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Greetings dear listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast.

Now brought to you by Dispatch Media or the Dispatch.com where if you go there you can sign up for the Goldberg file for David French's now copious newsletters or for the morning dispatch which will soon be daily and eventually you'll be able to find our web only content as well as links to all the new podcasts that are coming and you might actually find out what actually happened with a Ted Cruz's dad on the grassy knoll but that will come later in the

meantime this episode is brought to you by sleep number and sleep number beds more about that in a little bit our guest today is a friend of mine someone who's writings I actually rely on often he's one of these guys who when he writes about foreign policy stuff if I disagree with him and then I read his stuff I have to reevaluate my position.

Don't always come around but I always have a momentary panic like oh crap this he disagrees with me and of course I am talking about Eli Lake Eli welcome to the Remnant great to be here thanks so much for having me you are still a Bloomberg guy correct correct

and good luck with the campaign we'll just leave it there I'm one of the ones who are yeah I'm still a columnist yes and that is one of the stranger things but I know you can't talk about any of that yeah they'll activate your pain collar yeah um so we've had as I was telling you as we were procuring beverages we've had a lot of foreign policy specialists on here yeah deep dives on Iran

or Islam or Turkey or whatever North Korea we haven't had a lot of foreign policy generalist types and that's sort of and you're actually a reporter on this stuff too so that's that's your metier is some annoying people might say what uh what do you think the state of foreign policy is right now in America like our alliances just someone saying how do you feel about America

vis-a-vis it's standing in the world and all the rest just so for a level setting where would you put us where would you put the situation these days I'm not panicked but I'm alarmed I do think that there are some trends that are good so let me start with the good uh here's a good one good the bad and the ugly okay here's the good trend okay I think that ever since Henry Kissinger opened up relations with China

in China there has been a largely a kind of consensus in US foreign policy with a few dissenters that as long as we increase the trade relationship with China eventually over time they would reform and would be a responsible actor on the world stage and that we would kind of the relationship would be too big to fail and it would also you know that all of this would be would work itself out so you know

anybody who says oh my god I didn't realize there's such to horrendous human rights abusers in China or something like that I mean wake up we all knew right but the idea would be that over time you would create a Chinese middle class and that they would demand the same kinds of freedoms and we would see this this kind of liberalization

and that hasn't happened and that actually the good news I think is that um let's leave Trump aside for a minute I do think that there's really a serious bipartisan consensus as we just saw in the vote I think

there was one vote against the Hong Kong Freedom and Democracy Act so even if Trump vetoes it and he is not committed that it will be over written in what does the act do just for listeners who haven't followed it.

It's actually really pretty clever this is another sort of bright spot which is it is an attempt to use the threat of individual sanctions on Chinese military officers and soldiers that would be committing any kind of human rights abuse

potential serious crackdown in China now there have been clashes but there hasn't been a

the Tiananmen style or an invasion of the forces that are sort of gathering on the border Hong Kong yet and it is an attempt to sort of signal that if you do that then you can't send your kids to the college in the United States and you will be a pariah in the West and will freeze your assets

and they they're using an approach known as the Global Magnitsky Act which was originally against sort of all of the Russian officials responsible for the torture and murder of this Russian lawyer who had uncovered this incredible tax fraud scheme

and then you know has been more recently applied to you know sort of the members of the Saudi you know intelligence apparatus that were responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi

this is an effort to try to kind of signal using this threat before something bad happens that even if Xi Jinping decides that he has to go in that hopefully there will be a significant number of you know military officers who do have if there's a garrison of Chinese officer there's a garrison of Chinese military inside Hong Kong they have the internet it's not filtered really so they're aware

and the idea is really to signal to them and others that you know if you do this you know we're watching and I've talked to some of the activists and some of the people who are part of the democracy protest in Hong Kong I was just in Halifax International Security Forum over the weekend

and there was a contingent of those folks there and I'm you know they're very happy about this bill so that's a good thing and if it becomes law it will become law okay

if if Trump vetoes it there will be I mean everybody is saying even Republican leaders I should say and it was their bill this is Jim Ritches bill Senate Farm Relations Committee Chairman and he's a major Trump ally but on this thing I think this will be an area like we saw with Turkey and Syria where Republicans will criticize the president

but more importantly we're getting the immediate dynamic I think there really is becoming a kind of bipartisan consensus on these China issues there's a lot of support in the Democratic Party for the measures that the Trump administration took with regards to Huawei and I hope they're not reversed in a Trump and a trade deal but so that I think is seeing that change is important so that's a good thing waking up on China let's just call it that

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