ChinaTalk

Heart attacks, prostate cancer, Jake Sullivan awake for a home invasion attempt at 4 AM because he was just up working on a random Tuesday night?

Is the national security bureaucracy in America unwell?

To discuss, I have on today John Gans, a former Pentagon speechwriter, who’s had many, many other jobs in Washington. He is also the author of the fantastic “White House Warriors,” a history of the National Security Council.

We get into:

• Why the organizational design of the NSC leads to such crushing burdens for midlevel and senior staffers
• The kinds of high-flyers that are drawn to the national security complex and what keeps them there
• How POTUS’s time constraints impact decision-making
• Why NSC’s historically are excellent at spotting problems but often overeager when crafting solutions
• The NSC’s role in America’s “forever wars.”
• Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, and Trump’s “maverick model” of running the NSC compared to the Eisenhower vision of “regular order”
• How seemingly prosaic technological innovations like track changes and video conferencing have dramatically changed national security policymaking
• How reading Shakespeare can improve the quality of our policy-making
• What a better model could look like

Illustration from the New Yorker's recent feature on Sullivan. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/16/trial-by-combat

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Noah Smith of https://www.noahpinion.blog/ and Matt Klein of https://theovershoot.co/ join ChinaTalk to discuss:

We get into:

• What's really happening with China's economy and why it matters strategically
• How China's potential peak parallels Japan's
• Why the world should and shouldn't be scared of China's progress in semis and EVs
• What another Trump Administration could do for US-China relations
• How Noah actually does his substack

This was a fun one, I hope you enjoy!

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Kurt Campbell is the Deputy Assistant to the President and the White House Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs. ChinaTalk recently joined Campbell in Washington to discuss US-China relations and mark the podcast’s 300th episode.

We discuss:

• The nature of national power today;
• If China is peaking;
• How ideology impacts Beijing’s foreign policy;
• Campbell’s hopes and fears for the Biden administration’s Asia policy;
• Whether the US is still aiming to “maintain as large of a lead as possible” on chips and AI;
• How to think about the risk of and effectively deter military escalation;
• And the dark shadow of Tiananmen and its lasting impact on Chinese politics and US foreign policy.

Outtro music: Brahms: Sonata in E flat major for Viola and Piano, Op. 120, No. 2 I. Allegro amabile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrC4rx5VrA

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Straight from Tokyo, Japan: an exclusive with Amb. Rahm Emanuel.

Before his current posting as US ambassador to Japan, Rahm served as a senior advisor to Bill Clinton, multiple terms in the US House of Representatives, Obama’s first chief of staff, and the mayor of Chicago.

If nothing else, you can count on his gloves-off, no-holds-barred approach to politics — and he’s been no different when it comes to China. Notwithstanding reports that even officials in Biden’s NSC have told him to stop “taunting” China, Rahm has been consistently, uniquely willing to say out loud what virtually every other high-ranking US official doesn’t.

Of course, the ambassador — or, as his desk placard during his chief-of-staff days read, “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself” — may take issue with that framing. His comments aren’t “critical,” Rahm says, but “truthful.”

This interview covers a ton of ground. On China:

• How the Biden administration is closing the chapter on “hub and spokes,” what tomorrow’s “latticework” architecture will look like, and what Asia-Pacific alliances might look like under a second Trump administration;
• The future of Japan-Korea, and a peek behind the curtain on how the historic Camp David summit materialized;
• Rahm’s “3 Cs” for China — calm, conflict, charm — and how US foreign-policy leaders should reckon the mutual inconsistencies among those three;
• And roads not taken by Xi: why Rahm thinks China’s entrepreneurial culture has taken a nosedive, and what China’s government today is most scared of.

And on politics and life:

• Why “diplomacy” and “politics” are the same thing — and why that’s a good thing;
• Whether the State Department suffers from a personality deficit, and what makes for a good ambassador;
• How to heal America’s body politic — post-Trump, post-Recession, post-GWOT;
• Why Rahm thinks “quality time” with kids is “BS,” and thoughts on raising kids as a time-crunched politician;
• And what Rahm thinks the biggest emerging threat to the world is.

I really enjoyed my trip to Japan, and I’d love a financial excuse to continue recording shows on the country. If you work at JETRO, METI, The Japan Foundation, Mitsubishi, Rakuten, etc. and are interested in seeing more deep coverage of Japan and US-China-Japan relations on this podcast, do reach out!

Outtro music: Tadao Hayashi Japanese Harp Trio's 1977 take on I Could Have Danced All Night Tadao Hayashi Harp Trio – The Impossible Dream 1977 (youtube.com)

Also from 1977, Tokai by Kaeko Onuki Tokai (youtube.com)

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Israel is a country dear to my heart and I wanted to provide the ChinaTalk audience with one more perspective on the events of this past weekend before returning to our regularly scheduled program.

To that end, I'm running a guest episode from the Promised Podcast, a show from TLV1 which is "an inside view of how Israel can warm your heart and make your blood boil. It’s a show by a journalist, a professor and an NGO professional who live in and love Israel even though it drives them crazy, and who each week discuss the latest in Israeli politics, culture, and society."

Thanks for listening.

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