This meeting yesterday actually delivered results for the American people and quite frankly, the people of China and people around the world. But the American people benefited from this sit down together between President She and President Biden's.
I realize politics gets involved in all this stuff. Like Nicki Haley just said, Biden's meeting with President She was embarrassing. You know, you have to the praiseier side or beat down the other side. But these meetings with evil dictators and the breathy coverage of them, like look at they've become friends, and this is paving the way for How do you know what are you talking about? Do you remember when George Bush said he looked into Putin's soul or whatever and saw a good man. How did that
turn out? President She smiling at Joe Biden's calling him old friend is not an indication of anything and all. The guy has a million slaves. He took over Hong Kong and beat people down in the streets. I'm hearing cynicism and anti Chinese bias personally, But perhaps we can ask Josh Rogan, global opinions calumnists for The Washington Post and author of Chaos Under having Trump sheet in the
Battle for the twenty first century. Josh, I'm excited about this new era of friendship and cooperation, aren't you.
Man. I hate to be the spoiler. I hate to dash all your newly found excitement and you're newly found enthusiasm about this new era of great power relations is in China, and you know, I think frankly for like, you know, think, the problem with being a journalist who covers China all the time is that, like every once in a while, they'll be this moment where ten thousand journalists want to write about China and then nine and ninety of them have no idea what they're talking about,
and then you know, they'll so they come up with two things like, oh, China good, China bad. And that's like as far as you could get. Now, you guys are way past that because you've been having me on your show for the last five years, so you are clued in along with your listeners, by the way, to the fact that the truth is that this relationship is
going one way and that way is down. And that's not because there's China Hawks in Washington, and it's not because Nikky Haley or Mike POMPEII or even Donald Trump or even Joe Biden. It's because Jijingping. It is on the order of one of the worst mass murdering totalitarian dictators we've seen. And he's doing what they call the Great Leap backwards, which is not an opening up, and it's just not a reform, which is not a lot
of the bs that he says that assembled. Did you see that dinner with like man like, oh, you know, you have to pay forty thousand dollars to hear Jijingping tell you that everything's okay. And Elon Musk was there, and Tim Cook and all these guys just like lining up to kiss the emperor's ring. It's gross. It's disgusting on a moral and a human level. But it's also really stupid because the fact is that you know what's going on in China, although we can't really know for sure, it doesn't look good.
But Josh, didn't you hear he said he might give us some more pandas. I just feel like you're overlooking the important parts.
Well, here's the thing about the pandas, And don't get me started on the pandas. Go ahead, I cripe about the Pandas. Now, okay, listen those First of all, do you know what happened with the pandas. They spread all these propaganda and China that we were mistreating the pandas.
No, I didn't know that.
So there's this whole For months, there was a one of the pandas was sick, not the ones in Washington, but in the US. And you know he was getting the best care that pandas could possibly get, but he still he looked thick, you know. So they spread this picture around China, and they convinced the billion Chinese people that we were mistreating the pandas. That's why they took back the pan They created a crisis inside their own country. So that should tell you all you need to know
about what's going on in Beijing. It's not about us. It's not where like where Americans were so solid sistic. We think we just have the right policy, if we just say the right thing, everything's fine with China. But it's really not about us. What's going on in China is about China, and it doesn't look good. And this guy, she is getting worse and worse. I just think in the last months, right, the Farm Minister disappeared, the Defense
minister disappeared, the former premier drop dead. You know, you've got CEOs of major conglomerates falling out of windows an unprecedented rate. You know, none of that has anything to do with us. That's what happens inside of a crime organization, inside of a mafia organization, you're constantly purging the compos and you're constantly getting rid of all the rivals, or you get murdered. That's how this that's what the CP
DCP is. It's a it's a crime family, and he's the Don Jijing Ping WHI should call him Don Jijing Okay, so what do you do with that? Okay? Well, I think to be honest about administration is that are not crazy the theory of it, which is sort of like, you know, you try to talk to them and then you do a lot of stuff with the allies, which makes perfect sense. But then when Joe Biden gets you know, in Toronto, to me, just can't help himself be like, oh,
he's my friend. I spent eighty six hours traveling with him. Is not true, by the way he always says this, He's like, oh, we he spent seventeen thousand miles. It was like a thousand miles. He's like ninety one hours we spent together. It's like five. There's this famous story that Joe Biden always tells about him as usually, he told it again this week. He was like, we were standing on the edge of the Tibetan plata. Joe Biden's never been to the Tibetan plato.
Okay, wow, all right, you know before you go any further, because we read your recent column and it's terrific as usual. But I can accept, having been into this sort of thing for like my entire adult life, that there is a certain naivete and almost Stockholm syndrome me battered spouse syndrome among the American people. We're convinced if we just are good to them or nice to them or generous to them, they'll stop hitting us, essentially, or they'll become
a good cooperative country. I get that. I can accept that people have their lives, they're not up on this stuff. But if the president in the United States actually believes his own bull crap, like the stories you're just describing, that's awful. Do you have any sense of is that just old Jo Scranton Joe spinning yarns or do you think he believes that stuff?
A little and a little from Columbee? You know, I think you know. But here's the thing, here's the crazy thing. Every president does that. Every president I've been a journalist for twenty years, every single one, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Obama, Trump, Biden, they all thought they could charm the dictators. Okay, they all think they're dictator charmers. With Putin too, by the way, Obama did the reset and Trump wanted to meet with Putin, and Biden was
trying to do a reset. But then they invented Ukraine. So there's this. You're right, it's like a nice thing about Americans that we think, if we're just charmed these dictators, we're gonna convince them that they shouldn't be dictators anymore. And it's like Lucy in the football, you know, and we just keep going, We just keep falling for it. We just keep falling for it, you know. Esventually we've got to realize that, you know, psychopathic, genocidal, murder as murdering, totalitarian,
aggressive dictators probably not going to change their stripes. They've made their call on what they're going to be you know what I mean, And we just have to deal with that.
Where are you on the likelihood? Because if I'm president, she and I actually am planning to invade Taiwan at some point, I'm going to do it while Joe Biden is still president because he's an old man with a party with a lot of problems. Why wouldn't you do it now?
Well, he's not ready now, so that's one problem. You know, you need to keep preparing, you know. That's why people say twenty twenty seven. And I don't think that's like any sort of magical date. I just think that's like kind of around when he'll be ready. Needs the invasion for us, needs the economic independence. You know, there's stockpiling food. Why are they doing that? There's stockpiling food and fuel
all over China. And then he needs the nuclear deterrent to keep US at bay, which they're building a thousand nuclear weapons. Why are they doing that? I thought we just had a nice meeting. You're still building a thousand of nuclear weapons. Didn't we have a nice meeting? You know? So one thing is they're not ready. Second thing is there's something going on in Taiwan. We'd ever talk about, which is that, Like they're going to have this big
election in January. You know, if they elect the pro Chinese side, which could happen, by the way, then that could change his calculus. He's gonna wait to see what happens in Ukraine, if we have the sticking power there or not. So I mean, I think like invasion is like probably his last resort. Maybe he could take Taiwan without invading. Wouldn't you rather do that if you were him? So you know, I think he's going to take Taiwan
one way or the other. But if you can get it without the war, I think he's going to try that first, to be honest.
Interesting, Yeah, honestly, I've been reading a bit about the opposition party and how warned they are to China and how they're ahead in the polls, and so we'll have to watch that. But China is also facing some pretty serious economic headwinds, not all of a sudden, but that nobody was talking about a year or two ago. Josh, how signif do you think that is right?
No, I think it's really significant, and I think but I think people draw the wrong conclusion. You know, people in Washington they're like, oh, China's having problems economically, that means we don't have to do anything. They can go back to sleep. They're just going to collapse under their own weight. That's what you you know, the pro China people and watching that say, they're like, oh, they're not ten feet tall, they're only six feet tall, so we
can all go back to sleep. It's fine. And what I say is that, no, actually, when Jijingping it doesn't have that economic you know, benefit to show his people to bolster his legitimacy, that's when he is going to get more aggressive externally. He's got to blame that on somebody that's us. So actually he gets more dangerous the worst their economy, that's not less dangerous. That's what I think again, based on everything we know about every dictator. Ever.
So I'm watching some of the coverage on the cable news and they're talking about as you see Joe Biden and Jijingping walking through the garden looks like the beginning of a friendship and a thawing. I mean, how do you react to that sort of commentary?
It's really I mean, it's really good for choosing thing. That's exactly what he needed, you know what I mean. He's like, you know, facing a lot of trouble at home. Imagine you're inside the Chinese system and you're looking at this mass economic mass COVID all of that stuff. You're looking at Using Thing like, dude, you know, you better
get your act together. So then he's like, you know what would really be good is oh, maybe I can get like, you know, some really great pictures of all of the world's leaders, you know, telling me I'm the cast me out. That's exactly what he got. So we know what Using Thing got from this. Meaning I don't know what we got. Resumption of communication is really not a thing that we should be like, you know, really celebrating.
That's that should be like the minimum. I think, I don't know, maybe I'm crity.
No, I saw you write that, and I agreed. Touting the fact that they're now willing to take our phone calls. Yeah, that is like the minimum requirement of a friendship. And they then they and then and then they haven't done it yet. They've just said they would in the future, So no guarantee they will still take our phone calls. Josh Rogan's The Global Opinions calling this for The Washington Post. Go ahead, Josh, if.
You were my best friend for twenty five years, I would hope you would take my phone call, but you didn't answer by his phone call for a year. A friend?
Is that right?
Friends like that these enemies? Yeah.
So my final question, it's a sprawling one, and you could write not one, but to multiple books on the topic, is how goes the great decoupling or disentangling of the economies?
You know it goes? You know, I think, like you know, in the end, we're gonna have to figure out what we have to decouple and what we don't have to you know, like if you want to talk about like toys and bicycles, I don't think we need to decouple from toys and bicycles, you know, if they want to. You know, Manu put a bunch of Mariotte hotels in China.
I'm okay with that. But when it comes to the AI, to the nuclear secrets and to the top silicon chips into the things that make our missiles, you know, missiles, no, we're gonna have to decouple from that. When it comes to masks, I guess we're going to need our own masks because it's give me another pandemic. And then what we really need to de couple of guys is the money.
We need to stop having our Wall Street firms send our retirement funds, our pension funds into the hands of the companies that are building the machines that's pointed against us.
That's the crazy part of the decoupling that we can't get around to, which is the fact that Wall Street firms and their bosses, who were all paid forty thousand dollars to clap and do standing ovations for Jiji thing last night, they're all taking your money, your savings, your retirement and they're investigating companies that are committing atrocities and building the military. That's we're pointed right at us, and
that seems crazy. So, I mean, you know, you're right, that's going to have to build another book, if not a whole nother show.
And we could be talking about TikTok as well. We were earlier on the show. The fact that we let the communists Chinese at least in some measure, control the number one news source for our young it's a suicidal, you know thing. We're engaged, but it's unbelievable we'll talk about that more another time, Josh, I hope you can come on and chat again soon anytime. All right, thanks a million. How good was that? Armstrong and Yetty