WTH is going on with the new Cold War? Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger on the West’s growing rivalry with China and Russia
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has brought horror and misery to millions and challenged the US-led international order to an extent unseen since the Cold War. As NATO struggles to mount an effective response to Russia’s aggression, a growing alliance of dictatorships led by Putin and China’s Xi Jinping is attempting to shape the geopolitical order to their interests and against those of the US. With casualties rising in Ukraine and growing fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, does the US now find itself in a new Cold War?
Matt Pottinger joins Marc and Dany to discuss the new cold war, the conflict’s ideological underpinnings, and the historical analogies that help explain Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Chairman of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies China Program, and a Senior Advisor at The Marathon Initiative. From 2019 to 2021, Pottinger served in the White House in senior roles on the National Security Council staff, including as deputy national security advisor. He previously served as senior director for Asia, where he led the administration’s work on the Indo-Pacific region, in particular its shift on China policy. Before his White House service, Pottinger spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What the hell's going on? |
| 0:01.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:03.0 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:04.1 | I don't know what the hell he's talking about. |
| 0:05.8 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:07.7 | What hell's the matter with these guys? |
| 0:09.2 | We don't know what's going on. |
| 0:11.0 | What hell's going on? |
| 0:12.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:27.9 | And I'm Mark Dyson. |
| 0:28.9 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:30.3 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:32.8 | Mark, what the hell is going on this week? |
| 0:35.1 | Well, what the hell is going on is we're entering the fourth week of the war in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are still holding on, not only holding on, they're doing really well. They've actually had some advances and then taken back some territory from the Russians. So that's good news. And we just got back, you and I, from the AEI World Forum and Sea Island, which is AEI's premier annual |
| 0:55.8 | conference. And it's an off-the-record meeting and lots of fascinating people come. And you ran |
| 1:02.1 | probably what I would consider the best plenary session of any World Forum I've ever attended. |
| 1:07.3 | So kudos to you. But it was fascinating, not just because of your brilliance, but because of the brilliance of some of the people you brought together for it. And one of those was Matt Pottinger, who was the former Deputy National Security Advisor in the Trump administration, who made a really fascinating intervention about how we're at the start of a new Cold War. And so we reached out to Matt and said, hey, we know this is off the record, but would you |
| 1:27.5 | like to come on the podcast and share your thoughts with our audience? And he said, absolutely. And so we've got him on the podcast today. So I'm a huge fan of Matt's. And he did a wonderful job. And I'm really happy that we're able to share it with our listeners. The reality is that when bad things happen in the world, you want to sort of define them down. You want to say, okay, what's happening in Ukraine is terrible. We feel really badly about it, but it doesn't touch on Poland or it doesn't touch on NATO. You hope that it doesn't give signals to China to attack Taiwan. And what I think is becoming |
| 2:05.0 | increasingly clear is that this is a much scarier time than we want to admit. I'll just sort of |
| 2:12.0 | at a tiny, really personal perspective. One of the things that is hard, especially for those of us who love |
| 2:18.4 | and study history, is to imagine to yourself that for most people, when some of the most |
| 2:23.9 | cataclysmic events were going on, the Holocaust, you know, when nuclear weapons were dropped |
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