Every person who subscribes to Social Science Files must listen to this podcast. If you don’t listen to podcasts ask one of your grandchildren to play it for you! Much of the interview focuses on China now, the China-US relationship, dangers faced in world today, and other topics I have covered in the Plop! section of Social Science Files since the start of the 2nd Trump presidency e.g. Panama Canal. All interesting.
But the crowning glory can be heard in the final 10 minutes. Calmly and reasonably Michael Robert Auslin of Stanford and the Hoover Institution sets out a magnificent quasi-Confucian philosophical rationalisation and justification for Trump’s agenda.
So eager am I to persuade you of the merits of this interview that I will risk an extract from the transcript, though transcripts are never as impressive as the spoken word. And because transcripts are written by computers there are always major errors. For example (below) on China giving encouragement (not “loss”!) to the green agendas.
THE TRANSCRIPT
Freddy: Hello and welcome to the Americano Show. Today I am delighted to be joined by Michael Robert Auslin or Misha Auslin. I think we can call you Misha, is that right?
Misha: Indeed.
Freddy: For the purposes of the show, you are Misha. But look up Michael Robert Auslin. He is a historian, a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and also the author of a new substack. Well, quite recent subject. It's about a year old. It's called The Patowmack Packet, which is all about Washington DC. And it is utterly fascinating. So I highly recommend it to all Americano listeners and indeed viewers. Michael, what we're going to be talking about today is China, because you're an expert on America-China relations. …
MGH: I’m skipping (China, the world, Ukraine, much else) to the last 10 minutes …
MISHA
… But really, when you look at most of China's effort, it's on dominating the sort of, whether you want to call it Dumbarton Oaks style international organizations, because those are the really effective ones on telecommunications, on global health, on international civil aviation, all of those different things. Law of the Sea, those are the ones that China tries to dominate.
So, you know, for the Trump administration, attempting to ensure that your strategic focus, and therefore your economic focus, is really on the true threats abroad, because what you want to do again is focus at home. In many ways, makes a lot of sense. You know, if this were, you know, 2023, and you're talking about cutting off aid to Ukraine, you know, people would, I think, rightfully say, well, you know, the war has just started. You know, terrible thing, right? But it's just started.
You know, when you're three years down the road, and what looks increasingly like a 1914 situation of just entrenched armies along lines of control with very little movement and just butchery, then is it right to start looking at alternatives to that status quo?
You know, he [Kissinger] came under a lot of criticism for saying Ukraine is going to have to give up some of the territory that it's already lost because it's not feasible that it's going to get it back without extraordinary cost. And he's been proved right. So it's really interesting to see the split then between the Trump administration, and I would say many in the US, and the European leadership, which seems to be doubling and tripling down.
And of course, Prime Minister Keir Starmer just made some extraordinary commitments to Ukraine. But within 24 hours of those, Zelensky was coming back to Trump saying, I'll sign the Minerals Agreement, and we need to get you back involved in the process. So whether that's some type of recognition that European commitments may not be able to resolve this the way that Ukraine would like, or a sense that even if they can, you still need the United States there. I think the leverage really lies with the Trump administration right now.
FREDDY
I think that's absolutely right. And I think Keir Starmer’s administration, as much as I have insight into it, is sort of speaking out of both sides of its mouth because it's simultaneously encouraging Zelensky to fold on the deal while saying, we'll stand up for you and so on. But what you were, just to go back a bit, what you were talking about about China and sort of bodies affiliated with the UN, that leads me to think about climate change.
And there's been quite a lot of interesting work that's been done recently exposing the extent to which China is behind the loss of the climate change lobby in Europe and America, and that it sees strategic leverage in making climate change, something that America pre-occupies itself with in terms of policy and Europe too, while it continues to churn out far more carbon emissions than ever. That's a key part of this story, is it not?
MISHA
… I think what the Trump administration is doing, which is facing a lot of resistance from people, again, because I think of the accretion of above all mindsets, ways of seeing the world, is a very painful, use your metaphor, a very painful ripping off of the bandage, or a very painful ripping off of the mask, or pulling the curtain back to show the man, the little man behind the curtain, that a lot of what we thought had its own validity really didn't. And so whether it's USAID spending hundreds of billions of dollars to push climate change issues, or to push issues related to lifestyles around the world, or things like that, or whether it's China doing it, what people interpreted as essentially good faith campaigns are at least to some degree being revealed as very cold and calculating political campaigns. That's what I meant about the mindsets.
Everyone came in for decades saying, you know, global warming and global change and whatever climate change, we have to deal with this because it's a threat to the future. And then you find out that so much of this was funded by groups committed to it, as opposed to an impartial reading of the science. Same thing with the vaccines.
And you saw the, I don't know if you saw, but yesterday the nominee for the head of the National Institutes of Health, Stanford scientist, Dr. Bhattacharya, J. Bhattacharya, was basically talking about how so much misinformation had been funded, which is exactly turning the tables on the supposed misinformation of those who had skepticism. As well as the fact that, by the way, people like Senator Tom Cotton were excoriated and were absolutely denigrated for suggesting back in 2020 that COVID leaked from a lab, not necessarily intentionally, but that it leaked from a lab.
Now, that is more or less the common wisdom, as it should have been from the very beginning. When John Stewart says that that makes sense, that's the most likely explanation. I think the rest of us can then happily come on board with it. So, it's a fascinating and I understand and agree, unsettling, if not terrifying moment to confront all these shibboleths, but then find out that they were all Potemkin villages. That there was no international, it is an unsettling, if not frightening thing to confront all these shibboleths and realize there was no real international constituency for it. And what international consensus there was, was bought.
Bought and paid for. That's what Doge is finding out. Hundreds of billions of dollars laundered through hundreds, if not thousands, of different pop-up shell NGOs. That's the latest thing that they've discovered, getting a billion, seven billion dollars for climate change issues, which is utterly and totally unaccounted for. So if you really do believe in science or believe in facts, then at least it would be an interesting game to play this out. Let Trump and Doge and Musk have their way, and then see what actually happens.
Because what their judgment is, and what they're trying to tell us in essence, is that everything that you were brought up to believe, itself was disinformation. And when they told you it was disinformation, that was disinformation. True Orwellianism. And that was jumped on and abetted by our enemies, our adversaries like China. Why wouldn't they? Of course you would. Why wouldn't Russia? Why wouldn't Iran? They would be stupid not to basically walk through the door that we had opened and cause dissension within our communities, cause a political paralysis, cause an enormous waste of money.
I mean, we have wasted hundreds of... Americans are living intense in Western North Carolina because after Hurricane Helene, the Biden administration essentially washed their hands of them and left them alone while they sent tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine and for climate change and for vaccination stuff. That's why 70 plus percent of people who watch Trump's State of the Union agreed with it and that's a CBS poll. That's not a Fox poll. That's a CBS poll. We may be at a point, it's almost like if you've ever read The Structure of Scientific Paradigms [Thomas S. Kuhn], a famous book, where you have one way of viewing the world and then there is a radical shift to viewing a different way of the world.
I think that we may be getting to that new shift, which in itself is a shift backwards. Ten years ago, nobody talked about trans in the way that we do today. And you did not. No one would have allowed a boy to compete against a girl, let alone harm a girl in sports, which has happened over and over and over. But there was a radical world view shift just in, I mean, in an eye blink, in the space of a few years, that suddenly said that all this is normal. And now Trump is trying to reverse that.
And those like, you know, Javier Malay and Bukele, Nakebi Bukele in El Salvador, and maybe Giorgia Maloney in Italy are also on board, trying to reverse that. And it is upsetting everything. The resistance is extraordinary. I don't understand that the Democratic Party in the United States has essentially reduced itself to two propositions. Men should be in women's sports, and we will fight an endless open war for Ukraine forever, without any sense of how it can be won. That's what the Democratic Party is today.
And the fighting is vicious because it's not just saying it's a policy. What Trump is trying to do is change a world view. And I'm not saying that everything he's doing is necessarily right or correct, but I'm saying that that's what he's essentially doing. We saw a little bit of this in his first term, even though he made deals with China, when he was basically saying, look, China is the adversary. And the National Security Strategy said they were the adversary. And other statements that came out of that first administration said, they're the adversary.
What that did was upend 40 years of consensus about China. And it was very unsettling. And there were a lot of people, a lot of China experts and people very invested in the China relationship, who wrote op-eds and signed op-eds in The Washington Post and other places, saying China is not the enemy. And Trump said, no, they are the enemy. We might try to make a deal with them, but you have to understand they're the enemy. And that upended 40 years. Now, in the second term, with basically no restraints whatsoever on his own sense of what he wants to achieve, he's doing that across the board. He's not the only one to say vaccinations were problematic. He loves the vaccination. He did Operation Warp Speed under his administration. But he's not the first one to say that you need transparency on this. He's certainly not the first one to say that there are questions about climate change. And he's definitely not the first one to say that you can't have an open-ended war in Ukraine. Henry Kissinger and others said that. But what he's doing is doing it all at once.
It is a tornado, a tsunami of the like that we honestly haven't seen since at least 1933. And maybe ever, because I don't know if Franklin Roosevelt tried to change the mindset as much as he simply said, we're going to use every tool at our disposal to create a new governing structure and sort of a new compact between the government and the citizen. That's in response to the Great Depression.
Trump's doing something in a way much more profound. And they didn't do it piece by piece or piecemeal. They did it in a blitzkrieg. And that's why everyone is shocked. And that's why everyone has not had the time mentally or intellectually to absorb it, I think, and say, wait a second, what does make sense and what doesn't make sense? And when you're talking about an intractable issue like a China that is not going to give up its goals, its preferences, its demands for influence and layer that on top of all of this, then suddenly you get to this point where you think, my God, everything is spinning out of control. And that's not necessarily the wrong interpretation. It is spinning out of control in the sense of what tried to be controlled was false in a way. You couldn't control a China to make it into your partner because China didn't want to be your partner, right?
So it's almost a complete, it's not just an epistemological change. It's almost an ontological change. What is reality?
What you thought was reality really wasn't. And Trump is doing stuff that honestly I didn't ever expect any politician to do. And I'm not saying they're doing it perfectly or that they understand it all. But they are really essentially saying that the world in which you thought you lived was in many ways a false world. So now we have to find that right world. And I'll wind up, because I know I've been rambling on about this, but you sort of opened the door to it.
There's a very old Chinese concept called rectification of names. It's a Confucian concept. And really what it basically means is bringing your understanding of the world into conformity with reality. Meaning, you can have a name for something that does not actually reflect what that is, you know, calling night day. You can call night day, but that means the name is wrong, and it means your understanding of the world is wrong.
And so, there's a very, very long, I mean, long, millennial long tradition in Confucian thought, that when things get out of whack, when it becomes clear that you're not responding in effective ways to what's happening, and you're wondering why that is, you need a rectification of names.
Very simply, you need to call things what they are. And whether you agree with him or not, I think that's what Donald Trump is doing. He even dropped the sort of qualifying term biological men in his State of the Union speech, where some people are trying to say, well, we're going to ban biological men from women's voice. He said, no, we're banning men. You don't need to parse it and define it. Until five minutes ago, everyone in the world, for all of human history, understood what a man was and what a woman was. And it wasn't particularly controversial. People could live their lives the way they wanted, but you didn't fool yourself into calling a man a woman.
He's trying to rectify names. China is not a partner. It's an adversary at best and an enemy at worst. He's rectifying names. When you do that, it has inherent policy implications, and that's where it becomes just as difficult. I actually think it's very difficult to rectify names. But then there's an added level of difficulty because you are now trying to reorient your world to the reality that you have now accepted what actually is reality, as opposed to imputing a reality that really isn't there.
… That was long, sorry.
FREDDY
No, I was about to say, you weren't rambling at all. That is one of the most brilliant attempts to swim through the flooded zone that we are living in.
And I'm extremely grateful to you for it. Thank you very much for coming on to Americano. And I think we need to talk again soon, as this apple cart keeps being turned over. …
My thanks to the Spectator, and conservative Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller
