#387 — Politics & Power

0:29Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. And therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

0:45Today I'm speaking with Rahm Emanuel. Rahm is currently the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, where he is just wrapping up his term. He was also the 55th mayor of the city of Chicago, a position he held until 2019. Before that, he was President Obama's chief of staff. He was also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois. And prior to that, you might remember him as a key member of President Clinton's administration, ultimately serving as his senior advisor for policy and politics. I happened to be going to Japan and realized I could talk to Rahm in person at the embassy. and there was a lot to talk about.

1:25We generally discuss the state of the world and American politics. We talk about his ambassadorship in Japan, the mystery of Japan's economic health, U.S. competition with China, possible conflict over Taiwan and the Philippines, the significance of the South China Sea, the history of the U.S.-Japan friendship, and then we turn to U.S. politics. We discuss how the Democratic Party lost its way, immigration, whether Vice President Harris needs a sister-soldier moment, whether she should explain her changes of position better than she has. And then after we cover that fraught territory, we turn to the happy topic of the Middle East.

2:10We discuss the standing of Israel in the eyes of the world, anti-Semitism, the Abraham Accords, Hamas, settlements in the West Bank, the influence of the religious right in Israel, a possible war with Iran, Netanyahu and Israeli security, a two-state solution, whether a Harris administration would reliably support Israel, and other topics. Anyway, the conversation was a lot of fun, and now I bring you Ambassador Rahm Emanuel.

2:48so i'm here with ambassador rahm emanuel ambassador thanks for joining me oh thanks for coming in on your vacation well it's kind of like it's kind of like a work release program exactly yeah we'll see if i can get through complete sentences here because i've been in the country for almost 48 hours oh so you woke up at one in the morning yeah exactly close yeah i I know that feeling. After four hours sleep. Yeah, yeah. But it's great to meet you. Nice to meet you. We were thrown together by the incomparable Michael Kivas. Correct. And yeah, so we owe him the credit of this. Well, we'll see at the end of the show whether he gets points or demerits.

3:22Exactly, exactly. So there's so much to talk about. I want to start with your current post here in Japan, but we're going to wander from the Pacific. Oh, we're going to play Risk. We're just going to go across the map. Yeah, we're going to. because obviously you've touched, you have so many areas of expertise. So just to remind people, you have served in two presidential administrations. Counting this would be three, yeah. President Clinton, senior advisor, President Obama's chief of staff, and then ambassador for President Biden, or for the United States. Forgive me, I didn't really think of an ambassadorship as, is it technically?

3:57That's fair, no, you're right. Is it in the executive branch? No, it's the State Department. You could say, but your appointment, you know, there's two types of appointments I don't want to waste on it. There's a career appointment, and then there's political appointments. We're the only country that really has it. And in the political sphere, it breaks down donors or formerly elected officials. Like Senator Mansfield, majority leader, ambassador here. Former Vice President Walter Mondale, ambassador here. Former Speaker of the House, Tom Foley, ambassador here. This has to be a coveted gig, right?

4:29On the list of countries where you can be an ambassador. Well, you haven't seen the House, but this probably will get me in trouble. but it will never be referred to as Section 8 public housing. But if you're going to live in public housing, that's the way to go. But the job is actually, on a serious note, the job itself at this moment in time between the United States and Japan is like everything every other ambassador wanted. Japan's ready to break out, do things and do things from real energy and time, etc. And I think they've surprised themselves, I could, about how much they've gotten done in a short period of time.

5:01We're in the middle of redesigning our entire Indo-Pacific strategy from a hub and spoke to this lattice war. Because of my background and experience, I've been intimately involved in the trilateral with Korea, Japan, and the United States, pushing that along. And then also the one with the United States, Japan, and Philippines. And so it has been from a work product, from kind of that intellectual energy that comes from really kind of putting your thumb on the scale. Totally fascinating. from a quality of life. It's a culture and experience that I feel like it's a gift to be part of something I never really knew.

5:36And then on a personal level, there's things about the society I find. Now, again, we're outside of it. For a lot of people, sometimes inside, they feel it's oppressive. So you could feel that about our society on certain things. But, you know, as a former mayor that a city of Chicago that created safe passage routes for kids to walk to school, my staff always tired of hearing that. I would say they accomplished that in Tokyo, from what I can tell. Yeah, you have five-year-olds walk just eight, nine blocks to school, just put their hand up, cars come to a stop. The respect for life, you then realize how much we have stolen children's childhood from them in America.

6:10So from a lot of levels, I find this to be professionally rewarding and personally a gift. And I told the president that. I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity to experience a whole new culture. All right. So there are two mysteries that confront the novice in Japan. Neither one of us would refer to ourselves as novice. No, that's my first time here. I'm fresh off the plane. So from what I can tell, there has been an impressive amount of economic stagnation here in almost a lost generation. I mean, you had put a dollar in the Nikkei in 1989, you'd have exactly a dollar today or something close to that.

6:59Depends what the Yen's trades at that moment, but yes. I don't think... Let me just complete this thought because it's not as invidious as it sounds. And yet, it's obviously an incredibly prosperous society, right? It's just impeccable on so many levels, and it's not showing, at least from what I can tell the signs of economic dysfunction that you would expect if you just looked at that graph. So can you? Yeah. You know, one of the things I've read a little, and I'm very persuaded, I don't think the analysis, oh, the lost decades is really, it's a top line. So if you lift the hood, if you go to the manufacturing side of the economy from a productivity measurement, et cetera, it's incredibly productive.

7:45Why? Japan got a head start on the decline in population. So they're leaders in robotics and automation. The top four robotic companies in the world, two of them are Japanese. Of the top seven, depending on how you want to count it, are eight automation companies. Almost half are Japanese. So from the manufacturing side, which is a bigger piece of their economy than for the United States, quite productive and stayed at world-class standards. Now on the service side, your description is accurate. The cloud is just coming here as a kind of a metaphor for a bigger kind of stagnation in the service side and technology adoption, et cetera.

8:21But the economy is a very export oriented and it's highly world-class economy. They have a lot of strengths in my view. I mean, you have a highly educated workforce. They stay to the office till 10, 11 o 'clock at night. We can't get people in America at 10 or 11 in the morning into the office. Great universities, highly safe and secure modern infrastructure system. You can get anywhere in the Indo-Pacific daily multiple times. So there's a lot of advantages to that part of the economy. And in the areas, I'll give you like, take semiconductor space, it gets a lot of notoriety. I could refer to Japan as the supply chain of the supply chain.

9:05So there's about 18 companies that are dominant in the materials and packaging, which is so essential, that have anywhere from 40 to 70 % of worldwide share of market in their space. And when you think of the people that make machines for the semiconductors, there's ASML in the Netherlands, Tokyo Electron here. And so they have a lot that is a specialty, but you could get overwhelmed and biased from the writing, and I'm not sure it's 100 % accurate. And then it skews the way you interpret stuff. And it's in kind of early stage velocity now back. There's a much higher debt than we're carrying in the US, right?

9:50Much higher than anybody else. I mean, there's like 200 plus percent. On the other hand, they do have that we don't have. $22 trillion, not yen, in savings. So while their debt is extremely high from a GDP standpoint, their savings is off the chart. Now, that's the good news. The bad news, it's earning, up until this point, zero interest rate. And it's sitting, as our grandparents would do, in the mattress. There was no 401k, no savings type of, no allocation of capital. I sound like I was listening to Larry Summers when I was at the White House, but the use of capital is not the most efficient.

10:31So from your perch here, how are you viewing our growing competition with China? That's an open-ended question. Increasingly bellicose noises coming from the other side of the Pacific. You know, here's what I would, I think we have to have a more, I wouldn't say a nuanced view, and this is one of the things I've enjoyed working on in the sense of the trilats and some of this stuff. China made a major mistake in this region. Go back 10 years with Wolf Warrior and maritime or other type of aggression to every country. You saw it just the other day with the Vietnam on their fishing. You see it in the Philippines.

11:07You see it on the border with India. You see it strafing Australian planes. You see what they've done to Japan and they just got the last couple of weeks in sense of territorial, both aerial and naval, surfership. I wouldn't call it aggression, but kind of violation. That has made our job of organizing much easier. They try to isolate a country like the Philippines is doing now. And we have been able, through our lattice work system that President Biden has really put together, to take China as a strategy of isolating a country and make it the isolated party. And so on a political side and a security side, I think we're in a better position than we were before.

11:45And I think China, which is why they always complain they're being contained or we're trying to contain them. They do a pretty good job of containing themselves because everybody in the region right now is trying to figure out how to make sure that the United States is anchored here as a counterweight against China. That's a big advantage for us. Where I think we are a beat behind the music, I think we're doing a great job, if I may say, on the diplomatic side, a really good job in updating on our security alliances and bringing, like given what Japan's doing, the ROK is doing, India's doing, others, a lot.

12:17I think China is making the same mistakes with their economic coercion, their mercantilism, their debt trap diplomacy. And we are just in the early stages of responding to that in the way that it took us about four years ago to figure out how to use their tactics against them, their own tactics against them. And China is, and I would say this, we made a mistake as a country, all of us, we're all responsible for it. We called them a strategic competitor, believed what we were saying. China, when Xi comes in, decides the United States is a strategic adversary on their backheels because of the financial and banking and problems.

13:00And we held on to this concept. They were a competitor. They adopted a policy that we were an adversary and we just caught on to who they are and what they're doing. And so we lost a decade that said they also are in the beginning stages of losing a decade but we have to make the most of that time and move with do speed and smart not just urgency what do you think we're going to get to u.s politics but what do you think the implications are of the u.s election for our future with china well it depends first of all what happens that the the gap in your question well here's what i think what is china i'm kind of biased but i you know let me say this I don't, this is a crude way to say it.

13:45The Indo-Pacific is an away game for us. It's a home game for China. And if you think you're going to be relevant in dealing with China, either on the security angle, the political angle, the diplomatic angle, the economic angle, you need allies and you need allies to trust you. And so if you are not good with your allies, then you got a problem here because you can't do anything in the region without a Japan, without a Republic of Korea, without an Australia, without a New Zealand, without a Singapore, without an India, without the Philippines. So I gotta be careful so I don't get outside the Hatch Act of the U.S.

14:20being partisan. I think it's pretty clear one candidate's really strong about alliances and allies, believes in them. It's very pertinent to this part of the world. You cannot operate that way without allies. And if you don't give allies trust and confidence, they'll do the bare minimum. And let me try, if I could illustrate one point, you know, for 30 or 40 years, presidents have tried to bring China, or rather Japan and Korea on the same page with us. And for a lot of historical reasons, we all have, we have a complicated history with Japan. Japan has a complicated history with Korea. We actually also have a complicated history with Korea.

14:58That said, given where they were, given where their countries were, given their trust in the United States and specifically trust with the administration, both President Yun and Prime Minister Kishida went beyond just clearing the bar they went farther and the end result was probably one of the bigger bolder moves we made in the region diplomatically last 20-30 years China notices that now if you don't work with your allies and give them confidence they're not going to take the step take a look at President Marcos right now unlike Duarte he is taking a step of trust with the United States you don't treat an ally with that kind of respect they something that's really, really important to the United States can slip through our fingers.

15:39So I think our election, and again, I got to be careful. Remind me of the implications of that Hatch Act. Just how tongue-tied will you be? Well, I become a roommate for you. The cost of it is I lose a job and then I become your roommate, and that's really kind of not good for you. No, you can't violate, and there's some attorney at the State Department that's like, I don't know, ghosting me everywhere on this thing. So I'm not allowed to be partisan, so I will analyze it. So if you ask me about what it means here, you have to really believe in alliances if you want to be a counterweight to China.

16:15If you don't, then you want to basically say, well, we're might equals right, and that's China's right, and that's their backyard. That's a different state. I think you will find our allies taking a different strategy to the United States after that. Yeah. Let me say this, the Hatch Act applies to U.S. politics. Sometimes people don't think it applies to, I'm joking, my involvement in Japan. Right, right, right. So what about Taiwan? Is this something, perhaps you can't comment on it with full transparency, but what do you understand our policy with respect to Taiwan to be? Well, I think, what would we do?

16:54If it's a very clear ambiguity. So strategic ambiguity is our official policy. Well, yeah, it was established when Kissinger and Nixon came up with the one China policy. But, you know, so look, there's three flashpoints right now. The South China Sea with Philippines. There's the Taiwan Straits and Taiwan. And then there's the 38th parallel with North Korea and South Korea. And so not wrong to ask about Taiwan, but everything you're thinking about Taiwan is playing out, not just Taiwan, but in real time, something's playing out right now in the South China Sea with the Philippines and China. And I always remind, you have a sovereign nation, Philippines.

17:39The international court in 2016, China versus Philippines ruled in favor of the Philippines. China has summarily dismissed it, not even listened to it. and they are a treaty ally of the United States. So while a lot of people rush right to Taiwan, my view is, I don't know why you're passing up what's going on with the Philippines because this is everything we're talking about and whether the islands, the fishing rights, et cetera, and the international court rules established by the court, interpreted by the court, matters and whether a small country has standing against a more powerful country.

18:15Is it your understanding that we have the same policy with respect to the Philippines? as Taiwan? No, in fact, we have a stronger policy because they're a treaty ally. Taiwan is not a treaty ally. Are we treaty bound to come to their defense? Yeah. I mean, if something was to happen and Senate President Marcos has indicated this and said something that he would consider this as something that would happen to the Philippines from a security standpoint for their military could trigger that alliance and that commitment in the word of the United States. Now, I try to remind people, the South China Sea, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, all kind of counter other countries too.

18:5614 % of the world's entire fish stock and catch is in that water. Massive amount of undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves there. China is in confrontation. Just the other day, there was a story. they their coast guard they went after uh the vietnamese fishing boats said that those are their islands and it's very clear they're vietnamese islands they're doing it with the philippines etc now we don't have a treaty ally with uh we're not vietnam's not a treaty ally philippines is a treaty ally right we have a commitment to their uh this there's not only their sovereignty but their military safety is that multilateral does the uk have the same commitment with the Philippines?

19:40No. No? Yes, based on history. So you mentioned the complicated history between Japan and the U.S. and Japan and Korea, et cetera. That's actually the second mystery I wanted to ask you about. So for anyone who even has a passing understanding of what happened during World War II in the Pacific, it seems frankly miraculous that we found in Japan a friend of such durable goodwill as has persisted for the last 60-some odd years. I don't know when the friendship started, if you can place it on the calendar, but it had to be at the latest 1960 or so, right? I mean, when did things completely thaw?

20:23Well, I do think it's a testament how the bitterest of foes can become the best of friends. Yeah, I mean, it offers some hope for the world, one would hope, but it does seem frankly miraculous when you try to map it onto other conflicts that we're going to talk about. When I listen to the Japanese, they have a change. There is, and you read history, this is my reading of it, so other people say he doesn't know what he's talking about. There's no doubt, and it's over in the residence for the ambassador is where General MacArthur receives the emperor. Now, our big moment at the end of the war is the signing of the Missouri.

21:02That's our moment. That's our kind of trigger point. The meeting with the emperor and the acceptance of the emperor will stay as the emperor is a trigger point for the Japanese as I read history, as I witness history, as I witness others talk about it. And the way the emperor then talks about the United States. And that is the first step on a journey to a different place from enemies during war to building friends. The second piece is, I think it's really, really, nobody ever told me about this, and maybe I'm guilty of not talking to the right people or whatever. I think I talked to a lot of people when I was, what I call in the Senate COVID quarantine, before you get confirmed.

21:42So we all know George Kennan's long memo about the Soviet Union containment, et cetera. Marshall sends Kennan here, afterward. I mean, this is later in his career, early in the late 40s. And he writes an equally valuable memo about the role Japan will play as an anchor in this post-49 to communist China and an anchor for the United States in the Pacific, Indo-Pacific. It wasn't called Indo then, but the Pacific or in Southeast Asia. And it's, I happen to see it just once referenced in a book, so I pulled it up. It's unbelievably prescient. Now, so you can date 62 and the military alliance, et cetera.

22:27But I would literally, if you ask me, okay, what was the first step on that journey to a different place? The receiving the emperor, us embracing the role of the emperor, which allowed Japan to move on. It's pretty also clear in the days of both Hiroshi and Nagasaki, we were more explicit where Secretary of State Burns is not. That we would, which is what Stimson was arguing for, that the emperor would stay. the war may have ended sooner. It's a judgment call. It's an interpretation. So that to me is, and it would give you hope. And I'll tell you the other thing. And I say this about the president Biden, when he held the ROK and the Japanese prime minister and the ROK president in Camp David, it's pretty ugly in Ukraine, pretty ugly in the Middle East, a lot of conflict in the world, Sudan.

23:15And you look at the rest of the certain battles in Africa, There was a place in Camp David where it shows what diplomacy and dialogue can achieve versus, I'm not saying that sometimes conflicts don't have their own logic, but I thought that was a hopeful sign in a pretty dark time that we're living in. Yeah. As I say, it would be wonderful if there were a deep analogy between what we accomplished here, given just how horrific World War II was and the current crises you've mentioned. We're going to get to the Middle East and Iran because I— Because you can't help yourself. Certainly top of mind.

23:55But we're going to go through, let's go through U.S. politics and see what the Hatch Act can allow us to talk about. I mean, so you obviously - I am a former ballet dancer. I'm pretty flexible. We'll see. You have a deep knowledge of democratic politics, obviously, and also you were a mayor of Chicago, which gave you a special view of the local implications of certain policies. many of us so i'm a lifelong democrat i've never voted republican i don't think i've been tempted to vote republican but i have often thought in the last few years certainly certainly since um what appeared to be a kind of social justice moral panic that took over the democratic party in around 2020 that i would campaign for liz cheney or ben romney at this point just give me a normal Republican, and I could get behind that person.

24:52And if you know my history and, you know, castigating the theocrats on the Republican side, you would know just how far a pendulum swing that is. But that is in response to a sense that the Democratic Party has really lost its way. It may be recovering its way, certainly. It seems to be executing a kind of pivot, however, unacknowledged in the campaign of Vice President Harris at the moment. But we're talking about a party which seemed for years at a stretch, again, I would date this to the 2020 campaign, to be, I mean, pick your ghastly policy, defund the police. People should have their reputations destroyed for doubting whether they're more than two sexes biologically.

25:38I mean, there was an activist takeover of the conversation. that I think has done great harm to our politics, if for no other reason than it has given real motive force to the personality cult that has subsumed the Republican Party. And there are many single issue voters now who are not... I know I'm giving you a lot. Feel free to respond. Which of the 42 questions do you want me to answer? I'll sharpen it up. Respond to the claim that the Democrats lost their minds for a few years there on issues like immigration and crime and what is politically necessary now in the final stages of this campaign?

26:22Okay. So, well, that's this campaign, but it's that, that question is about a bigger than just this election. Yeah. Okay. So let me try to unpack a couple of things that there's a lot in there. not one that ever believed in or supported defund the police. And even when those who advocated said, well, it doesn't mean what it says, well, then my attitude was, well, no, don't say it because if it doesn't mean what it says, you're confusing a lot of people, but you have to back up as a mayor that also had to work with and should have worked with the management of the police department. We had a lot of every Chicago, New York, LA, Every city of any size had safeguards in.