Ambassador Robert Blackwill

And it's the most delicate balancing act to go just far enough, but not too far.

I don't believe he himself, for example, ever said we must take sovereign possession of Greenland.

No.

I think he tries to make his point perhaps often through silence.

And so good for him for trying and retaining, if he has it, the ear of the president.

Yes, I do agree with that.

And in that context, I think we are headed for not a multipolar world in which the superpowers are first among equals and so forth, although there's a lot of talk about the middle powers now and so forth.

Yeah.

I think we're headed for a bipolar world that will be very familiar to us.

And it will be the United States- Cold War II, basically, huh?

Yeah, well, in that sense, there'll be many differences, but in that sense, and it will be the United States and China trying to attract

these major other countries in the international system, beginning with and including the four you mentioned.

And that will take ignoring, in some cases, their human rights

domestic practices and others, India comes to mind a determined avoidance of anything that smells like an alliance while they get closer to the United States, which has been happening and so forth.

And what they want, I think, out of the United States is a consistency based on American strength.

based on American strength, not a consistency based on ideology from their point of view.

And I tried to make an argument and it's argued at length in the report that American strength

has not been impressive, the application of American strength.

You mentioned, and I neglected to follow up, the Obama administration's decision to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership was catastrophic.

It was a chance to have a framework for international trade in Asia led by the United States.