Ian Bremmer
speaker
4,435 appearances
19 recordings
12 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 1 Aug
Ian Bremmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Describe what that was and why they were able to do that.
So for some 30 years now, the Chinese have been investing in
in exploitation of critical minerals and rare earths around the world that are essential for a lot of military and industrial purposes, energy purposes, other infrastructure that we all rely on.
And the Americans were not investing in it, thinking, well, it's cheaper coming from these Chinese sources, so great, we'll just buy it from them.
Kind of like the way the Europeans
decided to get a lot of their cheaper energy from Russia, kind of the way all of us decided to get our semiconductors from 100 miles off of the Chinese coast.
All of which is true if politics don't matter.
If politics matter and you don't trust those countries and maybe they might act to make vulnerable your just-in-time supply chain, suddenly you have a problem.
And the lock...
that China had globally from 30 years of these investments, including in the processing of these critical minerals inside China themselves, suddenly they said, if you want to get them, you need a license.
You need to apply for a license to China.
If you're not considered on the right side of the law with us, we're not going to provide you with those critical minerals.
And you had suddenly CEOs of big companies going to Mar-a-Lago telling Trump, you better cut a deal with these Chinese because otherwise, like literally our factory floor is going to shut down.
And so the Americans had to buckle, had to suddenly say, okay, we got to do a deal with these guys.
We can't afford a trade boycott.
We got to sit down and figure out like, you know, they give us some on fentanyl and we give them some on tariffs and let's talk about Taiwan and the rest.
And that was a complete climb down, turnaround.
of the sort that we've more recently seen with Trump's war goals in Iran, once the Iranians broke glass, pulled emergency lever, and shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which he thought they wouldn't do.
In both cases, Trump's eyes were bigger than his stomach.
He has a big punch, but also a glass jaw, can't take one hard from another side.
Showing 681–700 of 4,435 · page 35 of 222
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