Tony Blinken
speaker
101 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tony Blinken’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, the big picture is this, Tim. I think what's really frustrating is we put the country in a position of strength. both at home and around the world. At home by investing in ourselves in really historic ways so that our competitiveness would be as strong as possible.
You know, everything from the Chips and Science Act to the Inflation Reduction Act to the Infrastructure Act, all of these investments but designed to make sure we could compete around the world and that our workers, our companies had what they needed to compete effectively.
But what I was working on around the world with others in the administration led by the president was to make sure that our alliances and partnerships were as strong as possible.
Because when we're dealing with all of the problems that we're likely to talk about around the world, whether it's Russia and Ukraine, whether it's China, whether it's Iran, whether it's anything else, we're so much better off when we're doing it with allies and partners than when we're doing it alone.
And where we're headed now is a world not where it's America first, but where it's America alone. And that's not good for us. It's not good for getting stuff done that matters to the American people.
Look, I think we've got to start with this. Back in his first term, I think President Trump was right to put more focus on China and to put more focus on some of the egregious practices they were engaged in that were doing real damage to American workers, to American companies, to American communities, including, for example...
You know, this notion of overcapacity where they flood the market with certain products that have been subsidized and otherwise given an unfair advantage, pushing American companies, American products, American workers out of that sector. And it was important to focus on that. But the way you do it really matters. And here's the thing.
If we're dealing with something that China is doing that we don't like and we're doing it alone, we're what, about 20, 25 percent of world GDP. when we're doing it with our European allies, our Asian allies, suddenly we're 50 or 60% of world GDP. That's something that China can't ignore.
But instead of focusing intensely on those areas and on those products where China was trying to get an unfair advantage and lining up allies and partners, to join with us. We've gone at this with a machine gun spraying everything in China, but also our allies and partners, the very people that we need with us to deal effectively with what China's doing. So I think there's clearly a role
for focused, targeted tariffs, for example, on certain Chinese products, especially in areas where they're trying to dominate the sectors of the future in ways that are unfair. Solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries for those vehicles. That's where you want to put the focus. That's what Biden was doing.
But now in broadening this out and basically having what amounts almost to a trade embargo with China and doing it in a way that's alienating our allies and partners who are not with us, We're pushing them toward each other, away from the United States, and maybe even toward China.
And that's simply going to undermine everything that we're trying to do to protect our workers, to protect our companies, to protect our people.
I think they have the ability in many ways to wait us out. They can take more pain by the nature of their system than we can take. And partly that's what they're counting on. So they match the tariffs in a dramatic way. And it's now a little bit of a game of chicken to see who's going to pull their punch first. I hope we can find a way to navigate this in a smart way. Look, Tim, here's the thing.
We spent a lot of time talking about de-risking, not decoupling from China. Now that sounds like Diplo speak, but basically it means let's focus on the specific areas where either China is taking unfair advantage of us economically, or where we've got a national security issue or question.
Like for example, we don't want to be selling them the highest end microchips because that's going to go into their military and pose a threat to us or throw a threat to our allies and partners. But it doesn't mean cutting off trade. It doesn't mean cutting off investment. That's beneficial to both of our countries. We both need it.
Now what we're seeing is instead of de-risking from China, we have the rest of the world that's looking at de-risking from us because we've lost the most important thing that undergirds any trade relationship, political relationship, military relationship, and that's trust. People don't know that they can trust the United States. They don't know what we're doing. They don't know where we're going.
They don't know if what we say today is going to be reversed tomorrow and then reversed again the day after. So I think China's looking at this too and thinking on the one hand, look, this isn't great. It does hurt us, but we have some ability to to endure and to take more pain by the nature of our system than the United States does. So I'm afraid they're going to try to outweigh this.
Look, I get that people are not, you know, necessarily enthusiastic about foreign aid or diplomatic programs.
One penny on every dollar covers basically everything the State Department and USAID do, or in the case of USAID, were doing in the past. And the bang for the buck is incredible. Because not only are we helping countries solve problems that, if not solved, are going to come back to bite us because in the absence of solving them, people are going to go to war. You're going to have mass migrations.
You're going to have disease that spreads across the planet and hits us. You're also building incredible goodwill through what we've often called soft power. If we're in retreat.
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