Pottinger on Trump 2.0

02/14/24 • 54 min

2 Listeners

Matt Pottinger reported for years out of China, served as a US Marine Corps intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, and held several senior roles on Trump's NSC , concluding his time in the White House as the Deputy National Security Advisor.

Today, Matt chairs the China Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

In this interview, we discuss:

How Matt expects a second Trump administration’s China policy might develop.
Why Trump is leaning more into strategic ambiguity than Biden, what that means for deterrence, and how that impacts the likelihood of him standing by were the PRC to invade Taiwan.
Why bipartisan support for the US-China trade war will continue to shape the contours of great-power conflict.
Matt’s look at the origins and political fallout of COVID-19.
Plus, reflections on Mike Flynn and how Trump ran his NSC.

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Outtro music: Miles Davis, So What https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXk1LBvIqU

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Today, Matt chairs the China Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

In this interview, we discuss:

How Matt expects a second Trump administration’s China policy might develop.
Why Trump is leaning more into strategic ambiguity than Biden, what that means for deterrence, and how that impacts the likelihood of him standing by were the PRC to invade Taiwan.
Why bipartisan support for the US-China trade war will continue to shape the contours of great-power conflict.
Matt’s look at the origins and political fallout of COVID-19.
Plus, reflections on Mike Flynn and how Trump ran his NSC.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER! https://www.chinatalk.media/

Outtro music: Miles Davis, So What https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXk1LBvIqU

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

Is the NSC Unwell?

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

Outtro audio from

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Next Episode

AI at the Frontier: What it Takes to Compete

What does it take to train a frontier model? What's the know-how, the secret sauce that makes firms lets OpenAI and Deepmind push the limits of what's possible? How much are Chinese firms benefitting from western open source, and in the long term is it possible for western labs to maintain an edge?

The hosts of the excellent Latent Space podcast, Alessio Fanelli of Decibel VC and Shawn Wang of Smol AI, come on to discuss.

We get into:

How the secret sauce used to push the frontier of AI diffuses out of the top labs and into substacks
How labs are managing the culture change from quasi-academic outfits to places that have to ship
How open source raises the global AI standard, but why there's likely to always be a gap between closed and open source
China as a "GPU Poor" nation
Three key algorithmic innovations that could reshape the balance of power between the GPU rich and GPU poor

Outtro music: CHEKI https://open.spotify.com/track/1zKL2bOEkMDGuIjLhG34YA?si=9a713a88aa3d4f71

Cover photo: "Inkstand with A Madman Distilling His Brains" 1600s Urbino. Kind of like training a model! https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/188899

The met description: In this whimsical maiolica sculpture, a well-dressed man leans forward in his seat with his head in a covered pot set above a fiery hearth. The vessel beside the hearth almost certainly held ink. The man’s actions are explained by an inscription on the chair: "I distill my brain and am totally happy." Thus the task of the writer is equated with distillation—the process through which a liquid is purified by heating and cooling, extracting its essence.

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