you're listening to the Tutor Dixon podcast in the Clay and Buck podcast network.

Welcome to the Tutor Dixon podcast. I'm Tutor Dixon and it is great to have you tuning

into our podcast today. Now we have a lot going on with national security and foreign relations,

especially after this past weekend with a visit from our Secretary of State Lincoln to Saudi Arabia

and China. And I want to jump into that right away with my guest today. She is the founder of

Polaris National Security and former Department of State spokesperson Morgan Ortega's.

Morgan, thank you for joining us. Absolutely great to be here. Thank you. Yes, there's so much going on.

I really was like, where do I even start? But I do want to start with this trip to China because

some interesting stuff happened. We know that the Secretary of State went over to China and it was

questionable as to whether he was even going to be allowed to meet with President Xi, even though

Bill Gates had literally just met with him. What does that look like for the Biden administration?

So let's just start from the very beginning of good Lincoln even be going right now.

So no no Secretary of State has been to China since 2018. Obviously I was in the Trump

administration for the last two years of the administration and served as Pompeo spokesperson.

And we did meet the Chinese our our counterparts on you know for what they would call by lateral

meetings. That just as a fancy word for meeting the two sides are meeting on the heels of like in

G20 or we met them once in Hawaii in 2020 during COVID. But we never went to China and one of the

reasons that Pompeo made that decision tutor is because especially in 2020 whenever Pompeo was one

of the first people in the world to start calling out China for not being open about what was

really going on with COVID. Actually he did this in February 2020 and a lot of people confuse and

sort of think that somehow the US and China relationship is bad because the United States

is upping the rhetoric. It's a very Washington centric view that you often hear where they

...