The Pentagon's Secret Disinfo Campaign Discrediting China's COVID Vaccine Unveiled; France's Unprecedented Elections, China, Ukraine, and More with Commentator Arnaud Bertrand
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
U.S.-Led Disinformation Campaign (7:39)
Interview with Arnaud Bertrand (37:25)
Outro (1:34:15)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the biggest media story by far in U.S.
politics in 2016 was focused on Russia.
Not only did they falsely insist that the Trump campaign had colluded with Moscow to hack the email accounts of the DNC and of John Podesta, But even more media indignation was focused on the fact that Russia had engaged in unprecedented and incomparably evil interference with our sacred democracy by using a few Twitter bots and Facebook pages to disseminate what our media called disinformation.
What made this reaction so mystifying was the obvious belief that the United States and other freedom-loving democracies would never, ever engage in that kind of treachery.
Instead, this kind of interference and trickery was the sole provenance of the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin.
Now, anyone who knows even the most minimal amount of American history should have instantly scoffed at that claim.
It is beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S.
has, quote, interfered in the internal affairs of countless other countries, including Russia's, for decades.
And the U.S.
has done so with methods that included clandestine disinformation campaigns, as well as tactics a bit more extreme and far worse than a few online bots.
It was just embarrassing to watch so many corporate media employees express what appears to be earnest rage that Russia would do such a thing.
Late last week, Reuters published a genuinely good and important piece of investigative journalism.
Credit where due, that's the type of journalism that we rarely see anymore.
Rather than bravely denouncing the bad acts of America's enemies on the other side of the world, Reuters actually revealed a secret and morally repugnant online disinformation campaign conducted in secret by the Pentagon.
That online campaign was designed to spread fears and doubts and resistance to the COVID vaccine that China was offering impoverished countries and impoverished people for free.
That was being done, spreading hesitancy and doubt about China's COVID vaccine at the very same time that the US government was arguing that anyone spreading vaccine skepticism and encouraging vaccine hesitancy was guilty of killing large numbers of people.
Indeed, not only Did they mandate that Americans take the vaccine they were given upon threat of losing their jobs or their freedom of movement, but the government actually coerced big tech outlets to censor and ban anyone expressing doubts about the vaccine's efficacy or its safety all at the very same time?
That the same US government was using an army of online bots and fake social media accounts to spread vaccine doubt in the poorest countries in the poorest populations of the world.
Now, it is really worth reviewing these revelations and then putting them in historical context of American behavior.
As well as the claims it was making the government about how nobody but Russia does such a thing.
As well as the moral calculations that drove this clandestine campaign against China's COVID vaccine.
It really is remarkable when one delves into the details of what the U.S.
government did here and therefore that is exactly what we will do.
Then, as we reported two weeks ago with the help of a professor who was a specialist in the EU, the European-wide elections for the EU Parliament provided major shocks and surprises for EU elites everywhere.
Many countries saw a decisive rejection of pro-establishment parties replaced by a mass surge of support for what are called far-right populist parties.
That happened in Germany and in Holland and elsewhere, but especially in France.
In response to the devastating defeat of his party at the hands of Marine Le Pen, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked even his own allies by dissolving the French Parliament and calling for snap elections, a move that could very well result in the first ever French Prime Minister from Le Pen's party.
All of this has caused extreme chaos in EU politics, but especially in French politics.
Many of the trends that drove the EU election are, of course, visible and clearly present, if not dominant, in the modern-day current American politics as well.
So to help us sort out everything that is happening there, we will speak to the French political analyst and commentator Arnaud Bertrand.
While he is French by origin, Bertrand has lived for quite some time in China.
He is an expert in Sinology, which is a study of all things Chinese, and he has, in my view, been one of the most informed and enlightened analysts on the Washington-Beijing relationship, along with both wars that the U.S.
is currently funding, the one in Ukraine and the one in Gaza.
We are excited to talk to him and think you will enjoy hearing from him As well, before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the most bizarre things that I've seen in my almost 20 years working as a journalist covering American politics and American wars and the U.S.
security state has been the hysteria that emerged about Russia in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, a narrative obviously used to try and sabotage the campaign of Donald Trump by falsely accusing them of having collaborated with the Russian government.
But one of the anchors of this claim Was that Russia had done something extraordinary and unprecedentedly evil.
Which is that they had used fake Twitter profiles and a few Facebook pages and bots to spread what the media calls disinformation to American voters, namely trying to confuse them or trying to mislead them and particularly trying to drive them to vote for Donald Trump.
Now, one of the reasons it was so mystifying and bizarre to watch that propaganda, and the media really seemed to believe it earnestly, Was because the idea that what Russia had done there, interfering in our sacred democracy through the use of these online
Information campaigns, that that was somehow unprecedented and interfering in our democracy is that everybody knows, who has the most minimal knowledge of American history, that the United States has spent decades interfering in virtually every other country in their internal affairs and their internal politics, obviously including Russia, using exactly those same tactics as well as far worse ones.
And there are plenty of examples, as we're about to show you, where the United States Basically replicated what Russia did or alleged is alleged to have done in 2016, long before Russia ever did that in multiple other countries all around the world.
But Reuters last week produced what I have to call an excellent piece of investigative journalism.
It is so rare these days for corporate media outlets to actually denounce What our own government is doing, or to disclose the secret misconduct of our own government, so often it's just all about denouncing these countries on the other side of the world who the United States government tells us we should hate, that does nothing.
But this is what the role of the American media is supposed to be, is being adversarial to our own government.
And the investigation that they produced and the revelations that they published are really extraordinary.
I had read it last week.
I kind of took note of it, but I really delved into it over the last 48 hours.
I appeared on Breaking Points this morning where I talked about it, and that kind of made me focus even more on the implications of the story, and I started realizing that it had much more importance and is much more amazing than I had initially realized when I began looking at it.
So, first of all, let me show you the key items of the Reuters report, what Reuters revealed on June 14th.
There you see the headline, the Pentagon ran a secret anti-vax campaign.
to undermine China during the pandemic.
The US military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China's Sinovac inoculation.
Payback for Beijing's efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic.
One target was the Filipino public.
Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
Now let me just stop here and give you the context for what was happening.
As all of you know, the United States government was insisting that the vaccine that Pfizer and other big pharmaceutical companies had produced was urgent and necessary for everyone to take, that it was the only way to stop the pandemic.
There were all kinds of claims by prominent media personalities who claim they combat disinformation, like Rachel Maddow, who notoriously said, if you take this vaccine, you cannot contract the virus.
That means it stops at you and you can no longer spread it.
That was the claim.
There were also attempts to make it completely taboo to question whether there were any dangers or risks to this previously untested vaccine, this vaccine that was created in a very short period of time.
It was really an experimental vaccine.
And one of the things the United States government did when it negotiated with all these big pharmaceutical companies is it was using the America first ideology of Trump.
And the negotiation and the agreement that the United States government reached was, you are going to prioritize American citizens, make sure American citizens get this vaccine first, and you're going to sell it to the United States and to American citizens at a very, very low rate.
As a result, in exchange, you're permitted to sell to the rest of the world and gouge them on whatever prices you want.
So you give it to the US for 30 cents a vaccine, you can sell it to the rest of the world for $10 or $20 a vaccine if you want.
And what that meant was that there were a lot of very poor countries that could not afford to buy the vaccine.
And we were being told, remember, that everyone taking the vaccine was necessary to stop the pandemic, that people who refused to take the vaccine were killers of your grandmother.
That was the message that the US government was spreading.
And so China saw that there were a lot of these poor countries that could not afford the vaccines of Western pharmaceutical companies And so they offered to donate their own vaccine that was showing the same amount of efficacy as the American vaccine to these poor countries like the Philippines and countries in the Mideast, in part because China wanted this vaccine stopped, in part because
They understand that if they are seen providing assistance to poor countries, that will give them an opening to be better liked.
That's something the United States has used for a long time.
That's what foreign aid is for.
There's some disaster in India and the U.S.
government announces we're sending $100 million to help the people of India.
And then obviously the idea is that the people of India will perceive us in a better light But whatever the motives, the Chinese government was going to provide, and was providing, free, or basically free, vaccines to all these poor countries, including the Philippines and the Middle East, that needed them and that could not get them from the West because they were too expensive to get them from the West.
And the United States government, while on the one hand, insisting that taking the vaccine was so crucial that people should be fired Or prevent it from leaving their house if they refuse to do so.
And that anyone questioning the vaccine online should be censored and banned.
And they were.
On the one hand, that was their message.
On the other, they didn't want China to be able to gain influence in these countries by giving their vaccine for free.
And so they created an online clandestine disinformation campaign.
They weren't spreading valid doubts or claims about the Chinese COVID vaccine.
They were spreading false claims about the Chinese COVID vaccine to spread doubt and fear and skepticism among these poor people who could only get it through the Chinese vaccine, and therefore encouraging them not to get it.
And that was an effort to prevent China from gaining influence in those countries.
It goes on, quote, the clandestine operation has not been previously reported.
It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China.
A Reuters investigation found through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos The U.S.
military's propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign.
Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits, and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines, China's Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S.
military officials familiar with the Philippine operation.
Almost all were created in the summer of 2020.
And centered on the slogan, hashtag China virus.
Is that China?
Yeah, China.
Oh, China ang virus, which means essentially China is the virus.
In Tagalog, the language of the Philippines.
Now, the Reuters account goes on, quote, tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China's vaccines among Muslims as well.
At a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day.
A key part of the strategy?
Amplify the disputed contention that because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China's shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.
The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden's presidency.
Reuters found, even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation.
A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S.
military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage Chinese vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details.
So they admitted they were doing it when Reuters discovered it, but declined to provide details.
A Pentagon spokeswoman said the U.S.
military, quote, uses a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks aimed at U.S.
allies and partners.
Not sure what that has to do with spreading anti-vax messages in developing parts of the world at the same time that the US government was forcing its own citizens to take the vaccine and preventing any attempt to question it, destroying the reputation of anyone who was, quote, anti-vax.
When it turns out, one of the most prolific spreaders of anti-vax messaging Among the poorest populations that were most vulnerable to COVID was the U.S.
government itself.
The Reuters account investigation goes on, quote, sources involved in the planning and execution, say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the Military Psychological Operations Center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.
Quote, we weren't looking at this from a public health perspective.
Said a senior military officer involved in the program.
Quote, we were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.
One military-created meme targeting Central Asia showed a pig made out of syringes.
Reuters found similar posts that traced back to the U.S.
Central Command.
One shows a Chinese flag as a curtain separating Muslim women in hijabs and pigs stuck with vaccine syringes.
In the center is a man with syringes.
On his back is the word China.
It targeted Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a country that distributed tens of millions of doses of China's vaccines and participated in human trials.
Translated into English, the ex post reads, quote, China distributes a vaccine made of pork gelatin.
Now, obviously, there are a lot of people in the United States, especially now, who distrust the COVID vaccine, who believe that the COVID vaccine is both dangerous and ineffective.
So what is so notable here, other than the fact that the US, yet again, was using exactly the kind of fake, deceived, concealed online disinformation campaigns through fake Twitter bots and Facebook pages and profiles that it claimed only Russia uses, Was the fact that the position of the US government is that this vaccine saves lives and that everyone needs to take it as the only way out of the pandemic.
And at the same time, they were publicly claiming that and putting all kinds of mandates on American citizens to take the vaccine.
They were doing exactly the opposite in the developing parts of the world, all to prevent China from gaining influence in those countries, even if it meant, as they anticipated, That millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people would die in those countries because they were encouraged by the U.S.
government not to take the vaccine.
Now, just as a reminder of the context, the New York Times in August of 2021 reported the headline there, China says it will provide 2 billion vaccine doses to the world.
The pledge, which included a $100 million donation to COVAX, intensifies competition with the U.S.
over leadership in ending the pandemic.
China's top leader, Xi Jinping, said the country would provide 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to the world this year and would donate $100 million to global efforts to distribute the doses to developing countries as Beijing attempts to take on a more prominent leadership role in curbing the pandemic.
Mr. Xi's pledges were announced on Thursday in a written message to an international COVID-19 vaccine cooperation forum chaired by the Chinese government.
Quote, China will continue to do everything it can to help developing countries cope with the epidemic.
And it was exactly that.
Chinese aid to these impoverished countries to give them the vaccine, which was the only way they could get it, that the U.S.
government was trying to sabotage through this campaign of deceitful online campaigns, giving false claims about the Chinese vaccine.
Now, just to remind you what the U.S.
government was saying in public about people who were spreading vaccine skepticism or anti-vax messaging, listen to what Joe Biden said about people doing that in July of 2021.
Joe Biden in public accused Facebook of killing people because the U.S.
The pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.
And they're killing people. - Joe Biden in public accused Facebook of killing people because the US government was claiming that Facebook wasn't censoring enough, that they weren't removing enough content that that they weren't removing enough content that questioned the vaccine.
The U.S.
government accused Facebook of killing people by allowing anti-vax messaging to circulate.
And yet at the same time that Biden was saying that, that whoever spreads anti-vax messaging is guilty of murder, the U.S.
government was doing exactly that in secret to the poorest people in the world.
One of the ironies of what Biden said there as well was that part of the Reuters investigation showed that Facebook actually discovered, as did Twitter, detected this false government-backed social media campaign and saw that these were bots and fake profiles.
Facebook went to the U.S.
government indignant, saying, you spent Months badgering us to remove anti-vax content to ban people from questioning the vaccine.
And now you have this program to disseminate anti-vax messaging to the poorest people in the world.
And the U.S.
government said, please don't take down those profiles.
We spent a lot of money to build those.
We promise that we won't use them regarding COVID anymore.
And they promised that and then Facebook noticed that the US government was continuing to use those fake accounts to spread this anti-vax messaging.
Here from CNN, just to give you a reminder of what we were told about how evil the Russians were for using a few fake Twitter profiles and Facebook bots.
CNN December of 2018, Russians sought to recruit, quote, assets through social media, the Senate was told.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is set to release two reports on Monday detailing the breadth of the Russian social media campaign to sow discord in the United States.
All of the major social media platforms were used as part of the campaign, the report said, but new knowledge found in 2017 as investigators and reporters began unearthing the Russian social media campaign on the two platforms it used most, Facebook and Twitter.
Quote, the IRA, that's the Russian agency that was accused of spreading this disinformation campaign, the IRA shifted much of its activity to Instagram.
The spread of disinformation on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has received less scrutiny than it has on other platforms.
Quote, the most prolific IRA efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black audiences as assets, the report noted.
This is unbelievable.
That corporate media over and over and over depicted Russia as engaging in some kind of never-before-seen attack on our democracy by using these tactics that the United States has reused over and over and over again.
And they did so, these corporate media outlets did, without ever noting that the United States has always engaged in this kind of interference in the internal affairs of other countries using these exact tactics and more.
Here from Politico, this is an actual article that Politico published in July of 2018.
It has this headline, Putin's attack on the U.S.
is our Pearl Harbor.
Make no mistake, hacking the 2016 election was an act of war.
It's time we responded accordingly.
By Mark Hurtling and Molly McHugh.
Quote, the Mueller indictments have pulled back the curtain on enough of the details that we should see how much we still don't know but need to.
They show the extent to which Russia has learned to, quote, hack our systems.
Using these hybrid asymmetric means with an emerging and polished cyber capability at its core, they are, in short, working us.
Using our social media and free press to manipulate opinion.
Using willing collaborators to act on their behalf.
Using a degraded trust in government institutions and the free press to sour further confusion and distrust.
They are winning using covert, deceptive means, and it's all completely out in the open while remaining totally invisible.
It's actually unbelievable.
Just five years previously, There was a report in The Guardian in July of 2011 that revealed, as the headline says, the CIA organized a fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden's family's DNA.
Senior Pakistani doctor who organized vaccine programs in Pakistan and arrested by ISI for working with US agents.
So just to give you the context here, the US wanted to find bin Laden inside Pakistan, and they recruited the people who had been going around for years, convincing Pakistanis to not be so suspicious of vaccines, including against polio.
And they finally made progress in convincing Pakistanis to trust the vaccine they were given, to not think of it as some kind of plot by the West to poison them.
And then the US government goes and Deceitfully uses this vaccine registration campaign to spy on Pakistanis.
Quote, as part of extensive preparation for the raid that killed bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organize the vaccine drive to And even starting the, quote, project in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and U.S.
officials and local residents.
The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an Al-Qaeda courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwabi, to what turned out to be Bin Laden's compound last summer.
The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B.
Bypassing the management of the health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden.
Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.
Now, in response to those revelations, health workers around the world were enraged at what the US was doing.
Spreading suspicions about polio vaccines by using the program to spy on Pakistanis after decades of efforts to try and convince Pakistanis that they should trust the polio vaccine.
Polio is a horrific but completely avoidable disease that ravages children and the U.S.
spread skepticism about that vaccine by doing that.
And in response to the revelation that the U.S.
had been spreading anti-vax messaging in the poor parts of the world that Reuters published.
It turns out that at least six senior health officials inside the U.S.
government resigned in anger over what the U.S.
government had done.
And then they even went and interviewed the kinds of experts that are very pro-Fauci, that were defending Fauci and the health establishment all the time.
And when they found out what the U.S.
was doing, even they said, This is morally repugnant.
We were basically encouraging people all over the world not to take the COVID vaccine.
Now, here is just to give you kind of more history on how much the U.S.
has always done this.
From AP in April of 2014, the U.S.
secretly built a Cuban Twitter in order to stir unrest.
Quote, the U.S.
government masterminded the creation of a quote, Cuban Twitter.
A communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, the Associated Press has learned.
The Obama administration project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the internet with a primitive social media platform.
First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people, then the plan was to push them toward dissent.
Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a US agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.
Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, currently yet again indicted in facing felony charges for bribery and other corruption, who was also the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the USAID, the agency connected with the CIA and the State Department, should be applauded For giving people in Cuba a platform to talk to each other.
Quote, the whole purpose of our democracy programs, whether it be in Cuba or other parts of the world, is in part to create a free flow of information in closed societies.
So they created what was essentially a fake Twitter network in Cuba to lure young Cubans into using it, thinking they were using a real social media account without realizing it was actually being run And contaminated by the U.S.
government to deceive them and manipulate them through anti-government messaging.
It's not just the U.S.
government that does that, it's also the Israeli government.
In March of 2023, so six months before the October 7th attack, AP reported, quote, Israeli army admits to a covert influence campaign in Gaza war.
Quote, days into Israel's devastating war with Gaza militants in 2021, They had a war with Gaza in 2021 and many other years.
The Israeli army began deploying keyboard warriors to a second front, a covert social media operation, to praise the military's bombing campaign in the coastal enclave.
The Israeli military acknowledged Wednesday that it made a, quote, mistake in launching the secretive influence campaign on social media in an effort to improve Israel's, the Israeli public's view of Israel's performance in the conflict.
Israel's Haaretz Daly first exposed the social media operation on Wednesday, reporting that the army employed fake accounts to conceal the campaign's origin and engage audiences on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
It seems that the Israeli expression of regret and remorse was not exactly sincere, given the fact that just 10 days ago, An exact replica of this Israeli influence campaign was revealed, though this time it was directed at United States lawmakers and American citizens, designed to deceive them into having a more positive view of Israel than they had by manipulating them with fake Twitter and Facebook profiles.
Here from the New York Times, Israel secretly targets U.S.
lawmakers with influence campaign on the Gaza war.
Quote, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs ordered the operation, which used fake social media accounts urging U.S.
lawmakers to fund Israel's military, according to officials and documents about the effort.
Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S.
lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war in Gaza, according to officials involved.
The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel.
The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to officials in the documents.
The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israeli comments.
The accounts focused on U.S.
lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel's military.
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts.
The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.
Again, it is remarkable what was done in 2016 and what is going to be done again in 2024, trying to get Americans completely enraged over Russia's secret campaigns online to influence America public opinion when the United States has been doing this over and over and over again, as has Israel, aimed at American citizens and what they think as well as other countries.
But in this case, what was so amazing about this U.S.
secret manipulation campaign of public opinion is that they were encouraging in mass people to be doubtful and cynical and resistant to a COVID vaccine, acts which in public the U.S.
government said was basically the expression of murder, that those acts kill people.
And at the same time that the Pentagon was demanding and mandating and requiring that Americans take this vaccine and censoring and banning any efforts to question the vaccine, in secret the U.S.
government was working as hard as they could to prevent the poorest people on the planet from taking this vaccine, willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people in their effort to try and ensure that China wasn't perceived in a more positive way because they were offering the vaccine for free. willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands or
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Order at 1775coffee.com slash Glenn. Arnaud Bertrand is an entrepreneur and political analyst on economics and geopolitics.
He founded various companies such as Housetrip and me and QI.
He has published articles in numerous political journals around the world about geopolitics and economics and wars.
He is an archaeologist who has a doctorate in Sinology, which is specializing in relations between the Chinese and and the rest of the world, including Central Asia, and going back to antiquity.
He has become one of the most insightful political analysts on a wide range of questions.
As we told you before, it was our local subscribers who kept insisting that we invite him on, and we finally decided we should, and we were able to arrange this, and we are very certain that you will find his commentary and analysis very enlightening.
Welcome to System Update.
I'm very happy to welcome you to your debut here, and I really appreciate your time talking to us tonight.
Thank you so much for inviting me, Glenn.
Sure, so let me start with Europe and with particularly France, where I believe is your country of origin.
We did several shows on the remarkable results of the EU elections, the way in which establishment centrist parties really collapsed Most commonly in giving way to a surge of support for what are called far-right populist parties that happen in places like Germany and Holland, but especially in France where Marine Le Pen's party got three times the vote.
of current President Emmanuel Macron's more centrist establishment party, you can call it establishment, the center-right party.
And you had a long analysis, a long thread, about how the decision by President Macron to dissolve the French parliament and call for snap elections, which is a kind of difficult thing to understand why you would do after an election that just showed that the most popular party is Marine Le Pen's party, why you would then call another election, although I guess he was banking on the fact that people would always turn to him whenever the far right is threatening to emerge. although I guess he was banking on the fact that
It's looking like that's not a very good calculation according to polls, but tell us what has gone on as a result of Macron's decision-making If you could give us a little bit of your insight into why you think Macron made that decision.
Sure.
It's hard to understand exactly why he did that.
The most common view in France is that he did so to throw chaos into the French political system because he gave a very short timeline for other parties to organize themselves for the election.
Just three weeks.
Actually, less than a week to choose the right candidates, to choose who would be the candidates to stand as MPs and who to ally with and so on.
And then just two weeks to run a campaign.
So I think his bet was that there would be so much chaos into the French political system that he would be seen as the safe choice.
Well, he will win the election, but obviously it doesn't look that way because the left organized very quickly.
They all gathered into a new alliance that they call the Front Populaire, the Popular Front.
And then the far-right, Le Pen, is also very organized.
Actually, she's attracting other political parties around her in a new far-right alliance.
So in the end, what the polls show, what we may probably end up with, Is Macron's party getting completely annihilated?
I think the current prediction is that his party is in the lead in only three seats in Parliament out of hundreds of seats.
So it looks like it will probably backfire big time on him.
So just to follow up on that a little bit, Marine Le Pen sort of found this protege who's a 28-year-old, basically very soft-spoken but effective advocate for her political views.
He's very loyal to her, but he also kind of has this You know, obviously Marine Le Pen's party was perceived accurately as having been born from actual neo-Nazis or pro-Nazi ideologies, including her father who denied the Holocaust.
And she's been working on moderating the party's image, knowing that she needs to in order to win.
And now she has this kind of successor.
Who is even more kind of appealing to people just in terms of his comportment and personality.
He's not at all a kind of fire-breathing user of rhetoric.
Quite the contrary.
He tries to be as open and welcoming as possible.
And it seems like it's working.
So do you expect that her party will win and that he will end up as France's prime minister?
Or will there be so much support on the far left with Macron that they'll be able to stop that?
I think it is likely that the Rassemblement National, Le Pen's party, is going to win.
They're leading in the polls.
But it doesn't look like they will have a majority in Parliament.
So I think it's going to be You know, similar to the results of the European election, where Le Pen's party, from memory, got something like 34%.
And the left parties all together, because they're in an alliance now, will get something like 30%.
So then after, it will be up to Macron to decide who to pick as a prime minister, which party, either Le Pen's party, so picking Jordan Bardella, the young man you were speaking about, or someone else from the left, maybe, if they can organize into a coalition.
I think the common view in France is that if those are the results of the election, he will pick Jordan Bardella from the Rassemblement National, and he will remain as president.
It will be what's called in the French political system a cohabitation.
And that he will try to basically show the French public, through this sort of conflictual relationship between Macron as president and a Rassemblement national government,
He will try to show that, you know, Rassemblement National is not what people were expecting and he will try to undermine them every step of the way so that in the next presidential elections, which are three years from now, people, you know, will vote for him, well, his party again, because he can't run again.
So that's what people expect after, you know, anything can happen.
It's kind of amazing that Macron's whole political career has been based in this promise that he is the vanguard against both the far left and the far right, but particularly has positioned himself against Marine Le Pen, against whom he ran in the runoff in the last election.
So for him now to turn to her party and select her protege as prime minister is extraordinary, even though The strategy that you're suggesting, which is kind of forcing them to be in a position where they have to govern and not just be an outsider party where all dissatisfaction benefits them, might end up working.
Who knows?
But let me just ask you one more question about the EU elections, in part because I think there are so many similar dynamics driving What happened in the EU to what is also shaping American politics in terms of the rise of this kind of right-wing populism?
Obviously, there are differences between, say, Trump and Marine Le Pen and, you know, certainly the AFD, which is probably the most extreme of all in Germany, and Geert Wilders.
There's all differences between these ideologies and these parties.
But at the same time, it seems as though What is driving a surge in support for them seems very similar to me.
And so I wanted to get your sense of what you think is causing this shift of support, this rise in support for these right-wing parties.
Is it just a kind of belief in the anti-immigration grievances that these parties are promoting?
Or is it a more kind of generalized anger toward the EU and Brussels establishment?
I think, I mean, if we take a step back, I think at the end of the day, it's a lack of trust in the system, because the French have been, it's a bit like the kind of uniparty system in the US.
The French have been alternating for decades between the centre-right and the centre-left, basically, or the centre-centre, like Macron.
And, you know, France has been steadily declining in so many ways for decades.
So the French got the impression that governments, one after the other, were simply managing decline.
Bit by bit, governments were just, you know, taking things away from them.
And there were never anything positive being done to improve their lifestyle.
So I think.
And then of course they attribute that to too many different things to immigration and so on and so forth.
But at the end of the day I think it's it stems from You know, a general incapacity of those various governments to redress this in France and, you know, progress things instead of managing decline.
And that's why they turned to the only option that they haven't turned to, which is Le Pen.
It's more like we've tried everything else, let's try this and see how it goes.
After, I don't know if it's going to work because Le Pen, in order to de-demonize her party, she's changed a lot.
She's pro-NATO, pro-EU now.
Pro-Israel?
She's pro-Israel?
Yeah, very, very pro-Israel.
So she's looking more like a Melanie-type character in Italy.
And, you know, when you look at polls in Italy for Melanie, more people are dissatisfied with her than satisfied.
So, you know, I don't have much hope that she will manage or even attempt to significantly change.
Yeah, I mean, for me, there's no doubt that if someone were to ask me, what is the primary source of Trump's popularity and appeal, at least among the people who support him, it would be exactly the same thing that you just described, namely a perception that the elite class, the establishment, however you want to define it, has long go cease caring about the interest of ordinary people, are just doing nothing to stop the decline and disintegration of the country and of economic security, the American dream.
And Trump is successfully channeling that by saying, I'm the enemy of the establishment that we both hate.
I mean, it seems to be a very effective weapon.
So I want to use what you said about Jordan Maloney and Marine Le Pen to kind of shift a little bit to focusing on Ukraine, because it was remarkable how when Maloney was elected as the Italian prime minister, The American media really basically was equating her with Mussolini, saying that she's an incredibly dangerous fascist figure.
And then the minute she affirmed her support for the NATO war in Ukraine, all of that discourse disappeared.
And you now see like positive profiles of her as she's a pragmatist, she became, you know, a kind of safe, mainstream leader in the New York Times.
You see that all because of this issue in Ukraine, which is also a vessel for expressing support for NATO and a proxy for saying that you believe in the EU, since that's a NATO and EU project.
So in a way, she kind of won by diluting herself in a big way.
Well, let me ask you about Ukraine, because we've had a lot of people on our show to talk about the war itself and kind of the geo strategy of the war and why it's so difficult for Ukraine to win.
But I want to ask you about the economic part of it, because I find your analysis on economics so informed and well read.
And I want to ask you specifically about the claims that we heard at the start of the war in Ukraine were that the U.S.
and NATO were going to join together to destroy the Russian economy and collapse the ruble by using the sanctions regime that has long suffocated the economies of many countries.
And yet, in the case of Russia, it clearly seems not to have worked.
I mean, you can maybe argue that it's had some negative effects, but in a lot of ways, the Russian economy is doing better than it was doing before the war.
So it's clear that U.S.
sanctions did not at all collapse Russia.
Why did this sanctions regime that has worked in so many other cases in the past to destroy the economies of countries the U.S.
wanted to destroy not work in the case of Russia?
Because I think simply Russia is too important a country.
You know that there were many U.S.
political figures that kept saying that Russia was the equivalent of a small European country.
The Russian economy was as large as, I don't know, Italy or Spain or something like that.
But I think that was... I did a thread last year, I think, where I actually looked into it.
And when you look at the Russian economy by PPP, which is a price parity way, Actually, it's the biggest economy in Europe right now.
It's not like they produce things that we can easily dispense of.
They are the first oil producer in the world, even bigger than Saudi Arabia, for instance, and they produce so many different commodities that it's just too important a country to separate yourself from.
I just saw a statistic in June, I think it was, Russia, again, was the first exporter of gas to Europe.
So here we are, two years and a half into the war, with sanctions on just that.
Europe, you know, promising that they will completely Sever their economic ties with Russia, but it shows that they just can't.
They're just too dependent on it.
So that's the key reason.
You can very well sanction effectively a small country like, say, Cuba or even Venezuela or Iran, but a country like Russia is just too big and too important.
One of the notable things that it seems to me is somewhat new is that some very big and important countries just openly ignored US sanctions and continue to buy oil and sell all sorts of things to the Russian economy.
Obviously, China has stood behind Russia, but so has India.
And a lot of other countries, including Saudi Arabia, a lot of other countries doing business with Russia despite US sanctions.
Do you see that in some way?
And I wanted to ask you more about this when we get to China itself.
But do you see that in some way as a reflection of the fact that the US, we just don't really live in a unipolar world anymore, where the US is the sole superpower, there is now a meaningful block of countries that are powerful and wealthy, And influential that are willing to defy the United States and even kind of create their own alliance that is also helping Russia to avoid these sanctions?
Absolutely.
The war in Ukraine didn't create this situation, but it revealed a growing rift between what we commonly call the West and the West, where it provided an opportunity for all those countries where it provided an opportunity for all those countries of the global South, but not only, to finally say, you know, enough is enough.
We don't want to systematically align with the West anymore and basically do things that are against our own interests just to please them.
So for many of those countries, China in particular, it would have been tremendously damaging to their economy On their own geopolitical position to follow the West with the sanctions on Russia, I mean, China as Russia is China's biggest neighbor.
They have two, three thousand kilometers of border.
Why would they?
Of course, Russia is one of the rare friends today in the world.
Why would they?
make an enemy out of Russia just to please the West when the West's first geopolitical objective after they've eventually defeated Russia is to go after China.
It doesn't make any sense.
So I think it revealed a growing mindset in the global thoughts where enough is enough.
We want to act now in our own interests instead of being told what to do in the West's interests.
I want to get to China in a second.
Before I do, I just want to ask you one more question about Ukraine and the war there.
What was so obvious, I think, from the beginning was that the way in which the US and NATO defined victory, which they swore they would back this war until they achieved,
Was not just a maximalist definition of victory, but almost an impossible one, which is we are not going to stop until we expel every Russian soldier from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which the Russians had annexed in 2014 in response to this Western-backed coup that removed the elected president of Ukraine.
And of course, you have the Russians who would never, ever, ever permit a loss like that, where they got expelled from every inch of Ukraine and were forced to give back Crimea, in part because they consider Crimea of crucial importance to their national security, and to see that loss of that is existential, especially since the West is moving closer to their border there.
But also just they would never accept the humiliation of being driven out of Ukraine, including the provinces where people are more loyal to Moscow than Kiev.
So from the beginning, it seemed like this irresolvable war that had no way out because the way NATO defined victory was a way that Russia could never and would never accept.
They'd probably use nuclear weapons before anything like that could happen.
No, if I knew that, and a lot of other people knew that, the U.S.
government obviously knew that as well, and now there's reporting that what we all have known, the New York Times finally acknowledged this, that there was negotiation between Ukraine and Russia at the start of the war that came very, very close to solving this conflict diplomatically that would have prevented the destruction of Ukraine, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, And although the New York Times didn't mention it, there's also a lot of reporting on how Joe Biden and Boris Johnson and other NATO members intervened to put a stop to that.
They obviously didn't want a diplomatic solution.
They wanted the war to continue.
What do you think is the thought behind the West's and the Americans' obvious intent to keep this war prolonged forever?
I know there was an idea at first that, oh, we're going to weaken Russia, but that's not happening.
So what do you see as the way out of this war?
How it will ever end?
So, I think one of the most important geopolitical objectives for the US is to prevent a unified Eurasia.
It stems from the old British Empire doctrine, where they always prevented a unification of Europe.
Because, you know, there were these small islands off the coast of Europe, and they knew that if ever Europe was to unite, then, you know, they wouldn't stand a chance if ever there was a conflict.
And from many different American strategists, we know that this doctrine is the same at the usual level for For the U.S., for instance, Brzezinski in the Grand Chess Board wrote exactly that.
If ever there was a united Eurasia, so with Europe, Russia and China, then the U.S.
believes that it would be very, very bad news for them.
So I think fundamentally that is the primary objective to ensure a durable divide at the heart of Eurasia between Europe and Russia.
I think that is why they didn't agree to those First of all, right before the war, Russia made what looks right now as a pretty reasonable ask to just refuse that Ukraine would join NATO and commit to remain neutral.
I think anyone with any common sense can agree that this would have been much better for Ukraine, given how things look right now.
And then, like you said, two months into the war, there were those Istanbul negotiations, where Basically, the negotiation arrived at a point where you had a solution, you know, pretty similar to this.
Russia, I think, will withdraw from, not from Crimea, but from those provinces in exchange for basically the neutrality, the long-term neutrality of Ukraine.
And that would have meant a warming of relationship between Russia and Europe and probably resuming all the trade with the pipelines and so on.
And I think that's fundamentally unacceptable to the US.
And so that's why the war continues to this day, unfortunately.
So you mentioned this U.S.
longstanding desire not to permit a unification of Eurasia, but also one of the foundations of U.S.
foreign policy in the Cold War Which was obviously aimed at undermining and stopping the Soviet Union was to ensure that the Soviet Union and China never were permitted to align as well or to unify that there was always this huge wedge between the two countries that was critical to the US foreign policymakers in the Cold War was you can't have Beijing and Moscow together in an alliance.
Amazingly, the US managed to avoid that throughout the entire Cold War.
And now, it seems like China and Russia are closer to one another than they have been in a long, long time, including the fact that China is providing a lot of support for the Russian effort in Ukraine.
How do the Chinese government see Russia in terms of being an ally and why are they willing to stand behind Russia when it comes to Ukraine?
So, I don't think that the Chinese are so much behind Russia on Ukraine.
I mean, they've never provided weapons.
I think to an extremely large, to a very, very large extent, this accusation by the US of providing dual use goods and so on.
I don't think that China does that a lot, simply because for China, their main issue is Taiwan.
For them, Taiwan is a territorial integrity issue, where they consider Taiwan a province of China.
They want the world to respect their territorial integrity.
So they don't want to be cynical by backing Russia in Ukraine, because that would mean that they don't They respect territorial integrity for themselves, but not for Ukraine.
And in fact, if you look at the Chinese peace plan that was presented last year, it's a 12-point plan.
So they presented it last year, it was almost immediately rejected out of hand by the West.
The first point, and that was very much not reported in the media, at least very little, the first point of the plan China is respecting the UN Charter on Ukraine's territorial integrity.
So China is not behind Russia for Ukraine?
But in general, it's true that they're very, very close to Russia.
First of all, because it's their biggest neighbor.
So you always want to have a good relationship with your neighbor, of course, especially if you study Chinese history.
The threat always came from the north, right?
So they were invaded by the Mongols so many times, by the Manchus and so on, so having a good relationship with the northern neighbor is pretty important for Chinese, given their history.
And also because they understand, and that was part of the, that was written in Brzezinski's Big Chess Board as well, He wrote, I can't remember the exact quote, that the most dangerous situation for the U.S.
would be an alliance between China, Russia, and Iran, because those are just very important strategic countries.
That's exactly what we have today, when you look at it.
I mean, it's not an alliance in the military meaning of the term, but it's a strategic alliance.
They're working together in order to bring about a multipolar world order where the US cannot anymore Basically, submit countries to their will, and instead, every country will have the opportunity to pursue their own interests more freely.
That's the goal of the Alliance, rather than fighting wars.
Well, there's also a very related kind of paradox of American political discourse when it comes to China that I wanted to ask you about as well, which is, you know, we've been hearing, at least since the Obama administration, that we have to pivot to China, stop focusing so much on the Middle East, because China is our real long-term adversary.
We need to do what we can in the Pacific in order to undermine their aggression and all that sort of thing.
And yet at the same time that we constantly hear this belligerent rhetoric from Washington and the media about China, China is able to very extensively expand its influence into regions in the world that the United States has long dominated, including obviously in Africa and in South America and in the Middle East.
Here in Brazil, for example, which the United States has always cared a lot about because it's the second largest country in the hemisphere.
It has a lot of geostrategic importance and resources.
China has now replaced the U.S.
as Brazil's biggest trading partner.
And China has a lot of influence in Brazil as a result.
This is replicating itself all over the world in African countries and in the Middle East.
And so while we're claiming that We have to do everything to stop China.
Whatever we're doing is enabling, if not causing, Chinese influence to grow.
Why do you think China is having so much success in convincing or luring countries to kind of move away from the American and Western European sphere of influence and move to better relations with China?
I think a lot of it has to do with the tangible benefits that they get from their relationship with China.
So first of all, China has those five principles of peaceful coexistence, which has been the core of their foreign policy.
Well, everything's Joe and Lye on my own.
Joe and Lye came up with those five principles.
This year is the 70th anniversary of them.
And they're pretty strict in respecting those principles.
So one of them is non-interference in In the internal affairs of other countries.
Another one is peaceful coexistence.
So no war.
China hasn't fired a single bullet abroad since 1979.
bullet abroad since 1979.
So that's what, that's 45 years.
And pursue mutual benefits, which is another of the principles.
So, you know, when you when you deal with China, you You get into a relationship where, well, first of all, you know, a lot of trade happens.
So the common view is that China sells an awful lot but doesn't buy a lot from other countries, which is not true.
I'm sure when you look at Brazil, for instance, it's It also sells a lot to China, so it derives a lot of benefits from that on top of being able to buy relatively cheap products from China.
So all in all, It's a very different approach to the relationship than the U.S., which economic power is declining.
So, bit by bit, the relationship that many of the countries in the global south get with the U.S.
It's less and less an economic relationship where they trade a lot and derive benefits from that, but it becomes more and more a purely political relationship where the U.S.
makes a lot of demands that are mostly in their own interests.
And the benefits for the countries involved are less and less obvious, and it becomes a very one-sided relationship that cannot be sustainable in the long term.
I think that's the dynamic that we're progressively seeing.
Yeah, there's that famous quote from an African leader, I forget who, but he said, when the United States comes, you end up getting a lecture.
And when the Chinese come, you end up getting a new hospital.
I think this kind of resentment toward the US and to the West is something that China is very effectively exploiting.
Let me ask you, you know, sometimes I honestly feel that Americans are more propagandized than almost any other country in the world.
I mean, the fact that so many Americans believe that China is this aggressive, militaristic, expansionist power, while the US is sort of this, you know, peace loving country that just only tries to help other countries, when as you said, the Chinese haven't had a war since 1979.
Even that was like a one month border dispute with Vietnam and Cambodia.
And I think it's fair to say the US has had quite a number of wars since 1979.
But also you look at a map And you just see the U.S.
has China completely encircled with military bases in Japan and the Philippines and South Korea and off the coast of some of these islands and there's all kinds of U.S.
fighter jets buzzing China right near its border, something that of course the Chinese don't do to the United States.
But I know from experience that when I try and convince people of this, when I try and make them see this kind of gap between the propaganda we hear about China on the one hand and the reality of their conduct on the other, the one thing people will raise is, well, China clearly has its eyes on Taiwan and is threatening to invade Taiwan.
There was a reporting last week, I believe it was from the Financial Times, that said that President Xi believes that the United States was trying to provoke China into invading Taiwan in order to kind of isolate the Chinese from the international stage the way they did with Russia, and I guess a lot of people think that the U.S.
also helped provoke Russia into a war with Ukraine, and that China resisted that because they don't actually want A war over Taiwan.
They obviously value it and think it's theirs as part of their territorial integrity, and they will insist on that.
But what is the view in China and Beijing with respect to Taiwan?
Do you believe that there is some imminent willingness to use military force to take it back and control it?
Or what is the Chinese plan with regard to Taiwan?
No, I believe that everyone wants to avoid the war.
I haven't met a single Chinese person who said they wanted to go to war over Taiwan.
In fact, I think most Chinese, even on the mainland, prefer the status quo, the situation that has existed since Since the deal that Nixon and Kissinger made with China.
And most Taiwanese want the status quo.
Surveys after surveys, the Taiwanese say we want the situation we've had for For decades, we don't want reunification and we don't want independence because it served both countries so well.
If you look at how the mainland and Taiwan developed over the past few decades with the status quo, you know, it makes total sense that both sides would want to continue like that.
So, I think that the reports, I mean, what Xi Jinping said in the Financial Times, that's a very commonly had view in China.
I have no doubt that Xi Jinping himself truly believes that the US is playing the Taiwan card, as they say, and moving away from the agreements that they made with China in so many ways.
The Nixon-Kissinger agreement, they're moving away from that, undermining the one-China principle in order to instigate a war.
I have a casus belli in order to justify the same types of actions that they took against Russia and tried to isolate China from the international order.
That is the common view in China.
And when you look at US actions with regards to Taiwan, it's actually pretty hard to To deny that there are a lot of provocations going on.
So, you know, look at the Pelosi visit to the islands.
Recently, they even put boots on the ground.
There are American soldiers on the ground in Taiwan.
Just not anywhere in Taiwan.
It's not on the Taiwan island itself, but it's on Kinmen Island, which belongs to the Republic of China.
Which is, you know, just a couple of miles off the coast of the mainland.
So, you know, actions like that are immensely provoking.
And, you know, why would they do that if they wanted to keep the status quo and keep the situation peaceful?
Yeah.
And of course, Joe Biden, I mean, that's so interesting because the status quo has worked since that agreement that Nixon and Kissinger struck.
And yet you see very explicitly that Washington is trying to upend the status quo.
Joe Biden is the first American president since that deal with Nixon who has refused to maintain strategic ambiguity and has explicitly said on at least four occasions that if the chinese try and take back taiwan we will go to war in order to protect uh taiwan i speak of nancy pelosi who did this you know very provocative visit uh to china to taiwan as a separate country she was in india today i don't know if you saw this and she gave a speech yeah
where she was keeping praise on the dalai lama in tibet and she was saying the dalai lama will be remembered as a great man through all of eternity.
Whereas I'm saying to you, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, you will be remembered by nobody.
Nobody will give you the slightest credit for anything.
I mean, there's this very hawkish and militaristic and provocative posture by a lot of Democrats, not just Republicans.
And I wanted to ask you about the role of superconductors in that industry in Taiwan, because obviously the importance of Taiwan is in a lot of ways based on their dominance of these chips and superconductors on which the world's computers and internets depend.
Do you think that the US sees Taiwan as worth fighting over because of that industry?
Or what do you make of the Taiwanese dominance over superconductors and how that affects the American and Chinese views of semiconductors rather and the view and the way it affects Chinese and American relations?
So first of all, I think from the Chinese side, the Semiconductor thing plays a very little role.
I don't think it matters that much, simply because if you look, they've wanted to reunify with Taiwan since before.
Semiconductors were a thing.
So for them, from the Chinese standpoint, it's more putting an end to the civil war, because that's really the root cause of the Taiwan issue.
There was the Chinese civil war between the communists and the KMT, who were backed by the Americans.
And at the end of the civil war, which they lost, the KMT retreated on Taiwan, which was part of Chinese territory, and protected by the Americans, that was their last stand.
And we're still in some way in this civil war, and it's not the KMT in power anymore, but the Chinese in Taiwan are still making their last stand.
And from the Chinese standpoint, it is putting an end to that civil war that motivates them.
And also the fact that they're backed by the US means that Taiwan is sort of the last remnant of China's so-called century of humiliation, where foreign powers can't, came to China and, you know, colonized some parts of China and were able to dictate, you know, policy when it comes to China.
Taiwan is the only place that remains, that symbolizes that.
So those are, in the Chinese mindset, those are the two key reasons, not semiconductors.
From an American standpoint, I think semiconductors matter.
And what worries me quite a bit is the fact that they're forcing TSMC, which is the big semiconductors company, to build some factories in the US, in Arizona, famously.
In order to alleviate this danger that if there was a war in Taiwan, then semiconductor supply to the U.S.
would be affected.
And why this war is missed, of course, is because right now this is a very big deterrent for the U.S.
not to have an immediate conflict in Taiwan, because they know it will affect the semiconductor industry so much.
But when that factory in Arizona is up and running, of course, it will be much less of a deterrent.
So it is quite worrying, I think.
So I just want to ask you a couple more questions because of time constraints.
And I'd love to have you back on to ask you a lot more, including about things we haven't really gotten to, like the war in Gaza and the like.
But let me just ask you this, first of all.
When people raise the issue of whether Washington is pursuing a Cold War with China, or even the possibility of a shooting war with China, one of the things to me that seems different about China when it comes to the United States is that in the past, whenever the United States wanted to go to war with a country, all different power centers in the United States were unified in their willingness to go to war, or at least they were in different
Whereas in the United States, you have this really interesting split where financial elites and corporate America and Wall Street are very dependent on China, are in bed with the Chinese, have a very positive relationship with the Chinese economically, for all kinds of reasons, and yet it's the military and intelligence communities that seem to be a lot more antagonistic to China.
Do you see this split where so much of American economy and American corporate power and Wall Street depend upon China as being an impediment, something that will impede a kind of all-out Cold War of the kind we had with the Soviet Union that will endure for many decades?
I think to some extent, but we're seeing a lot of efforts by the US to salami slice, as the Chinese say, this close relationship.
We're even seeing some U.S.
politicians like Robert O'Brien, who used to be Trump's national security advisor, and who, as I understand, is one of Trump's closest advisors today when it comes to foreign policy, just wrote an article in Foreign Affairs where he called for a total decoupling of the Chinese and the US economy.
I have no doubt that if Trump gets elected in November, they will try to, you know, I don't think they will manage to put in place a total decoupling, but at least they will, you know,
The Biden administration is also doing that to a quite important extent today, especially when it comes to high tech, tech industry.
I often compare the current strategy of the U.S.
to the strategy of the aliens in the Three-Body Program, where the S.A.N.T.I., the aliens, sent a device to Earth before they arrived to stop any technological progress On Earth, because otherwise they knew that when they would finally arrive to Earth, then the humans would be more technologically advanced than they were.
And in some way, it is what the US is trying to do.
With China trying to, with the sanctions on semiconductors, with the recent sanctions on green tech and so on, they are trying to stop China's technological progress.
In order to remain ahead in tech and remain dominant in the more value-added products in the valuation, basically.
So, yeah, to go back to your question, I think today both economies remain very coupled, but I think unfortunately both parties, Republicans to a very, very strong extent and the Democrats to a slightly lesser extent,
We are trying very hard to stop this, well, to decouple to some extent, which is also worrying because, again, it is another deterrent against war.
And when you try to remove that, war is again more likely.
Yeah, it is amazing, though, how, yet again, on the major issues, the two parties have so much overlap, even if they kind of have some differences on the margins, obviously with regard to Ukraine, with regard to Israel, with regard to China.
Let me ask you this last question just briefly.
I know you talk a lot about the Israeli war in Gaza that's backed by the United States.
We cover it a lot, are very critical of it in many different ways.
But I wanted to ask you about this war from the Chinese perspective.
Does the Chinese government care all that much about what the Israelis and Americans are doing in Gaza?
And either way, do they see it as an opportunity to kind of feed into this narrative about the malign influence of the United States in the world that they're successfully employing to get more and more countries to want to be more closely aligned with them?
So the answer is yes and yes.
So, first of all, the war in Gaza is quite extraordinary in China.
I don't think I've ever seen a foreign conflict that was so publicized It's important to the Chinese population in general.
Very recently, we just had the Gaokao in China, which is the pre-university exam.
It's an extremely important exam for For Chinese young people.
We saw so many young kids at the end of their exam getting out of the exam room with the Palestinian flag and that going viral on Chinese social media.
People don't realize it's a very, very big topic in China.
And of course, China has always been on the Palestinian side ever since Mao.
In fact, Mao several times compared the Palestine issue to the Taiwan issue.
He thought they were extremely similar.
So yeah, it is very important for the Chinese people and for the Chinese government on their square, definitely on the Palestinian side.
After they don't want to eradicate Israel, they've always been pushing for a two-state solution based on the 19th 67 borders, but in the current war in Gaza, they've done a lot to support Palestine in so many ways, diplomatically at the UN and so on and so forth.
And yes, they're absolutely using that to illustrate the US role in the world.
In fact, it's fascinating if you look at recent surveys in Southeast Asia.
Before the war, most countries, when asked the question, would you rather side with the US or China, most countries were replying the US.
But right now, it's shifted after the war in Gaza, especially in Muslim countries in Southeast Asia, so Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei.
Where, you know, the answer to that question, would you rather side with the U.S.
or China?
They replied China at 70 to 80 percent.
I mean, it's quite extraordinary.
So with that, the U.S.
is, with the support of Al-Gaza, I think the U.S.
is completely losing the Muslim world, which is, when you think about it, it's quite crazy that they're losing them now.
After everything that happened in the so-called war on terror.
But yeah, it's doing a lot of damage to the US image.
And as a consequence, it's benefiting China, which looks like a much saner alternative to the US right now.
It's amazing how much the U.S.
is willing to sacrifice and lose simply to tie itself at all times to Israel.
I mean, I don't think people realize just how much damage it's done to the United States' interest in the world.
Arnaud, I super appreciate your coming on.
I hope people will follow your work, including where you're very prolific on Twitter.
We'll put your profile there for people to follow it, and I hope they will.
I really am an admirer of your work and I appreciate your time tonight and I hope to see you back on our show again.
Thank you.
It will be a great pleasure.
All right.
All right, have a good evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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