Trump met Xi, TRUMP BACKED DOWN: Tariffs Failed / John Mearsheimer

0:00 I believe the Russians will pursue a maximalist strategy regarding conquering territory and turning Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. If you give Ukraine maneuver room to rebuild after some sort of settlement and then to change its mind on NATO admission or NATO membership, you'll be in real trouble. So if you're the Russians, you want to do everything you can at this point in time to take as much territory as possible. and to do everything you can to Ukraine because you can't trust the West. You just can't trust anything that Trump says. >> And unfortunately, that tails right into the China stuff because Trump, who loves to win and be seen as winning, especially domestically, had this really

0:45 cheery evidence of how good this trip was with China. >> I thought it was an amazing meeting. He's a great leader, great leader of a very powerful, very strong country, China. And uh we I mean what can I say? We have uh it was an outstanding uh group of decisions I think that was made. A lot of decisions were made to there wasn't too too much left out there. Taiwan never came up discussed. Actually we had a long meeting as you know but uh a lot of things we discussed in great detail. A lot of things we brought to finalization. a lot of finalization. >> I thought it was a great meeting. I I

1:31 think it was a very friendly meeting. Uh it was a good meeting for two very large powerful countries and that's the way we should get along with a large powerful >> Why did you write your >> Well, let's go back to where this all started. It started last April. Was it Liberation Day? uh when he launched all these tariffs on countries around the world, he threatened to put massive tariffs on China and he was going to bring the Chinese economy to its knees. He understands full well that we're in a security competition with China uh that has an economic dimension and a military dimension. And with regard to the economic dimension, he thought that we had the upper hand in terms of trade and that tariffs were our warinning weapon.

2:19 But he was wrong. And the Chinese who play hard ball had two aces up their sleeve. One was rare earths to include rare earth magnets and two was soybeans. And what the Chinese did was they basically started to cut off the flow of rare earths and rare earth magnets to the United States and they stopped buying soybeans. Uh this would have a crippling effect on the United States especially the rare earths. We absolutely need those rare earths and they monopolize the control of rare earths and uh and rare earth magnets. So what Trump has done is he

3:08 backed off. He backed off on tariffs and the quid proquo is that the Chinese have backed off for a year on the rare earths and rare earth magnets and they're now going to buy soybeans. Uh but the end result is if you compare to where we are today with where we were in April, uh it's Trump who had to back down, not the Chinese. Uh so his attempt to bring the Chinese economy to its knees with these tariffs uh failed. I I want to look at the tariff part second, but uh let's let's stick on the rare earth part because I'm I'm trying to understand what the significance is of the very limited time frame that China said, "Yeah, we'll put a one-year freeze on

3:55 all this stuff or go back to where it was for a year." And and I know that Trump and the administration have made a number of deals with Malaysia and some other countries in Asia about rare earths, etc. There's a big uh funding issue going on in the United States to to create the capacity to do so. But uh by the best sources that I can come up with, it would be somewhere around a decade before we would be able to be at the both the generation of the rarest themselves, meaning mining them and having them reprocessed into a usable situation. So if you're talking about one year here and it would take us 10 years to get self-sufficient over here, what what happens in that delta? Well, what the Chinese are doing here is they're telling the United States, "We'll give you a reprieve for one year,

4:41 but uh then we'll renegotiate." And you want to keep that in mind, boys and girls, uh moving forward. Uh and if you decide that you're going to play hard ball with us in this one year that we now have, you want to understand that when we come to the table in one year, uh we might not be happy with you because of your past behavior. >> Good point. You just want to understand the Chinese uh are hard ball players and they're very smart, right? Much smarter than the American leaders are. Uh whether you're talking about Democrats or Republicans, Chinese are first class strategists. And of course, the same thing is true of Vladimir Putin. And the problem that the United States has is that it's led by second, if not third

5:26 class strategists, and this included the Biden administration as well as the Trump administration. uh you just scratch your head when you watch what the Americans are doing. Uh you know, both from a strategic point of view and a moral point of view just to go to the Gaza genocide. I mean, think about that. Here's this great liberal democracy, the United States of America, that puts a remarkably high premium on human rights, defines the world in terms of good guys and bad guys, where we're the good guys and everybody who is against us is a bad guy. Well, this good guy, the United States of America, under first Joe Biden and now Donald Trump, uh, is complicit in a genocide. Uh, this is really quite remarkable. And, uh, that's just the moral side of things. If

6:13 you go to the strategic side of things, you look at what a hash we've made of things in the Middle East, not only with regard to Gaza, which we were talking about before, but Iran as well. Uh you look at the situation regarding Ukraine uh and how we've been dealing with China. Uh it it's it's depressing as an American to think about the low quality of our leadership. Uh and you know people may say that guys like you and I are unpatriotic. We're not you know loyal to the United States. We're not America first. I would say and I'm sure you would agree with me on the contrary. Right. >> Yes. We want America to be uh number one. We want America to behave as morally correct as possible. Right. And

7:00 we're critical of the United States because it's failing on both counts. >> Right. That's exactly 100% no dispute whatsoever. U I want to look at the tariff issue itself and and to kind of see where we are. So you mentioned Liberation Day when that first came out and it it ended up blowing up to 145% tariffs and etc. Then it got down to like 30 for a period of time. They were going through several rounds of negotiation. This one apparently is going to end at uh according to Trump here. Uh it's going to help on the the fentinel issue. We'd like you to talk about that. But also that the tariff rate he said would be down to at 47%. >> Tariffs remain exactly the same. >> 55%. >> That's about uh No, it's it was 57 now it's 47. >> And how long? because we reduced we

7:47 reduced it by the fentanyl and because I believe they are really taking strong action. We've already seen the action on fentinel and they're taking very strong action. Now >> he's going to be very strong in enforcing the fentinol everything having to do with fentinel and regulations internally including taking very strong measures against those that don't obey. So is this whole fentinil issue and the drugs coming out of China which with precursors and all that is is that just kind of for public consumption and so China just said sure 10% off and we'll do something here as opposed to 20% off. Uh so first of all on the fentinel issue how serious is it and is China really doing something to get drugs into the United States? >> I honestly don't know Danny uh I mean

8:33 I've read a bit about this but I can't make heads or tails of it. uh uh you know so I I don't I don't know what to say. Uh I mean I think that uh maybe they've taken certain steps that uh make Trump happy and that allows him to reduce tariffs by 10%. Or or maybe they haven't done very much at all but he's just looking for a rationale for reducing tariffs by 10% uh to keep Xi Jinping happy. uh just very hard to say to for me to say I just it's not an issue I can I can figure out very clearly >> and and and so about the total tariff so it's right now he says that they're basically leaving China with a 47%

9:19 tariff rate on Chinese good what is that something that's sustainable is that something that's even good for America >> well there's this huge debate on whether these tariffs uh you know work to America's advantage And uh I think it remains to be seen whether they work out or not. I'm not an economist and I I just don't know what to make of it all. Uh you know some of the tariffs have been lowered. If you look at uh what's happened in uh during the Asia trip with regard to both Japan and South Korea, right, it's quite clear that in both cases the tariffs have been reduced to 15%. Uh so that will be good for the American consumer I think. Whether these 40% 47%

10:08 tariffs on China hurt the American consumer or damage the American economy I think remains to be seen. But I'm not in a position to venture a guess on this. I can talk about strategic issues and foreign policy but when it comes to tariffs in the economy I don't know what to think. >> Fair fair enough. Neither do I. We'll have to get somebody else on to cover that part. But the one thing the last thing I want to talk about before you do leave because it's very much in line with something you mentioned a second ago about the morality and the the utility of our foreign policy and that's what's happening down around Venezuela at the moment because by all accounts uh it it seems there's barely a fig leaf covered that we just want to get rid of Maduro and we want a regime change war and we'll get it. In fact, I think that the latest offer is Maduro either

10:56 voluntarily walks away, he's assassinated, or he's captured. And and we're saying that out loud in publicly. Uh that doesn't seem to follow international law as far as I'm aware. What do you say? >> Oh, there's no question about that. But I would also note just to talk about the morality of our foreign policy. We didn't talk about the fact that the United States is blowing uh boats out of the water and killing people uh who we don't even know. We don't even know who they are or what they're doing. Uh supposedly they're narco terrorists who are bringing drugs to the United States or terrorists to the United States. Uh but there's no evidence that that's true. Uh and as we know, the US Navy has

11:42 the capability to stop these ships uh board them and find out exactly who is on board and what those people are doing. Uh, and you would think that the United States would do that before it just blew those ships out of the war, the ships, those boats, uh, out of the water and killed all the people who were on the boats. And so, what what does this do to our I don't even say credibility, but to our interaction with other countries in the in the region, in our own hemisphere here. when you have the president of the United States when asked about that issue that you just mentioned there that there apparently is the legality and is the lawfare where you can on the on the high seas interdict and to find out what's on board these and Trump just says yeah I

12:27 don't want to mess with that I don't want to worry about a declaration of war we're just going to kill them we're just going to kill those people but is there any justification internationally or otherwise even domestically to just uh summarily execute people because you suspect them of running drugs No, he's the assassin chief. Period. He just he thinks he has a right to kill anybody uh who he uh deems an enemy of the United States. He doesn't need any evidence uh to support that decision. Uh he doesn't need to get approval from Congress. Uh he he is the assassin chief and he just does what he wants. And you have the same situation with regard to the Maduro government. he just has

13:13 decided that uh we have to get rid of Maduro and uh he's going to go in there and figure out some clever way to do that. Uh and as you know, Danny, the United States has a rich history of behaving this way in the Western Hemisphere. Uh I mean, we've had our gun sites on Cuba since probably about 1959, uh when Castro took over there. And uh you remember the Bay of Pigs uh in April 1961 shortly after JFK became president. Then there was the Cuban missile crisis and we've been involved in Cuba trying to topple the government or the regime there forever and ever. And uh Venezuela is now in our gun sites as well. And of course the Venezuelans and the Cubans uh

14:01 have quite good relations for obvious reasons. Uh but this is the way the United States has long acted in the Western Hemisphere. And uh I think virtually all of our neighbors south of the border fully understand that the United States is a ruthless country when it comes to uh running the Western Hemisphere and they better be very careful that they don't anger the United States. Do do you do you ever see a scenario in the future where all of these things building up all going back to the ' 50s, '60s, maybe even before that, that it can come back to haunt us that maybe the conditions we might not be in as much of a position of power and that people would remember this and take action against us or is it a case that where nope, they will always be powers and we can literally do what we want and

14:47 there's nothing they can do about it. Well, with regard to the western hemisphere, we are so powerful uh and so secure that uh we can behave in careless and ruthless ways. Uh and by the way during the unipolar moment you know from roughly 1992 up to about 2017 when we were the only great power on the planet and were remarkably powerful relative to everybody else and remarkably secure back here in the western hemisphere. We were able to behave in very cavalier and careless ways. uh and we got in the habit of acting that way and it's carried over now into this multipolar world. But the

15:33 United States, despite all the talk uh about how dangerous the world is and how vulnerable we are uh to this threat and that threat, the United States is the most secure great power in the history of the world. We're remarkably powerful. And if you look at our geographical location, it just doesn't get any better. You have Canada to the north, Mexico to the south, fish to the east, and fish to the west. I mean, this is the ideal strategic situation, and it allows us to just do all these foolish things uh that would get other countries into deep trouble, but don't get us into much trouble. Uh and uh and someone like President Trump, he understands this. He

16:18 understands how powerful we are. He understands what all the levers of power are and he understands he can do pretty much everything and get away with it. And if you look at what's happening, I think that description is quite apt. But one would imagine that the time does have a habit of changing things in the future and there may come a day when we don't have that relative power dominance over everybody. And who knows how it may work out then. People may remember all of these things. Uh we I don't want to get into that situation. Uh, but listen, we really appreciate you coming on today, especially with all these things going on here. And just to shoot everybody back to your Substack there where you don't have to wait for John to be on our show here. You can go to mirimer.substack.com to find all the great stuff. More commentary by the on this China stuff.

17:05 You can go there and uh continue reading there. So, thanks for coming on today. >> Thank you, Danny. Although all these issues are categorically depressing, it is always enjoyable to talk to you. Well, and and and certainly likewise because if nothing else, it it makes me think that we're not as crazy as we as it appears in comparison to what else is going on. So, there is some sanity and we appreciate you doing that as well. Thank you. >> You're welcome. And we appreciate you guys. And by the way, we got another show coming right up. actually Larry Johnson uh who was just in Moscow and has some fresh perspective on how may things may look there especially in terms of this current offensive that's going on these these uh new milit nuclearpowered weapons that have coming

17:51 off and what may happen to negotiations later on. All that coming up with Larry Johnson here in about five minutes. So uh be sure and tune in and we'll see you there in a few minutes. Bye. [Music]