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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Evan Osnos and John Cassidy on Michelle Obama’s trip to China.
00:15:52
Evan Osnos and John Cassidy on Michelle Obama's trip to China.
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- [00:00]
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Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, March 27th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. President Obama was in Europe this week to reassure allies about Russia, and First Lady Michelle Obama visited China. She spoke at Peking University.
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Evan Osnos
That's why it's so important for information and ideas to flow freely over the Internet and through the media. Because that's how we discover the truth.
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John Cassidy
That's how we learn what's really happening.
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Evan Osnos
In our communities and our country and our world.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Evan Osnos and John Cassidy join me to talk about the agendas of the two trips. Evan, you spent years reporting from China. Those were purposefully anodyne remarks, especially compared to the speech Hillary Clinton gave as first lady in Beijing in 1995 at the United Nations Conference on Women. Let's just listen to that for a second to get a sense of the contrast.
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Mint Mobile Advertiser / Asma Khalid
It is time for us to say here in Beijing and for the world.
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Dorothy Wickenden
To hear that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights and as separate from human rights. So the party leaders weren't very happy with that one. Lots has changed in China since. Obviously, though, the advances on freedom of speech and human rights aren't all that easy to pinpoint. Talk a little bit about this and what the government's reaction was to Michelle Obama's speech.
- [02:39]
Evan Osnos
Well, in some ways, the legacy of Hillary Clinton's visit to Beijing still looms large. If you talk to people in the Chinese political class, it's one of the first things they bring up with the subject of Hillary is they'll say, well, you remember when she came to China in 1995 and said these things that were very critical of the Chinese government. So in a way, that was the backdrop that Michelle Obama was confronting when trying to design this trip. And they were trying to walk a pretty fine line. The goal was, on the one hand, to do what the White House calls people to people diplomacy, to step beyond the very sensitive issues that are at the heart of the relationship with trade and human rights, obviously espionage, and to try to get to the deeper foundation, which is that these two countries have to figure out a way to get along and to promote exchange. So that was the positive side of it. And at the same time, they couldn't go over there and simply give a pass to the Chinese and say nothing of consequence. So they had to come up with a way to try to make some sort of statement without doing so much that it overshadowed the visitors.
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Dorothy Wickenden
And what was the leadership's response to Michelle's remarks?
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Evan Osnos
The leadership's response was reflected in the fact that the state media did censor the comments that she made about free expression, which, you know, basically proves the point. But then at the same time, it did not become the lead story when she said, for instance, that a country needs to have a culture of free expression to promote innovation, to promote technical creativity, the kinds of things which China is desperately trying to do. She was able to get that message across with just enough energy so that it made its way onto the Internet. People were talking about it, but it didn't strike them as a guest coming into their house and saying something uncomfortable, which is what they were trying to avoid.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and her emphasis was on education. And it was interesting that she was asked from some of the students about education in America and what they see as some of the advantages we have here.
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Evan Osnos
One of the surprises, I think, from this was that, you know, she got up in various places and talked about her own experience. For one, she talked about being an African American woman and the possibility that she never imagined that that would lead to the White House. And for Chinese listeners, there's echoes in that of what it means to be a Tibetan or what it means to be a Uyghur Muslim minority. And then, of course, she also talked about the experience of being an American student and how simply how hard it is to get into Princeton and Harvard Law School, as she did. And that deflates, I think, some of the mythology on both sides that you've got lazy American students sitting around while the Chinese are getting up before dawn and practicing piano and training for the SATs. Because both of these images are more fiction than they are reality.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Yeah. Once again, evidence of Michelle's masterful diplomacy. She's really good at this, John. It looks as though the Obama administration will never quite succeed in what it's always called its pivot to Asia. Explain the role that Obama has wanted the US to play in Asia.
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John Cassidy
Asia is the great rising power. It makes sort of strategic sense to pivot to Asia, as he said. But that raises two problems. What do you actually do in Asia? Because you immediately run into the Japanese Chinese rivalry, which is what the US has done. And where does that leave Europe? Where things are not quite as tidy as they appeared 10 years ago. So it's okay to say you're going to pivot to Asia, but I think a lot of people in Europe took that as a message that America was withdrawing to some extent from Europe. So what Obama's had to do this week is to reassure the Europeans that the Atlantic alliance still in safe hands. And I think he did a pretty good job of that. His speech in Brussels was one of his better speeches. I think he hit all the notes he really needed to hit. First of all, he needed to reply to Putin's lecture, which he delivered a week ago, remember when he sort of attacked the west for trying to undermine Russia and used the sort of lessons of history to justify the annexation of the Crimea. Obama sort of took him on point by point. Wasn't wholly convincing on some of the details, but, you know, it was a pretty successful speech. I think the White House will be pleased with the trip.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Evan, what about the right wing opponents who constantly accuse Obama and even more so in recent weeks of saber rattling, you know, without backing up his threats with force?
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Evan Osnos
Well, he's in a very difficult position because if you think about the crises that he's confronted over the course of the last year, if you think about Syria and Ukraine, the simple fact is he knows that he has very little support among the American public for intervention. In those cases, there was a poll done by Pew in December that show that support for an activist American foreign policy has dropped to its lowest level since 1964. So he doesn't have popular political backing to get involved. And yet when he doesn't get involved and when he uses essentially rhetorical tools by drawing lines in the sand, red lines, saying that things are intolerable and they must be stopped, well, then he gets beat up from the right for saying things that he can't back up with action. But I think what we've seen isand certainly the way he conducted himself in Europe is that he's comfortable going over and delivering a mixed message, trying to reassure allies who have been anxious over the last few years by saying that the United States is still involved in what he called the contest of ideas, but also signaling that, as he said, the United States is not going to be using military force to dislodge the Russians from Crimea. And that's a realisticfrankly. It's a realistic description of what the United States can and will do.
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Dorothy Wickenden
One of President Obama's tasks this week in Europe was to help ease tensions between Japan and South Korea. Tell us what that's about and how it affects his China policy.
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Evan Osnos
This has been one of the persistent and unwelcome headaches that his administration has confronted. In East Asia, you have two allies, Japan and South Korea, which are essential to America's presence in the Pacific. We have large concentrations of American troops in each country, but for their own slightly esoteric reasons, they're also involved in this very intense conflict. It goes back to World War II, when Japan recruited Korean women, comfort women, to work in prostitution rings. And Japan hasit believes that it has apologized for that. The Koreans believe they could go much further in that apology. But you have in both countries a rising sense of nationalism and self awareness, and it has put these two countries at loggerheads in recent years. On President Obama's side, he faces the role of being a mediator between two allies, and he's trying to get these two to sit down, to play nice, and to shore up an alliance which is designed to be a counterweight to China's growing power in Asia. So it is a bit of a sideshow, but one that he can't afford to ignore.
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Dorothy Wickenden
John, you talked about what a good job Obama did in his speech, but he's asking Europe to go along with increased sanctions on Russia. How is that going over? And is that going to have the effect that's needed to curtail Putin's ambitions.
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John Cassidy
Well, I was very skeptical when the initial sanctions were announced. Remember, the first list was just 11 people, most of whom were politicians, Russian politicians who didn't have any foreign bank accounts. The main impact of the sanction is to freeze people's assets overseas and prevent them from doing business with the U.S. banking system. That just looked, I think I described it as pitiful in a blog post I wrote. But after Putin gave his big speech at the Kremlin and the formal annexation of Crimea, the US Stepped up its sanctions to include a lot of the business people around Putin. And I think that sent a more effective message. And the Europeans did go along with it. Even the Germans, who have been reluctant in the past to take any sanctions against Russia, did sign up to that. And I think the message they have sent to Putin is, look, you've taken Crimea. We sort of accept that. We're not going to do anything too serious to try and reverse that. But the question is, what's going to happen now? And Ukraine, of course, isn't a part of NATO, so there's no credible military threat to go in there if Putin decides to take eastern Ukraine. So you have to build a sort of economic wall, which is what they're trying to do. And the threat is that if he does interfere in eastern Ukraine, the sanctions will be stepped up enormously to include not just a lot more people, but also the Russian oil industry and the Russian banking system. And because Russia is now a big player in international trade and a lot of rich Russians have interests all over the world that would be very damaging to the Russian economy. So I think it has given Putin pause. The sanctions are in place. Russia's got the Crimea, and I think there's just going to be a standoff going forward.
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Dorothy Wickenden
And did Obama say anything to reassure allies who are pretty much in Putin's general neighborhood?
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John Cassidy
No, he did. I mean, that was. I mean, it didn't really get much pickup in the US Press, but I think that was one of the most significant aspects of the speech. A lot of people suspect that Russia has always resented the fact that the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are now members of NATO. They used to be part of Greater Russia and were also obviously part of the Soviet Union. A lot of people think that Putin long term has got designs on bringing them back into the Russian ambit, but they're now part of NATO, so they're covered by the American nuclear guarantee. And Obama said explicitly that we'll honor our NATO commitments.
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Evan Osnos
What we will do always is uphold our solemn obligation our article 5 duty to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our allies. And in that promise, we will never waver. NATO nations never stand alone.
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John Cassidy
He's effectively saying there that if the Russians invade the Baltic states at some future point, the way NATO works, there's a nuclear umbrella, America would use nuclear weapons against Russia. The question is whether that's credible. There was some commentary in the Financial Times and other places that we have to work to make that threat more credible, put more military into these places, et cetera. But then again, that raises the threat of another Cold War. But Obama certainly, you know, to the extent that he was going over there to reassure the Poles and Lithuanians and the Balts, he did that.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Evan, what's the view on the Ukraine crisis from China?
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Evan Osnos
Well, you know, China is in an awkward position because in some ways it aligns itself with Russia these days simply as alternative powers to the United States. But I think oftentimes we tend to read more deeply into that relationship in the west than we should. The truth is that China and Russia have been historically, going back a very long time, they've been rivals and opponents much more often than they've ever been allies. And China is unnerved by Putin's decision to intervene in the Ukraine. You know, one of China's core principles of foreign policy is not intervening in the internal affairs of other states. And it says that over and over because it, of course, worries that other states would intervene in its own affairs if there was ever a dispute, for instance, in Tibet or out in the far western reaches of the country. So when it sees Putin venturing in and annexing Crimea, that is a source of enormous concern. So I think this is actually an opportunity in which the United States and China have. Have more in common than they do. That separates them. Neither one of them has an interest in seeing Putin's adventurism continue.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Next month, President Obama himself is going to be traveling to East Asia, where China's territorial ambitions are a source of anxiety. What is on the agenda there?
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Evan Osnos
Yeah, this is an important trip. The President is going to Asia in April to visit a number of important American allies. Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia and South Korea. And the message in all those cases is. Is clear, which is that the United States will stand up and defend and support these countries in what appears to be this escalating conflict over territory in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. I think a lot of foreign affairs commentators would rank that high on the list of places in the world today that is likely to be a flashpoint so, for instance, China is in this conflict with Japan over some uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. And the reason these matter is because they sit in the middle of enormous mineral rights. There's the possibility for oil exploration, but it's also about China asserting a more powerful role in the region. And this has made American allies extraordinarily uncomfortable. The president of the Philippines, Aquino, compared it to Europe on the eve of World War II, and he compared China's role to that of the Germans when they had seized the Sudetenland. And he said, it's time for the west to stand up and, and say that this is unacceptable. So the president is in the position of going to East Asia to signal that the United States recognizes the threat that's posed, the possibility of a conflict that would draw in the United States. But at the same time, he's trying not to signal too much that we're prepared to join in a fight. There's ayou know, a senior defense official was quoted not long ago saying, the last thing we want to do is get ourselves into a fight fight over some uninhabited rocks in the Pacific. So it's difficult because you don't want to embolden, for instance, the Japanese leader Shinzo Abe into taking more assertive steps to provoke a confrontation with China. But you also need to make sure that the United States is not perceived as a weak player in Asia, and that would allow China to then take more steps of its own.
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Dorothy Wickenden
It's interesting that Beijing isn't on his agenda.
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Evan Osnos
He's not going to Beijing. And China's played that off and says, of course it's looking forward to his visit in November. But no, that's designed to send a very clear message, which is the US Believes that it has a number of allies in the region and it's going to back them up.
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Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, thank you. Both Evan Osnos and John Cassidy are staff writers. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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Podcast Host / Announcer
You can subscribe to this podcast and other free New Yorker podcasts in the itunes store. On the next New Yorker Out Loud, Dexter Filkins and George Packer talk about new books by veterans of the Iraq war.
- [16:39]
Evan Osnos
Phil Kley's book is funny. It's black humor. It's dry humor. It's understated, but it is savagely funny.
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Podcast Host / Announcer
New episodes of the New Yorker Out Loud come out on Monday afternoons. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available@Audible.com New Yorker subscribers can access the digital edition for tablets and phones at no extra charge from the App Store or from Google Play.
- [17:07]
Mint Mobile Advertiser / Asma Khalid
America is changing, and so is the world.
- [17:11]
John Cassidy
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [17:19]
Mint Mobile Advertiser / Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [17:22]
John Cassidy
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
- [17:26]
Mint Mobile Advertiser / Asma Khalid
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [17:31]
John Cassidy
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:39]
Dorothy Wickenden
From.
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Evan Osnos
PRX.