Jordan Schneider

There's a lot of economic opportunities sort of couched in this like liberalization thesis that the more we engage with China, the more kind of open, democratic, friendly it will feel to our small liberal sensibilities.

that may have ended up being the case had 1989 turned out differently.

But that's not the world we're in.

And I would put our third periodization starting around, I don't know, 2013, 2014, where the Obama administration, followed by Trump won, really started to reframe China as more of an enemy, or I would say a competitor.

And in that

We've had a lot of different permutations of the thing we're seeing today from Trump one's trade war to covid to Biden putting on all these export controls and banning stuff like Chinese electric vehicles to now.

Trump too, where we're now like, you know, six months into a saga of we had liberation day and now we're escalating on this and that front.

But the fact of the matter is it's a big mess because these are the two largest economies in the world and they're not separate.

Um, and there's a lot of sort of pieces of both systems that see advantages in keeping connections.

Right.

It's a fascinating question.

I'm going to start with a history analogy.

You know, there was a big autarky fetishization in the late 20s and 1930s as well.

And you had this idea of sort of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan that, you know, the equivalent of chips

um, or rare earths in that age was, you know, stuff like access to oil or other, or other minerals, or, um, there were all these like, um, you know, ball bearings, all these like critical inputs that if you didn't have control in a literal colony of yours, you didn't have factories in your country, then you were sort of subject to the whims of another country.

And if you think the world is fine and we're going to keep trading, then like, that's great.

That's like, you know, this is like Ricardian trade and like, we're all richer for it.

If you come at it from a perspective that they did in the 1920s and 30s with, you know, Mussolini and Stalin and Hirohito, that like, this is a vulnerability.

We are bound to get screwed.

So we need to act first and, you know, get what's ours because it's all going to, you know, come to shit sooner or later.