The US, China and the World Order

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. So after an intense week of global politics at and around the UN General Assembly and the Trump, Xi Jinping meetings in Washington at the same time, Ishaan Tharoor is with us. Some of you know he used to come on during his years, nearly a decade, as a global politics columnist for the Washington Post but as that staff has disintegrated as ordered by Jeff Bezos, Ishaan joined the New Yorker a few months ago. He now writes their weekly international politics column there called Global Notes. We'll talk to him about the news of the week, largely in the context of his latest article called The Worlds that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping Want.

We'll talk about who Benjamin Netanyahu's allies were at the UN this week, even as many world leaders walked out on his defiant speech. Ishaan has a recent article on perhaps an underreported coalition of world leaders on the right in that respect. Ishaan, besides now writing for The New Yorker, is an Edward Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ishaan, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ishaan Tharoor (1:27)

It's a pleasure to be back with you, Brian. Wonderful to always chat.

Brian Lehrer (1:31)

So your New Yorker article on Trump and Xi Jinping, I thought did a really good job of showing readers how much Trump has changed his tune with respect to China over the year. So maybe start by reminding our listeners of how Trump made China a centerpiece of his original campaign for president in 2016 Would you do that?

Ishaan Tharoor (1:52)

For sure. I mean, we should look back a decade ago, and I think it's fair to credit President Trump with being the single most influential figure in making hawkishness on China a bipartisan cause. He saw China not principally as a security threat, but as a profound mistake of a generation of American policymakers, that the US in the heyday of its unipolar moment, let China into the global system, into the WTO, and then allowed the Chinese economic drug or not to take root. It's manufacturing power of globalization around the world.

And in Trump's narrative and in the narrative of many people, populists in the West, China is to blame for our shrinking middle-class, for the increasing precarity of working class life in our societies, the hollowing out of industry, the disappearing of manufacturing jobs. And so he campaigned with the goal of redressing that, of supposedly making a fairer global trade system, and checking China's industrial predations.

His first term, he acted on some of that. In his first term, he started the trade war, initiated rounds of tariffs, had some talks. But the tariffs endure through the Biden administration, an administration that, while it recalibrated its approach to China, didn't really shift the fundamental analysis of China as a threat and strategic competitor. And that's carried now into this term. But yes, to bring us home here, Trump has changed his tune. He initially slapped huge tariffs on the Chinese. And then, when the Chinese realized that the Chinese showed the hand they had, which is a very good hand, and cut off the exports of critical minerals that so many of our industries around the world need, Trump had to backtrack. And in recent months, he has been peddling an incredibly friendly line, not necessarily to China at large, but certainly to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who he hosted with so much pomp and ceremony the last couple of days.

Brian Lehrer (4:17)

So on that arc of history, that change and where we are now, you wrote that in April of last year, China responded to Trump's unprecedented tariffs with expanded export controls that showcase the dominance of its critical mineral supply chains, which many US companies depend on.

Trump backtracked and has conspicuously softened his stance. That's from your article. I wonder, Ishaan, if you could background our listeners a little bit more on what they call critical minerals because I think a lot of people don't understand what that even means and why that gives China some leverage over the United States.

Ishaan Tharoor (4:55)

Well, yeah, there's critical minerals, there's rare earths. These are things that you find in the ground that go into so much of our electronics, like copper and nickel and bauxite.

I don't want to get too into the weeds on this, but especially lithium, all these components that are mined, and that make into our cell phones, the parts of every kind of facet of our 21st century life. Especially now as we try to think about the changing 21st century economy, the need for electric vehicles, batteries, all of that depends on a supply chain of critical minerals, and the Chinese have spent decades putting themselves at the heart of these supply chains in both extracting them and processing them. So the US is playing catch up. It's impossible to really properly catch up right now and we live in a world where there are so many intertwined supply chains going from countries and back and forth, that to untangle that is impossible. So China has clear leverage here and it used its leverage when it came to Trump's trade war.