we can expect that we will be on this pod talking, I think more likely than not talking about some form of marriage code military action at some point. But as you said, the window is just open. Could be this weekend, could be quite some time errors.
- [73:53]
A
John, not to underscore my own infallibility, but I think there's nothing that immediately comes to mind this week other than continue continually being wrong about the US not taking action yet against Iran, continuing to hope that I remain wrong, but feeling like it's entirely possible that ultimately we're going to be proven right and they'll do that in the next week or so.
- [74:13]
B
Okay, ditto. Let's see what happens there. And then reading recommendations.
- [74:19]
A
Yeah. So last week I think we both recommended fiction, which was unusual. Maybe for this podcast I wanted to recommend another book and it's Iran related book. It's a book called Shah of Shahs by a Polish foreign correspondent named Richard Kaposhinsky and he was a correspondent in Iran during the time of the Iranian revolution and many other places around the world as well. He writes in an almost novelistic fashion that has led some people to allege maybe not all of this is pure nonfiction, but to my mind it is the best read available on what actually went down down when the Shah was deposed, when the Iranian revolution occurred. And it reads almost like great fiction and might be a little bit of fiction in there, but Shah of Shah is by Richard Kaposhinsky to possibly preview what may be to come yet again in Iran in the days ahead.
- [75:17]
B
I have seen reference to that book recently. I've never actually read it, but I now intend to do so.
- [75:22]
A
I used to teach it in a class I teach taught on foreign correspondence to undergrads when I was in law school. So amazing.
- [75:28]
B
Amazing. I was gonna recommend the Adam Serwer essay in the Atlantic, actually in the zone of another mind meld about Minneapolis. He has just you've read some of the remarkable lines. There are many more remarkable passages in it. Can I also totally, shamelessly put in a plug for listeners to read a piece I wrote with Tal Feldman in Foreign affairs called Geopolitics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Intelligence? We try to lay out a way of thinking about the US China Tech competition and US Strategy towards AI. And I won't subject you to a lot of this, but I'd invite you all to take a look at it. End of Shameless Plug. And guys, you can find links to all of our recommendations and all of the readings that we've referenced in the show notes. So thanks everybody for listening. Thank you, John, and look forward to seeing you guys next week.
- [76:20]
A
Well, that's all for today. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Long Game.
- [76:24]
B
In the meantime, send us your questions and comments@long gameoxmedia.com and find us on substack@staytuned.substack.com the links are in the show notes.
- [76:42]
A
That's it for for this episode of the Long Game.
- [76:44]
B
If you like the show, please follow, share with friends and leave a review. It really helps listeners find us for.
- [76:51]
A
Updates and more analysis in your inbox. Join the community@staytuned.substack.com the long game is.
- [76:57]
B
A Vox Media Podcast Network Production Executive Producer Tamara Sepper Lead Editorial Producer Jennifer Indig Deputy Editor Celine Rohr Senior Producer.
- [77:08]
A
Matt Matthew Billy Video Producers Nat Weiner.
- [77:11]
B
And Adam Harris Supervising Producer Jake Kaplan.
- [77:14]
A
Associate Producer Claudia Hernandez Marketing Manager Leanna Greenway Music is by Nat Weiner. We're your hosts John Finer and Jake Sullivan.
- [77:24]
B
Thanks for listening.