CNN And Jake Tapper In Deep Trouble In Defamation Lawsuit: With Jonathan Turley; TikTok Ban, Trump's China Policy, And More With Arnaud Bertrand
CNN could be in deep legal trouble as they face a major defamation case. Law professor Jonathan Turley explains the high stakes case and what it means for the future of media, journalism, and more. Plus: With the TikTok ban deadline approaching rapidly, Americans are flocking to the Chinese-owned app RedNote. China expert Arnaud Bertrand discusses how China is reacting to the influx of "TikTok" refugees. Finally, Arnaud Bertrand weighs in on what the Trump presidency could mean for China.
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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, on the dot, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, much of the U.S. corporate media has spent the last eight years relentlessly and sanctimoniously sermonizing about the evils of disinformation, and more so...
That our only protection against it is to put our faith in those media corporations to tell us the truth, to teach us and protect us from these falsehoods.
The core irony of their crusade is visible to everyone.
No sector of society spreads disinformation and falsehoods more aggressively, frequently, casually and destructively than these very same corporate media outlets.
Despite their clear and demonstrable record of lies, very harmful lies, in fact, it is very difficult to sue these media outlets for defamation, even when their lies about someone directly harm their life or their reputation.
There is, on the one hand, a good reason for that relatively difficult standard, which is that if journalistic outlets are constantly petrified of being sued, that will make them excessively cautious, even fearful to the point of paralysis when trying to report on powerful and wealthy people.
But suing them...
While difficult, validly so, is not impossible, nor should it be.
If one can prove that the lie was told deliberately or with such completely recklessness that it amounts to intentionality, then it is possible to win a trial against Medialis to get to a trial and then to win.
Right now, CNN and its on-air personalities, including one of its star anchors, Jake Tapper, are in deep trouble in a state court in Florida, precisely because of ample evidence that they not only lied on their broadcast, but did so with clear, explicit malice.
The lawsuit was brought by Zachary Young, a former Navy veteran and U.S. government official who now has a private security company.
Tapper aired a report in which CNN accused Young of fraudulently exploiting vulnerable Afghans by running a black market in which he forced them to pay him in order to have any hope of leaving and resettling in the United States.
CNN's efforts to have the case dismissed have been repeatedly rejected.
The trial is ongoing, and law professor and prominent media analyst Jonathan Turley has been one of the people extensively covering what is going on there.
And what it means for the media generally Then, Arnaud Bertrand is a French entrepreneur who lived for nearly a decade in China where he has, in our view, become one of the most reliable and informed experts on that country as well as international relations in general.
We have had him on the show before and always found it very illuminating and tonight we will speak with him about a wide range of topics including the possibly imminent or not TikTok ban in the United States.
The large-scale migration of American users on that platform to an explicitly and proudly Chinese platform.
The visit of a high-ranking Chinese official to Trump's inauguration and what that means.
Likely U.S.-China relations under Trump.
And the ceasefire deal negotiated for Israel and Gaza that does now look poised to take effect.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There's a really interesting and I think important trial currently underway in a court, a state court in Florida, in which CNN is being sued for defamation by an individual in which CNN is being sued for defamation by an individual who it appears was the subject of a false and reputationally damaging And this...
Plaintiff has not only succeeded in getting to a trial, the trial is underway, I believe it's concluded and the jury now has the case where they're deliberating, but he's also seeking punitive damages because he was able to present evidence that CNN didn't just lie about him but did so.
With malice, Professor Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.
He is one of the most prominent and I think one of the most informed media voices when it comes to telling us about legal cases and legal issues.
He has a whole variety of credentials that I've gone through many times before.
He's the author of The Indispensable Right, Free Speech, and An Age of Rage.
And he joins us to discuss this CNN case as it struggles through a $1 billion defamation lawsuit and what it might mean for the media more broadly.
Professor Turley, always great to see you.
Thank you for...
Thank you very much.
- Gotcha, I'm glad to be with you, Glenn. - Yeah, absolutely, I'm glad you're here.
So, this case has actually gotten less attention than it arguably deserves, and I don't say that judgmentally.
This is the first time we're covering it as well, probably because there's so many other big news events taking place, but it certainly is significant, but I don't think a lot of people are very familiar even with the basics.
Can we just start with the CNN segment itself?
What it is exactly that they allege that triggered this defamation lawsuit?
Well, it boils down to this period, obviously, when we were pulling out of Afghanistan, there was panic.
There was very little warning at the end how fast it was going to be.
So you had a bunch of Afghan citizens that were trying very hard to get out of that country at the risk of their own lives.
Various groups sort of sprung up, including people who had been in the special forces, in the military, who were using different means to get people out.
One of them was this individual, and Zehri Young was running an operation to get folks out.
There was a charge, but what he was charging was in line with what other people were encountering as expenses.
But what really came out of this was an attack piece on CNN that zeroed in on him.
It was on Jake Tapper's program, and it focused on Zachary Young.
And it referred to his operation as a black market operation, basically accused him of something akin to human trafficking.
And it had many of the signatures that we have seen for so long in dealing with the media and these gotcha pieces.
They decided just to reach out to him with roughly two hours before airtime.
And that's an old trick, as you know, by many in the media, particularly the print media, so that they could say there was no response from the individual.
And in this case, to their chagrin, I think, Young responded.
And this led to emails that were quite profane, saying that he had responded, but also saying that we're going to bury this guy, referring to him with all types of profanity, showing real malice here in the emails.
There was never any evidence against Young himself or his company that he was engaged in these types of black market operations.
They also suggested that what he was doing was unlawful.
So when they eventually went to court, CNN really made an unholy mess of this.
I mean, I teach defamation in law school, and this is almost a case study of how not to defend a defamation case.
In fact, they had to replace their lead counsel after she argued that it wasn't false to say that it was unlawful because it violated Taliban law.
And that took a lot of people by surprise and said, really, is that CNN standard?
That this is unlawful according to the Taliban?
And that didn't go over well with the judge.
And the judge ruled against CNN in a series of motions.
So the case was going rather badly for CNN, and it got a lot worse this week.
You first had Jake Taffer.
Let me interrupt you there, because I want to get into that in detail, what's actually happening now.
But I just want people to understand the kind of legal framework a little bit better to understand why this is such an unusual event.
In general, it's actually quite hard to sue media outlets for defamation, particularly so if either you're a public figure, and I don't know what the status of Zachary Young has been ruled to be.
I don't think he's a public figure, but you know better than I in terms of what he's been said to be in that regard in this case.
But also when you're suing for punitive damages, you have a much higher standard as well.
You have to, as you said, show actual malice.
And often what happens is even when media outlets lie and everyone knows they lie, the court knows they lie, they still throw the case out on the grounds that it's impossible to prove the necessary malice or the mindset that you have to show that media outlets wanted.
Why has this case...
And you would assume, but I guess it's inaccurate in this case, that CNN would have very good lawyers, and it doesn't seem like they do.
They've had to switch them, which you know about.
But how did it get so far to the point where we're now not only in the middle of a trial, but the trial is concluded and the jury has the case and is deliberating?
Well, first of all, the record in the case was replete with what seemed to be open malice.
I mean, you had these producers promising to bury this guy, and one producer saying, I'm going to take that as a promise.
You had them giving him virtually no time to respond, and when he did, they made no real changes.
And then, to make matters worse for them, when they were at trial, Producers testified that they didn't even think when CNN finally came out with a statement that really we didn't mean to suggest he was part of the black market.
All these producers testified in front of this jury.
We didn't want them to do that.
We don't think it's warranted.
And, you know, observers said that they felt that the jury was moving quickly away from CNN. But what was most outstanding was the impact on the judge because there was a series of mistakes that culminated this week.
Where the judge responded to the CNN's lead counsel by saying, you have basically zero credibility with me.
I mean, that's never a good sign.
But it came after the CNN counsel was waving around a document saying that it was a smoking gun showing that Young was lying about not being able to get a job.
Well, that document turned out just to be an application for the renewal of his security clearance.
And he ended up not getting it.
And the judge was irate and said that you really need to give him an apology and I need to decide what to do here.
So all of that really established, I think, for the judge, certainly the early stuff, evidence of potential actual malice.
But as you say, Glenn, one of the issues here...
It's an outstanding debate about New York Times v.
Sullivan, where the standard you described was first honed.
That was with regard to public officials.
And in New York Times v.
Sullivan, just as Brennan wrote a really beautifully written opinion, Where he said, look, we have to give a little bit of breathing room for the media and for the public in criticizing public officials.
And basically he said, look, this is the life you chose.
When you ran for office, you had to understand that people would say things about you that might be untrue.
But we want to give some breathing space for that to happen.
Well, that opinion really made sense to a lot of people.
It was sort of perfecting democracy.
But then later the court extended it to what are called Public figures.
And those are people who are celebrities or others in the news.
And said, well, you know, and the court said, this is a celebrity-driven country that we have.
Celebrities are actually more powerful than most public officials.
So they said, for celebrities as well, for public figures, you also have to shoulder this higher burden, which means that people could say things about you that they wouldn't be able to say about ordinary people.
And some of us have questioned that.
I don't see why, if you're a Kardashian or you're a CEO or you're a football coach, why you should have to shoulder a higher burden than other people when people have lied about you.
Yeah, and I think it's worth underscoring there, too, for people who might be hearing that and saying, why should media outlets get this special...
This kind of breathing room, it's true in a lot of professions.
If a physician or a surgeon makes a mistake and it results in harm or even death to the patient, there's a standard that says just a mere mistake, kind of good faith mistake, isn't sufficient.
It has to be the sort of thing that really widely deviates from standard medical practice.
Same with lawyers, same with a lot of professions, because you don't want people constantly petrified of being able to do their job or even taking some risks because of fear that there's going to be constant lawsuits.
I guess the thing that has surprised me here, having spent the last week or so familiarizing myself with this case, you're writing on it, people who have been reporters in the courtroom, is in my own experience, when you have a case like this and you're representing a plaintiff against a big corporation and you're asking for a lot of money and the corporation is suffering a series of losses as a defendant, oftentimes, usually, in fact, this type of case will settle before it goes to trial.
And then if you get to trial, somehow, And you're clearly winning and the corporation is suffering a lot of losses to the point where the judge is saying, my faith in you, the lawyer for this massive corporation, CNN, is at zero.
It's almost inconceivable to me that CNN wouldn't be offering enough money that almost forces Mr. Young to accept just because of the amount of money being offered.
I don't know if you have information about this or maybe just even form speculation, but why do you think that's not happening here?
Well, first of all, I just want to warn the engineers, we're getting feedback, so it's hard to understand, but I got the gist of your question, Glenn, and it is a mystery as to why CNN decided to push this case this far, and they did not settle.
I think it is because media generally win these cases, but as I've explored on my blog, There's a lot of cases now that have been going against the media, from the New York Times to CNN. There are cases that have been surviving these challenges because of malice showings.
And that is, I think, something...
Quite indicative.
In my book, The Indispensable Right, I talk about, I have a chapter on the media and how advocacy journalism has taken over from objectivity and neutrality to the point that you have many leading editors at newspapers rejecting objectivity.
That's the new thing in J schools, to say that objectivity and neutrality are sort of old news, no pun intended.
That has led to a lot of these problems, because once you get rid of objectivity and neutrality, then you've got advocacy and malice, and that tends to remove the protections that you have under these cases.
What's happening with CNN is a particularly interesting case study, because they were very aggressive in opposing this individual on a record that was not very good.
But they also alienated the judge.
So the way these things happen is that if you're a defense attorney, you've got to worry first about the verdict against your client, but also the size of the award.
If the award is too high, you put in a motion for remitter, which is a motion to reduce the award, which a judge can do.
A judge can't increase the award, but he or she can reduce it.
Well, when you have a judge saying your credibility with me is zero, it means that that fallback position has become a lot worse.
And so it is surprising that CNN has not changed its approach to this case.
And some of the evidence is terrible for CNN. I mean, there's even emails saying this guy has such a punchable face.
I mean, really talking about him with a level of contempt that really wreaks a ballast.
One of the things, you know, I remember one of the very first big cases in sort of the digital age of media with digital media was when Hulk Hogan sued Gawker in a, also in a Florida state court backed by Peter Thiel because of the publication also in a Florida state court backed by Peter Thiel because of the publication of a sex video involving Hulk It wasn't a defamation case, but it was a suit against the media outlet.
And one of the reasons, having followed that case very closely, that the jury ended up hating Gawker and ruling in favor of Hulk Hogan was because these Gawker editors and journalists were so smug and so condescending.
And just so reeking of this sort of patronizing attitude that everything they do is inherently noble and cannot be questioned.
The kind of attitude that a lot of people have detected in media generally, corporate media generally, and has turned a lot of people off.
From what I can tell in this case, there's a lot of that as well.
I've seen some of these deposition clips where, and as you said, they're very unrepentant.
They've gone before into trial.
By the way, are you able to hear me better?
Is that problem fixed?
I think so.
And once again, we're having this bad connection, but I think I have the gist of it.
So forgive me if I hit a little off mark, but I think there is that.
First of all, you do have those cases from Hulk Hogan, I believe you mentioned, and others that you see a trend here that is going against the media.
It's a very different situation.
When I started to teach towards...
You rarely saw, as you mentioned, Glenn, at the outset, you rarely saw a successful case.
This was really a case...
The New York Times for Sullivan was designed to make this...
Relatively rare.
And it had, for good reason, you know, after, during the anti-segregation period, you had an effort to basically drain newspapers, including the New York Times, by suing them under state law, requiring only a simple negligence standard before very hostile juries in the South that were blaming a lot of these northern media outlets for bringing so much attention to the freedom fighters.
That period, all the way until relatively recently, showed a great deal of confidence for media lawyers that they could beat these things back.
That's changing, and I think it's changing because of the media.
And one other issue I wanted to raise, Glenn, is that we just recently had a case involving a woman who is part of the new media, and you have been a very great leader in that sense.
Of creating an alternative to legacy media.
The fact is that media has been sawing on the branch they've been sitting on for years.
And you have revenue and readership and viewership plummeting.
You have the Washington Post lost $77 million last year, half their viewership.
They brought in a new editor.
And this is a direct quote who told the newsroom, nobody's reading your stuff.
And yet the response of many of the reporters was to try to get him fired, right?
So the media is having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that they are increasingly doing copy for themselves, being read by their friends and not by the public.
So you have this recent case from the Supreme Court involving a new media journalist, and she has a bigger following along the border than the local papers do.
And the Supreme Court treated her as a journalist.
It wasn't dealing with these standards, but it was a very important moment because years ago, the Supreme Court might not have treated her as a journalist, but they did say in this matter, this is a journalist who people read her stuff.
She does investigatory work.
So as the landscape of media changes, as people move away from legacy media, I do think you're going to see more of these cases come up.
So I know you're having a little bit of difficulty hearing me, so I just might want to ask you one or two other questions just because of the difficulty that you're having.
I don't know why.
We'll figure that out.
But there was also a recent case where President Trump, President-elect Trump sued ABC News.
And this is the kind of lawsuit he sued them for defamation.
You're talking here about a former president, a now elected president.
Where the standard would obviously be very high for Trump to have to meet in order to be able to maintain a defamation suit against ABC because in that spectrum that you described of celebrities or public officials, we're talking here about the highest, most powerful political official where you would definitely want the media outlets to have a good amount of space.
But rather than try and get the case dismissed, or I guess they did try and it didn't get dismissed.
ABC News ended up settling with Trump and paying him $15 million to his presidential library and to a foundation and apologizing for the story.
And I'm just wondering, obviously we like to think of courts as being insulated from political and cultural trends, but the reality is they're in society and they reflect cultural trends as much as anybody.
Do you think that this growing hostility toward...
Mainstream media outlets, this lack of trust and credibility and faith that they are now plagued with will make it easier for people to sue these outlets, for courts to be more scrutinizing of whether, as you say, they're acting more as activists and not journalists and therefore more subject to a claim of malice?
Yeah, I think I got the gist.
It just shows, by the way, that even if I can only hear one out of four words from Glenn, it's still powerful and compelling.
I commend you.
I do think that the media was shocked by this election because movements like the Brandon movement, you know, that when you have let's go Brandon chants, that was more of a criticism of the media than it was Joe Biden.
It was the public sort of Yankee doodling the media using their own false expression in that case, pretending that the crowd was saying let's go Brandon instead of something profane about the president.
Use that as a mantra against the media.
But more importantly, in this election, they saw that this narrative that was unrelenting in the campaign, overwhelmingly negative coverage of Trump, went nowhere.
So, you know, Harris had every advantage.
She had over a billion dollars.
She had the media, 99% of the media, just hammering every night.
In her favor.
She had the sitting administration that was working to help her.
And it still did not work.
And I think it shocked the media.
And to that extent, you did see some changes.
Over at the Washington Post, Bezos was, I think, able to use that moment to say, we really need to do something.
I used to write for the Washington Post.
I wrote regularly for them, and I enjoyed it.
I haven't done that in a long time.
But a change happened, and it happened very, very quickly.
And what was happening is the Washington Post wrote off half the country.
And I wrote a column saying, you're not going to be able to sustain that.
You can't write off half the country and just try to work on the other half to get them to be your subscribers.
And we've seen this at CNN. We've seen this at MSNBC. And you have these falling numbers.
Now, quite frankly, I should reveal that I work with Fox.
I'm a legal analyst there.
But I used to.
I worked twice for NBC, twice for CBS. I worked for BBC. And I often challenge my colleagues, many of whom I know from my prior networks, that they're not even curious about what's happening.
That's what I find odd.
Years ago, I gave a speech to a media group, and I said, it's like a ship of fools.
You don't even have a modicum of curiosity as to why people are voting for Donald Trump, why they're leaving the media.
And I think that we're now seeing the results of that.
And I also told them, look, Fox News has more Democrats.
And I asked them, why is that?
I mean, given what they say about Fox, and I'm not saying this to puff up Fox.
I'm really not.
They don't need me to do that.
But Fox has more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.
And what I've simply asked, honestly, as someone who's been in the media a long time, as you have, is why?
And the answer, I think, is that these people just can't see stories.
On Fox, on other networks.
And they're coming to Fox because they want to see those stories, not necessarily because they agree with Fox generally.
Some people are getting that, but I don't know how easy it will be to reverse that.
So I think that with the Trump administration that you were referring to, Glenn, they're going to have a very hostile case.
One of the most hostile reporters for NBC was recently told that she will go back to the White House.
That is someone who would regularly give speeches against Trump in the press room.
It just shows that NBC certainly is going to repeat what it did in the first term.
Yeah, that's Yamiche Alcindor.
So I know you're having trouble hearing me.
You can only hear one of every four words I'm saying or so.
I did have more to talk to you about, but it doesn't make sense to continue while you're not able to hear me.
So I think we're going to let you go.
I'm going to pass you to the newsroom just to see if they can fix that quickly because I'd love to continue.
But if not, I just want to thank you so much for your work.
It's always great to see you.
Always great to talk to you.
Hopefully we'll have a little bit more time to talk, but if not, then have a great evening.
Well, it's great to talk to you, Glenn, even if I get only one out of four words.
Thank you so much.
All right, thank you.
Have a good night.
All right, so we're going to have Arnaud Bertrand here in just a few minutes, but we want to make sure that we don't have the same issue with him.
I also don't know, do we have any issues with my audio now, or was that only for the guest?
Okay, so everything seems to be fine.
I think the audio will be fine, so we're going to have him here in a few minutes.
So I just want to set up what I want to actually talk to him about because there's been a couple of important developments and several issues that we've often covered that I want to talk to Arnott about, particularly because he is based in China and these stories relate to China.
Some of them at least do.
So first of all, we spent all night last night, the whole show, talking about this peace deal that unquestionably was the responsibility and the work of President Trump.
Everyone credits him, including the media outlets most hostile to him, for having basically gone in like a bull in a china shop and dispensed with every diplomatic nicety to the point where his envoy in the Middle East was told that it was the Shabbat and therefore Netanyahu couldn't meet after he called from Qatar and said I'm coming there.
And he said, I don't care about the Shabbat Shabbat.
I'm coming there anyway, and Netanyahu's going to meet with me.
And he did, and they've been extremely aggressive because President Trump wants this deal done for whatever motives, whatever personal reasons he might have, whatever more noble reasons he might have.
Who cares what the motive is?
Anything that brings about an end to this devastation in Gaza is something that ought to be celebrated by any decent human being.
There was a concern, a series of concerns over the last 24 hours that Israel was looking for a way to back out of the deal.
They were claiming that Hamas was trying to change the terms of the deal after it was agreed to, when in reality it was Israel that was doing that.
Some of the more extremist members of Netanyahu's government are threatening to leave the government if the deal goes through.
There's claims that this deal will, really it's an illusory deal, that it will simply allow Israel and even the plan is for Israel to go back after they get a lot of their hostages back and start bombing again as if nothing ever happened.
But for the moment at least, there now is reports in the Israeli media that the deal seems to be concrete and agreed to in full.
There's an expected vote tomorrow in the cabinet to finalize that deal in the Israeli cabinet.
And presumably if that goes through, there will be at least some sort of cessation of hostility, some sort of cessation of these endless bombings and destroying the remaining parts of Gaza.
And obviously the Israelis are trying to bomb as intensely as they can before the ceasefire takes hold.
Killing as many Palestinian children, as many Palestinians in general, destroying as many of their civilian infrastructure and as much of their residential neighborhoods as they possibly can if there's anything really left to destroy.
And there is a little bit.
They're trying to destroy the rest of that.
It gives you a sense for the kind of sadism and barbarism and savagery that is driving the Israeli war, but we're going to talk to Anard about that.
He covers that issue a lot and where we are with that deal, what the likelihood that deal will actually lead to some sort of permanent peace between Israel and Gaza or something resembling a permanent peace.
We're going to also talk to him about this extremely interesting development when it comes to the TikTok ban, which is one of the issues we covered most extensively, have been opposed to.
That TikTok ban from the very beginning is an obvious attempt to empower the government to control political discourse over the Internet.
We've covered the Supreme Court case about it.
We've covered the politics behind it.
We've covered the real reason that this ban finally passed after being around lingering in Washington for four-plus years, which is the fact that for a long time when it was first presented, the argument was we have to ban TikTok because of the threat posed by China and not enough people were willing to vote for the TikTok the argument was we have to ban TikTok because of the threat posed by China and not enough people were willing to vote for the TikTok ban in Congress to
And the only thing that changed between 2020 and when it was presented and couldn't pass in 2024 when it finally passed was October 7th happened.
And even the leading sponsors, the Republican sponsors of this bill said the only reason they could get this TikTok ban passed was because Democrats started believing That the only reason so many young Americans were opposed to Israel is because there was too much Israel criticism circulating on TikTok, too much pro-Palestinian content, too much video of Palestinian civilians being blown up by Israel and so huge amounts of the country, the young people in their country, were turning against Israel and that was way too much of a threat.
And it was really an attempt to censor pro-Palestinian Anti-Israel speech.
It was a pure attack on free speech, despite the initial justification that it was necessary to protect our cybersecurity from China or our privacy from China.
The idea that China needs TikTok to spy on us has always been laughably dumb.
We've reported before about how there's an open market where all of your data and Internet activity is bundled together.
Anyone can buy it.
The U.S. government buys it.
The U.S. intelligence community buys it, even though that's information they would otherwise require to Obtain a warrant in order to get.
It's completely available for anyone to buy.
China would need to build and manage and promote a huge social media platform in order to spy on Americans.
Anyone can buy that information.
Everything about your internet data and your activities is available to everyone unless you take precautions with encryption and the like in order to safeguard it.
What was so interesting about it was that Donald Trump in 2020 was an advocate of the TikTok ban.
In fact, he tried to impose it by executive order and the court said it couldn't be done by executive order.
It required a congressional vote.
But over the last year in the 2024 campaign, Trump came out and opposed the TikTok ban.
He said, I like TikTok.
I'm doing well on TikTok.
It seems to be an important platform for Americans.
There's a lot of young Americans who use it.
I think his son uses it, Barron.
And he became acquainted with it and familiar with it and decided that it was actually an important tool for Americans to use to get information, to express themselves, to organize politically.
He also happened to have a major, major investor in ByteDance and in TikTok, Jeffrey Yass, who became a major donor to the Trump campaign.
And one would not be accused of excess cynicism for assuming.
That Jeffrey Yass is influenced by being a major donor on Trump.
Trump promised during the campaign, if you don't want TikTok banned, vote for me.
And he's now made good on his word by first running into the Supreme Court while they were considering the constitutionality of the TikTok ban and filing an amicus brief saying, as president, I am urging you.
To delay implementation to allow me to resolve this in a way that won't result in the TikTok ban.
And then the court held our argument, seemed quite hostile to the challenges to the TikTok ban, clearly believes the TikTok ban is constitutional, is likely to uphold that law, and it's scheduled to take effect in three days.
On January 19th, one day before Trump...
It's inaugurated.
Think how cynical that is in Washington, by the way, to implement the TikTok ban and purposely have it take effect only after the election so American voters don't realize what they've done until it's too late.
So it's about to take effect in three days.
They've asked the Supreme Court to stay its implementation.
They seem unlikely to do that.
And so Trump has now said that he's strongly considering an executive order to ban its implementation.
There's questions about the legality of that implementation.
But Chuck Schumer today...
Introduce legislation that will delay implementation as well.
Obviously, people in Washington are starting to realize just how cataclysmic it is, how repressive, how disruptive, how unjustifiable it is for an app that 170 million Americans choose voluntarily to use as their prime source of political organizing and expression and information access to just shut that down, have it just go dark overnight.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of creators on that platform who are quite angry about the imminent ban, and their protest is expressing itself through a large-scale migration to a different Chinese app, one that is actually not owned by an American company and Western investors the way TikTok is, but one that's actually a Chinese app called Red Note.
And they're going there, and they've been welcomed by Chinese users, and they're basically saying we're doing this because our government is repressive and is trying to prevent us from using an app that we all love, that our livelihoods are based on, that our socializing and political organizing are built around.
And as a protest, we're not going to go to Instagram, we're not going to go to Facebook, we're not going to seek refuge in YouTube or X. Instead, we're going to go to a Chinese app and use it on purpose.
And inside the United States, in the Apple Store, that Chinese app, Red Note, has become the number one most downloaded app.
As a result of a huge migration of American users on TikTok to this Chinese app to spite the government.
And there's been a lot of really interesting dynamics in how they're interacting with the Chinese users on that app, what their realizations are on both sides.
And so there's a lot to talk about with Arnaud.
There's also the really important question of...
What will Chinese-American relationships be under President Trump?
What will it be economically?
What will it be militarily?
How did the Chinese see the Trump administration and what's likely to come?
He's really the perfect guest to help us sort all of that out, and we will talk to him right after this break.
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Arnaud Bertrand is an entrepreneur who founded Health Trip.
I will ask him about my pronunciation of his name.
I think it improved significantly since the last time.
That was later acquired by TripAdvisor, which he then built in Skilled as a leading European vacation rental marketplace that attracted over $60 million in venture capital.
Currently, he serves as founder and CEO of MianQi, one of the premier English language platforms for traditional Chinese medicine.
He has lived in China for seven years.
He has deep personal connections to the country.
He has, in my view, emerged as one of the most informed and illuminating voices on all China-related topics.
He reaches an audience of 100 million, is one of the most followed commentators on China on the social media platform.
He has really, I think, provided a lot of great commentary on other issues as well, including conflicts in the Middle East.
We had him on the last time to help us sort through French elections.
He's really an all-purpose political analyst and commentator.
Arnott, it's great to see you.
How are you?
Good evening.
Thank you.
Thank you for inviting me back, Glenn.
Yeah, we were debating it, and some people didn't want you back, and others did, and so we voted, and you won by a very close margin to be able to come back, so we're happy to have you.
All right, let me ask you, first of all, the biggest topic, obviously, in international relations before we get to all things related to China is the ceasefire deal between Israel and Gaza that, by all accounts, was fostered by the United States, and particularly With the thumb of Donald Trump on the scale that finally got it done after 15 months of Biden basically doing nothing.
There's been concerns about whether the deal is going to go through.
I think the latest Israeli reports are there likely to.
There's obviously a lot of concerns about whether this will really mean the end of the Israeli destruction of Gaza or whether it's just a ploy to get back hostages in exchange for a temporary reprieve.
What do you make of this ceasefire deal, how it happened, and what it's likely to lead to?
I mean, I wrote yesterday that...
There was actually very little cause to celebrate.
Of course, from a Palestinian point of view, it's very relieving.
But what Gaza meant was actually the death of some pretty fundamental principles in the world, such as principles as fundamental as murdering women and children is bad.
And, you know, this deal, whether it goes through or not, as you say, it's still unclear, doesn't serve that fundamental issue, what's been broken by Gaza.
Those, like, the international system, the fact that it's revealed that the ICJ and the ICC are completely, you know, broken effectively because...
They can't act.
And the fact that we, as collective human beings, we can't even agree on fundamental principles like mass murder is bad.
So I think that if the deal goes through, not only we will need to rebuild Gaza, but...
Also, that's what I'm not seeing in that deal.
We will need to rebuild all those fundamental things in the world, all those that have been broken.
Until I see that movement towards that, it's very hard to be enthusiastic about this.
I think regardless of what happens, you can share the happiness that Palestinians in Gaza are obviously feeling and expressing because they're going to get to go to bed for however many nights for the first time in 15 months without believing that they and their children are going to be blown up into pieces while they lie in their beds as has happened to tens of thousands of their fellow Gazans.
So you can certainly understand the happiness and share the happiness of that.
I wonder, though, One of the primary ways that the United States and its NATO allies, its Western allies, have sold so many wars is through this obviously pretextual mythology that the United States and NATO upholds the,
quote, international rules-based order, that the United States and the West uphold ethical and moral standards against rogue nations that refuse to.
And this has always been such a transparent farce, such an obvious propaganda tool for inducing support for all kinds of American aggression.
And it seems to me, and maybe I'm being naive or overly optimistic, that this international rules-based order has been so flagrantly destroyed and spat upon and just utterly ignored by the United States and by Israel for 15 months in a way that the world cannot deny.
That it seems to me possible that that weapon that the United States has, that propaganda weapon, will be gutted.
Nobody could possibly take seriously, not even the US media, not even Americans who are trapped in a closed information system the next time the US government tries to sell that narrative.
Do you think that's also possible?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
I mean, that's very clear.
When you combine everything that's happened over the past, you know, three, four years, you know, starting with COVID, really, I think, you know, after Ukraine, Gaza, and so on, I think it's crystal clear that less and less people in the world and in the West actually believe the The narrative out there.
It's quite hard to see what that's going to lead towards.
I think that what's clear is that there is a very big divide between the West and the rest.
Doesn't believe at all what the West is saying anymore.
And more and more, they're organizing their own sort of parallel system with their own institutions, their own rules and so on and so forth, like, you know, BRICS and various organizations.
And in the US or in the West, you're seeing countries Acting more and more erratically and chaotically, as we've seen in Gaza, as we're starting to see with some of Trump's rhetoric over annexing Greenland, Canada, and so on and so forth.
And that's at odds, I think, with more and more at odds with what the population...
Once with what the population is seeing.
And so, you know, what will that lead to?
Will people revolt?
Will there be, you know, finally a political movement inside the West where there is sort of a counter-movement from that?
That's a bit unclear.
Before we move to TikTok and other China-related issues, I just want to ask you this one last question.
One of the countries that you know very well is France.
You're a French citizen.
You come from France.
So I want to focus in a little bit on Western Europe with regard to this conflict.
Because one of the things that always strikes me is if you look at the reasons for this very intense and pervasive and up until now unbreakable support for Israel in the West, It's almost like there's, it's the byproduct of some very aberrational events, almost like luck on the part of the Israelis.
You have this very strong now, you know, people always talk about AIPAC and the Israel lobby, which of course is important, but in the United States I would think much more important now is the fact that you have a very strong evangelical movement in U.S. politics, in Congress especially, and over the last several decades, evangelical dogma has come to be Pitched as requiring steadfast religious-like support for Israel, almost more than American Jews have.
And that has become a major factor in why you see this insane extremist support for Israel, no matter what effects it even has on American interests.
But then in Europe, in Western Europe, you have what I think is even a little bit more understandable, but still very kind of the happenstance of history, which is that you have Obviously a very serious moral guilt in Europe and a kind of sense of moral responsibility to Israel as a result of the Holocaust that was perpetrated against the Jews.
You see it particularly in Germany, but I think you see it in France, in the UK, in Italy, all throughout Europe.
I want to ask you both in France and more generally, leaving Germany to the side because they're always an exception.
Do you think that this war has started to weaken that obligation, that sense of obligation that Europe has toward Israel and it hasn't affected how the population perceives Israel?
Actually, no.
In fact, if you study France's recent history, we used to have Even as late as under Jacques Chirac, so the beginning of the 2000s, we used to have a very pro-Palestinian, very pro-Arab policy.
In fact, in Gaza itself, there is a Jacques Chirac street, which illustrates that.
And since then, France's official policy has become...
More and more pro-Israel.
And Macron, I think, was by far the most pro-Israel president.
And I think at heart, the key route behind that is France becoming more and more vassalized or aligned with the U.S. Because back in Chirac's time, we were still out of NATO. It's Sarkozy,
the president that came right after, that pulled us back in NATO. And so, you know, when you're not directly protected by the U.S., You can still have some measure of independence, an independent voice.
But when you're part of NATO and so, in effect, you're under the US protection racket, if you will, then it's very, very hard to have an independent foreign policy.
And I think at heart that is the key cause behind France's pro-Israel shift.
But there is another important aspect in this, which is the immigration topic, which is very hot politically in France, in Europe overall, as it is in the US.
And the fact is in France, Most immigrants come from North Africa and so are Muslims.
And so unfortunately in France, you know, many politicians are playing on that.
So they're tying the anti-immigration stand to kind of an anti-Muslim position overall.
And that's why you're seeing people like Le Pen and so on.
Really becoming extremely pro-Israeli as well because they see Israel's fight as being quite common to France's fight against immigration and Islam.
And so if you pull France's supporters of Le Pen on the most movements on the right, on Five Rights, you're going to see that...
Those guys are the most pro-Israeli.
And that's a big challenge also because if you look back even, you know, 10 years, 20 years, Le Pen, the father...
Who just died today.
Who just died today.
Or yesterday.
He died five days ago, yeah.
So he was famously anti-Semitic.
In fact, he was condemned for that, for saying some outrageous thing on the Holocaust and so on.
So that's another major, major shift in France's...
Yeah, that almost is another, almost like, these are, they are in one way happenstance, but I think the Israelis have been very adept at exploiting these sorts of narratives.
I mean, it's almost throughout the entire democratic world where the right wing, the populist right, is not just supportive of Israel, they're obsessed with it.
Here in Brazil, the Israeli right, you go to any one of their protests, any one of their rallies, you'll see as many Israeli flags as you see.
Brazilian flags.
You now go to Argentina, where Malay is constantly going to Israel, expressing his love and worship of Israel.
Keith Wielders in Holland has a big Israeli flag in his office.
As you say, the European right, the Western right, the democratic world right has become extremely obsessed with Israel.
Part of that is religious in Latin America, but also a big part of it is this perception.
That our enemy is Islam and Muslims and that we share a common enemy with Israel and therefore we should support them in their destruction of Arabs and Muslims.
Alright, let me move to the issue of TikTok because it's really fascinating.
There was a time when the ban was first proposed under the Trump administration in 2020 when it was all about Fear-mongering over China and we have to protect ourselves from the evil Chinese trying to corrupt the minds of our youth and spy on us.
And it didn't go anywhere.
And I don't know if you heard my saying before you came on that what really put it over the edge, and even the leading advocates of the TikTok ban admit this, is that the perception arose not about China, but that there was too much anti-Israel content being allowed on TikTok, too much pro-Palestinian content, too much...
Imagery about what was being done in Gaza that turned American youth against Israel.
That's what really enabled the momentum to pick up to ban TikTok.
But now, as it's about to be banned, as it's about to be actually closed and 170 million Americans are about to lose it, everyone in Washington is a little bit freaked out because they realize that this is just a cataclysmic act of repression and disruption, disruption and they're finding ways to try and get out of that.
What has been the view of all of this in China?
Because, you know, Americans are often told that one of the things that makes China repressive is they close Google or they put restrictions on Facebook and YouTube because they don't want an open internet.
And here you see the U.S. now shutting down, trying to shut down a major app.
What has been the perception in China about all this?
So, I mean...
I think most people are amused, especially of the TikTok refugee phenomenon on Sharon Chu.
It's important to remind that what America is doing with TikTok is quite a bit different from what China did with Facebook on Twitter, for instance.
Because at heart, what happened in China, the Facebook and Twitter thing, is that China has famously very strict rules around content, content moderation, and is that China has famously very strict rules around content, content moderation, So if you're a social media platform, you need to censor content according to the guidelines, and you need to...
Keep all your users' data in China, in the country.
And what happened is simply that Facebook, on Twitter, and all the American social media that are not in China anymore...
Refused to do that.
Some accepted that, like LinkedIn, for instance, and they're still in China.
So there is an opportunity for American social media firms to stay in China if they abide by China's rules.
Censorship rules.
Not only censorship, but...
And data retention.
Yeah.
Exactly, basically.
But TikTok is quite a bit different because TikTok themselves have said, put some rules.
We're more than happy to keep all the data in servers in the US. We're more than happy to abide by any content moderation rules and so on.
But no, even if they were to have those rules and respect them, the ban would still go Because the app is Chinese.
So there is nothing they can do, effectively.
It's discriminatory.
So it's quite a different situation, I would say.
And that's what people in China generally point out, is that it's unfair and discriminatory towards...
China, Chinese companies in a way that, you know, China doesn't act.
They have some rules.
You can criticize them.
But they're the same for everyone.
Like Chinese social media platforms also have to respect them.
Yeah, it's an interesting point because we've actually done reporting before on how TikTok desperate to stay in the United States because of how profitable it is for them.
And they're at the end of the day, they're really just a for-profit company wanting to make money.
They're not really an arm of trying to corrupt the American youth for this Chinese Communist Party.
But they offered every one of those concessions, as you said.
In fact, they hired huge numbers of former CIA and FBI and NSA officials away from Facebook, away from Google to do their content moderation.
We once had a video critical of U.S. and NATO policy in Ukraine.
Banned by TikTok, showing that they were censoring to accommodate the U.S. government in a way that even other platforms weren't.
That was the only platform where we had that video removed.
And I think you're right that at the end of the day, it's really just about we don't care if you abide by our rules.
We don't even care if you censor the way we want.
We just don't want anything to do with China here.
One of the things, though, that has happened is you mentioned this migration of all these TikTok creators afraid that TikTok is going to get shut down and trying to kind of build a new...
Home for themselves on social media purposely using this Chinese app, Red Note.
You referenced the Chinese name.
I'll leave that to you so I don't butcher it.
But one of the things that I've read that I've seen reports suggesting is that the Chinese government is now starting to worry because there's a lot of interaction between young American content creators on TikTok and young Chinese creators on TikTok.
And that this could end up circumventing some of these censorship roles by having American creators disseminate a bunch of ideas and views and experiences and thoughts that the Chinese government wants its citizens to be shielded from.
Is that a valid concern?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I don't know.
I think the Chinese government is...
He's probably worried.
I think that's correct because it is quite something.
It's the first time that there is a large-scale direct social interaction between Western and Chinese users on social media.
And so I think that they're wondering what...
What that will lead to.
I think it's more of a wait-and-see approach to see if there aren't some unintended consequences or bad consequences for China arising out of that.
So I don't think that there will be an immediate move, I think.
What can be more expected is wait-and-see patients and then sharing true red nodes, bit-by-bits, adapting to this new status quo.
And also, it's important to note that it's also not from a user standpoint.
It's also a bit...
Because obviously most Americans don't speak Chinese.
Most of those new users don't.
Many Chinese don't speak English.
And so even just if you go to share Hongshu today, it's a bit weird.
You have like half the post in Chinese, half the post in English.
And so from a user standpoint, it's a bit of a weird experience.
So I think it's fair to assume that there will be more and more.
Separation between those languages.
So if you're American, if you only speak English, then you're going to see only English posts and vice versa.
So I think naturally, just even from a user experience standpoint, it's fair to expect.
More and more separation between both user groups simply because they speak different language and they also have different cultures and interests and so on and so forth.
But I think that probably China is also going to conclude that it's obviously very much a win for them to have yet another social media platform that's very popular among Americans.
So it will be shooting themselves in the foot if they did some policy to antagonize that new user base.
It would be the funniest thing ever, really, if the U.S. government, both parties, ends up driving Americans from a...
Platform that I guess you could say is associated with the Chinese into an actual Chinese social media platform that is built for the Chinese people.
I do, though, I saw a lot of videos over the last week, though, circulating that were very interesting where, you know, having grown up in the United States, I know this very well, that when there's a country that the United States government wants to demonize...
All anyone knows in the United States is this caricature of that country and therefore of its people.
And it was always amazing during the Cold War there was this pro-peace music where they would say things like Russians love their children too and it was considered profound as though that had never been thought of that way before.
Because that is a really important way that the American government propagandizes citizens to believe that these people in these other countries are.
Just basically not really human.
And so when you see interaction between Chinese young people and American young people and the Americans are saying, oh my God, I can't believe how culturally connected they are, how happy they seem, the stuff they're saying about their lives is so at odds with the things that we were told to believe about them.
It does seem like a major benefit, maybe not for the Chinese government or for the American government, but just for the world.
Do you see that as promising that way?
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, that is actually the very reason why I started being vocal on those issues is because I was simply outraged at exactly that.
People seeing, you know, China and the Chinese people as, you know, so dehumanized in a way.
And so anything that...
Improves cultural understanding between both countries is an enormous plus for the world.
At the end of the day, I'm absolutely convinced of this.
The biggest reason for tensions, hatred on walls is a lack of understanding.
So anything that promotes understanding is absolutely amazing, I think.
All right, so let's talk about what...
It's likely to come with this new administration vis-a-vis China.
President Trump is always just such a, I think, enigma, an unpredictable enigma.
One of the things that made my friends on the left, made my former friends on the left angry with me is I had been long emphasizing the value that Trump can bring uniquely as sort of what Seymour Hersh called a circuit breaker.
You elect Joe Biden, you elect Kamala Harris, you elect any other conventional Republican, and they're just going to continue with this inertia of how U.S. foreign policy and U.S. politics have been for decades.
No one really is going to change anything in a radical way.
Trump, just because of his very heterodox behavior and comportment and ideas about the world, has the ability to break things in a way that we just saw with Gaza.
Now, even we're not sure where that will go, but...
Everyone acknowledges that that wouldn't have happened absent whatever crazy kind of energy he brought there.
And I think the same is true in China.
You obviously have a lot of hawks inside the new Trump administration who speak about China as this grave and existential threat.
We have to abandon everything and focus only on stopping China.
And then at the same time, you have that exact same view in the Democratic Party.
They're not any different when it comes to China, but you have President Trump who clearly has a lot of respect and even admiration for President Xi.
He prides himself on this kind of He looks at President Xi as sort of this world-historic, very strong figure and likes to think of himself in the same category, and it's important to him to have positive relations.
President Trump has talked about Chinese society before in a very kind of admiring lay that almost no other mainstream American politician does.
Clearly, there's going to be an economic competition.
That's what President Trump does.
I think there's going to be tariffs and trade conflicts and the like.
We saw that in the first administration.
But as for the relationship writ large, meaning the military component of it, the geostrategic component of it, and the economic component, Is there a sense in Beijing that there's a possible improvement on the horizon with the Trump presidency, or is it kind of pessimistic?
I think it's more confused, the general mood, because there are a lot of mixed signals, right?
On the one hand, there are some very positive signals from Trump himself.
So the invitation of Xi to his inauguration even kind of hinted at proposing a G2 in one of his messages, meaning China and the US jointly leading the world, even though I think for some...
Reasons that we can go into China will not accept such a deal.
But still, it's an extraordinary thing to propose.
So that's clearly very positive.
But, you know, when you look at his appointments, he appointed like...
Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, who is extremely okish on China.
He had his confirmation hearing, I think, yesterday or the day before, and he said some insanely aggressive rhetoric on China.
You have David Perdue, the ambassador to China, who also wrote some very, very okish and negative things on the country.
And, you know, also you have the initiatives that Trump campaigned on, like the tariffs and so on.
So it's fair to say that no one knows quite exactly what to expect from the new Trump administration.
I suspect that Trump is going to try very hard to, you know, Gain a lot of leverage against China in order to end up with some sort of deal that reorganizes the world order in the US's favor as much as possible.
And so the main tension is going to be around that.
I think China is going to try to avoid the US having...
That I think is the key to everything.
And I think in some ways Trump is an extension of the U.S. worldview since the end of World War II, which is this idea that the United States has to maintain hegemony and be the strongest country in the world with whom nobody can compete.
That was the goal of the Cold War.
Once the Soviet Union was vanquished, the idea was the United States is now the world's superpower.
No one can challenge us.
And nobody really did until the emergence of China economically and militarily.
I think this is the first country that the United States really takes seriously as a major threat, not just to get close to the United States, but in some senses that have already surpassed it.
And one of the things that I think aggravates that fear in Washington and What feeds this view that China has to be treated not as a competitor but almost as an enemy is that there's a new geopolitical coalition or alliance forming around China with BRICS that's attracting a lot of countries that used to be in the US orbit and a lot of...
Parts of the world, including Latin America, that have always been in the U.S. orbit.
You're seeing Trump now focused on Panama.
Marco Rubio is going to focus a lot on Latin America, I think, for fear of the Chinese influence there.
How important is BRICS to the Chinese future?
And is there a way that if China pursues BRICS, it can have a friendly relationship with the United States?
I think the key paradox of BRICS is that, in theory, it shouldn't be needed, right?
At the end of the day, what fuels BRICS is a need, a passive need for a lot of global health countries to have rules that make sense for them.
Right?
Because they are legitimately quite resentful at the, you know, the post-World War II order or the world order that shaped up after the Cold War.
That is, you know, too much in the U.S. interest.
And so, wisdom from an American standpoint.
I think would be to recognize that there is this resentment, this anger out there of, frankly, most of the global health countries.
It's not a China thing or China-Russia thing, or even if you extend it to Iran and so on, it's extremely widespread.
And, you know, shape a bigger tent in...
A world order that they also agree with.
So that's the way, I think, from an American standpoint, to keep the world as they want it to be.
But instead, what they're doing is they're transforming the rules-based order, as they call it, into a more and more...
Chaotic place where there are no rules anymore.
As we've seen in Gaza, you know, there are literally no rules anymore.
The US doesn't respect any rules, even some very fundamental rules like it's bad to kill women and children.
That's out of the picture.
And so really for more and more of those countries, like, there is no choice.
It's like either...
If you go to the US, it's like, if you go with the US, it's more and more a picture of, you know, chaos and madness, where there are no rules.
And if you go to, you know, China, the brakes and so on, it's a much more regulated and predictable and stable offering, basically.
And I don't quite understand.
Why the US doesn't see that?
It's clearly not in their interest.
Because if you look at the world as some sort of jungle, right?
If you're a tiger, like the U.S., it's okay, right?
The jungle, you can live in it, but most of the countries are mouse, right?
The jungle is an extremely scary place, and so you want to have some rules out there so that all the predators are not going to eat you.
And so if you want to, as the U.S., if you want to control the jungle or be...
You want to have the jungle in a way where most of the animals are on your side.
You want to reassure them that you're a friendly tiger that abides by the rules and so on.
So I don't know why they're moving in the opposite direction, effectively.
Yeah.
Well, I think that is the point, though, is...
The U.S. is very happy to live in the jungle as long as it is the unchallenged king of that jungle, and that's no longer the case with the rise of China, and that's why people are so afraid of China, even though China has not ever been militarily aggressive, let alone to the United States, but also to other countries.
All right, let me ask you the final question, this question about Taiwan, because it's sort of the big elephant in the room whenever you're talking about the U.S. and Chinese relationship.
I think even in Washington, With all the warmongers and extremists, even there people perceive a war with China, a hot war with China, military conflict, direct military conflict with China to be insane.
Nobody wants that.
The one problem is that Taiwan could be that hot spot, that tipping point that leads to an unintentional escalation.
A lot of people in Washington still do believe that Taiwan is this vital national interest to the United States that we're duty-bound and morally bound to protect them.
What do you think is the current posture of China with respect to Taiwan?
Obviously, they want Taiwan to be formally reunified with China.
There's been concern that the Chinese would try and do that through military force that would then provoke the United States to enter in defense of China.
It seems like now, though, there's an attempt to sort of take a more subtle approach of almost assuaging the people of Taiwan, issuing identity cards, offering some sort of benefits, the way the Russians have a lot of people in these other countries like Georgia and Ukraine who identify far more with Moscow and prefer to be part of Russian rule than they do of the countries in Georgia and Ukraine and other places as well.
I think the Chinese posture is that obviously the...
In the long run, they want reunification.
And that can mean many things.
It doesn't mean that Taiwan has to be part of mainland China.
It could even take the form of some sort of commonwealth.
As some quite thoughtful Singaporean strategists have laid out, I think to me that's the best solution where China and Taiwan are in some sort of arrangement similar to the UK Commonwealth.
I think China would be even happy with some sort of solution like that.
Ideally, they would like this to be done peacefully over time.
But I think that she is also personally convinced, and is actually said so to Ursula von der Leyen once, that the U.S., he is trying...
To induce, to provoke Taiwan into a war.
And when you've seen things like, you know, what Nancy Pelosi has done when she visited the island and things like that, and all the moves to move away from the existing agreements around strategic ambiguity, around the One China policy and so on, you can see that, you know...
Basically, the U.S. is playing the Taiwan card.
And so I think a military move by China against Taiwan would only happen if there is a clear action either on the U.S. side or the Taiwanese side to...
Make the situation so that any hope of peaceful reunification is lost, basically.
I think that's China's standpoint.
And if America doesn't want a war in Taiwan, and I think that Trump has seen her after, it's hard to know what he really believes, but I think...
Everything he said on this issue is quite reassuring in that he doesn't want to see a war there.
And he's appointed some people, like Michael Anton as the director of policy planning, who also say that.
But after, let's see how that's...
How that shapes out.
I'm actually more worried of the Philippines than I am of Taiwan, because I think Taiwan is a very mature issue.
I think everyone knows exactly where the red lines are.
And so it's hard for someone to do a move where...
They wouldn't be seen as the aggressor.
So if the U.S., for instance, does something egregiously provocative, like recognizing Taiwan independence, for instance, that will spur a war, but it would be obvious that it would have been provoked by the U.S. So I don't see the U.S. Doing that,
well, you never know, but I think it's fair to predict that the issue is so mature that it's going to keep, there might be some tension here and there, but the trajectory is going to keep the way it is.
Whereas the Philippines is quite a brand new issue.
All the sides are testing each other, and so there is much more potential.
For, you know, bad move that could trigger a conflict.
It was so interesting, the position of the U.S. government going all the way back to Obama, the first term of Obama, is that we have to extricate ourselves from the Middle East because we have to pivot to the Pacific, we have to focus on China.
And while there is some focus on China increasingly, for better or worse, in Washington, between the war in Ukraine and the obsession with Russia, And everything taking place in the Middle East, it seems like China's just always on the back burner when it comes to the United States, not necessarily every part of Washington.
A lot of Washington is focused on China.
But in terms of the attention that the U.S.-China relationship gets compared to its significance and its importance for the next century of world history, it's amazing that it never really seems to surface to the top because the U.S. always has so many other wars that are taking place it's amazing that it never really seems to surface to the top because the U.S.
And that's why we're always happy to have you on to give a lot of enlightenment and shine a lot of wisdom on exactly how people can start thinking about this in a way different than the way they're trained.
It's always great to see you.
We really appreciate your coming on and we'd love to have you on again.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Absolutely.
Have a good evening.
Yeah, you too.
Bye-bye.
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