Brian Carter
speaker
98 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Brian Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You're going to pay for that. So how are we going to talk about how you're going to pay for it? It's going to be some tariffs. But, you know, I lost my own daughter to the fentanyl plague. I want him to make them pay. But is he going to do it in his own way with these tariffs or negotiations? Is he going to invite him in for a talk? It sounds all good.
And you get the quiet punch in the in the in the private meeting that that does seem to be some of what they have in mind to do. But we're just going to have to see how the results shake out. But I think they have to demand accountability on COVID and fentanyl. I think they're going to have to press on not having the phase one trade agreement honored.
And then, you know, once you got them at the table, what are you going to do? What do you got? What's your offer, Mr. Shee?
I've lived and shared that experience that you expressed on the skepticism, and I also can't say whether this is four-dimensional chess, which I don't understand, or whether this is one-dimensional chess, which I also don't play. But it's clearly something has to be tried differently, and one of the redeeming qualities I've seen in the Trump approach
is that he is clearly comfortable in the most uncomfortable situations. And part of what he does to set up negotiations is he's blunt and direct about things that the counterpart might be uncomfortable being raised. I've worked for presidents before who were not comfortable making those kinds of conversations happen, and we didn't necessarily get the movement we wanted.
So I kind of support trying this other way and just sit back and measure those results, but we've kind of glided along a path where the economic trends have to change. I think Xi Jinping is forcing some of those changes. He began a process of strategic decoupling before Americans even understood what those words were.
And I think that COVID and economics and if you look at investment, some of this changing of supply chains is moving of its own inertia, whether our leaders want it to or not. I want it to. But so, you know, she has to see some of this writing on the wall. I hope Trump's style and opening salvos will move things forward.
Every administration comes in with high hopes and people sort of try to feel out where the progress can be had.
I agree a lot with Gordon's general analysis of these things. The only sort of twist I would put on it really is it just reminds me of how we saw and talked about the war on terror after 9-11. It's this idea that a war is declared on us and we can choose whether we saw it or not, but really our only choice is whether and how we're going to respond.
I think that basically the Communist Party of China never was planning to be our friend, but it certainly was happy to receive advantage over many years. I think it's been in a low-grade economic and political war with us for some time, and it's acquired the capability to be in a hot war with us.
Whether and how that plays out, I think that whether you look at what happened with COVID, whether you look at what's gone on with weird efforts to compromise parts of the United States or sow division through psychological apps like TikTok and other kinds of things, they clearly are engaged in what the Communist Party is built around, which is political warfare, ideological warfare, above all else.
so that you get your opponents to divide and sort of get conquered by themselves so you don't have to rise up as high to be the top dog. That, I think, has been tried and true for them. It's playing out more. And so are they on a war footing? I'd say they always have been to a degree. It's just these different lanes where it's accelerating or getting emphasized more.
I think it's a little more shocking to see the military part space, AI, and technology really reaching farther and faster now. But the fundamentals really were us deluding ourselves that they thought otherwise during a reform and opening period. And Xi Jinping, I think, is a different leader that way.
Yeah, well, there are more questions than answers when it comes to China's economy. It's always been thus. When I was a very, very young intelligence officer and my job was to kind of assess what was going on in the Chinese economy, some of our sources in government were better than what the private sector had. Now I'd say it's absolutely the reverse.
The private sector has a better view into what's happening inside of China in terms of data. But that's still very, very incomplete. When it comes to their statistics, I think we fall back on the truism. They lie, but we still can sort of see trends. Their property sector has been weak for some time. Their people have significant restrictions on moving capital out of their country.
They have significant lack of trust in the viability of their banks. And so they put a lot of their life savings into real estate.
And so when people see pictures of real estate high rises crumbling or largely vacant, that's the hopes and dreams of a generation of Chinese workers who haven't been living a lavish lifestyle, but we're trying to save for retirement or their children's better life, etc. They have some really bad fundamentals inside, but they're at scale very big.
And these authoritarian totalitarian regimes like North Korea and in some ways we'd rather not admit China, they can stick around a lot longer than we would expect. And in some ways, that's more troubling to me. I see a weak and at risk China as maybe even more likely to risk conflict. than one that is on the gravy train rocketing up in performance.
And so I think in an odd way, that's why we're seeing some of what we are with picking fights they didn't need to around their periphery.
Absolutely. I mean, he basically has said that he doesn't believe in the reform and opening policies of Deng Xiaoping. He wants the ideology of socialism and the ideological struggle to be first priority because he wants control as the way toward stability. He doesn't see openness and growth as a way toward stability. And I think that is really in conflict with what
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