Arthur Kroeber

a deliberate effort, I think, with the United States to reduce the channels of information that we have with China and direct experience, which is very bad.

And I think one of the bad outcomes of COVID in China was that they kind of locked themselves off from the rest of the world for almost three years.

They got really obsessed by this self-sufficiency industrial policy complex.

The Chinese system has always had a lot of difficulty communicating with the rest of the world.

This has been persistent for many decades and centuries.

And so this gave them a great excuse to just like not do the thing that made them feel very uncomfortable, which is like engage in communication with the rest of the world.

And they concluded it's kind of okay.

And so they also retreated into a very –

sort of paranoid narrative about what the U.S.

is up to, which is to a significant degree justified, but not entirely.

And I think lost sight of the value of really robust communications aligns with the rest of the world.

So both sides are entrenched in very suspicious and

self-reinforcing narratives about the other, which makes it incredibly difficult to forge a better communication system.

And I have to say, you know, I'm fairly critical of both of the Biden administration and the Trump administration, different ways how they handle this.

I think the Biden administration could have done a lot more a lot faster.

I think they were – sort of had the idea that it was good to have more communication but they waited for two years before they did anything.

And then they were very parsimonious about how they did it.

And I think they could have been much more aggressive.

They weren't and that's a problem.

And then I think the Trump administration unfortunately just doesn't have –