Aaron Friedberg on the China Challenge—and a World in Disarray

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2024

⏱️ 81 minutes

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Summary

What are the latest developments in the US-China relationship? What can we learn from recent elections in Taiwan? How does the CCP view the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East? To discuss these questions, we are joined again by Princeton professor Aaron Friedberg. Considering the situation in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, Friedberg argues that we face distinct but overlapping challenges from “increasingly aggressive authoritarian powers.” According to Friedberg, China has supported our rivals out of the belief that “conflict wears us down, deflects our attention from the Indo-Pacific region, and contributes to divisions emerging in this country over foreign policy in a way we haven’t seen in some years.” Kristol and Friedberg also discuss the deepening divisions in the country over foreign policy, and consider how a Republican or Democratic victory in November could affect the global security situation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again. I think for the sixth time, amazingly.
0:22.0	My old friend Aaron Friedman, a distinguished professor of politics at
0:25.9	Princeton University for quite a long time now, served in the White House and in the
0:31.1	federal government, done a lot of work with the Defense Department
0:34.0	and other parts of the U.S. government's a real practical experience
0:37.0	as well as superb academic credentials,
0:40.0	one of the leading China experts who's been right
0:42.0	about China when so many of your
0:45.3	fellow China experts were wrong and thinking it was all going to work out fine and
0:50.1	you wrote a whole book about how they were predicting they were going to be wrong and they are wrong.
0:54.1	Is that made you popular in that community Aaron?
0:57.2	Well, you said my fellow China experts, the real China experts don't consider me a China expert.
1:02.3	I'm out of that fraternity, which is a certain advantage.
1:07.6	You do serve on the, yeah, I bet that's right.
1:10.1	You do serve on the Congratially mandated U. mandated US China Economic and Security Review Commission,
1:14.8	which is a distinguished bipartisan commission, which studies US China relationships, so you're in the
1:19.7	middle of that with members of Congress and dealing with the administration as well.
1:24.7	So great to have you here.
1:26.9	What a time, huh?
1:27.9	I mean, we had a conversation in March and focused on China, but we'll talk quite a bit
1:32.4	about Russia, Ukraine Ukraine and how China's interest in that and how they might have an interest in a frozen conflict there and I thought you know the world's getting awfully complicated we have this big long medium and long-term threat from China. We've got Taiwan. We have Russia
1:46.1	Putin having launched the largest ground war Europe in 80 years and now we have a major conflict to say the least in the Middle East, with Israel and Hamas. We have the
	...

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