Tom Friedman
speaker
94 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tom Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Ezra Klein Show · Tom Friedman Thinks We’re Getting China Dangerously Wrong · 15 Apr 2025
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apparently or reportedly urged Trump to fire the head of our national security agency and his deputy, two of the most respected intelligence professionals in the world, because they weren't pro-Trump enough. Who knows what it was, Ezra? And Trump did that. fired the head of basically two of our most important cyber warriors, defenders and warriors, widely respected around the world.
He did that on the advice of a political witch doctor. Holy mackerel. I mean, it's market up or down. How can we be a serious country? Talk about things that filter down. that then filters down through the whole bureaucracy. Can I offer up intelligence that Trump will not like? So that's, to me, just, we have to get that in there because- Let me offer a useful comparison here, I think.
Yeah. Which is why on my trip, I can't tell you how many people asked me, are you having a Maoist cultural revolution? Of my words, right-wing wokest, basically. Because what was the revolution, the cultural revolution? It was Mao unleashing his ideological youth to tear apart, basically, the deep state in China. And it didn't end well. It set China back.
It went on for a decade, and God knows how much it set China back. And so I just couldn't agree more, Ezra. It's one of the things that so troubled me watching this happen. But I want to go back to your other point. I'm not running for office. But if I were, as a Democrat— I would not be doing Trump Lite.
I would provide this comprehensive alternative of leveraging our allies, setting down conditions, long-term tariffs on China gradually implemented, behind which we invest in the ecosystem of the 21st century with government help as much as we can and taking a long view because we got into this the long way. We're not going to get out of it the short way.
It all should be the other thing. And I am happy to be the advocate of it. We just saw a little snapshot of what the other looks like. And I think we're going to grind ourselves up. I think we're going to make ourselves less stable, less prosperous, and less able to manage the three key challenges of the 21st century climate, a trust architecture for AI and disorder.
And so I'm perfectly ready to be called naive, idealistic, but just don't say I haven't done my homework because I have.
I travel with my colleague, Keith Bradshaw. Our colleague, Keith Bradshaw, has been in China for 23 years. And we interviewed two professors who will go nameless, both super pro-American, study actually the United States. One of them told us on his last trip to America, as he was leaving, got to the gate, got pulled aside by what he assumed were FBI officers, taken into a room, give us your phone.
The other one, when he arrived, got pulled aside, taken into a room, give us your phone. And if that's where we're going, we're going to a bad place. And if we're going to that place, because that word gets out immediately. Boy, last time I was there, I got pulled aside by the FBI. Well, that word gets out. Then everyone says, I don't want my kids to study there. I don't want to travel there.
I don't want to be tourism there. And we're going to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, there's a joke among the Chinese that the whole war, this is a little ethnocentric nationalism, the whole conflict is actually our Chinese versus their Chinese. You know, one of the things, Henry Kissinger is a very controversial figure in history.
We know for all kinds of things from the Cambodia bombing. But I would say he is missed right now in one sense. He was a Republican who understood the importance of this relationship. And his last book was about AI, which he wrote with Craig Mundy and Eric Schmidt. The Republican Party has no sort of credible authority figure right now that can actually, they have to listen to.
And so it becomes just this competition for who can outbash China. And that just doesn't end well. I can't emphasize to you more, Ezra, when I go to China, I'm writing about America. I'm trying to hold a mirror up of what it looks like to be serious about that 21st century ecosystem. And I'm doing it for my kids and my grandkids.
And you can call me whatever name you want because I'm not listening.
I'll tell you, I had the good fortune of speaking at this conference with Yuval Noah Harari. And he was so good because his whole talk was about trust. and whether we're going to learn to re-inject some trust into this relationship. And so my book recommendations, or my thought is I got to go home and reread all of his books.
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